excerpt
Deferral...
Forword (p. 6)
In a society in which media pressure is tending
to impose the event as the sole legitimate
cultural format, it was up to a school to dare
to define a different kind of workspace: one in
which time would be consecrated to testing
out new situations, with no concern for visibility
or attendance figures. For the audience
rating system does not sit well with the long
time lapse required for a new idea to gain
acceptance.
La Box, the gallery of the National
School of Art in Bourges, has openly reaffirmed
the research function concomitant with
the teaching mission of a public higher education
establishment. La Box is not just a
showcase or an art outlet; it is an experimental
framework within which all exhibition
parameters can be challenged in the presence
of students and teachers and with their active
participation. The principle of an annual
curatorship emerged as the precondition for
an approach to programming. A call for curatorial
projects was issued and a proposal chosen
by a vote of the entire teaching team after
a group interview with the shortlisted candidates.
This delegation process enabled reconciliation
of the independence of stance
required by a genuine curatorial approach
with the equally necessary transparency of
the selection procedures. This transparency
guarantees the school's democratic, collegial
functioning while providing the students with
interlocutors — the curators — ready to
assume responsibility for their choices and
discuss them throughout the year.
Entrusting young curators with a complete
programme rather than a single event
thus signals a certain resistance to the obligation
to produce attention-getting content. And
to focus the first such season on varieties of
deferral was an especially pertinent decision
on the part of the guest curators. There is a
genuinely political issue to be dealt with
today on the periphery of the art scene — in
spaces and at junctures where the spotlights
have been turned off and the microphones
unplugged — in the form of an urgent need to
invent forms as independent as possible of a
visibility system monopolised by the media
and their sponsored offshoots. This, it seems
to me, is what Marie Cozette, Keren Detton
and Julie Pellegrin set out to do by giving
expression to time lapse in fascinating variations
on the paradoxical deferral strategies
implemented — before, after or whenever —
by the artists they brought together here.
Maria Wutz
