Anti-Humanist curating: Finding a way further in

ABSTRACT

As a brief introduction to the new research project Anti-Humanist Curating, this essay focuses on the limits and problems of liberal Humanism, the prevailing ideological framework of our societies in the post-industrial Western nations, and how these limits and problems may be explored, expanded and exploded to consider new formulations of the politics of contemporary curatorial modalities. The contemporary operations of this ideology are interrogated as manifest specifically through the workings and ethics of contemporary curatorial practices: i.e. within the technologies that make art visible and the conditions of the reception of contemporary art. This introduction also discusses how curatorial practices might regain more stringent political valence for the production and reception of contemporary art more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-Humanism
• Humanism
• Post-Fordism
• late Capitalism
• contemporary art
• curatorial practice
• Liberalism
• neo-liberalism
• ethics
• critical politics