A C T 1 T h e P r o l o g u e
Prologues are traditionally the opening to a play or story that establish context giving the audience a sense of history and background. The following chapter acts as a review of the literature and aims to position this research within the fields of inclusive arts, self-advocacy and curatorship. Crucially, intersecting between these three genealogies two key themes emerged; autonomy and authorship. This chapter explores these themes across the context of inclusive arts, self-advocacy and curatorship, and the thesis itself exploring how the curation of Auto Agents made the themes of autonomy and authorship lived and visible.
Autonomy remains a key objective for self-advocates but, as we come to explore, autonomy is being increasingly questioned and reconceptualised within self-advocacy; with models of interdependency now emerging. Via the practice, we see how the curators on this project all require unique and complex networks of support to enable autonomy in their everyday lives. This is explored in relation to how artworks and exhibitions are often not the work of a lone ‘genius’ but are in fact configured through a matrix of equally complex relationships and networks. Autonomy is also queried within the field of inclusive arts; varying models of this practice grapple with how ideas of artistic autonomy relate to artists whom require facilitation and support to create their art.
Authorship - the state or act of writing, creating, or causing - has also been a central concern for self-advocates who vie for more control over their lives. This has increasingly manifested in terms of academic research where learning disabled people have campaigned to have greater involvement and recognition in authoring research (Aspis, 2000). Similarly, in a completely different networks of sites and literatures, learning disabled artists have sought for their own artistic authorship to be recognised and celebrated within mainstream arts contexts (Creative Minds, 2017). Authorship within curatorial contexts has continued to be a topic of interest as curators, artists and institutions have historically worked together to commission art, but how authorship is negotiated, and what is at stake during these negotiations, is explored across these sites.
setting the scene: inclusive arts
To review the emergence of Inclusive Arts I began by broadly exploring the history of art by disabled people. What is evident is that for centuries disabled people served as objects to be depicted, rather than active creators of culture. Whilst disability is artistically represented at different points in history[1], the earliest literature found relating specifically to the art work made by disabled people is in reference to Art Brut, promoted by Jean Dubuffet, in the 20th century. Art Brut is defined by qualities such as rawness, spontaneity, and individuality and requires that the artist be “socially isolated” and exercise his or her creativity in “complete isolation from external cultural influences” (Davies, 2009). Over time, Art Brut evolved into Outsider Art, a term coined in 1972 by British art historian Roger Cardinal. Outsider Art is considered a more inclusive coinage for Art Brut, applied more broadly to people on the margins of art and society: the disabled, the homeless, ethnic minorities, migrants, folk artists and the self-taught. Notably, Outsider Art is also commercially successful reflected in its annual dedicated art fairs and collectors, international studios and the many large-scale exhibitions appearing at powerful institutions.[2]
Whilst Art Brut and Outsider Art are genres in which some disabled artists continue to practice, Disability Art emerged in the 1980's and is now regarded as a distinct genre, described as the last remaining avant-garde movement (Bragg, 2007, no pagination). It is intimately connected to disability politics and as disabled poet and activist Alan Sutherland describes; “disability arts would not have been possible without disability politics coming along first” (Sutherland, 1997, p.159). In short, the radical socio/political interpretation of disability entered the political arena in mid-1970s following the “groundswell of political activity amongst disabled people” across the world (Barnes, 2003, p.4). Specifically, the emergence of the social model of disability which foregrounded how society is geared almost exclusively to the needs of a non-disabled ideal, filtered through to the art created by disabled people. Armed with this re-interpretation of disability, what resulted was unease over the prevalence of negative imagery and lack of genuine authorship by disabled people in popular culture and the arts. Mainstream art and culture was not only perpetuating attitudinal barriers, it did not reflect the experiences of disabled people (Masefield, 2006). What emerged was politically fueled artworks by disabled people now articulated as the Disability Art movement. In an interview I conducted with Tony Heaton, a prominent disabled artist who spent 10 years as the CEO of Disability Arts organisation Shape, he stated;
Whilst Art Brut and Outsider Art are genres in which some disabled artists continue to practice, Disability Art emerged in the 1980's and is now regarded as a distinct genre, described as the last remaining avant-garde movement (Bragg, 2007, no pagination). It is intimately connected to disability politics and as disabled poet and activist Alan Sutherland describes; “disability arts would not have been possible without disability politics coming along first” (Sutherland, 1997, p.159). In short, the radical socio/political interpretation of disability entered the political arena in mid-1970s following the “groundswell of political activity amongst disabled people” across the world (Barnes, 2003, p.4). Specifically, the emergence of the social model of disability which foregrounded how society is geared almost exclusively to the needs of a non-disabled ideal, filtered through to the art created by disabled people. Armed with this re-interpretation of disability, what resulted was unease over the prevalence of negative imagery and lack of genuine authorship by disabled people in popular culture and the arts. Mainstream art and culture was not only perpetuating attitudinal barriers, it did not reflect the experiences of disabled people (Masefield, 2006). What emerged was politically fueled artworks by disabled people now articulated as the Disability Art movement. In an interview I conducted with Tony Heaton, a prominent disabled artist who spent 10 years as the CEO of Disability Arts organisation Shape, he stated;
|
Disability Arts is a clearly defined genre. The generally agreed definition of Disability Arts, the one that the disability arts movement have found most accurately reflects what we are doing, is that it is art made by disabled people which reflects the experience of disability. (French, 2014)
|
The Disability Arts Chronology published by Disability Arts Online in 2008, which is currently being developed into the National Disability Arts Collection and Archive (2018), is a valuable source for tracing the practices of disabled artists and disability arts organisations. The archive aims to map and collect artworks and associated materials produced by disabled artists over the last 30 years, recognising they are an important part of the history of disabled people in the UK. From reviewing the interviews, it is clear that early on in the Disability Arts movement disabled artists expressed that they do not wish to be just recipients of art but also creators and producers; emphasising their right to authorship and representation. This concern highlighted new barriers within the arts in terms of education, as few disabled artists were able to obtain any training in order to pursue an artistic career. This prompted several Disability Arts organisations to develop their own training (Graeae, 2017; Shape, 2017; Carousel, 2017). Disability Art is therefore not just about exposing disabling imagery, but also the processes and structures of society and is therefore positioned as playing a key role alongside conventional political activities:
|
Arts practice should also be viewed as much as a tool for change as attending meetings about orange badge provision[3]... Only by ensuring an integrated role for disability arts and culture in the struggle can we develop the vision to challenge narrow thinking, elitism and dependency on others for our emancipation. To encourage the growth of a disability culture is no less than to begin the radical task of transforming ourselves from passive and dependent beings into active and creative agents for social change. (Morrison and Finkelstein, 1992, p. 11)
|
With developments within disability politics[4] proving useful in understanding and articulating issues of access to services, for example transport and public places, it was then applied to identify accessibility issues in places of arts and culture. ‘Access’ has been useful for galleries, museums and heritage sites in conceptualising barriers to their participation. There has been previous research into accessibility of art galleries for disabled people and the majority of this early research investigates best practice solutions into making cultural institutions physically accessible (Rayner, 1998; Earnscliffe, 1992). However these debates swiftly developed and further barriers were identified in terms of institutional access as disabled people vied for better representation within funding bodies, boards and employment within institutions (Culbard and Daly, 2009). On this Masefield (2006) writes; “Ultimately neither the creation nor the training, employment nor funding of Disability Arts will be possible, unless we are fast tracked onto the Arts Boards”. Arguably, this remains a persistent struggle. After attending a Disability Arts congress organised by DaDaFest in 2014 and 2016, many of the speakers and delegates remain dissatisfied with current representation of disabled people in roles such as directors, funders and curators. Throughout this project Leah in particular was very aware that curators are rarely, if ever, learning disabled, and that being a curator denoted a position of importance. “People don’t think we can do a job like that” Leah commented whilst creating a zine page. “That’s why it’s important we tell people we’re curators” she explained whilst producing a striking collage featuring the word ‘status’ in response to ‘what is art?’. For Leah, it appears there is potential in the role of a curator to bring about change, but for others, these ‘gatekeeper’ roles are seen as barriers to their expression and autonomy. It has been suggested that until gatekeeping roles are undertaken by a wider range of people and manifested in ways that invite new thinking and ‘non’ traditional representations of what a leader is, the playing field will remain uneven (Marsh and Burrows, 2017). Therefore by enabling learning disabled people to curate through devising an inclusive an accessible process, this project potentially contributes towards addressing this identified gap in the representation of disabled people in the arts as cultural leaders.
But the heavy politicization of Disability Arts has been called into question. As Disability Art placed such importance on the political dimension of the work, it has been suggested that this has been at the expense of technical artistic competence. Roland Humphrey, the editor of the first Disability Arts Magazine (DAM) during the early 1990s, speculates that the structures handed down from the political movement to the artist have effectively narrowed and restricted the practice and that; “Disability Arts has to be good art first and foremost otherwise it will be ignored” (1994, p. 66). He proposes that there is a cost to ignoring mainstream criteria of what constitutes `good' art. Whilst Disability Arts has certainly constituted an empowering `voice' for disabled people, its dislocation from mainstream contexts has arguably delayed its recognition in cultural theorisation.
Furthermore, the politicization of the genre has also been accused of excluding learning disabled people. It has been argued that learning disabled people were initially left out of disability politics (Campell and Oliver, 1996, p.97) and Disability Arts has been accused of inheriting this issue through excluding learning disabled artists from the movement. Dan Goodley and Michelle Moore explore this in their book Disability Arts Against Exclusion stating that “people with learning difficulties in disability arts in Britain mirrors the shaky position held by self-advocates with learning difficulties in the disability movement” (2002, p.16). Whilst Disability Arts brought the difference in human bodies to the attention of audiences, this did not widely include learning disabled people. Many learning disabled artists require support, often in the form of facilitation, in order to produce their art work. Consequently, this inclusion of non-disabled people via facilitatory roles complicates the Disability Arts paradigm which has sought to “free itself from the domination of able-bodied professionals” (Oliver and Barnes, 2012, p. 104), muddying the waters around autonomy and authorship. Therefore the artwork produced by learning disabled artists is rarely labelled as Disability Art or found within Disability Arts contexts.
Instead, Inclusive Arts Practice developed as a new distinct genre. This field aimed to account for a spectrum of collaboration that enables authorship by learning disabled artists through facilitation. This term is generally used to describe a “facilitated artistic collaboration between people with a disability and people with no disability” (Perring, 2005; Calvert, 2009) but in the UK, Inclusive Arts Practice has particular currency for specifically defining the practice of working with learning disabled people in a facilitated collaboration model where “professional artistic practitioners collaborate with individuals with intellectual or learning disabilities to create new art work” (Austen, 2014, p.11). Leading Inclusive Arts practitioner Alice Fox[5] (2010, no pagnation) defines the term as;
|
Supporting creative opportunities between marginalised and non-marginalised people through artistic facilitation and collaboration as a means of challenging existing barriers and promoting social change.
|
The collaborative approaches used within this category varies widely, with some practitioners favouring “improvisational or participant-led models” across creative forms and others utilising more “structured frameworks of direction in which an auteur or director figure seeks what they are after” through scripts, sequences or dramaturgical design (Austen, 2014, p.11). Throughout this project I was clear to define my own role as a facilitator to the curators, artists and broader networks, and not an artistic director. I explained that my role was akin to a support worker who was there to help them keep track of the exhibition, to work and communicate effectively with people, and crucially, to support them make critically-engaged decisions. But ultimately, the decisions and trajectory of the exhibition were theirs to make. Therefore, the position of facilitator required a reflexive approach; ensuring my personal opinions and preferences did not influence the group’s decisions. This was particularly tested during the artist’s recruitment process, whereby I was required to enable the curators to interview and assess potential artists for the commission, but crucially, keeping my own views out of the mix explored further in Act 3: The Commissioners and The Commissioned.
Inclusive Arts is also understood to be related to a range of practices, but notably, it has similarities to the participatory arts which place emphasis on ‘process’ rather than ‘product’ (Bourriard, 1998; Kester, 2004; Lacy, 2010; Helguera, 2011). But the term ‘Inclusive Arts’ can be traced back further in the UK to the Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Teams (PATs), and specifically to PAT 10: Art and Sport, which describes the arts as “being an integral part of the Government’s policy to combat social exclusion” (Hoey, 2001, p.130). This policy articulation led to wide range of initiatives, funding streams and job roles which aimed to explore how arts and culture might relate to social inclusion.[6] Perhaps the most ambitious – and one through which the term ‘Inclusive Arts' gained greatest momentum – was the flagship Creative Partnerships Policy for Education introduced by New Labour in 2006. In this context, the term was applied to arts practice that championed social inclusion with an emphasis on the enjoyment of cultural participation for all, rather than the arts being used for any form of social critique.[7] The connections that Inclusive Arts has to social inclusion agendas has come under heavy criticism for being neither good art or good social work on the grounds that the 'art' somehow has been compromised (Belifore, 2002; Bishop, 2006; Thomson and Hall, 2007). In 1997 François Matarasso wrote one of the first large scale evaluations on the evidence of social impacts arising from participation in the arts which considers the arts impact upon a variety of areas including autonomy, empowerment, local image and identity and social cohesion. Building on this in 2004, John Holden's report suggests that the adoption of inclusive arts into cultural policy has also fed into notions of quality;
The arguments seems to have got stuck in the old tramlines very quickly: instrumental vs intrinsic value, floppy bow ties vs. hard head-ed 'realists', excellence vs. access. Worse still, the instrument/intrinsic debate has tended to polarize class lines: aesthetic values for the middle classes, instrumental outcomes for the poor and disadvantaged. (Holden, p.24)
However, artistic quality and social engagement, or viewing art as either instrumental or intrinsic, are not necessarily in opposition as some of the literature suggests. My concern as an artist-facilitator has always been how to convey the quality of the process to wider audiences, which raises bigger questions for me in how we understand where the 'art' is primarily located in this type of work. This question arose during the curation of Auto Agents and prompted exploration in how to capture the curatorial process and furthermore, how we could reveal these to audiences as a way of identifying alternatives to the quality being defined only by people who ‘know’ about art. This resulted in the exhibition’s interpretation taking the form of a collaborative film, making visible the shared notions of authorship inherent in exhibition making, further explored in Act 4: Auto Agents.
Using Fox's definition, Inclusive Arts Practice places emphasis on the approaches to collaboration with 'marginalised' people with the ultimate aim of facilitating creativity and expression in order to promote social change. However this definition of Inclusive Arts Practice is problematic and characterising people as ‘marginalised’ raises further questions and concerns. Who decides upon the label of 'marginalised'? What problems does labelling people as marginalised create? Some suggest marginalisation is closely related to 'othering' which is a “way of defining and securing one's own positive identity through the stigmatisation of an ‘other’” (Agelides and Michaelidou, 2009, p.38). Whatever the markers of social differentiation that shape the meaning of 'other' - whether they are racial, geographic, ethnic, economic, or ideological - there is always the danger that they will become the basis for a self-affirmation that depends upon the denigration of the other group creating an 'us and 'them'. Over the years, social scientists have become increasingly aware of how their disciplines construct, legitimize and perpetuate 'otherness' (Andersen and Collins 1998; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fine 1998; Sampson 1993) and so researchers have acknowledged the importance of reflexivity when undertaking research when participants are marginalized in ways they are not (Traustadóttir, 2001).
In my work, I have become more drawn to approaches that do not set up binaries. The work of Anna Hickey-Moody for example explores how the term 'inclusive' is linked to ‘otherness’ and is questioned on the basis that it is grounded in a binary power relation model. Models situating ‘inclusion’ as an aspiration that sets up notions of exclusion, which can lead to right/wrong, ability/disability comparisons. Hickey-Moody also reflects on how discourses of inclusion in education have largely become a system of ‘othering’ that can only be dismantled by developing new methods for thinking about identity and embodied difference (2009, p.43).
Throughout this research I have been keen to seek out instances of curatorship specifically by learning disabled people. There are very few examples within contemporary arts contexts, however an example I did encounter was back in 2009 by arts organisation Project Volume. Visual Voices was a visual arts exhibition curated by Project Volume’s learning disabled artists at The Old Truman Brewery from 30th October to 5th November 2009 in response to modern London architecture. The exhibition was funded by The London Development Agency’s Cultural Skills Fund to address a gap in provision for artists and dancers with learning disabilities so that they can gain greater skills and become “cultural leaders” (Project Volume, 2017). A part of their skills development was to “encourage the true voice of the artist through nurturing their artistic vision and beginning to instil in them the skills for curating” (ibid). Unfortunately, there is no published literature on this project but through interviews via email with Susan Norwood the director of Project Volume in 2012, I was able to learn somewhat about the approaches the group used in curating and the organisation’s motivations to explore curatorial practices. In this interview Norwood took me through the process of supporting the group to engage with curation. This began with a day-long workshop at Tate Modern with their educational team where the group “gained an introduction to curating”. Norwood elaborates; "I divided the group into smaller groups, asking them to select different works from the exhibitions and group them together, and say why they had grouped them together and chosen them."
Following this workshop, the group then spent two weeks working out of a studio in East London. Here, the artists had space to experiment with display, and began to “critique each others work” by grouping them and “looking for similarities between each other’s work, and work which contrasted and added something to each group of pictures”. For the final exhibition, the artists were “divided into sub groups for the curating. There was a fine art, and photography sub group”. Using the comparative skills practiced during their studio time, the group made their selection and began to “play with what may go where in the space with the technician”.
Throughout the interview I conducted with Norwood, she places much emphasis on the traditional curatorial approaches of aesthetic comparison and relationship between works, but interestingly, throughout her description of the curatorial process, she makes no reference to labelling, interpretation, marketing or engagement with audiences. However, Project Volume’s aim for the project was not necessarily to ‘train’ people as curators, but to support artists in their membership to retain artistic autonomy over their work; sharpening their professional skills to work more effectively in the arts.
I think as any artist, disability aside, it is important to understand the whole process, so that artists have greater power over their work and can either curate or learn the process so that they can collaborate their ideas and thoughts when working with an outside curator… it is about retaining at times control over the vision and integrity of your own work.
Another example of curatorship I have encountered by learning disabled artists is during Side by Side: Learning Disability, Art and Collaboration, an exhibition and symposium at the Southbank Centre in March/April 2013 directed by Alice Fox. Fox employed an inclusive approach to the curation of the exhibition to include the Rocket Artists, a learning disability arts group based in Brighton. In her book, Inclusive Arts and Research: A Critical Manifesto, Fox discusses how the exhibition was curated and highlights the importance of enabling choice making in her approach; “Curating can be viewed as a series of choices to be made and problems to be solved. So in order to support inclusive curating with learning disabled people, we needed to support people to tackle those choices” (Fox and Macpherson, 2015, p.47). Whilst choice making certainly plays an important role in curating, the experience of designing a process to enable curation for learning disabled people on this project revealed that it is not just about choice. As Lucy Worsley, chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, warns; “People think curating just means choosing nice things. But this is only half of it”. Curating involves much more than the act of selection and requires “building up real knowledge of the items” (The Guardian, 2016). Fox continues to elaborate on how choices were enabled without really expanding on how the curators developed approaches in being critical or how the curators understood and related to the artwork.
Similarly to the Project Volume’s Visual Voices exhibition, I sense that the learning disabled curators on these projects were not supported to challenge and reimagine what curatorship is, therefore missing out on the unique contributions they could bring to the practice. Facilitating the curation of Auto Agents revealed to me that curation involves many of different types of actions other than choice making, and breaking them all down enough allows curation is not only to be accessible, but open to fundamental change. For example in terms of Auto Agents, I did not anticipate the curators bold approach to challenging and rethinking the exhibition’s interpretation. Had I set the project up in a way that defined the role of a curator as only choice making for example, we might never have explored alternative possibilities to interpretation which resulted in abandoning the dominant mode of text in favour for a collaborative film.
Inclusive Arts is also understood to be related to a range of practices, but notably, it has similarities to the participatory arts which place emphasis on ‘process’ rather than ‘product’ (Bourriard, 1998; Kester, 2004; Lacy, 2010; Helguera, 2011). But the term ‘Inclusive Arts’ can be traced back further in the UK to the Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Teams (PATs), and specifically to PAT 10: Art and Sport, which describes the arts as “being an integral part of the Government’s policy to combat social exclusion” (Hoey, 2001, p.130). This policy articulation led to wide range of initiatives, funding streams and job roles which aimed to explore how arts and culture might relate to social inclusion.[6] Perhaps the most ambitious – and one through which the term ‘Inclusive Arts' gained greatest momentum – was the flagship Creative Partnerships Policy for Education introduced by New Labour in 2006. In this context, the term was applied to arts practice that championed social inclusion with an emphasis on the enjoyment of cultural participation for all, rather than the arts being used for any form of social critique.[7] The connections that Inclusive Arts has to social inclusion agendas has come under heavy criticism for being neither good art or good social work on the grounds that the 'art' somehow has been compromised (Belifore, 2002; Bishop, 2006; Thomson and Hall, 2007). In 1997 François Matarasso wrote one of the first large scale evaluations on the evidence of social impacts arising from participation in the arts which considers the arts impact upon a variety of areas including autonomy, empowerment, local image and identity and social cohesion. Building on this in 2004, John Holden's report suggests that the adoption of inclusive arts into cultural policy has also fed into notions of quality;
The arguments seems to have got stuck in the old tramlines very quickly: instrumental vs intrinsic value, floppy bow ties vs. hard head-ed 'realists', excellence vs. access. Worse still, the instrument/intrinsic debate has tended to polarize class lines: aesthetic values for the middle classes, instrumental outcomes for the poor and disadvantaged. (Holden, p.24)
However, artistic quality and social engagement, or viewing art as either instrumental or intrinsic, are not necessarily in opposition as some of the literature suggests. My concern as an artist-facilitator has always been how to convey the quality of the process to wider audiences, which raises bigger questions for me in how we understand where the 'art' is primarily located in this type of work. This question arose during the curation of Auto Agents and prompted exploration in how to capture the curatorial process and furthermore, how we could reveal these to audiences as a way of identifying alternatives to the quality being defined only by people who ‘know’ about art. This resulted in the exhibition’s interpretation taking the form of a collaborative film, making visible the shared notions of authorship inherent in exhibition making, further explored in Act 4: Auto Agents.
Using Fox's definition, Inclusive Arts Practice places emphasis on the approaches to collaboration with 'marginalised' people with the ultimate aim of facilitating creativity and expression in order to promote social change. However this definition of Inclusive Arts Practice is problematic and characterising people as ‘marginalised’ raises further questions and concerns. Who decides upon the label of 'marginalised'? What problems does labelling people as marginalised create? Some suggest marginalisation is closely related to 'othering' which is a “way of defining and securing one's own positive identity through the stigmatisation of an ‘other’” (Agelides and Michaelidou, 2009, p.38). Whatever the markers of social differentiation that shape the meaning of 'other' - whether they are racial, geographic, ethnic, economic, or ideological - there is always the danger that they will become the basis for a self-affirmation that depends upon the denigration of the other group creating an 'us and 'them'. Over the years, social scientists have become increasingly aware of how their disciplines construct, legitimize and perpetuate 'otherness' (Andersen and Collins 1998; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Fine 1998; Sampson 1993) and so researchers have acknowledged the importance of reflexivity when undertaking research when participants are marginalized in ways they are not (Traustadóttir, 2001).
In my work, I have become more drawn to approaches that do not set up binaries. The work of Anna Hickey-Moody for example explores how the term 'inclusive' is linked to ‘otherness’ and is questioned on the basis that it is grounded in a binary power relation model. Models situating ‘inclusion’ as an aspiration that sets up notions of exclusion, which can lead to right/wrong, ability/disability comparisons. Hickey-Moody also reflects on how discourses of inclusion in education have largely become a system of ‘othering’ that can only be dismantled by developing new methods for thinking about identity and embodied difference (2009, p.43).
Throughout this research I have been keen to seek out instances of curatorship specifically by learning disabled people. There are very few examples within contemporary arts contexts, however an example I did encounter was back in 2009 by arts organisation Project Volume. Visual Voices was a visual arts exhibition curated by Project Volume’s learning disabled artists at The Old Truman Brewery from 30th October to 5th November 2009 in response to modern London architecture. The exhibition was funded by The London Development Agency’s Cultural Skills Fund to address a gap in provision for artists and dancers with learning disabilities so that they can gain greater skills and become “cultural leaders” (Project Volume, 2017). A part of their skills development was to “encourage the true voice of the artist through nurturing their artistic vision and beginning to instil in them the skills for curating” (ibid). Unfortunately, there is no published literature on this project but through interviews via email with Susan Norwood the director of Project Volume in 2012, I was able to learn somewhat about the approaches the group used in curating and the organisation’s motivations to explore curatorial practices. In this interview Norwood took me through the process of supporting the group to engage with curation. This began with a day-long workshop at Tate Modern with their educational team where the group “gained an introduction to curating”. Norwood elaborates; "I divided the group into smaller groups, asking them to select different works from the exhibitions and group them together, and say why they had grouped them together and chosen them."
Following this workshop, the group then spent two weeks working out of a studio in East London. Here, the artists had space to experiment with display, and began to “critique each others work” by grouping them and “looking for similarities between each other’s work, and work which contrasted and added something to each group of pictures”. For the final exhibition, the artists were “divided into sub groups for the curating. There was a fine art, and photography sub group”. Using the comparative skills practiced during their studio time, the group made their selection and began to “play with what may go where in the space with the technician”.
Throughout the interview I conducted with Norwood, she places much emphasis on the traditional curatorial approaches of aesthetic comparison and relationship between works, but interestingly, throughout her description of the curatorial process, she makes no reference to labelling, interpretation, marketing or engagement with audiences. However, Project Volume’s aim for the project was not necessarily to ‘train’ people as curators, but to support artists in their membership to retain artistic autonomy over their work; sharpening their professional skills to work more effectively in the arts.
I think as any artist, disability aside, it is important to understand the whole process, so that artists have greater power over their work and can either curate or learn the process so that they can collaborate their ideas and thoughts when working with an outside curator… it is about retaining at times control over the vision and integrity of your own work.
Another example of curatorship I have encountered by learning disabled artists is during Side by Side: Learning Disability, Art and Collaboration, an exhibition and symposium at the Southbank Centre in March/April 2013 directed by Alice Fox. Fox employed an inclusive approach to the curation of the exhibition to include the Rocket Artists, a learning disability arts group based in Brighton. In her book, Inclusive Arts and Research: A Critical Manifesto, Fox discusses how the exhibition was curated and highlights the importance of enabling choice making in her approach; “Curating can be viewed as a series of choices to be made and problems to be solved. So in order to support inclusive curating with learning disabled people, we needed to support people to tackle those choices” (Fox and Macpherson, 2015, p.47). Whilst choice making certainly plays an important role in curating, the experience of designing a process to enable curation for learning disabled people on this project revealed that it is not just about choice. As Lucy Worsley, chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces, warns; “People think curating just means choosing nice things. But this is only half of it”. Curating involves much more than the act of selection and requires “building up real knowledge of the items” (The Guardian, 2016). Fox continues to elaborate on how choices were enabled without really expanding on how the curators developed approaches in being critical or how the curators understood and related to the artwork.
Similarly to the Project Volume’s Visual Voices exhibition, I sense that the learning disabled curators on these projects were not supported to challenge and reimagine what curatorship is, therefore missing out on the unique contributions they could bring to the practice. Facilitating the curation of Auto Agents revealed to me that curation involves many of different types of actions other than choice making, and breaking them all down enough allows curation is not only to be accessible, but open to fundamental change. For example in terms of Auto Agents, I did not anticipate the curators bold approach to challenging and rethinking the exhibition’s interpretation. Had I set the project up in a way that defined the role of a curator as only choice making for example, we might never have explored alternative possibilities to interpretation which resulted in abandoning the dominant mode of text in favour for a collaborative film.
the self-advocate
a history of silence
To understand the importance of autonomy for self-advocates, we must first explore their histories. Mike Oliver (1990) argues that the emergence of capitalism in the 19th century identified people with impairments as economically problematic because they did not contribute effectively to the workforce. At the same time, the rise of the professional, particularly the professionals within medicine, created systems of knowledge which defined disability as individual pathology and “personal tragedy” (Linton, 1998, p11). The eugenicist concerns and emergence of social Darwinism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries also identified people with impairments as dangerous because of their capacity to reproduce, spreading their 'inferior' genes throughout the population (Williams, 1989). The labelling of people with Downs Syndrome as 'mongols' for example, illustrates this link that was made between racial and intellectual inferiority (Booth, 1987). The sexuality of learning disabled people also appeared as socially dangerous, and the connection between moral and mental degeneracy also operated the other way around (Chappell, 1997). To avoid these 'socially dangerous situations', what resulted was segregation with an aim to remove people with physical, sensory and learning disabilities, as well as those with mental illness from society. During this period, learning disabled people were denied choice and stripped of their freedom, which resulted in a “Lack of autonomy, segregation from the wider community” now recognised as an abuse of human rights (WHO, p.145).
But despite the quantity of publications on the history of British psychiatry, histories of learning disabled people during this period have not figured prominently. In the 19th century, ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ and the 'feeble minded' fell under two overlapping jurisdictions, the Poor Law Board and the Lunacy Commission, both resulting in long stay accommodation in workhouses or asylums (McClimens, 2004; McGlynn, 2005; Thomson, 1998; Wright, 2010). In the 19th century, philanthropic charity, education and medical authorities vied for control over how learning disabled should be cared for. Educationalists emphasised the potential of learning disabled people and concentrated on similarities with the rest of society, for example Édouard Séguin, a 19th century French educationalist, had argued that learning disabled people would benefit from education (Ryan, 1987). However, in 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act introduced compulsory certification for people considered to be ‘mentally defective’. Doctors were relied upon by the Mental Deficiency Committees administering the Act to identify and categorise ‘defectives’, resulting in their supervision within the community or their forcible removal from families and incarceration into mental deficiency institutions (Digby and Wright, 1996). Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, French psychologists and originators of the IQ test, maintained that ‘mental defectives’ were uneducable. The IQ test, which assumes a spectrum of intelligence from subnormal to genius, categorised degrees of ‘mental deficiency’ and was used by educational psychologists to identify people with learning disabilities throughout the 20th century.
The neglect of learning disabled people, and the lack of autonomy and control over their lives, was also evident in medical institutions. In the late 1960s, British newspapers The News of the World and The Guardian both exposed appalling conditions in two mental hospitals: Ely Hospital and Harperbury Hospital, and further scandals were revealed as more “staff ‘blew the whistle’ about hospital practices” (Ryan, 1987, p.117). As public pressure mounted, a series of government reports recommending reforms and legislation followed, the introduction of ‘care in the community’ (Brigham, L. et al, 2000) culminating in the closure of all ‘mental subnormality’ institutions by 2003.
But despite the quantity of publications on the history of British psychiatry, histories of learning disabled people during this period have not figured prominently. In the 19th century, ‘idiots’, ‘imbeciles’ and the 'feeble minded' fell under two overlapping jurisdictions, the Poor Law Board and the Lunacy Commission, both resulting in long stay accommodation in workhouses or asylums (McClimens, 2004; McGlynn, 2005; Thomson, 1998; Wright, 2010). In the 19th century, philanthropic charity, education and medical authorities vied for control over how learning disabled should be cared for. Educationalists emphasised the potential of learning disabled people and concentrated on similarities with the rest of society, for example Édouard Séguin, a 19th century French educationalist, had argued that learning disabled people would benefit from education (Ryan, 1987). However, in 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act introduced compulsory certification for people considered to be ‘mentally defective’. Doctors were relied upon by the Mental Deficiency Committees administering the Act to identify and categorise ‘defectives’, resulting in their supervision within the community or their forcible removal from families and incarceration into mental deficiency institutions (Digby and Wright, 1996). Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, French psychologists and originators of the IQ test, maintained that ‘mental defectives’ were uneducable. The IQ test, which assumes a spectrum of intelligence from subnormal to genius, categorised degrees of ‘mental deficiency’ and was used by educational psychologists to identify people with learning disabilities throughout the 20th century.
The neglect of learning disabled people, and the lack of autonomy and control over their lives, was also evident in medical institutions. In the late 1960s, British newspapers The News of the World and The Guardian both exposed appalling conditions in two mental hospitals: Ely Hospital and Harperbury Hospital, and further scandals were revealed as more “staff ‘blew the whistle’ about hospital practices” (Ryan, 1987, p.117). As public pressure mounted, a series of government reports recommending reforms and legislation followed, the introduction of ‘care in the community’ (Brigham, L. et al, 2000) culminating in the closure of all ‘mental subnormality’ institutions by 2003.
citizens not victims
Whilst learning disabled people long spoke up for themselves and developed means to resist measures and routines prescribed to them during this period, the more formalised self-advocacy movement developed in the late 20th century and is intimately related to de-institutionalisation and the conceptualisation of new viewpoints which redefined learning disabled people as citizens with rights, rather than victims (Kugel and Wolfensberger, 1969; Williams and Schoulz, 1982).
The first of these new viewpoints to emerge was the principle of normalisation, originating from Scandinavia by Karl Grunewald, Bengt Nirge and Nils Bank-Mikkelsen (Cocks and Stehlik, 1996), and then further developed by Wolf Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas from the 1970s in Canada. This principle rejects segregated institutional life and proposed that learning disabled people should be exposed to tasks and activities based on the social norms of their culture and “patterns of life and conditions of everyday living which are as close as possible to the regular circumstances and ways of life of society” (Nirje, 1980, p33). Whilst this principle has had a significant effect on the way services for learning disabled people have been structured throughout the UK and other parts of the world, it has also been criticized. Firstly, the civil rights movement for learning disabled people took a significantly different turn from other liberation movements such as Black activism, feminism and LGBTQ rights, as the normalisation principle was developed by non-disabled academics and professionals without the participation of learning disabled people (Wolfensberger and Tullman, 1989). This aspect has been criticised as being uninformed by disabled people themselves and places the responsibility for change on others (Oliver, 1990). Secondly, academics (Allan, 1999; Culham and Nind, 2003; Jenkinson, 1997; Peters, 1995) have raised further issues suggesting that the normalisation principle promotes the denial of visible difference. The assumption that to be ‘normal’ is the aspiration of learning disabled people, and not just of the professionals on their behalf, is recognised and strongly challenged (Morris, 1991).
Nirje disagreed that the aim of normalisation was to make people ‘normal’ (1985), however this principle has left practitioners thinking that difference is not something to be valued, while conformity is (Brown and Smith, 1992). This perception to conform was an issue that Wolfensberger also disputed. In response to criticisms, he further developed normalisation into Social Role Valorisation or SRV (Culham and Nind 2003; Wolfensberger, 1983). This, he argued, was intended to separate the controversial moral interpretations of normalisation, and to clarify its true intentions, which were about using culturally valued means in ‘‘the creation, support, and defense of valued social roles for people who are at risk of social devaluation’’ (Wolfensberger, 1983, p.234). The SRV set new benchmarks on issues such as rights, autonomy, social integration (Felce et al, 1998), which allowed for judgment on the extent to which services met the standards of SRV. [8]
From segregation in the form of institutions the 19th and early 20th century, to normalisation and SRV (Race, Boxall and Carson, 2005), what these have in common is the denial of difference and expectation that learning disabled people should conform to standards decided by non-disabled people. Whilst modern approaches of course agree that segregation from society is wrong, asserting learning disabled people should be included in every day 'normal' life, it can be argued that learning disabled people still have little voice in what is accepted as ‘normal’. This intersects debates on the inclusion of learning disabled artists into mainstream arts. Whilst the arts strive to include learning disabled people via initiatives like Arts Council England’s Creative Case for Diversity (2017), similarly, it is argued learning disabled people also have little voice in defining or influencing ‘legitimate’ notions of art form quality. During this project I was asked whether I, Bluecoat or other stakeholders were concerned that the curators would select ‘bad art’. For me this line of questioning draws attention not to the perceived skills, knowledge or discernment of the curators, but rather who gets to decide what ‘bad’ art is in the first place.
The second of these new viewpoints is the social model of disability. In 1974 the Britain’s Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) proposed a radical new approach to understanding disability in the clear distinction between the biological (impairment) and the social (disability). This approach is based on the understanding that society is geared almost exclusively to the needs of a non-disabled ideal (Barnes, 2003), which has led to the re-interpretation of disability and the facilitation of the ‘social model’ (Oliver, 1983) or ‘social barriers model’ of disability (Finkelstein, 1991). These models focus on the various barriers: economic, political, cultural and attitudinal, encountered by people with impairments, meaning disability is not a product of individual fault but is a socially created phenomenon. The social model of disability has provided a vital theorisation distinguishing between 'impairment' and 'disability’, therefore in this instance, disability is redefined as “the outcome of an oppressive relationship between people with impairments and the rest of society” (Fickelstein, 1980, p.47). This idea became central to the British disability movement as it enabled the identification of a political strategy, namely barrier removal. If people with impairments are disabled by society then the priority is to dismantle these disabling barriers through “collective political action” in order to promote the inclusion of disabled people. (Oliver and Barnes, 2012, p.22)
Whilst the social model of disability has proved incredibly successful, contemporary academics and activists alike have identified issues. Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson (2002) suggest that the social model dictates rigid notions of disability and does not allow for the viewpoint that we are all in some way impaired, therefore disability is a universal condition which affects us all. They suggest that everyone is vulnerable to limitations and will, through the ageing process, inevitably experiencing functional loss and morbidity (Sutherland, 1981; Antonovsky, 1979; Bauman, 1992). In addition, others have argued that the personal experience of their impairments are downplayed by the social model, criticising the failure of the model to reflect personal bodily experiences of pain which is often a part of living with an impairment (Crow, 1996; French, 1993).
But how has the social model of disability influenced the lives of learning disabled people? Anne-Louise Chappell (2010) has argued learning disabled people were an afterthought with regards to the social model of disability and they have also been excluded from the wider disability political movement. Simone Aspis, a self-advocate and political activist, commented that there is a tendency among people with disabilities (without the label of learning disabilities) to identify the problems of learning disabled people as inherent to their impairments, rather than resulting from issues of access and social barriers (Campbell and Oliver, 1996, p. 97). In other words, an individualised model of disability is applied to learning disabled people with Goodley arguing that people with ‘severe’ learning disabilities are at risk being “left in the realms of static, irreversible, individualised biology” (2001, p. 213).
However, it is important to remember that the social model of disability is a simplified representation of a complex social reality, and although it has been linked to various theories of disablement (Priestly, 1998a), Oliver and Barnes maintain that “it is not a social theory” (2012, p. 23). What is striking to me, is the impact of the social model across a range of originations including our central and local government. Whilst its literal application implies that “every dysfunction in our bodies can be compensated for by a gadget, or good design” (Vasey, 1992, p,44), the social model successfully facilitated a different set of questions being asked about disability which brought about change in many people’s lives, including increased autonomy and subsequently, improved access to the arts.
The first of these new viewpoints to emerge was the principle of normalisation, originating from Scandinavia by Karl Grunewald, Bengt Nirge and Nils Bank-Mikkelsen (Cocks and Stehlik, 1996), and then further developed by Wolf Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas from the 1970s in Canada. This principle rejects segregated institutional life and proposed that learning disabled people should be exposed to tasks and activities based on the social norms of their culture and “patterns of life and conditions of everyday living which are as close as possible to the regular circumstances and ways of life of society” (Nirje, 1980, p33). Whilst this principle has had a significant effect on the way services for learning disabled people have been structured throughout the UK and other parts of the world, it has also been criticized. Firstly, the civil rights movement for learning disabled people took a significantly different turn from other liberation movements such as Black activism, feminism and LGBTQ rights, as the normalisation principle was developed by non-disabled academics and professionals without the participation of learning disabled people (Wolfensberger and Tullman, 1989). This aspect has been criticised as being uninformed by disabled people themselves and places the responsibility for change on others (Oliver, 1990). Secondly, academics (Allan, 1999; Culham and Nind, 2003; Jenkinson, 1997; Peters, 1995) have raised further issues suggesting that the normalisation principle promotes the denial of visible difference. The assumption that to be ‘normal’ is the aspiration of learning disabled people, and not just of the professionals on their behalf, is recognised and strongly challenged (Morris, 1991).
Nirje disagreed that the aim of normalisation was to make people ‘normal’ (1985), however this principle has left practitioners thinking that difference is not something to be valued, while conformity is (Brown and Smith, 1992). This perception to conform was an issue that Wolfensberger also disputed. In response to criticisms, he further developed normalisation into Social Role Valorisation or SRV (Culham and Nind 2003; Wolfensberger, 1983). This, he argued, was intended to separate the controversial moral interpretations of normalisation, and to clarify its true intentions, which were about using culturally valued means in ‘‘the creation, support, and defense of valued social roles for people who are at risk of social devaluation’’ (Wolfensberger, 1983, p.234). The SRV set new benchmarks on issues such as rights, autonomy, social integration (Felce et al, 1998), which allowed for judgment on the extent to which services met the standards of SRV. [8]
From segregation in the form of institutions the 19th and early 20th century, to normalisation and SRV (Race, Boxall and Carson, 2005), what these have in common is the denial of difference and expectation that learning disabled people should conform to standards decided by non-disabled people. Whilst modern approaches of course agree that segregation from society is wrong, asserting learning disabled people should be included in every day 'normal' life, it can be argued that learning disabled people still have little voice in what is accepted as ‘normal’. This intersects debates on the inclusion of learning disabled artists into mainstream arts. Whilst the arts strive to include learning disabled people via initiatives like Arts Council England’s Creative Case for Diversity (2017), similarly, it is argued learning disabled people also have little voice in defining or influencing ‘legitimate’ notions of art form quality. During this project I was asked whether I, Bluecoat or other stakeholders were concerned that the curators would select ‘bad art’. For me this line of questioning draws attention not to the perceived skills, knowledge or discernment of the curators, but rather who gets to decide what ‘bad’ art is in the first place.
The second of these new viewpoints is the social model of disability. In 1974 the Britain’s Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) proposed a radical new approach to understanding disability in the clear distinction between the biological (impairment) and the social (disability). This approach is based on the understanding that society is geared almost exclusively to the needs of a non-disabled ideal (Barnes, 2003), which has led to the re-interpretation of disability and the facilitation of the ‘social model’ (Oliver, 1983) or ‘social barriers model’ of disability (Finkelstein, 1991). These models focus on the various barriers: economic, political, cultural and attitudinal, encountered by people with impairments, meaning disability is not a product of individual fault but is a socially created phenomenon. The social model of disability has provided a vital theorisation distinguishing between 'impairment' and 'disability’, therefore in this instance, disability is redefined as “the outcome of an oppressive relationship between people with impairments and the rest of society” (Fickelstein, 1980, p.47). This idea became central to the British disability movement as it enabled the identification of a political strategy, namely barrier removal. If people with impairments are disabled by society then the priority is to dismantle these disabling barriers through “collective political action” in order to promote the inclusion of disabled people. (Oliver and Barnes, 2012, p.22)
Whilst the social model of disability has proved incredibly successful, contemporary academics and activists alike have identified issues. Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson (2002) suggest that the social model dictates rigid notions of disability and does not allow for the viewpoint that we are all in some way impaired, therefore disability is a universal condition which affects us all. They suggest that everyone is vulnerable to limitations and will, through the ageing process, inevitably experiencing functional loss and morbidity (Sutherland, 1981; Antonovsky, 1979; Bauman, 1992). In addition, others have argued that the personal experience of their impairments are downplayed by the social model, criticising the failure of the model to reflect personal bodily experiences of pain which is often a part of living with an impairment (Crow, 1996; French, 1993).
But how has the social model of disability influenced the lives of learning disabled people? Anne-Louise Chappell (2010) has argued learning disabled people were an afterthought with regards to the social model of disability and they have also been excluded from the wider disability political movement. Simone Aspis, a self-advocate and political activist, commented that there is a tendency among people with disabilities (without the label of learning disabilities) to identify the problems of learning disabled people as inherent to their impairments, rather than resulting from issues of access and social barriers (Campbell and Oliver, 1996, p. 97). In other words, an individualised model of disability is applied to learning disabled people with Goodley arguing that people with ‘severe’ learning disabilities are at risk being “left in the realms of static, irreversible, individualised biology” (2001, p. 213).
However, it is important to remember that the social model of disability is a simplified representation of a complex social reality, and although it has been linked to various theories of disablement (Priestly, 1998a), Oliver and Barnes maintain that “it is not a social theory” (2012, p. 23). What is striking to me, is the impact of the social model across a range of originations including our central and local government. Whilst its literal application implies that “every dysfunction in our bodies can be compensated for by a gadget, or good design” (Vasey, 1992, p,44), the social model successfully facilitated a different set of questions being asked about disability which brought about change in many people’s lives, including increased autonomy and subsequently, improved access to the arts.
speaking out
‘We have seen how for many years learning disabled people lived in the shadow of others. They were abused, stripped of their autonomy and separated from the "normal" population into institutions (Wolfensberger, 1969). With changing viewpoints on disability which highlighted that learning disabled people had rights to autonomy and a voice, the self-advocacy movement gained momentum.
It is also not easy to write a brief chronology of self-advocacy because there is no established history in print, however self-advocacy and its spread from Sweden and the USA to the UK, has been previously documented (Goodley 1996; Goodley 2000; Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006). Self-advocacy in the UK Is said to have started in 1984 when the People First London Boroughs was founded, following the attendance of a small number of learning disabled people at the International Conference in the USA (Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006). Equally, defining self-advocacy is difficult and it continues to grow in complexity. From my own experiences working for self-advocacy groups I am aware that self-advocacy is understood and used differently by different people. From reviewing the literature, in its most basic understanding self-advocacy can be defined as speaking or acting for oneself or “those skills an individual uses to effectively communicate, convey, negotiate, or assert his or her own interests, desires, needs, and rights" (Van Reusen, Bos, Schumaker and Deshler, 2002, p.1). It means standing up for your rights in order to make decisions about what is best for you and taking responsibility for those choices. That said, not many people without learning disabilities talk about 'self-advocating', therefore self-advocacy has been applied to account for minority groups who have been historically denied a voice (Bhavani, 1990). In this context, self-advocacy can describe individual or collective self-determination against discrimination, and “potentially useful for all citizens who find themselves in marginalized positions” (Chapman, 2013, p. 45).
But crucially, how do you do self-advocacy or be a self-advocate? This was something I explored during the first year of this study by spending several months with Halton Speak Out working alongside self-advocates on a range of projects. From this experience I learnt that there are common themes in Halton Speak Out's work which are universal to many self-advocacy organisations. For example, self-advocacy work typically includes campaigning by or for an individual such as initiatives urging learning disabled people to develop awareness of autonomy and skills in ‘speaking out’. Secondly many self-advocacy groups run community-based projects such as improving access to local services like shops, transport and housing, and finally most groups also participate in national campaigns such as Stay Up Late, the right to vote and initiatives against hate crime.
Early manifestations of self-advocacy campaigns tended to focus on individuals learning the skills of 'speaking for yourself' (Atkinson, 1999; Simons et al, 1993). In the offices of Halton Speak Out there is a large bookcase filled with books, videos and DVDs made and circulated by self-advocacy groups dating back to the 1980s. These items focus on how to do self-advocacy and often “lay a heavy emphasis on education and skill development in areas like taking part in meetings and using the phone” (Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006, p. 135). Many of these earlier campaigns tended to focus on the individual self-advocate in a bid to build skills to support them to assert their voice, for example “Oi! It’s My Assessment!” produced by People First in 1993. Whilst undeniably these skills are vital for self-advocates, one criticism rose to this individualised approach to self-advocacy in that by confining it to a personal context, it fails to address the wider political, cultural, economic and social contexts of people’s oppression. Therefore it is claimed that learning disabled people remained ignorant of the political and economic factors which lead to their lives being controlled (Aspis, 1997).
However, self-advocacy groups today are rarely just focused on individuals and often there is also a collective focus. For example, self-advocacy groups often aim to affect their local communities. This is demonstrated in Halton Speak Out's Bright Sparks kite marking project. The Bright Sparks kite mark project supports children and young people with learning disabilities [9] to review venues and facilities in their borough for their peers. Funded by the local authority, in 2014 they have checked out 27 venues and facilities and 22 were given the Bright Sparks quality kite mark award to say they are good places for young learning disabled people to visit and use. Self-advocacy campaigns often explicitly look towards seeking change regarding how their communities perceive them (Pennell, 2001). Specific campaigns of this type include hate crime awareness, employment awareness and the 'label jars, not people' slogan.
An example of a national campaign Halton Speak Out supports is Stay Up Late. This originally began just as a campaign, but due to widespread success it has since turned into a registered charity. Stay Up Late aims to increase learning disabled people’s autonomy by promoting their rights to live the lifestyle of their choosing, including the right to enjoy a late night out clubbing, seeing gigs or friends. Stay Up Late grew out of the observations and experiences of Heavy Load, a punk band from Brighton consisting of people with and without learning disabilities. During their gigs they noticed an “exodus at 9pm” where learning disabled audiences would leave early due to their support workers “inflexible shifts”. (Stay Up Late, 2012). Heavy Load decided to challenge this and began raising awareness using their gigs about the right to stay out late despite shift patterns. The campaign has since been adopted by many self-advocacy groups across the UK, and since Stay Up Late has changed status into a charity, they also began awarding grants to self-advocacy groups to support nights out for learning disabled people. What has been successful about Stay Up Late is its dual functions of raising awareness of inflexible support, but also direct grants to ensure late night entertainment for learning disabled people takes place. Stay Up Late is an example of self-advocates challenging more broadly the lack of autonomy they have regarding their lives. Instead of planning gigs, parties and social events earlier, they looked at the system and saw that it was the way their support is administrated which is the real barrier. I think this indicates that self-advocacy can be a powerful tool and possess real weight in shaping services 'from the outside' (i.e. when not employed by agencies).
In the UK, self-advocacy proliferated with the publication of Valuing People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century in 2001, the first White Paper responding specifically to learning disabled people in 30 years. This cross-government strategy aimed to establish a framework for the delivery of health and personal social services for learning disabled children and adults. The four basic principles of Valuing People; rights, independence, choice and inclusion; were also at the heart of the governments strategic thinking concerning all disabled people in Britain. Valuing People highlighted the importance of personalisation in achieving increased autonomy and better lives for disabled people (Department of Health, 2001), and described it as everyone who receives support, whether provided by statutory services or funded by themselves, would be empowered to shape their own life though increased choice and control over the shape of that support (Carr, 2008). In other words, personalisation supports that individuals should have maximum choice and control over the services that affect their lives.
The personalisation agenda in the UK has been propelled by two key features; direct payments and person-centred planning. Direct payments, first introduced in 1997, allow disabled people in the UK eligible for adult social care to be able to opt to receive ‘direct payments’ (a cash sum in lieu of directly provided services). While direct payments can be used to purchase services from a voluntary or private sector agency, many people choose to use the money to employ their own personal assistants (PA), essentially becoming their own care managers. From the beginning, the campaign for direct payments was seen as part of a broader struggle for greater autonomy and independent living, with disability re-defined as being the social, cultural and attitudinal barriers to disabled people participating as equal citizens.
The second key feature of personalisation is person-centred planning. This is a set of approaches designed to assist someone to plan their life and support, and is used most often as a life planning model to enable individuals with disabilities to increase their autonomy, improving their own independence (Department of Health, 2010). Put simply, person-centred planning is a way of discovering what people want, the support they feel they need and how they can get it. It is an evidence-based practice that places emphasis on people’s skills, experience and abilities, as appose to what they cannot do, unlike previous social care assessments which has been claimed to have negative effects (Hunter and Ritchie, 2008).
Personalisation has been influential with central government describing it as “a cornerstone of the modernisation of public services” (Department of Health, 2000, p. 4). Whilst traditional modes of social delivery have been argued to produce the dependency of individuals, rather than promoting autonomy, preventing disabled people from obtaining full citizenship rights (Morris, 2006), personalisation seeks to shift power balance. For example, person-centred planning can be described as both an empowering philosophy and a set of tools for change at an individual, a team and an organisational level, as it shifts power from professionals to people who use services. However, Scourfield (1995) argued that changes such as the Direct Payments Act only represent a “qualified form of empowerment” (p. 470) as they do not alter the basic needs-based and means-tested basis of the welfare system. Therefore, a limitation of direct payments is that they have often been bolted on to existing traditional systems with varying degrees of success.
It is also not easy to write a brief chronology of self-advocacy because there is no established history in print, however self-advocacy and its spread from Sweden and the USA to the UK, has been previously documented (Goodley 1996; Goodley 2000; Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006). Self-advocacy in the UK Is said to have started in 1984 when the People First London Boroughs was founded, following the attendance of a small number of learning disabled people at the International Conference in the USA (Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006). Equally, defining self-advocacy is difficult and it continues to grow in complexity. From my own experiences working for self-advocacy groups I am aware that self-advocacy is understood and used differently by different people. From reviewing the literature, in its most basic understanding self-advocacy can be defined as speaking or acting for oneself or “those skills an individual uses to effectively communicate, convey, negotiate, or assert his or her own interests, desires, needs, and rights" (Van Reusen, Bos, Schumaker and Deshler, 2002, p.1). It means standing up for your rights in order to make decisions about what is best for you and taking responsibility for those choices. That said, not many people without learning disabilities talk about 'self-advocating', therefore self-advocacy has been applied to account for minority groups who have been historically denied a voice (Bhavani, 1990). In this context, self-advocacy can describe individual or collective self-determination against discrimination, and “potentially useful for all citizens who find themselves in marginalized positions” (Chapman, 2013, p. 45).
But crucially, how do you do self-advocacy or be a self-advocate? This was something I explored during the first year of this study by spending several months with Halton Speak Out working alongside self-advocates on a range of projects. From this experience I learnt that there are common themes in Halton Speak Out's work which are universal to many self-advocacy organisations. For example, self-advocacy work typically includes campaigning by or for an individual such as initiatives urging learning disabled people to develop awareness of autonomy and skills in ‘speaking out’. Secondly many self-advocacy groups run community-based projects such as improving access to local services like shops, transport and housing, and finally most groups also participate in national campaigns such as Stay Up Late, the right to vote and initiatives against hate crime.
Early manifestations of self-advocacy campaigns tended to focus on individuals learning the skills of 'speaking for yourself' (Atkinson, 1999; Simons et al, 1993). In the offices of Halton Speak Out there is a large bookcase filled with books, videos and DVDs made and circulated by self-advocacy groups dating back to the 1980s. These items focus on how to do self-advocacy and often “lay a heavy emphasis on education and skill development in areas like taking part in meetings and using the phone” (Buchanan and Walmsley, 2006, p. 135). Many of these earlier campaigns tended to focus on the individual self-advocate in a bid to build skills to support them to assert their voice, for example “Oi! It’s My Assessment!” produced by People First in 1993. Whilst undeniably these skills are vital for self-advocates, one criticism rose to this individualised approach to self-advocacy in that by confining it to a personal context, it fails to address the wider political, cultural, economic and social contexts of people’s oppression. Therefore it is claimed that learning disabled people remained ignorant of the political and economic factors which lead to their lives being controlled (Aspis, 1997).
However, self-advocacy groups today are rarely just focused on individuals and often there is also a collective focus. For example, self-advocacy groups often aim to affect their local communities. This is demonstrated in Halton Speak Out's Bright Sparks kite marking project. The Bright Sparks kite mark project supports children and young people with learning disabilities [9] to review venues and facilities in their borough for their peers. Funded by the local authority, in 2014 they have checked out 27 venues and facilities and 22 were given the Bright Sparks quality kite mark award to say they are good places for young learning disabled people to visit and use. Self-advocacy campaigns often explicitly look towards seeking change regarding how their communities perceive them (Pennell, 2001). Specific campaigns of this type include hate crime awareness, employment awareness and the 'label jars, not people' slogan.
An example of a national campaign Halton Speak Out supports is Stay Up Late. This originally began just as a campaign, but due to widespread success it has since turned into a registered charity. Stay Up Late aims to increase learning disabled people’s autonomy by promoting their rights to live the lifestyle of their choosing, including the right to enjoy a late night out clubbing, seeing gigs or friends. Stay Up Late grew out of the observations and experiences of Heavy Load, a punk band from Brighton consisting of people with and without learning disabilities. During their gigs they noticed an “exodus at 9pm” where learning disabled audiences would leave early due to their support workers “inflexible shifts”. (Stay Up Late, 2012). Heavy Load decided to challenge this and began raising awareness using their gigs about the right to stay out late despite shift patterns. The campaign has since been adopted by many self-advocacy groups across the UK, and since Stay Up Late has changed status into a charity, they also began awarding grants to self-advocacy groups to support nights out for learning disabled people. What has been successful about Stay Up Late is its dual functions of raising awareness of inflexible support, but also direct grants to ensure late night entertainment for learning disabled people takes place. Stay Up Late is an example of self-advocates challenging more broadly the lack of autonomy they have regarding their lives. Instead of planning gigs, parties and social events earlier, they looked at the system and saw that it was the way their support is administrated which is the real barrier. I think this indicates that self-advocacy can be a powerful tool and possess real weight in shaping services 'from the outside' (i.e. when not employed by agencies).
In the UK, self-advocacy proliferated with the publication of Valuing People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century in 2001, the first White Paper responding specifically to learning disabled people in 30 years. This cross-government strategy aimed to establish a framework for the delivery of health and personal social services for learning disabled children and adults. The four basic principles of Valuing People; rights, independence, choice and inclusion; were also at the heart of the governments strategic thinking concerning all disabled people in Britain. Valuing People highlighted the importance of personalisation in achieving increased autonomy and better lives for disabled people (Department of Health, 2001), and described it as everyone who receives support, whether provided by statutory services or funded by themselves, would be empowered to shape their own life though increased choice and control over the shape of that support (Carr, 2008). In other words, personalisation supports that individuals should have maximum choice and control over the services that affect their lives.
The personalisation agenda in the UK has been propelled by two key features; direct payments and person-centred planning. Direct payments, first introduced in 1997, allow disabled people in the UK eligible for adult social care to be able to opt to receive ‘direct payments’ (a cash sum in lieu of directly provided services). While direct payments can be used to purchase services from a voluntary or private sector agency, many people choose to use the money to employ their own personal assistants (PA), essentially becoming their own care managers. From the beginning, the campaign for direct payments was seen as part of a broader struggle for greater autonomy and independent living, with disability re-defined as being the social, cultural and attitudinal barriers to disabled people participating as equal citizens.
The second key feature of personalisation is person-centred planning. This is a set of approaches designed to assist someone to plan their life and support, and is used most often as a life planning model to enable individuals with disabilities to increase their autonomy, improving their own independence (Department of Health, 2010). Put simply, person-centred planning is a way of discovering what people want, the support they feel they need and how they can get it. It is an evidence-based practice that places emphasis on people’s skills, experience and abilities, as appose to what they cannot do, unlike previous social care assessments which has been claimed to have negative effects (Hunter and Ritchie, 2008).
Personalisation has been influential with central government describing it as “a cornerstone of the modernisation of public services” (Department of Health, 2000, p. 4). Whilst traditional modes of social delivery have been argued to produce the dependency of individuals, rather than promoting autonomy, preventing disabled people from obtaining full citizenship rights (Morris, 2006), personalisation seeks to shift power balance. For example, person-centred planning can be described as both an empowering philosophy and a set of tools for change at an individual, a team and an organisational level, as it shifts power from professionals to people who use services. However, Scourfield (1995) argued that changes such as the Direct Payments Act only represent a “qualified form of empowerment” (p. 470) as they do not alter the basic needs-based and means-tested basis of the welfare system. Therefore, a limitation of direct payments is that they have often been bolted on to existing traditional systems with varying degrees of success.
autonomy...it's complicated
There is no doubt that self-advocacy and the personalisation agenda made strides in not only challenging the slanted assumptions of the medical paradigm, but also in enabling learning disabled people to adopt a lifestyle of their choosing (Barnes 2004, p.7). However, the critical concepts underpinning them; autonomy, independence, self-determination and personhood, are problematic (Burton and Kagan, 2006; Graham, 2010). The liberal principle of autonomy is referred to as vital for learning disabled people (Algozzine, Browder, Karvonen, Test and Wood, 2001; Skouge, Kelly, Roberts, Leake and Stodden, 2007; Wehmeyer and Schalock, 2001), and has often been linked in British policy statements; one relating to the “collective rights” of groups of citizens to be self-determining, and the other relating to the “individual’s control” over their own life (Williams et al, 2015, p.107). But some argue autonomy is an unattainable concept, both practically and philosophically (Shakespeare, 2000; Magnus Reindal, 1999; Kittay, 2011; Leshota, 2015), and practitioners and scholars alike have instead drawn attention to the interdependency of all people, claiming “interconnectedness, kinship and relationality” are really the “defining features of what it means to be human” (Leshota, 2015, p.4). This position is echoed by Steven Smith (2013, p. 29)
It is better to describe all persons, whether or not impaired, as ‘interdependent’, rather than either independent or dependent, which then allows agency, autonomy and choice to be promoted as a matter of degree for everyone, recognizing how complex social structures and institutions facilitate this process for all.
Work within disability studies seeking to problematize autonomy has acknowledged the importance of interdependence in resisting binary definitions (McRuer, 2006). Here, there are no singularly ‘dependent’ or ‘independent’ bodies but a diverse range of body/minds that exist as a series of complex relations (Davis, 1995; Memmi, 1984). And although the pursuit of autonomy and independence remains a key aim for self-advocates, this sits alongside contemporary concerns regarding its colonization by neoliberal social policies promoting independence as a vehicle for reducing state and social responsibility (Goodley, 2014).
To further understand this question of autonomy and interdependency, disability scholars (Goodley et al, 2014) have examined logics of individualism, relationality and interdependency through the theories of the posthuman condition, primarily theorised in Rosi Bradoitti’s seminal text (2013). According to Goodley et al, like poststructuralists and postmodernists before her, Braidotti is clear: “the idealisation of the unitary, rational, independent, dislocated, solitary, able-bodied human subject has been revealed as a fiction” (Goodley et al. 2014, p.5). The self, subject, person, citizen or human is now firmly “interconnected in an ever growing whirlpool of capital, technology and communication” (ibid). Here, Braidotti describes the need for “critical distance from humanist individualism” (2013, p.39), and instead stresses the importance of “radical relationality, non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances” (p.144).
In addition, notions of the 'self’ and ‘personhood' are interwoven with autonomy and is therefore of importance to examine in relation to self-advocacy. The nature of the 'self' has been a central concern to philosophical debates dating far back in history. The first prominent accounts of the 'self' originated with the Greeks such as Plato, Aristotle and their successors, continuing through medieval thinkers including Aquinas and his contemporaries, and into the early modern period with Descartes (Green, 2009). These earlier theories emphasize “the human as a being that exists in itself with an internal principle of motion and with an abiding self-identity” (p. 264) [10]. This belief was joined by the birth of psychology as a discipline and scientific specialism, where in 1897 psychologist Wilhelm Wundt heralded a crucial turn when at the University of Leipzig he set aside space for conducting “psychological experiments” (Danzinga, 1990). This is one of the first uses of 'the laboratory' in psychology, which brought with it the connotations of white coats, experiments and objectivity which would as Nickolas Rose claims, become the “vital element of the scientization of psychology” (1997. p.227). Rose suggests that the relation to our 'self' has been “profoundly shaped by the psy disciplines” (ibid p. 226), meaning our view of 'the self' is defined by the norms and techniques which have come into existence through psy such as our emotions, intelligence, psychological distress and group relations.
Relating this idea to learning disabled people, how has psy affected this group? Rose asserts that we need to abandon the Western belief that we are all bounded and self-identical and “animated by an inner world” (p.226), but we are in fact 'assembled' selves and our psychology is constituted by our linkages into public languages, practices, techniques and artefacts. This sentiment is also echoed by Suzette A. Henke who has described the concept of a “stable” identity and the idea of what she calls the myth of a universal subject, or a unified monolithic 'self' is no longer useful, and is seen as a “phantasmagorical cultural construct” (2000, p. xv). Strozier (2002) also writes that the 'interior self' typified within philosophy as individual, insular and isolated is a simple construct which is now challenged. Similarly to scholars in disability studies, contemporary philosophers are also moving away from this insular, inner 'self' perception, to emphasizing the relational nature of the ‘self’ which addresses issues such as subjectivity, experience and community. For example, Strozier stresses the concept of relational identity, where the 'self' seen as a combination of “the interiority of self-experience and self knowledge” along with a self that is perceived in relation to “groupings” such as race (2002, p. 30). This understanding of 'self' is created through a range of relationships and interactions and is sometimes known as diasporic identity.
Here we see how ideas of autonomy are shifting in the context of disability studies and self-advocacy. Rather than viewing ourselves as autonomous beings, our capacity for autonomy is instead viewed in relation to interdependency. This view is also met with changing views on personhood. From the autonomous ‘self’ which the ancient Greeks articulated to contemporary philosophers and psychologists who consider our ‘selves’ as assemblages forged through relational identities. This increasing recognition of autonomy enabled through interdependency proves useful when articulating how learning disabled artists make artwork through facilitated models, and also points to relational approaches to curation in this project.
It is better to describe all persons, whether or not impaired, as ‘interdependent’, rather than either independent or dependent, which then allows agency, autonomy and choice to be promoted as a matter of degree for everyone, recognizing how complex social structures and institutions facilitate this process for all.
Work within disability studies seeking to problematize autonomy has acknowledged the importance of interdependence in resisting binary definitions (McRuer, 2006). Here, there are no singularly ‘dependent’ or ‘independent’ bodies but a diverse range of body/minds that exist as a series of complex relations (Davis, 1995; Memmi, 1984). And although the pursuit of autonomy and independence remains a key aim for self-advocates, this sits alongside contemporary concerns regarding its colonization by neoliberal social policies promoting independence as a vehicle for reducing state and social responsibility (Goodley, 2014).
To further understand this question of autonomy and interdependency, disability scholars (Goodley et al, 2014) have examined logics of individualism, relationality and interdependency through the theories of the posthuman condition, primarily theorised in Rosi Bradoitti’s seminal text (2013). According to Goodley et al, like poststructuralists and postmodernists before her, Braidotti is clear: “the idealisation of the unitary, rational, independent, dislocated, solitary, able-bodied human subject has been revealed as a fiction” (Goodley et al. 2014, p.5). The self, subject, person, citizen or human is now firmly “interconnected in an ever growing whirlpool of capital, technology and communication” (ibid). Here, Braidotti describes the need for “critical distance from humanist individualism” (2013, p.39), and instead stresses the importance of “radical relationality, non-unitary identities and multiple allegiances” (p.144).
In addition, notions of the 'self’ and ‘personhood' are interwoven with autonomy and is therefore of importance to examine in relation to self-advocacy. The nature of the 'self' has been a central concern to philosophical debates dating far back in history. The first prominent accounts of the 'self' originated with the Greeks such as Plato, Aristotle and their successors, continuing through medieval thinkers including Aquinas and his contemporaries, and into the early modern period with Descartes (Green, 2009). These earlier theories emphasize “the human as a being that exists in itself with an internal principle of motion and with an abiding self-identity” (p. 264) [10]. This belief was joined by the birth of psychology as a discipline and scientific specialism, where in 1897 psychologist Wilhelm Wundt heralded a crucial turn when at the University of Leipzig he set aside space for conducting “psychological experiments” (Danzinga, 1990). This is one of the first uses of 'the laboratory' in psychology, which brought with it the connotations of white coats, experiments and objectivity which would as Nickolas Rose claims, become the “vital element of the scientization of psychology” (1997. p.227). Rose suggests that the relation to our 'self' has been “profoundly shaped by the psy disciplines” (ibid p. 226), meaning our view of 'the self' is defined by the norms and techniques which have come into existence through psy such as our emotions, intelligence, psychological distress and group relations.
Relating this idea to learning disabled people, how has psy affected this group? Rose asserts that we need to abandon the Western belief that we are all bounded and self-identical and “animated by an inner world” (p.226), but we are in fact 'assembled' selves and our psychology is constituted by our linkages into public languages, practices, techniques and artefacts. This sentiment is also echoed by Suzette A. Henke who has described the concept of a “stable” identity and the idea of what she calls the myth of a universal subject, or a unified monolithic 'self' is no longer useful, and is seen as a “phantasmagorical cultural construct” (2000, p. xv). Strozier (2002) also writes that the 'interior self' typified within philosophy as individual, insular and isolated is a simple construct which is now challenged. Similarly to scholars in disability studies, contemporary philosophers are also moving away from this insular, inner 'self' perception, to emphasizing the relational nature of the ‘self’ which addresses issues such as subjectivity, experience and community. For example, Strozier stresses the concept of relational identity, where the 'self' seen as a combination of “the interiority of self-experience and self knowledge” along with a self that is perceived in relation to “groupings” such as race (2002, p. 30). This understanding of 'self' is created through a range of relationships and interactions and is sometimes known as diasporic identity.
Here we see how ideas of autonomy are shifting in the context of disability studies and self-advocacy. Rather than viewing ourselves as autonomous beings, our capacity for autonomy is instead viewed in relation to interdependency. This view is also met with changing views on personhood. From the autonomous ‘self’ which the ancient Greeks articulated to contemporary philosophers and psychologists who consider our ‘selves’ as assemblages forged through relational identities. This increasing recognition of autonomy enabled through interdependency proves useful when articulating how learning disabled artists make artwork through facilitated models, and also points to relational approaches to curation in this project.
inclusive research
As learning disabled people increasingly gained a voice driven via self-advocacy, their involvement in research also became increasingly debated (Nind, 2017). When looking towards how research is conducted with learning disabled people, Anne Chappell (1997) has argued that their views and experiences have not been conveyed in the disability research to the same extent as those of people with physical/sensory impairments. Chappell questions whether it is the very “nature of intellectual/developmental impairment that makes it more likely to create restrictions on the ability of people with learning difficulties to gain positions, for example, as researchers” (p.56) and become independent changemakers. This is partly due to the barriers in which involvement in academia presents such as lack of accessible media and accreditation. The affect is that the views and experiences of learning disabled people have not been conveyed without the involvement of non-disabled people as 'allies', 'supporters' or 'facilitators', which Chappell believes presents an obvious danger in that non-disabled sympathisers will assume a dominant role, potentially reducing the autonomy of learning disabled researchers. A key issue then emerges, if learning disabled people do require allies to enable them to author research and convey their experiences in a way which is acceptable to universities, researchers, examiners, editors, publishers and other gatekeepers, how should the integrity of their accounts be safeguarded? And what practices can their allies employ to accomplish this? This raises important methodological considerations in how research with learning disabled people is designed and conducted, but also in how it is disseminated and made useful to those ‘outside’ of the academy. How this research will be made accessible and useful to self-advocates has been a key concern. Whilst an easy-read thesis will be produced via collaborative workshops with the key participants, the research itself has naturally produced methods to enable the work to be more readily used such as zines and collaborative films.
However, Inclusive Research emerged in response. It can be defined as “research in which people with learning disabilities are active participants, not only as subjects but also as initiators, doers, writers and disseminators of research” (Walmsley and Johnson, 2003, p9). Inclusive research emerged as a key aspect of the self-advocacy movement as it ensures the inclusion of learning disabled people in in all stages of research. This supports participants to be active in all aspects of research, changing the nature of power relations in the research, reflecting a turn towards the “democratization of the research process’ (Nind, 2014, p.1). This ‘turn’ has much crossover with the struggle of disabled artists who sought not just to recipients of culture, but active authors and makers too. The first generation of inclusive researchers have established the need for learning disabled people to do research, they have worked out how it could be done and established what essential challenges inclusive researchers face.
However, Inclusive Research emerged in response. It can be defined as “research in which people with learning disabilities are active participants, not only as subjects but also as initiators, doers, writers and disseminators of research” (Walmsley and Johnson, 2003, p9). Inclusive research emerged as a key aspect of the self-advocacy movement as it ensures the inclusion of learning disabled people in in all stages of research. This supports participants to be active in all aspects of research, changing the nature of power relations in the research, reflecting a turn towards the “democratization of the research process’ (Nind, 2014, p.1). This ‘turn’ has much crossover with the struggle of disabled artists who sought not just to recipients of culture, but active authors and makers too. The first generation of inclusive researchers have established the need for learning disabled people to do research, they have worked out how it could be done and established what essential challenges inclusive researchers face.
the curator
the 'autonomous' curator
Many decades ago the role of curator conjured up images of a singular figure in a museum's basement; tending, caring, and cataloguing collections and artefacts attentively. However, the term ‘curator’ has moved beyond any singular definition and now occupies a much broader scope of activities, practices and professions. The term ‘curator’ has its origins in the Latin: 'cura', meaning ‘care’, and in the Late Middle English: ‘curate’ as one who has ‘a cure or charge’. Whilst this mode of curation still exists, the role has greatly expanded from this behind-the-scenes ‘caring’ figure whom “tended ground”, to one which actively secured, organised and “landscaped it” (Hickey, 2014, p.40), becoming the visible culturally central figure we know today.
Historically however, curators designed and executed exhibitions alone and this practice was closed to ‘non-curators’ (Taxén, 2004; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). In the mid-15th century, Italian nobles begun to arrange privately collected artworks, primarily from ancient Greece and Rome, with the specific intention of displaying them to invited guests holding valued social positions. A known example of these kinds of displays is the wunderkammer or ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale in Naples is one of the earliest cabinet of curiosities represented in a wood cutting and painting of the same name dating to 1599 (Mauriés, 2002, p.12). The wood cutting depicts a densely packed embellished room of objects, featuring books, shells and marine creatures, and a large stuffed crocodile. Accumulation, definition and classification was the threefold aim of cabinets of curiosities. But display panels, bespoke cabinets, drawers and cases were a response not only to a desire to preserve and classify items but also to “slot each item into its place in a vast network of meanings” (p.25). Such groupings of objects began the notion of storytelling and narrative within displays and the “construction of a temporally organised order of things and peoples” (Ferguson et al, 1996, p.101)
As time passed and the cabinets of curiosities evolved and grew in importance and the small private cabinets were absorbed into larger ones. In turn these larger cabinets were bought by gentlemen, noblemen and royalty for their amusement and edification and merged into cabinets so large that they took over entire rooms (Tate, 2017). After a time, these noble and royal collections were institutionalised and turned into public museums. The most well known example is of the Ark, the cabinet of curiosity of John Tradescant Senior (1570-1638) and John Tredescant Junior (1608-1662), which became the Ashmole Museum’s collection. The Ashmolean Museum is now known as the oldest public museum, and the first purpose built museum in the world.
With the emergence of the public museum, in the mid-19th century the group art exhibition format flourished and the curator became an influential figure of knowledge who could draw together artists via master narratives. The curator became a gatekeeper and responsible for “upholding divisions between art and artefact, “high” and “low”, practitioner and spectator” (Ault, 2007, p.38). As Pierre Bourdieu describes, curators evolved into “specialized agents who shaped the economy of cultural goods… capable of imposing a specific measure of the value of the artist and his products” (1993, p. 204). This shaping of cultural goods as Bourdieu describes, involves processes whereby art is “filtered and legitimized” (McIntyre, 2004, p.4). This process is described by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre as the “subscription process” (ibid). “Subscription” recognises that a series of 'gatekeepers' and 'stakeholders' namely curators, who by interacting with the artist and their art work, add to its critical value and provenance and could be understood as an implicit act of authorship. But some have argued that this traditional mode of curatorship became a standardised, homogenized, institutionalised and object-dominated methodology; the dynamics and activities of which paralleled the art market (Vidoke, 2010). This type of curatorial practice “worked within” (DeLara, 2014, p.4) from the institution and therefore has been accused of creating a distance between the audience and actions of the curator by upholding ideologies, certain systems or value or hierarchies, which are not made apparent to audiences (ibid; Ramirez, 1996).
But it was in the 1960s and 70s the curator’s prominent role was cemented. The wake of conceptualism paved the way for bolder custodial scenarios described as “curatorial expression” (Ventizislavov, 2014, p.87). This is exemplified in the work of curators Harald Szeemann and Lucy Lippard who undertook “ground-breaking” curatorial projects (Fotiadi, 2014, p.29) which had similarities with the work of some conceptual artists at the time, for whom the idea of a work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. In other words, the avant-garde movement among artists was met by an avant-garde movement in curating (Acord, 2010). For instance, Documenta 5 (1972) is today considered a major highlight in the history of contemporary art curating and the “first major exhibition project in which a curator can be seen as creative ‘author’” (Fotiadi, 2014, p.27). Documenta, a major international contemporary art presentation that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, is now in its 14th iteration. Documenta 5 is considered pioneering due to its radically different presentation that was conceived as a 100-day themed event comprising of performances and happenings, as appose to static displays. In the shift from the curator as master planner, ‘super-curator’ Hans Ulrich Obrist (2008) articulates how exhibitions have shifted from a historical approach of order and stability via static displays to a place of flux and instability; the unpredictable. This blurring of lines between artist and curator during this period characterises the conceptualist moment, but this was not always an amicable change. In the case of Documenta 5, artists were “hostile to the powerful Harald Szeeman on more than one occasion” (Balzer, 2014, p.46), and later a manifesto was signed by artists such as Donald Judd and Sol DeWitt which accused “Szeeman and his co-curators presenting work in themed sections without the artists consent” (p.47).
As themed exhibitions formats like this boomed, the curator’s autonomy grew, and subsequently they began to be criticised for superseding the work of artists through the reinforcement of their own authorial claims “that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts” (Vidoke, 2010). Implicit here is the idea of autonomy as a zero-sum game; that one person's gain must be equivalent to another's loss, or in other words, as curators gained autonomy the artists’ capacity for autonomy was diminished. Paul O’Neill (2012) explores this issue of whether contemporary curators can be recognised artists in their own right. In support of this claim, O’Neill cites theorist Hans-Dieter Huber who believes curatorship has been transformed into “something like a signature, a specific style, a specific image” and “what once was characterised the work of an artist, namely his style, his signature, his name, is now true of the work of the curator” (p.126). Developing this idea further, curator Jens Hoffmann argues an understanding of the author-curator's work as constituting individual practice due to a “strong creative sensibility” and “apparent artistic development over time” (ibid, p.97).
However not all agree on the curator’s claim to artistry and authorship. Robert Storr, an artist, curator, critic, and educator, wrote a series of articles for Frieze magazine on the subject of curators as artists. He finds the idea that curators as artists to be seriously mistaken, and he traces this mistake back to the various philosophical challenges to authorship, citing Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author discourses. In Barthes’ seminal text he rejects the idea of authorial intent, and instead develops a reader-response critical theory, or in his words “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (1967, p.148). Building on this, Storr asserts that the curator is not in the business of having aesthetic experiences but of facilitating these for end users. He uses the analogy of a curator “being akin to that of a good literary editor, who may justly take pride in spotting ability and fostering accomplishment but who is otherwise content to function as the probing but respectful ‘first reader’ of the work” (Storr, 2005). Similarly, Sue Spaid wrote an engaging response to Rossen Ventzislavov whom made the case in his widely-cited thesis that “curating should be understood as fine art” (2014, p.83). While Spaid agrees that curatorial ideas offer (though only temporarily) a genuine contribution to the life of the artworks involved, she identifies a crucial distinction in that she considers curatorial ideas to “contribute cognitive value, not artistic value” (Spaid, 2016, p.87, my italics).
This disagreement was of interest to me during this project as it questions the capacity and role of a curator and their autonomy over exhibitions. I find Spaid’s distinction of curatorial ideas adding ‘cognitive’ and not ‘artistic’ value to exhibitions most useful in defining the curators’ contribution in Auto Agents. I believe the curators on this project worked to alter or add to the work of the artists in Auto Agents through their interpretation and overarching theme. Whilst the artists contributed their own distinct works to the exhibition, they were drawn together and their cognitive meanings transformed through the curator’s framework of autonomy. Prior to Auto Agents for example, Alaena’s Secret Action Paintings had been previously displayed in other exhibitions, however its meaning changed when included in Auto Agents. Alaena elaborates;
Previously the 'Secret Action Paintings' had been included in exhibitions which were specifically orientated towards painting, and consequently tended to be discussed in terms of ideas relating to painting, such as gesture or experimental composition. As far as I know these paintings haven't been discussed in such personal terms of constraint/risk in everyday life before as they were in Auto Agents. Alaena’s physical work had not changed, however the curators’ exhibition theme did change the ‘cognitive’ meaning and interpretation of the work. The theme of autonomy meant Alaena’s work was now being discussed in terms of personal risk, drawing the piece into new meaning, demonstrating the curators contribution to the exhibition.
Historically however, curators designed and executed exhibitions alone and this practice was closed to ‘non-curators’ (Taxén, 2004; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992). In the mid-15th century, Italian nobles begun to arrange privately collected artworks, primarily from ancient Greece and Rome, with the specific intention of displaying them to invited guests holding valued social positions. A known example of these kinds of displays is the wunderkammer or ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale in Naples is one of the earliest cabinet of curiosities represented in a wood cutting and painting of the same name dating to 1599 (Mauriés, 2002, p.12). The wood cutting depicts a densely packed embellished room of objects, featuring books, shells and marine creatures, and a large stuffed crocodile. Accumulation, definition and classification was the threefold aim of cabinets of curiosities. But display panels, bespoke cabinets, drawers and cases were a response not only to a desire to preserve and classify items but also to “slot each item into its place in a vast network of meanings” (p.25). Such groupings of objects began the notion of storytelling and narrative within displays and the “construction of a temporally organised order of things and peoples” (Ferguson et al, 1996, p.101)
As time passed and the cabinets of curiosities evolved and grew in importance and the small private cabinets were absorbed into larger ones. In turn these larger cabinets were bought by gentlemen, noblemen and royalty for their amusement and edification and merged into cabinets so large that they took over entire rooms (Tate, 2017). After a time, these noble and royal collections were institutionalised and turned into public museums. The most well known example is of the Ark, the cabinet of curiosity of John Tradescant Senior (1570-1638) and John Tredescant Junior (1608-1662), which became the Ashmole Museum’s collection. The Ashmolean Museum is now known as the oldest public museum, and the first purpose built museum in the world.
With the emergence of the public museum, in the mid-19th century the group art exhibition format flourished and the curator became an influential figure of knowledge who could draw together artists via master narratives. The curator became a gatekeeper and responsible for “upholding divisions between art and artefact, “high” and “low”, practitioner and spectator” (Ault, 2007, p.38). As Pierre Bourdieu describes, curators evolved into “specialized agents who shaped the economy of cultural goods… capable of imposing a specific measure of the value of the artist and his products” (1993, p. 204). This shaping of cultural goods as Bourdieu describes, involves processes whereby art is “filtered and legitimized” (McIntyre, 2004, p.4). This process is described by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre as the “subscription process” (ibid). “Subscription” recognises that a series of 'gatekeepers' and 'stakeholders' namely curators, who by interacting with the artist and their art work, add to its critical value and provenance and could be understood as an implicit act of authorship. But some have argued that this traditional mode of curatorship became a standardised, homogenized, institutionalised and object-dominated methodology; the dynamics and activities of which paralleled the art market (Vidoke, 2010). This type of curatorial practice “worked within” (DeLara, 2014, p.4) from the institution and therefore has been accused of creating a distance between the audience and actions of the curator by upholding ideologies, certain systems or value or hierarchies, which are not made apparent to audiences (ibid; Ramirez, 1996).
But it was in the 1960s and 70s the curator’s prominent role was cemented. The wake of conceptualism paved the way for bolder custodial scenarios described as “curatorial expression” (Ventizislavov, 2014, p.87). This is exemplified in the work of curators Harald Szeemann and Lucy Lippard who undertook “ground-breaking” curatorial projects (Fotiadi, 2014, p.29) which had similarities with the work of some conceptual artists at the time, for whom the idea of a work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. In other words, the avant-garde movement among artists was met by an avant-garde movement in curating (Acord, 2010). For instance, Documenta 5 (1972) is today considered a major highlight in the history of contemporary art curating and the “first major exhibition project in which a curator can be seen as creative ‘author’” (Fotiadi, 2014, p.27). Documenta, a major international contemporary art presentation that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, is now in its 14th iteration. Documenta 5 is considered pioneering due to its radically different presentation that was conceived as a 100-day themed event comprising of performances and happenings, as appose to static displays. In the shift from the curator as master planner, ‘super-curator’ Hans Ulrich Obrist (2008) articulates how exhibitions have shifted from a historical approach of order and stability via static displays to a place of flux and instability; the unpredictable. This blurring of lines between artist and curator during this period characterises the conceptualist moment, but this was not always an amicable change. In the case of Documenta 5, artists were “hostile to the powerful Harald Szeeman on more than one occasion” (Balzer, 2014, p.46), and later a manifesto was signed by artists such as Donald Judd and Sol DeWitt which accused “Szeeman and his co-curators presenting work in themed sections without the artists consent” (p.47).
As themed exhibitions formats like this boomed, the curator’s autonomy grew, and subsequently they began to be criticised for superseding the work of artists through the reinforcement of their own authorial claims “that render artists and artworks merely actors and props for illustrating curatorial concepts” (Vidoke, 2010). Implicit here is the idea of autonomy as a zero-sum game; that one person's gain must be equivalent to another's loss, or in other words, as curators gained autonomy the artists’ capacity for autonomy was diminished. Paul O’Neill (2012) explores this issue of whether contemporary curators can be recognised artists in their own right. In support of this claim, O’Neill cites theorist Hans-Dieter Huber who believes curatorship has been transformed into “something like a signature, a specific style, a specific image” and “what once was characterised the work of an artist, namely his style, his signature, his name, is now true of the work of the curator” (p.126). Developing this idea further, curator Jens Hoffmann argues an understanding of the author-curator's work as constituting individual practice due to a “strong creative sensibility” and “apparent artistic development over time” (ibid, p.97).
However not all agree on the curator’s claim to artistry and authorship. Robert Storr, an artist, curator, critic, and educator, wrote a series of articles for Frieze magazine on the subject of curators as artists. He finds the idea that curators as artists to be seriously mistaken, and he traces this mistake back to the various philosophical challenges to authorship, citing Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author discourses. In Barthes’ seminal text he rejects the idea of authorial intent, and instead develops a reader-response critical theory, or in his words “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination” (1967, p.148). Building on this, Storr asserts that the curator is not in the business of having aesthetic experiences but of facilitating these for end users. He uses the analogy of a curator “being akin to that of a good literary editor, who may justly take pride in spotting ability and fostering accomplishment but who is otherwise content to function as the probing but respectful ‘first reader’ of the work” (Storr, 2005). Similarly, Sue Spaid wrote an engaging response to Rossen Ventzislavov whom made the case in his widely-cited thesis that “curating should be understood as fine art” (2014, p.83). While Spaid agrees that curatorial ideas offer (though only temporarily) a genuine contribution to the life of the artworks involved, she identifies a crucial distinction in that she considers curatorial ideas to “contribute cognitive value, not artistic value” (Spaid, 2016, p.87, my italics).
This disagreement was of interest to me during this project as it questions the capacity and role of a curator and their autonomy over exhibitions. I find Spaid’s distinction of curatorial ideas adding ‘cognitive’ and not ‘artistic’ value to exhibitions most useful in defining the curators’ contribution in Auto Agents. I believe the curators on this project worked to alter or add to the work of the artists in Auto Agents through their interpretation and overarching theme. Whilst the artists contributed their own distinct works to the exhibition, they were drawn together and their cognitive meanings transformed through the curator’s framework of autonomy. Prior to Auto Agents for example, Alaena’s Secret Action Paintings had been previously displayed in other exhibitions, however its meaning changed when included in Auto Agents. Alaena elaborates;
Previously the 'Secret Action Paintings' had been included in exhibitions which were specifically orientated towards painting, and consequently tended to be discussed in terms of ideas relating to painting, such as gesture or experimental composition. As far as I know these paintings haven't been discussed in such personal terms of constraint/risk in everyday life before as they were in Auto Agents. Alaena’s physical work had not changed, however the curators’ exhibition theme did change the ‘cognitive’ meaning and interpretation of the work. The theme of autonomy meant Alaena’s work was now being discussed in terms of personal risk, drawing the piece into new meaning, demonstrating the curators contribution to the exhibition.
no curator is an island
The enduring question of curator’s authorial and artistic autonomy is revisited and debated. However from reviewing the literature, the image of the curator as single-author is often to some degree a construction. More often than you would expect, and even in the cases of some exhibitions which have been strongly linked to an individual curator’s name, innovations in curating have actually resulted from collective or collaborative endeavours. This position intersects with debates in disability studies. In the section, Autonomy…It’s Complicated, I demonstrated how autonomy in self-advocacy contexts is also viewed as being enabled not through the individual, but via collective support and action.
For example, the instance of Documenta 5 described in the previous section is almost never remembered as a team project but an individual curatorial achievement of Harald Szeemann. Though on further research I found this to be not entirely accurate. Bazon Brock, who could be catergorised as co-curator on Documenta 5 described the process of curating the renowned exhibition as; “All the participating artists were named by the different curators, but chosen by collective decisions and of course Harry Szeemann was the moderator-in-chief” (Pesapane, 2009, p.135). Interestingly, Brock clearly presents the exhibition as a group endeavour with shared decision making, or in other words, as collective or collaborative curatorship. In Individual Methodology where the interview with Brock was published, it is clearly maintained that Documenta 5 had been the most important and complicated curatorial project during the first fifteen years of Szeemann’s career. But it is also demonstrated in the same publication through interviews with those working on the exhibition that both in terms of the conception, as well as in its delivery, it was the product of a collaboration with a number of individuals. Here we gain insight into how Szeeman’s autonomy as a curator was in fact enabled by a number of individuals. So why is Documenta 5 universally acknowledged as an achievement of Szeemann? Eva Fotiadi believes that it is due to the lack of systematic research on the history of curating that “allowed practitioners in the art world to create a curator's persona as it was more convenient for the professional art world” (2014, p.27).
But with the increase of new biennials and other large international exhibitions, the 1990s provided new sites where curatorial and artistic practices converged, explicitly blurring the distinction between artist and curator (O’Neill, 2012). Curating became an expanded methodology; emancipating the role of the curator from previous notions of “divine power” (Robbins, 2005, p. 150) and authorship through opening the possibilities of curatorial action. This approach to curating is relational, offering new possibilities of multilateral thinking across disciplines, fields, and so on, inviting dialogue across and between “without any need for any singular author” (De Lara, 2015, p.5), and crucially here, autonomy is not seen as a zero sum game but as distributed and shared. This shift away from a singular authorial voice was most likely aided by the 1990s and 2000s occupation with audience orientated art such as participatory and relational art practices. This reimagining of curatorship is famously advocated by Obrist who claims that to curate in this sense is; “to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations.” (2014, p.25), which could be understood in terms as relational autonomy as encountered in disability studies.
Obrist shifts authorship to authorship of the conditions for relations. A key example of this ‘curatorial action’ is the Serpentine Gallery’s annual Marathon event. The Marathon format described as Serpentine's “annual festival of ideas” (Serpentine, 2017) was conceived and established in 2005 by the gallery’s artistic director Obrist, with the first Marathon taking place in 2006 titled Interview. The Marathons have mostly been organised as annual intense two-day events during the month of October, where a huge variety of participants, (theorists, critics, artists, curators, politicians, scientists, anthropologists, poets, performers etc) from all backgrounds and disciplines are invited to give a short ‘presentation’ on that year’s topic in front of an audience. They have since taken on the following themes: Experiment (2007), Manifesto (2008), Poetry (2009), Maps (2010), Garden (2011), Memory (2012), 89plus (2013), Extinction (2014), Transformation (2015) and more recently Miracle (2016). On the Marathon events Obrist comments; “The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality… To keep art stimulating, it's important to open it up to new horizons, which includes showing it in unexpected contexts”. Obrist describes the normal museum-going experience like “being on a ski piste: go left, go right… It's too linear, too homogeneous” (Smart, 2010). For Obrist, collaboration is used as a method to disrupt this “linear” museum experience and importantly because of its collaborative approach, the Marathons has no singular authorial voice or power but “a ‘polyphonic interlacing’, rich in possibilities” (Bourriard, 1998, p.87). This lack of a singular voice could be interpreted that the format is also non-hierarchical and the actions of the curator, the artist, or the artworks in this context are “not individualized, rejecting the idea that art is autonomous from life” (DeLara, 2015, p.8).
In 2015 Karen Gaskill undertook PhD research into the social practice of the curator. In this study Gaskill identified the following characteristics of the social curation; “curation as an active and working practice” which is “holistic and responsive”. Social curation should also support the “relational, intangible attributes of works in equal measure to the physical, tangible aspects” (2010, p.125). Her thesis concludes;
For example, the instance of Documenta 5 described in the previous section is almost never remembered as a team project but an individual curatorial achievement of Harald Szeemann. Though on further research I found this to be not entirely accurate. Bazon Brock, who could be catergorised as co-curator on Documenta 5 described the process of curating the renowned exhibition as; “All the participating artists were named by the different curators, but chosen by collective decisions and of course Harry Szeemann was the moderator-in-chief” (Pesapane, 2009, p.135). Interestingly, Brock clearly presents the exhibition as a group endeavour with shared decision making, or in other words, as collective or collaborative curatorship. In Individual Methodology where the interview with Brock was published, it is clearly maintained that Documenta 5 had been the most important and complicated curatorial project during the first fifteen years of Szeemann’s career. But it is also demonstrated in the same publication through interviews with those working on the exhibition that both in terms of the conception, as well as in its delivery, it was the product of a collaboration with a number of individuals. Here we gain insight into how Szeeman’s autonomy as a curator was in fact enabled by a number of individuals. So why is Documenta 5 universally acknowledged as an achievement of Szeemann? Eva Fotiadi believes that it is due to the lack of systematic research on the history of curating that “allowed practitioners in the art world to create a curator's persona as it was more convenient for the professional art world” (2014, p.27).
But with the increase of new biennials and other large international exhibitions, the 1990s provided new sites where curatorial and artistic practices converged, explicitly blurring the distinction between artist and curator (O’Neill, 2012). Curating became an expanded methodology; emancipating the role of the curator from previous notions of “divine power” (Robbins, 2005, p. 150) and authorship through opening the possibilities of curatorial action. This approach to curating is relational, offering new possibilities of multilateral thinking across disciplines, fields, and so on, inviting dialogue across and between “without any need for any singular author” (De Lara, 2015, p.5), and crucially here, autonomy is not seen as a zero sum game but as distributed and shared. This shift away from a singular authorial voice was most likely aided by the 1990s and 2000s occupation with audience orientated art such as participatory and relational art practices. This reimagining of curatorship is famously advocated by Obrist who claims that to curate in this sense is; “to refuse static arrangements and permanent alignments and instead to enable conversations and relations.” (2014, p.25), which could be understood in terms as relational autonomy as encountered in disability studies.
Obrist shifts authorship to authorship of the conditions for relations. A key example of this ‘curatorial action’ is the Serpentine Gallery’s annual Marathon event. The Marathon format described as Serpentine's “annual festival of ideas” (Serpentine, 2017) was conceived and established in 2005 by the gallery’s artistic director Obrist, with the first Marathon taking place in 2006 titled Interview. The Marathons have mostly been organised as annual intense two-day events during the month of October, where a huge variety of participants, (theorists, critics, artists, curators, politicians, scientists, anthropologists, poets, performers etc) from all backgrounds and disciplines are invited to give a short ‘presentation’ on that year’s topic in front of an audience. They have since taken on the following themes: Experiment (2007), Manifesto (2008), Poetry (2009), Maps (2010), Garden (2011), Memory (2012), 89plus (2013), Extinction (2014), Transformation (2015) and more recently Miracle (2016). On the Marathon events Obrist comments; “The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality… To keep art stimulating, it's important to open it up to new horizons, which includes showing it in unexpected contexts”. Obrist describes the normal museum-going experience like “being on a ski piste: go left, go right… It's too linear, too homogeneous” (Smart, 2010). For Obrist, collaboration is used as a method to disrupt this “linear” museum experience and importantly because of its collaborative approach, the Marathons has no singular authorial voice or power but “a ‘polyphonic interlacing’, rich in possibilities” (Bourriard, 1998, p.87). This lack of a singular voice could be interpreted that the format is also non-hierarchical and the actions of the curator, the artist, or the artworks in this context are “not individualized, rejecting the idea that art is autonomous from life” (DeLara, 2015, p.8).
In 2015 Karen Gaskill undertook PhD research into the social practice of the curator. In this study Gaskill identified the following characteristics of the social curation; “curation as an active and working practice” which is “holistic and responsive”. Social curation should also support the “relational, intangible attributes of works in equal measure to the physical, tangible aspects” (2010, p.125). Her thesis concludes;
|
Just as the relational practices of the late 60’s and 70’s contributed to a new participative aesthetic reflective of the cultural and political changes of the time, Social Curation is reflective of a more thoughtful and considered way of being and interacting with the world (Gaskill, 2010, p.183)
|
From reviewing the literature, there are certainly similarities between Documenta 5 and the Marathons in that they draw together numerous voices through an expanded exhibition approach. However, Documenta 5, or at least the histories surrounding it, have been less open in regards to how this actually came about and by whom. The Marathons on the other hand, embraces and celebrates a similar format and collaborative approach, positioning it as the programmes core strength.
It has been explored how the role of the curator is contested as an individualised autonomous practice, but it is important to highlight that the same could also be said for the work of an artist, as similarly, art making is often mistakenly conceived as an individual pursuit. We think of the lonesome novelist or painter working in isolation in their studio; a gifted ‘genius’. But this persistent myth of the ‘genius’ artist endowed with great individual insight and skill has been widely disputed from different viewpoints such as feminism (Battersby, 1989; Sousslof, 1997; Parker and Pollock, 1981). In her essay The Cult of the Individual Fran Cottell summarises; “the idea perpetuated by the art market that individual geniuses arrive out of nowhere… is convenient but untrue. Artists invariably arrive at artistic solutions as a result of… social influences as well as for intellectual reasons.” (p.87). In fact, many claim “art is always social” (Lord and Lord, 2010, p.42) and equally, other have drawn attention to the “extensive divisions of labor” between numerous individuals and groups within art making (Howard Saul Becker, 1982, p.13). But how explicit artists and curators are about this “divisions of labor” as Becker describes, became of particular interest to me during this project, as I required to facilitate the curators and artists to make new work.
It has been explored how the role of the curator is contested as an individualised autonomous practice, but it is important to highlight that the same could also be said for the work of an artist, as similarly, art making is often mistakenly conceived as an individual pursuit. We think of the lonesome novelist or painter working in isolation in their studio; a gifted ‘genius’. But this persistent myth of the ‘genius’ artist endowed with great individual insight and skill has been widely disputed from different viewpoints such as feminism (Battersby, 1989; Sousslof, 1997; Parker and Pollock, 1981). In her essay The Cult of the Individual Fran Cottell summarises; “the idea perpetuated by the art market that individual geniuses arrive out of nowhere… is convenient but untrue. Artists invariably arrive at artistic solutions as a result of… social influences as well as for intellectual reasons.” (p.87). In fact, many claim “art is always social” (Lord and Lord, 2010, p.42) and equally, other have drawn attention to the “extensive divisions of labor” between numerous individuals and groups within art making (Howard Saul Becker, 1982, p.13). But how explicit artists and curators are about this “divisions of labor” as Becker describes, became of particular interest to me during this project, as I required to facilitate the curators and artists to make new work.
curator as commissioner
In addition to curatorial themes, curators have also been recognised to demonstrate capacity for authorship via commissioning. The commissioning of art is an age-old activity. For example, around thirty years after Christ, the Roman emperor Nero famously commissioned Famulus to paint his epic 300-room villa as the artist was known for “swiftness and delicacy of touch” (Buck and McClean, 2012, p.16). Early examples of commissioning such as this tended to take the form of direct patronage from an individual of status to an artist. Whether artists were commissioned for prestige, propaganda, celebration, commemoration or philanthropy, the act of commissioning art has traditionally been associated with status and considered “the highest level of artistic and cultural engagement” (ibid, p.17).
Today, commissions are less frequently granted to artists by individual patrons and more commonly by curators via an institutional capacity, enabling artists to create new work by providing them with financial, institutional and professional support. There are many complex challenges entangled with commissioning new artworks: conceptual, authorial, cultural, ethical, managerial, financial, legal and even emotional. Equally, there is no single way to commission contemporary art, the approaches to commissioning are often as unique and specific as the artworks generated. It is precisely this element of being at the cutting edge of creativity that makes commissioning such an exciting activity. Often commissioners become “intimately involved in their artists’ lives” through socialising and visiting studios, providing not only funding but also space, materials and feedback (Ryckman, 2007). For example, one of the world’s most respected private patrons is Cincinnati car dealer Andy Stillpass, who for over a decade has invited artists to stay and make often modest works for his family home, declaring that: “By commissioning works, I feel that I am commissioning experiences. I love the works that have resulted ... but just as important are the memories and the experience of working closely with artists” (Buck, 2012). Here we see evidence that commissioning art is not simply an individual autonomous act by curators and patrons, but also a relational practice.
But how is art commissioned? Becker claims that in an efficient patronage system, artists and patrons “share conventions and an aesthetic through which they can cooperate to produce work, the patrons providing support and direction, the artists creativity and execution” (1982, p103). However, Becker makes this distinction deceptively straightforward. I discovered many models of authorship in the arts. Co-authorship or “joint authorship” as Paisley Livingston suggests, requires uncoerced, cooperative activity between ‘authors’ involving shared intentions tied up in mutual beliefs held in common with regard to the work. Artistic collaboration amounting to co-authorship requires a coordination of art-making intentions and intentional actions. The difference between multiple authorship and co-authorship comes back to the issue of responsibility. Does an author take responsibility for just his contribution to the work or for the work as a whole? Where that work is made up of discrete, identifiable units of authorship, that work is multiply authored. And where that work is a “unified whole without discrete, identifiable units of authorship, that work is co-authored” (Hick, 2014, p. 153). Much of the literature surrounding contemporary commissioning of artists addresses the issues of authorship and circles around best practice solutions in maintaining good working relationships.
To commission art for Auto Agents, I spent much time exploring how the authorial boundaries could be made be transparent for the curators, which is further outlined Act 3: The Commissioners and The Commissioned. In Buck and McClean’s comprehensive book Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators and Artists, an entire chapter is dedicated to “Reaching an Agreement” (p.217). Here different models to agreements are discussed from informal agreements generated through correspondence, to legally binding contracts. Whilst legally binding contracts offer a solid sense of clarity and assurance, artist Jeremy Deller warns remains wary of signing binding agreements; “I try not to sign any piece of paper… to commit myself to this or that, or the other, or to stick to an idea… and why would you when the work is in progress?” (Buck and McClean, 2012, p.218). The very nature of making art is often responsive and reflexive and therefore must require flexibility in agreements. With this in mind, it is becoming common place that commissioning contracts enable revisions to take place at different stages. But perhaps more complexly is the issue of intellectual property rights. How should an artwork be credited, particularly if a collaborative commissioning process model was employed? Here ‘moral rights of authorship’ are articulated as separate to ‘actual ownership’ of the physical work. When tackling issues of authorship in this project, instead of just looking towards curatorial literatures, I also looked towards self-advocacy practices and how they address authorship. I employed several methods including person-centred planning tools such as PATH and Decision Making Agreements which explicitly break down decision-making processes.
Today, commissions are less frequently granted to artists by individual patrons and more commonly by curators via an institutional capacity, enabling artists to create new work by providing them with financial, institutional and professional support. There are many complex challenges entangled with commissioning new artworks: conceptual, authorial, cultural, ethical, managerial, financial, legal and even emotional. Equally, there is no single way to commission contemporary art, the approaches to commissioning are often as unique and specific as the artworks generated. It is precisely this element of being at the cutting edge of creativity that makes commissioning such an exciting activity. Often commissioners become “intimately involved in their artists’ lives” through socialising and visiting studios, providing not only funding but also space, materials and feedback (Ryckman, 2007). For example, one of the world’s most respected private patrons is Cincinnati car dealer Andy Stillpass, who for over a decade has invited artists to stay and make often modest works for his family home, declaring that: “By commissioning works, I feel that I am commissioning experiences. I love the works that have resulted ... but just as important are the memories and the experience of working closely with artists” (Buck, 2012). Here we see evidence that commissioning art is not simply an individual autonomous act by curators and patrons, but also a relational practice.
But how is art commissioned? Becker claims that in an efficient patronage system, artists and patrons “share conventions and an aesthetic through which they can cooperate to produce work, the patrons providing support and direction, the artists creativity and execution” (1982, p103). However, Becker makes this distinction deceptively straightforward. I discovered many models of authorship in the arts. Co-authorship or “joint authorship” as Paisley Livingston suggests, requires uncoerced, cooperative activity between ‘authors’ involving shared intentions tied up in mutual beliefs held in common with regard to the work. Artistic collaboration amounting to co-authorship requires a coordination of art-making intentions and intentional actions. The difference between multiple authorship and co-authorship comes back to the issue of responsibility. Does an author take responsibility for just his contribution to the work or for the work as a whole? Where that work is made up of discrete, identifiable units of authorship, that work is multiply authored. And where that work is a “unified whole without discrete, identifiable units of authorship, that work is co-authored” (Hick, 2014, p. 153). Much of the literature surrounding contemporary commissioning of artists addresses the issues of authorship and circles around best practice solutions in maintaining good working relationships.
To commission art for Auto Agents, I spent much time exploring how the authorial boundaries could be made be transparent for the curators, which is further outlined Act 3: The Commissioners and The Commissioned. In Buck and McClean’s comprehensive book Commissioning Contemporary Art: A Handbook for Curators and Artists, an entire chapter is dedicated to “Reaching an Agreement” (p.217). Here different models to agreements are discussed from informal agreements generated through correspondence, to legally binding contracts. Whilst legally binding contracts offer a solid sense of clarity and assurance, artist Jeremy Deller warns remains wary of signing binding agreements; “I try not to sign any piece of paper… to commit myself to this or that, or the other, or to stick to an idea… and why would you when the work is in progress?” (Buck and McClean, 2012, p.218). The very nature of making art is often responsive and reflexive and therefore must require flexibility in agreements. With this in mind, it is becoming common place that commissioning contracts enable revisions to take place at different stages. But perhaps more complexly is the issue of intellectual property rights. How should an artwork be credited, particularly if a collaborative commissioning process model was employed? Here ‘moral rights of authorship’ are articulated as separate to ‘actual ownership’ of the physical work. When tackling issues of authorship in this project, instead of just looking towards curatorial literatures, I also looked towards self-advocacy practices and how they address authorship. I employed several methods including person-centred planning tools such as PATH and Decision Making Agreements which explicitly break down decision-making processes.
is everyone a curator?
The word ‘curate’ is not the museum specific term it once was (Balzer, 2015). During the period I was preparing this literature review, I happened to visit a restaurant in the ‘hipster’ part of Liverpool. As I scanned the menu my eyes are drawn to towards a curious phrase; ‘curated by the head chef’. This is not the first time I’ve seen ‘curate’ appear in unexpected contexts. Hollywood actress Gwyneth Paltrow now ‘curates’ a weekly online lifestyle publication Goop [11], Firefly in Delaware became the first “fan curated music festival” in 2017 [12] and you can even download an app to help you ‘curate’ your funeral [13]. It appears curatorship is becoming a concept increasingly dislocated from the gallery, but why? This shift also raises further questions; Should the term curator be used broadly or narrowly? Can it cover professional museum curators as well as Pinterest boards? And does this mean in some way, we are all curators?
The rise of the term ‘curate’ to describe the activities of ‘owners’ of social media spaces, blogs and wikis appears to reflect an “agentive turn to meta-authorship” among larger numbers of participants in online media (McDougall and Potter, 2015, p.201). Michael Bhaskar’s book Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess suggests curation became a “buzzword” because it answered a set of modern problems; “the problems caused by having too much” (2016, p.6). With increased productivity, resources, communication and data, the more ‘stuff’ we produce as a society, the more valuable curatorial skills are becoming. ‘Curate’ as a label with its “scholarly pedigree, is more prestigious and thus deserving of a high price” rather than ‘selected’ or ‘organised’ (Kingston, 2011) and thus is becoming synonymous with the act of a ‘careful selection’, with comedian Stewart Lee quipping in response to ambiguous ‘curated events’; “it is reassuring to know that it has been curated, whatever it is” (Lee, 2016).
But where does this leave the gallery? In the art world, there are an increasing number of projects that transfer the curatorial responsibility over to the public. A notable example of this is Per Huttner’s project I am a Curator at the Chisenhale Gallery, London (2003). This exhibition invited the public to apply to be a curator for the day, and with over 70 artworks to select from, individuals worked with the gallery team for an afternoon in realising an exhibition. Other models invite the audience to select works via online possibilities. Do It With Others (DIWO), a project hosted by Furtherfield (2007). This drew reference from Fluxus’s Mail Art projects in creating an e-mail art exhibition where users submitted their artworks and their own ordering and selection strategies for public consideration. Another event using online platforms is Click! at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, defined itself as a ‘crowd curated’ exhibition, and invited the museums visitors, online audiences and the public to be responsible for the selection process. Click! asked photographers to submit their work with the public then being responsible for the final selection. The explosion of social media has also accelerated curatorial ways of thinking. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Snapchat enable users to collect and collate images and text for an audience of friends and strangers which “has become a ubiquitous, quintessentially 21st century act.” (Borrelli, 2013). Even Sotheby’s advises artists how to ‘curate’ an Instagram account for the art world[14]. In 2013, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria, hosted Like It, a permanent-collection exhibition based on solely on Facebook likes.
Some in the museum sector are unhappy about ‘curate’ being used in this way (Booth, 2012), but arguably this approach to curating is more democratic or inclusive as it allows a broader range of voices to be included in the valuing and recognition of art. But through the broadening of voices, the ‘quality’ of the exhibition gets called into question. The same critique is also applied to inclusive arts and participatory arts practices which employ audience engagement, on which arts journalist Ray Mark Rinaldi (2012, no pagnation) comments, “when audiences become a variable, the quality of art varies a great deal”.
However to me, an opinion poll of ‘likes’ or crowdsourcing art for an exhibition is not representative of curatorship. Curating is more than just choosing and displaying, it is about understanding and demonstrating how critically informed decisions fit into a wider matrix of linkages and publics. Curating is a critically-engaged rigorous process, and this study proposes that there are ways of engaging a wide spectrum of people with curating by reconfiguring the framework for critical decision making using inclusive and participatory approaches. Can anyone be a curator? I believe most people can. But to engage ‘anyone’ with this practice, it must be underpinned by a rigorous process to ensure a critical eye has been cast. Therefore for this project, I have paid particular attention to developing ways to support the curators to be critical in their role.
The rise of the term ‘curate’ to describe the activities of ‘owners’ of social media spaces, blogs and wikis appears to reflect an “agentive turn to meta-authorship” among larger numbers of participants in online media (McDougall and Potter, 2015, p.201). Michael Bhaskar’s book Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Excess suggests curation became a “buzzword” because it answered a set of modern problems; “the problems caused by having too much” (2016, p.6). With increased productivity, resources, communication and data, the more ‘stuff’ we produce as a society, the more valuable curatorial skills are becoming. ‘Curate’ as a label with its “scholarly pedigree, is more prestigious and thus deserving of a high price” rather than ‘selected’ or ‘organised’ (Kingston, 2011) and thus is becoming synonymous with the act of a ‘careful selection’, with comedian Stewart Lee quipping in response to ambiguous ‘curated events’; “it is reassuring to know that it has been curated, whatever it is” (Lee, 2016).
But where does this leave the gallery? In the art world, there are an increasing number of projects that transfer the curatorial responsibility over to the public. A notable example of this is Per Huttner’s project I am a Curator at the Chisenhale Gallery, London (2003). This exhibition invited the public to apply to be a curator for the day, and with over 70 artworks to select from, individuals worked with the gallery team for an afternoon in realising an exhibition. Other models invite the audience to select works via online possibilities. Do It With Others (DIWO), a project hosted by Furtherfield (2007). This drew reference from Fluxus’s Mail Art projects in creating an e-mail art exhibition where users submitted their artworks and their own ordering and selection strategies for public consideration. Another event using online platforms is Click! at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008, defined itself as a ‘crowd curated’ exhibition, and invited the museums visitors, online audiences and the public to be responsible for the selection process. Click! asked photographers to submit their work with the public then being responsible for the final selection. The explosion of social media has also accelerated curatorial ways of thinking. Platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and Snapchat enable users to collect and collate images and text for an audience of friends and strangers which “has become a ubiquitous, quintessentially 21st century act.” (Borrelli, 2013). Even Sotheby’s advises artists how to ‘curate’ an Instagram account for the art world[14]. In 2013, the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, Austria, hosted Like It, a permanent-collection exhibition based on solely on Facebook likes.
Some in the museum sector are unhappy about ‘curate’ being used in this way (Booth, 2012), but arguably this approach to curating is more democratic or inclusive as it allows a broader range of voices to be included in the valuing and recognition of art. But through the broadening of voices, the ‘quality’ of the exhibition gets called into question. The same critique is also applied to inclusive arts and participatory arts practices which employ audience engagement, on which arts journalist Ray Mark Rinaldi (2012, no pagnation) comments, “when audiences become a variable, the quality of art varies a great deal”.
However to me, an opinion poll of ‘likes’ or crowdsourcing art for an exhibition is not representative of curatorship. Curating is more than just choosing and displaying, it is about understanding and demonstrating how critically informed decisions fit into a wider matrix of linkages and publics. Curating is a critically-engaged rigorous process, and this study proposes that there are ways of engaging a wide spectrum of people with curating by reconfiguring the framework for critical decision making using inclusive and participatory approaches. Can anyone be a curator? I believe most people can. But to engage ‘anyone’ with this practice, it must be underpinned by a rigorous process to ensure a critical eye has been cast. Therefore for this project, I have paid particular attention to developing ways to support the curators to be critical in their role.
[1] Depictions of disability date back as far as 1050 through religious depictions of healing. See the Disability History project by Historic England.
[2] Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale titled The Encyclopedic Palace (2013), the Museum of Everything at London’s Tate Modern (2010), Souzou: Outsider Art from Japan at the Wellcome Trust (2013), Alternative Guide to the Universe at The Hayward Gallery (2013) and Outside In at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery (2016).
[3] ‘Orange badges’ (replaced with ‘blue badges’ in 2000) are a type of parking permit for disabled people and their support.
[4] Namely the social model of disability discussed further on page 34.
[5] Alice Fox developed the MA Inclusive Arts Practice at the University of Brighton as well as Side by Side, an international exhibition of learning disability visual art at Southbank Centre in 2013.
[6] Examples include; Arts Council England's two-year social inclusion research programme (2000), Department for Culture, Media and Sports report on museums and galleries as 'centre's for social change' (2001).
[7] This is not a phenomenon limited to the UK. The shift towards an instrumental cultural policy, is also a wider European trend, as well as evident in Australia and Canada (Vestheim 1994, p.57-71).
[8] Facilitated by a comprehensive programme of training for professionals (PASS and PASSING). This was widely disseminated in the UK from the late 1970s and “by 1989 over 3000 people in the UK had attended the 6 day PASS programme” (Sullivan and Munford, 2005, p.21).
[9] 14 young people trained as kite markers in 2017 according to Halton Speak Out’s AGM report.
[10] These perceptions of the 'self' continued through to 19th century, where 'individualization' and 'modernization' became reoccurring themes in 19th century social thought literatures, evident in the writings Karl Marx, August Comte, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber (Rose, 1997).
[11] See Goop website: http://goop.com/whats-goop/
[12] See article ‘Delaware festival Firefly to become first fan-curated music festival in 2017’ (NME, 2017)
[13] See article ‘Death apps promise to help people curate their afterlives’ (The Guardian, 2016)
[14] See article ‘Curating an Instagram Account for the Art World’ (Sotheby’s, 2016)
