| art.description.project | Setting the Table was a practice-based, research initiative in the form of a four-day long, intensive, assembly of international artists, organisers and curators. Twenty-five prominentcurators, artist-curators, community organisers, theorists and representatives of artist-organisations
were gathered in the social setting of a tentative and alterable, trans-historical exhibition. Amidst selected objects, artefacts and art works from various forms of artist-organisation,
those assembled were tasked to collaborate on a script-in-hand, adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace (PEACE, after Aristophanes, Bowman. 2018) that was performed for, and with, a public.
As practice-based research it departed from dominant, recent research (Ault, Bronson, Kouoh, Kester, Khonsary and Podesva, O’Neill, Raunig, Sholette, and Staal and Warzsa) that emphasises artist-organisation as parallel,secessionary, alternative and counter-institutions in which, though, little attention is specifically paid to the roles, strategies, methods and forms of curating initiated by artists. It sought to
proceed and advance from recent significant work by Filopovic (2017) and Green (2018), to pose the contention that further research needs to be conducted into the curatorial methods
and strategies, as conceived of and rehearsed by artists; but in this case specifically in relation artist-organisation. Thus, Setting the Table sought to also advance new knowledge of
how artist-organisation is an exemplary form through which to consider the extendibility of curating (the curatorial as defined by Fletcher, Lind, O’Neill, Martinon, Rogoff) via the
collectivised, collaborative and social potentia of artist-organisation.
The originating aim of this research was to interrogate how artistic practices are extended through the ‘artist-led’, beyond the artist as auratic producer of recognisable and recognised art
work. It sought to determine methods by which to entangle the administrative, collaborative, managerial, programmatic, social, contextualising and theorising activities of artists; and to consider the implications of these granular actions to – and through – the field of curating,and as coincidental with its potential extendibility. A key contention was: that the
administrative, managerial, programmatic, social, contextualising, and theorising activities of artists that contour artist-organisation, may be understood as being of curating. This suggests that greater attention needs to be paid to the consideration of curatorial methods and strategies, conceived of and rehearsed by artists; whether parallel, secessionary,
complimentary to, or concurrent with the work of institutions and those of a projectarian nature.
Therefore, as practice-based research, the aim of Setting the Table was to conceive of forms of exhibition, in which these granular activities, may be foregrounded or become entangled in
ways that do not simply sustain them being thought of as extra-artistic or subservient to the production of artworks. As a research experiment, via exhibition-in-the-making, Setting the
Table provided a platform for discussion, consideration and rehearsing of these ideas. It established the format of an ‘exhibition-in-the making’ as a method by which exhibitionary
form may be purposed to be propagative of research; as opposed to the dominant notion of exhibition as a format for the display and dissemination of research.
Thus, the project commissioned to allow for propogation and dispersal via , the tables commissioned from Emma Leslie (Prototypical Tables for Social Housing Assembly. 2018) were re-exhibited at the London Design Festival and featured in ENKI magazine in August 2018. They were also used by the social housing and community project, The Drawing Shed to launch their new initiative TriO: http://makingplaces.co.uk/node/9817709
https://www.emmaleslie.co.uk/#/weite/
https://www.londondesignfestival.com/event/open-studios-assemble%E2%80%99s-sugarhouse-studios
Additional outpouts included:
1. a publication produced for the exhibition with an original essay by Jason E. Bowman focusing on the curatorial courses laid out in Francis Cape’s ongoing project, Utopian Benches/We Sit Together.
2. the script of Peace (After Aristophanes).
3. the video of the performance of Peace (After Aristophanes) will be made available of which an early iteration may be viewed here:
https://vimeo.com/266651522/eb5320a5c9. | sv |
| art.description.supportedBy | The project was supported, in part, through a four-year long research (2014-18) grant from the Swedish Research Council. Entitled Stretched (Principal In: Jason E. Bowman; CRs:
Julie Crashaw and Mick Wilson with RA: Kjell Caminha), this research project aims via curatorial and exhibition-making methods to produce new critical knowledge on what
expanded modes, models and constellations of artistic practice are constituted and generated in the field of ‘artist-organisation’.
Baltic Contemporary Arts funded the project with 6,000 GBP from internal funds and made further gifts in kind and time, including of staff time and the use of the BALTIC 39
Project Space. New York University funded the travel costs of Clinical Associate Professor, Melissa Rachleff Burtt. Edinburgh University paid for the travel and accommodatuion of Dr. Deborah Jackson. Nottingham University paid for the travel and accommodation of Dr. Karen Salt. Raven Row gallery paid for the travel and accommodation of its director, Alex Sainsbury.
Amongst lenders to the exhibition included Murray Guy gallery, New York; the estate of Edith Simon; and the Trustees of the Burston Strike School. | sv |
