As an undergraduate student at York University, where I was first introduced to the dynamic and disparate expression that is (Canadian) experimental video and film, I worked part-time as a museum tour guide. My first two summers were spent at a late 19th century farmhouse on the edge of Oakville, sweating it out in period costume; the latter two unfolded at a short-lived marine history site, located on Toronto?s blustery waterfront. In the five years since and, of course, with the benefit of ?20/20 hindsight? and some self-reflection, I now find that the experience of (and critical skills earned from) being a museum tour guide and a curator of experimental video and film are not entirely unrelated. Both tasks rely on animating things that are ?not quite here? and both are intimately concerned with the project and the process that is History/history. One is obliged to be equal parts librarian and spokesperson; sideshow barker and archivist. Ennui is the enemy in both vocations.
There is currently (and curiously?) no ?how-to? guide for curating and programming video and film, though the catalogue for Karyn Sandlos' program "Waiting and Wanting..." aspires, in its own way, to address that absence. It occurs to me, as I recall the training manuals prepared by my two respective museum employers, that a curator?s guide would be difficult to write. Though the employee orientation documents were successful at relaying an endless array of ?facts? and trivia, they did little to prepare me for my modest job as an animator of historical memory. That is because the enigma of how we experience the past ? in fragments, when in real time and real space ? kept getting in the way of my efforts to relay the ?facts? objectively. Both these lessons have been important in my personal and professional growth, as they taught me the value of (un?)consciously ?doing? ? listening, watching, conversing, debating, reading, and so on. The successful curator must be eager for new sensorial and critical experiences before contemplating how a program might respond to, or interrupt the flow of, information audiences have grown accustomed to.
Knowledge, it has been said, is (about) power, and the task of the curator is to challenge hierarchy and other ?normative? power relations in the realm of viewing and listening. Loosening the authority of meaning allows the audience and the work to have an open exchange where unorthodox ?learning? may transpire. Though a productive relationship between viewer and viewed is difficult to construct, it is a necessary pursuit. At screenings of fringe film and video, one is aware that what will unfold before the eyes once the lights go dim has been selected and organized by a curator. The curator?s strategies, like the individual works in the program, invite contemplation. Often, the pieces in a program are framed based on similarities in form and aesthetics or content and theme; or they serve as subjects to develop a broad theory. (Example: ?Dear viewer, please observe how these ten performance videos reflect socialized anxieties about gender and sexuality.?) As a curator, one must encourage the audience to engage with difference and deviation, allowing for connections to be made which are non-sensical and embodied. The curator?s role, even in the classroom, is to suggest and stimulate (and not insist upon) connections, as the audience ultimately interprets a program in their own personal and political ways. The curator must remain mindful that developing creative programming strategies which invite active and inquisitive responses to a medium we are conditioned to believe is a pretext for eating popcorn, is no easy task these days. This is, crucially, what experimental work demands and, frankly, deserves.
The revelation (and for some, revulsion) of post-modernism is that one person?s understanding of what is culturally significant about, say, conceptual art video from the early 1970s will always differ from another person?s, though there is less dispute about the ?thingness? that is, say, conceptual art video practice. It was made, it exists. Thus, the role of the curator, like the museum tour guide, is to animate, to enliven, and to create a discursive space wherein that gap, between the actual (the object that is video and film) and the affective (the experience of video and film), can be negotiated individual-by-individual. The key is to give some discernible order to these ?things? (never underestimate the importance of an evocative program title!), while remaining conscious of affect and the effectiveness of keeping things loose. The curator has various tools at her/his disposal that can account for these strategies ? the catalogue essay, the post-screening Q+A session, the conference panel discussion. But these same oft-staid forums can also be used to shift authority and agency to the artists and to the audience, where it ultimately belongs. Having more questions than answers is certainly desirable, pedagogically speaking.
It is my belief that the experimental video and film curator, like the museum tour guide, is (consigned to being) an educator in a society increasingly drawn to ?entertainment?. This statement is less a lament for the educational role of the curator and more a caveat: the project and process that is History/history always (paradoxically) demands ?newness?; progressive strategies that oppose, for instance, the notion of university classrooms as the mausoleum of dead things, worn out ideas, and passive spectators. In Canada, the role of the curator as educator seems to be an unshakeable reality, as most practitioners and programmers of marginal media (myself included) find work in institutions ? universities, galleries, or festivals ? in order to pay the bills. There are forces in play (beyond mere economic marginalization) that oblige fringe video and film curating to take place in these encoded spaces, as if there is nowhere else that ?difficult? work should appear. Of course, the political stakes in each presentation arena present different challenges. Complacency and convention do little to nurture engaged communities eager to participate in the exchange that is the making and dissemination of (Canadian) fringe video and film. The curator can educate viewers about the role of institutions; not as mere collectors of things, but as living spheres of experience and exchange. For the present obliges us to evoke, not instruct, the past.
james missen
(originally published in march 2005)
