Minor Curating?

ABSTRACT

The main focus of this text is to argue that one answer to critical effectiveness in curatorial practice, as well as how to address tensions between Utopian, social and political thought in the display of artworks and an avoidance of curatorial narcissism, is through an ethical approach to exhibition making that involves affirmative modes of critical humour and humility against postmodern irony.

One might also see projects in unlikely places as embodying a similar potential against inflated curatorial discourse when compared to the content of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1984). Deleuze and Guattari's idea is that a minor literature can deterri-torialize the major language of the time, and this essay argues for a corresponding curatorial practice in a local context. For example, it may be possible for a new form of contemporary programming — a minor curating that stammers or stutters — to counteract the prevailing order of things.

KEYWORDS:

• humour
• humility
• curating
• biennale academicism
• post-postmodern irony
• nonsense
• global/utopian
• local/incomplete
• productive disjunctions
• curator as prism
• photographic abstraction