curating: more than a ting
^ Compost station in Tree's garden in SF, CA
If for Beuys, “everyone is an artist”, is everyone also a curator?
As discussed elsewhere, I'm interested in the ways elements of "culture" - everything from sculpture and painting to music and household crafts, cooking, theater, and poetry - relate to each other, blend, support, riff, dance with people, and place, and sing with awareness of deep time and future generations.
It’s a fine mouthful, but how do these elements come together? In cities and colonized spaces where ties to preindustrial traditions are generally weaker, the official cultural weaver for museums and galleries is usually the curator or perhaps a curatorial team. On a popular level, music, film, and fashion industry leaders, social media influencers, and mass media can pick and highlight elements from the often commercially assisted lifestyles of celebrities or trendsetters in various subcultures. Many of these people are influenced by the priorities of the industries and funders that market to them and pay their bills and work together to fuel new trends, so it can be pretty complex. They bring their skills and style to their fans, networks, businesses, patrons, advertisers, institutions, museums, and venues, usually for a brief but intense period of time, and then move on to the next theme or concern, or location altogether. Sometimes an author or art critic may weave a bundle of ideas and images together in a written piece to make a point without having to move any actual objects around. Rarely, however, are these efforts about helping people shift the way they live in any sustained or multigenerational way much deeper than just directing their attention to the latest style, fad, or product. Cultures with a focus on living close to the Earth, often have extraordinary cultural systems which support them. Examples can be seen from the Amish to the Omo River Valley, and beyond. These, of course, are often cultural systems barely understood by outsiders.
Theater of the Oppressed, a powerful blend of theater, community problem solving, personal transformation, and education (even this doesn't do it justice- much to explore if you have the chance), offers the idea of the "spect-actor" a blend of actor and spectator roles common to what many people think of as theater.
spect-actor
"This is a term created by Augusto Boal to describe those engaged in Forum theatre. It refers to the dual role of those involved in the process as both spectator and actor, as they both observe and create dramatic meaning and action in any performance. …
Boal emphasizes the critical need to prevent the isolation of the audience. The term "spectator" brands the participants as less than human; hence, it is necessary to humanize them, to restore to them their capacity for action in all its fullness. They must also be a subject, an actor on an equal plane with those accepted as actors, who in turn must also be spectators. This will eliminate any notions of the ruling class and the theatre solely portraying their ideals while the audience being the passive victims of those images. This way the spectators no longer delegate power to the characters either to think or act in their place. They free themselves; they think and act for themselves. Boal supports the idea that theatre is not revolutionary in itself but is a rehearsal of revolution." — from our friends at Wikipedia
I picture articulture as an embodiment or practice of a similar type of decentralized creativity and piecing together. Just as we all gravitate to and develop our own music, books, food, and fashion sense, we'd all be active participants in selecting cultural elements that matched our own aesthetic sense of how we’d like to live as well as meeting the needs of family, friends, and neighbors and, um… ecosystems. Some people might be really good at it but we'd all be involved in the collective multispecies dance of making it better. Arti-cura-cultur-alists or some other awkward mouthful.
The "artist", "curator", "participant", "OG", "educator", "student", scientist", "manager", "activist", “neighbor”, etc. all merge together dynamically in a conversation about fitting our ourselves and our world back together more effectively, but not as passive consumers. Community-engaged social practice artists often work with this but generally, it's the work of a specific person or team and not part of a larger strategic evolving, ongoing effort with progressively shared components layered in over time.
Rarely is this creative effort connected to our day-to-day lives. Rarely does it offer practical support for anyone wanting to decolonize (and de-carbonize!) their life and reclaim more direct access to the food, water, shelter, and resources they might need to survive or that others and particularly other beings might need.
For this to work, it must emerge, I believe, from lived experience rather than theory or pretty words. Top-down, side to side and bottom-up, inside/outside, and relationships I don't have words for will all be welcome and necessary for the diversity of interrelationships to sprout, bloom and reseed. How might we compost for this? In other words, what might it take to nourish this process?
At some point, what actually works might be less about curating, farming, parenting, or learning how to be a better human at all, but rather noticing what feels right and is helpful and what is not. When the larger world around us has a greater say in what emerges, it may be a sign that we’re beginning to listen.
To use the extended metaphor of compost inspired by the image at the beginning of this post, we have the Latin for composita, compositum “something put together”, and the Latin curatus, past participle of curare "to take care of", curator "overseer, manager, guardian," and of course, curare, to “cure”. I see, the evolution of this curator concept to be more toward the compost end of the spectrum where it’s less about ego and more about what works over time for the Earth with people. Some great patterns and systems might endure for a while, naturally, like this epic ting, but the focus is on efficacy. Does it help us live an ethical low-footprint resilient life that gives us and those around us a deep sense of joy and meaning?
I don't want pesticides and plastic in my compost. I know that much. It takes a balance of brown and green and dry and wet and aeration and time. It also depends on what I have in abundance around me. What do I have to work with? What can I use? After that, what do I want to grow with it? This is, of course, a metaphor and recipe for life.
I think it may work like that. Culture/compost transforms what comes and nourishes the land. Neither the shovel nor the shoveler cause compost. It will surely happen without us. Until we can hold that humility (yeah, humus, soil) our egotism and misconceptions of agency will limit what we can support. We contribute to and give of our efforts and love; we can't cure, make, fix or solve it all, but we can certainly help. There's plenty of space to begin at any point along the journey to let life show us its wisdom. To follow the composting metaphor, we can apply it to the full lifespan of culture and articulture:
Food- where, for example, do we start and what can we work with? To be explicit: what theme or behavioral shift might you want to support in your life? Do you want to use songs, sculptural objects, paintings, or local heirloom vegetables to assemble into an art-system to address that theme? (See 5 questions for more about ways to start.) What are we eating/consuming and where/how is it grown/manufactured (where does our “art” come from")? What are the things that inspire us most and where did they come from? What cultural elements do we feel we have a strong affinity for and can actually use and incorporate? Are these elements self-generated, coming from a friend, museum, gallery, or gift? What are the stories of our things? Can we grow more to share with others? So many traditions anchor connection through food and beverages: they’re delicious, convivial, and nourishing. Can we anchor our systems in existing rituals/meals/meditation or add them to our other traditions accordingly? How do these sharing practices highlight interconnection? (So many questions it’s dizzying.)
Scraps- what is left over from what we eat/consume? Is it biodegradable? What other compostable/reusable organic material could we use? What do those scraps say about our habits, our inspiration, or our environment? In essence, what are the downstream effects and byproducts of our culture? (Hint: fix this.)
Composting- how are the cultural digestion processes and their resultant impacts tended and supported? Who does this? Breaking down/remixing/adapting and repurposing? Can we mix and layer art-systems enough to create or highlight useful patterns or bring about deeper healing? Are some things too sacred to mix? Whose job is this?
Sifting/soil-making- What do we do with the organic richness that emerges? Where do we put it; what do we want to grow? What cultural structures, festivals, mobile salons, or potlatches can we come up with or expand on to share this creativity with our neighbors? Who needs to be gifted some tasty decolonial jam complete with its own song and poem to follow up cob oven heirloom grain Digger bread baking day? Good ideas and systems need to be shared! (See Step 4)
Crops and garden- this is where we live and where our food can come from, so we have more opportunities to tend and nurture and plan. How integrated is this with the rest of this process? What big infrastructure or planning or policy can we support to enhance our collective wellbeing and address systemic issues? This is beyond the traditional role of the artist (or at least most artists). How can we think and coordinate on a larger scale? Can we avoid fetishizing charismatic cultural megafauna and neglecting the systems and humble microbes yet again?
Plus consider the buildings required to support this, the tools, the myths, the ancestral traumas, the atonement and reparations, the science, watersheds, and safety of the neighborhood... All opportunities to weave back in and nourish with great love. And it’s cyclical or spiral or iteratively fractal.
I'm not fully sure how to empower this creative synergy yet, other than to point and try to embody it myself until the words get clear. I spend time writing about this yet don’t have decent prototypes working in my own family yet. People curate their homes and lives to some degree already. How might we invite a deeper, more shareable approach that supports how we want/need to live in the decades ahead? It comes down to nourishing what aches to be all around us already. I feel we might have a chance with this approach.
