Updated July 2019. Guaranteed to be in process continuously.

Note: This document (which can be found in each exposition) was intended primarily for the doctoral pre-examination board. Much of the content can be found in the dissertation. Read the summary if it's helpful. Otherwise, feel free to go directly to the Open House exposition itself from the landing page.

Introduction

My research centers on how choreographic thinking operates within curatorial practice.

Choreographic thinking, for me, includes elements of movement and arrangement, embodiment and encounter. What happens when you curate from this position? 

I maintain that my curatorial method, what I am calling choreographic curation, yields an approach that is exploratory in spirit, responsive to context, and open-ended. Curation under these conditions becomes an embodied form of inquiry: a way to ask questions, make introductions, and invite possibilities, using the platform of the gallery space as laboratory, rehearsal room, studio, and stage. It seeks, rather than seeks to answer. 

The purpose of this research is to delve more deeply into my own curatorial practice specifically: to advance my understanding of choreographic thinking in gallery settings, and to analyze and refine my practice. My approach to curating is in conversation with durational and spatial art practices, including installation, sculpture, and dance, among others, but the primary focus is on my curatorial projects: how they are produced via a choreographic ethos, and what they might produce, in turn.

Expanded Art Practice as Curatorial Catalyst: Making, Movement, and Meaning

My curatorial work is part of an expanded art practice. This is beyond simply saying that I curate “as an artist.” It entails a set of iterative and roving gestures which include making objects, performances, situations, and programs, teaching, chairing panels, organizing events, and encouraging others to make, view, and experience the arts. There is a fluid relationship between activities: each informs the other in an ongoing, indirect feedback loop.

I do my aesthetic thinking and making through movement—the movement of ideas, objects, materials, and people. It is necessary for me to move in order to spatialize my thinking and give ample room for concepts to emerge, assemble, and rearrange. This moving-mapping-building-writing-arranging-researching-testing-configuring practice is not an attempt to get away from something, but rather to move closer. This reveals my curatorial perspective, too: artworks within exhibitions could be said to contain parallel types of movement activities, before, during, and after their occupation in a gallery setting: a choreography of intersection.

On the Emergence of the Choreographic

I draw my initial interest in the choreographic from dance theory, from my own movement practice, and from my various activities in the visual arts, including sculpture, installation, and curatorial work. My work as a performer in museum and gallery-specific performance works has also contributed to this interest.

At the start of the doctoral program, I was focused on the concept of counter-choreography: an expansive, but resistant subjectivity, a compositional approach that takes a detour from finalizable form but that still has aesthetic or emotional resonance (e.g., in the work of Xavier Le Roy and Ulla von Brandenburg).

While counter-choreography has not disappeared as an area of consideration, it began to shift when it was set in relation to my other work. As a curator, I was considering themes such as agency, processual subjectivity, and embodiment through the lens of developing exhibitions and related programs. At the same time, I began to pay more attention to the connections between my dance and movement practices and my work in the studio—activities that have been concurrent for a very long time, but rarely connected.

Doctoral research is an opportunity for me to connect these areas of inquiry, and to develop insights about how these practices (moving, making, curating) intersect and inform each other.

What Is the Choreographic? What Is a Choreographic Practice?

How do I use “choreographic thinking” and what do I mean by it within the realm of the curatorial?

First: a choreographic practice is not tethered to choreography, dance, or movement arts as they are commonly understood. The choreographic moves beyond one discipline. It is more about activation and emergence than fixed points or final destinations. It could be a strategy for thinking, or for structuring the event of thinking. Or a technique, a tendency, a way to be inquisitive.

While my own definition is not likely to emerge until the end of this research project, a few key theorists have informed my evolving answer to this question. Erin Manning, philosopher and professor of philosophy, studio art, and cinema at Concordia University, notes that “a choreographic practice challenges the presupposition that movement is secondary to form, subjective or objective. The choreographic…is a technique that assists us in rethinking how a creative process activates conditions for its emergence as event.”[1]

Choreographer William Forsythe speaks about choreography as a proposal and argues that it is about thought as much as a particular discipline: “Choreography is the term that presides over a class of ideas: an idea is perhaps in this case a thought or suggestion as to a possible course of action.”[2]

Theorist Jenn Joy situates the choreographic in terms of relation: “To engage choreographically is to position oneself in relation to another, to participate in a scene of address that anticipates and requires a particular mode of attention, even at times against our will.”[3]

These are situations that are already quite familiar to me as a curator. My challenge, if I am already curating in a choreographic manner, is to investigate how this works within my practice, and articulate what it enables.

The Curatorial

Beatrice von Bismarck, Paul O’Neill, and others have written about “curating” and “the curatorial,” and what the expanded field of the curatorial might entail. Some of those discussions will surface in my research project, but for the purposes of the summary document, I mention only a few.

Maria Lind proposes the curatorial as a methodology, such as that used by artists in postproduction, drawing from “the principles of montage, employing disparate images, objects, and other material and immaterial phenomenon within a particular time and space-related framework.” She also concedes that this activity “includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all practices that work with defining, preserving, and mediating cultural heritage in a wider sense.”[4]

However, it is not only the logistical or operational aspects of orchestrating exhibitions that link to choreography. I want to reiterate that the choreographic goes beyond choreography to become a mode of thinking, an approach, an event. It allows potential (action) to infiltrate the curatorial, thereby shifting it to an activation rather than an answer.

What happens when the two areas, the choreographic and the curatorial, are mapped or merged? Are there ways to look at theories of the curatorial as they interface with or build on ideas about the choreographic? While the writers on the curatorial I have quoted here are not actually responding to those who have commented on the choreographic, I put them in relation as a speculative gesture: a way to delineate a possible (overlapping) territory.

In terms of Joy’s ideas about the choreographic and the relational, Beatrice von Bismarck and Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer might add (italics are mine):

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. It implies invitation—to artists, artworks, curators, audiences, and institutions; it receives, welcomes, and temporarily brings people and objects together, some of which have left their habitual surroundings and find themselves in the process of relocation in the sense of being a guest. Thus, the curatorial situation provides both the time and the space for encounter between entities unfamiliar with one another.[5]

Irit Rogoff, traveling in a parallel plane to Manning and Forsythe, notes that the curatorial shifts from the representational to being a “trajectory of activity”[6]—it is about the ongoing work of knowledge production (and the production of subjectivity as well), not the end-product: “The curatorial as an epistemic structure… It is a series of existing knowledges that come together momentarily to produce what we are calling the event of knowledge.”[7]

By entangling these two strands of aesthetic inquiry—the choreographic and the curatorial—I have arrived at this place: to curate choreographically is not so much to curate performing or dancing bodies in galleries, but rather to use the choreographic as a method and mindset for producing generative, exploratory exchanges of art objects, ideas, and people within an exhibition context.

My Own Curatorial Knowing & Being

This project attempts to clarify what it is that I know in the curatorial realm.

Curation is both a type of knowledge production and way of constituting subjects. It produces its own agency, in concert with artworks, which have agencies and epistemological territories of their own. It can be a form of pedagogy, or community, or political discourse.  It produces effects in collaboration with visitors, spaces, events, and ideas, and in relation to agents beyond the curatorial field itself. I cannot capture all of these possibilities or externalize them collectively as “one thing,” but these are some of the conditions of the curatorial that I will address. 

My own best curatorial practice is long-form, happening not just in one singular project, but over the course of many. It is most effective when it is embedded in a specific place. It is inherently about an encounter with a public, or with collective publics. It is aware of settings, systems, and institutions, and relationships, but I would characterize it as responsive rather than relational. It tries to uphold a generosity of spirit, but that does not mean that it shares everything or invites everyone.

In response to the SHARE: Handbook for Artistic Research Education’s “fourth task” question for artistic researchers, which challenges the researcher to identify the contingent nature of their work, its necessity, and the alternatives[8]: No. Right now, it could not be any other way.

To some degree, my project is as much an attempt to share a poetics of choreographic curation as it is an effort to prove that such a thing exists in the first place.

Drawing from/on/alongside: Dance, Performance & Museums

My investigation is part of a broader discourse around the ways the visual arts and the performing arts intersect: the shared histories, methods, or vocabularies, how the different domains together produce new, interdisciplinarity art forms, and how the practices of creation and reception shift when activity in one domain is theorized or produced through the lens of another.

Some recent curatorial theory on the intersection between exhibitions and performance includes Maren Butte et al., Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance and Florian Malzacher’s and Joanna Warsza’s Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy. This intersection is reflected in a number of recent exhibitions, as well, from Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018-2019) to Objects and Bodies at Rest and in Motion at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2014).

While discussions of curation increasingly reference concepts and vocabularies from dance and the performing arts (and vice versa), many of these do not move past the singular case study. My research project was initiated because I was hungry for a way to develop these passing references into a more robust theoretical structure from which to develop and analyze my work.

Although I am not conducting a comprehensive review of these discourses, I am in dialogue with their concerns. I feel there is more to address, however, particularly in the realm of choreographic thinking. Rarely has room been made for speculating about what it would mean to curate through and with the mesh of the choreographic, and how that impacts the process, and potentially the outcome, of a curatorial project.

Assumptions & Conditions: What I Am Doing (and Not)

I am operating under the assumption that curatorial work can be considered part of a broader artistic research practice, an accepted format for making and engaging with art. I am not completely derailing commonly understood notions of curation and exhibition development, but I am pushing at the boundaries to create more flexible structures. I am not concerned at this point with the global art market, nomadic curatorial practices, the lure of the art star, or the biennial. Those trends undoubtedly influence all art practice today, but they are not my area of inquiry.

My curatorial practice is set within specific, local settings, in non-commercial and non-spectacular spaces. My exhibition projects often take place in academic institutional environments, but I am not overturning the institutions in which curating takes place. To some degree, I enjoy the challenges, and the structures, that institutional settings provide. I do not balance on these supports uncritically, however. In developing and enacting what I am claiming is a flexible, movement-centered curation, I do critique, debate, and speculate about these naturalized, static, and colonialist conditions of the gallery and the academic institution. I grant that they are inherently problematic. However, this body of research is to illuminate my own practice, and in doing so make room for future research inquiries that may be outside the scope of this project.

I am taking for granted the idea of interdisciplinarity in the sense that I can be in dialogue with different discourses in the arts and can draw from a varied set of resources to analyze and further my practice. Perhaps this is central: I am usually most in my element when trying to take ideas from one domain and applying them, however inelegantly, to another. These awkward pairings—between the choreographic and the gallery, between the dramaturgical and the art object—are not made lightly. They are a way for me to move, literally and conceptually. They are a means for ideas to move.

Finally, I am not crafting a manual of curatorial practice, at least not one that can be commodified for easy transfer. I disagree with the requirement that new knowledge is always something that can be scaled up, shared, or reproduced. This project will likely expose gaps in my attempts to grasp choreographic curation, shortcomings in my ability to share it completely, inadvertent omissions of details that I will not know to be important until years later, and full-scale chasms where a leap of faith will be required, an acknowledgement of shared, yet incomplete understanding: I kind of get it, you nod. (If I squint and tilt my head.)

I see what you mean.

Methodologies, Themes, and Questions on Choreographic Curating

My artistic research is conducted through a series of loosely assembled gestures rather than any specific set of repeatable steps. These gestures include: curating exhibitions, reading, organizing panels, developing pedagogical programs, attending lectures and events, visual diagramming, and producing artworks, installations, and performances, among others. All of these varied activities have been called into service as a way of examining my questions on choreographic curation. They function collectively as a “mapping” practice. I will weave their effects throughout the research project as needed.

Unsurprisingly, these activities are in themselves a form of inquiry, leading to other questions. Some of my questions at the start of this research project included: How can I make curation more like a sculpture? Or a laboratory? Or a front porch? Now, I am curious to know: What is my method, and how did it develop? Under what conditions or settings does it manifest? What does it enable?

In this research, I will analyze and articulate my method of choreographic curation through the production and close examination of my own curatorial projects. As a supplement to these efforts, I will analyze other exhibitions and artworks that might be considered choreographic in process or effect and theorize the implications of the choreographic on areas including subjectivity and embodiment.

The exhibition projects I have developed serve as research methodology, research activity, and research outcome. For the written document, I will examine how the choreographic informs and operates in three projects, primarily ones produced in my capacity of director and curator of the Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy. I am embedded in my research context. This not only allows me the logistical and production support I need to develop exhibition projects, but it permits me to consider areas of my research as they appear in different forms, over time. I have access to the process of curation in a way that simply looking from the outside at someone else’s curatorial work will not provide. Admittedly, this comes with biases, but this is an artistic endeavor, not a sociological one.

Each exhibition project will elucidate some aspect of choreographic thinking in the curatorial sphere. Projects, archived as expositions on the Research Catalogue, will include exhibition materials and images. The expositions will also contain reflections on the exhibition’s process and outcomes.

The theoretical components will be extended via more in-depth texts that form part of the written dissertation. These texts will create a bridge between the expositions and my broader research themes, and may include: what objects can do, curatorial dramaturgy, resistance and refusal, the role of the curator, different modes of sensing and knowing, and how materiality moves. These discussions will be enriched by analyses of outside works of art or exhibitions in order to investigate how these principals operate in other settings. Examples might include the impact of the choreographic in Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, the nature of curatorial dramaturgy in Benedick, Or Else at New York University, or the interchange between scores, drawings, and sculptures in the work of Trisha Brown or Charles Gaines.

The final output will be a printed text, which will be supplemented by project documentation on the Research Catalogue.

In addition to dance and performance theory, I draw from a variety of other texts, thinkers, and theorists. This project benefits from recent writings on curation that address the intersection of performance and curation, as well as select writings from the fields of museum studies, museology, and feminism and queer studies, among other sources. I am indebted to many other experiences: an early production of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, experiencing Ann Hamilton’s Event of a Thread at Park Ave. Armory, seeing Einstein on the Beach 36 years after it was first performed, attending (and being dissatisfied with) a lecture by Jessica Stockholder, and much more. Only some of these latent sources will be referenced or even consciously included.

Artists/exhibition projects I may integrate into this research include:

• Helena Almeida, My Work Is My Body, My Body Is My Work at Jeu de Paume
• Ulla von Brandenburg, It has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon, Power Plant, Toronto
• Constantin Brancusi
• Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest and/or other pieces
• Lucinda Childs
• Conversations with curators including Ute Meta Bauer, founding director & professor, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, and Meg Onli, assistant curator, Speech/Acts, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
• William Forsythe
• Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread, Park Ave. Armory
• Lyn Hejinian
• Roni Horn
• Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
• Tyehimba Jess
• Judson Dance Theater
• Ragnar Kjartansson
• Ralph Lemon
•  Xavier Le Roy
• Annette Messager
• Senga Nengudi
• Phillipe Parreno, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, at Park Ave. Armory
• Sari Palosaari: Time Is Out of Joint, Galleria Sculptor
• Liisa Pentti + Co.
• William Pope.L
• Yvonne Rainer
• Jacques Tati

Some of the authors and texts I may consider in my research include (not comprehensive):

• J.L. Austin
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Tony Bennett: The Birth of the Museum
• Beatrice von Bismarck et al.: Cultures of the Curatorial (three volumes of series)
• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari
• Michael Fried
• William Forsythe: The Fact of the Matter (and/or other texts)
• Pil Hansen & Darcey Callison: Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness and Engagement
• Jenn Joy: The Choreographic
• Carrie Lambert-Beaty et al.: Dance/Draw      
• Efva Lilja
• Maria Lind
• Kirsten Maar et al.: Assign & Arrange: Methodologies of Presentation in Art and Dance
• Florian Malzacher & Joanna Warsza: Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy
• Erin Manning
• Fred Moten & Stefano Harvey: The Undercommons: Fugutive Planning & Black Study
• Hans Ulrich Obrist et al.: Curating Subjects; Ways of Curating
• Paul O’Neil, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture and “The Politics of the Small Act” essay from OnCurating
• Katherine Profeta: Dramaturgy in Motion
• Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger & Iris Sikking: Why Exhibit? Positions On Exhibiting Photographies
• Susan Rosenberg: Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art
• Stephanie Rosenthal: Move. Choreographing You. Art and Dance Since the 1960s
• Stephen Weil: Making Museums Matter

Some key themes and questions, in addition to those noted already, include:

• What does choreographic thinking produce in the curatorial? What is the nature of the thinking process (material, spatial, textual, other) that contributes to the curatorial arc?
• Who else is using the choreographic and how? What does each of these voices bring to the table? What am I adding or how am I expanding the scope of the discussion?
• Knowing and being. What types of knowledge and non-knowledge can curating in a choreographic manner produce or encourage?
• Is there a curatorial dramaturgy? What kind of dramaturgical scaffold is possible or necessary when choreographic thinking drives curation?
• Does choreographic curation follow or produce a score?
• How does space work in the choreographic curatorial method? How do installation, dance, and architecture inform space? How does space perform?
• The role, function, and activity of objects. What can objects do? Can objects and displays be speech acts? Or choreo-acts?
• The role of the curator. Does the position of curator/author shift within a choreographic method?
• The temporal dimension of curating. Paying attention/joint attention. Institutional time, learning time, slowness and speed. Role of inaccessibility, boredom.
• How does the choreographic curatorial resist? What does it resist? Is there a “wayward curating" that challenges or reconfigures normative systems of display, vision, and discursivity?