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The way we think about curating here at MA Curatorial Practice is modeled on the notion of the network, with its porous membrane, its centrifugal structure always reaching into the political, addressing how we can be together. Every curatorial gesture is toward the linked relations among things that the senses and intellect bind, scrutinizing what’s to be known in the condition of among, of between-us, in which we as organizers of historical and contemporary moments try to find a crucial idea with its bite—always attempting to clarify the argument and carry the idea from person to person, thing to thing, leveraging its particular truths, its viral need. Here we are, at the threshold of a new year, and what we thought we knew as the basis of democracy eroded in the frame of a few months, and still erodes, still haunts us with what’s left to protect. Everything we can bring to the making of exhibitions, of assemblies, of performances and storehouses of documents helps us to form these hubs and nodes in the linking logic of an ethics that embodies what we do in the name of being together, as Judith Butler says; of how to be kin in some feeling, earthly way, as Donna Haraway has taught us.
The MA Curatorial Practice program, which I began to create fourteen years ago, is based on these notions of linking and gathering practices, sharing how to fashion a crucial idea for curatorial making, whatever it may be in the urgency and desire of that emerging curator. There are narratives that run through the program: the Case Studies with extraordinary curators and others as faculty, who share the grain of their knowledge and experience in working with different materials (film, video, digital media, performance, archives and collections, the spoken word, sound, light, and space itself) in the act of curating. There is the sequence of art and exhibition history courses; the theory courses; the courses in rhetoric and logic (to make a better argument), in phenomenology (so that we better understand bodies and objects in space, essential to exhibition-making); the writing workshops; the visit to a major international biennial; the internship at a leading international museum or Kunsthalle. All of these are parts of the practical and intellectual toolkit that we offer, so that they link together in each student’s mind, thinking through not only how to find and curate that crucial idea but also how, in a larger sense, to think of "the Curatorial" as the formation of a network reaching outward into the social sphere and the politics of curating as a form of ethical composing, of negotiating and navigating our lives with others.
I know this may sound abstract, but the necessity of the Curatorial as a kind of tool-making for the world is both large and particular, based on technical skills and hands-on training, along with the skills to research, to think critically, to gather the specific knowledge necessary to organize exhibitions and other curatorial projects, querying and answering the world in this time and place as you and we need, speaking to society under duress, with the weight of history and the moment calling. This what we try to bring to our work together in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.—Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair
To learn more about the program, visit us here.
