FORUM B-OPEN READING GROUP: ANTHEA BUYS
B-opens first reading group in 2012 is hosted by Anthea Buys, resident at Hordaland Art Centre this January. Buys has chosen two texts and one recipe for the reading: The Man of The Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe, an extract from Three Banquets for a Queen by Charlotte Birnbaum and a recipe for great great Aunt Bessie´s biscuits. In the study circle, Buys wants to look at the rise of incidental amateur professionalisms in contemporary artistic and curatorial practice and the relationship of knowledge in traditionally “non-art” fields to the art-specific practices which this knowledge informs. The texts and the discussion will be in English.
Buys writes:
“An exhibition-maker is… an administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.” (Harald Szeemann)
Since Marcel Duchamp, in the early Twentieth Century, coined the term “readymade” to describe artworks made by the appropriation of everyday objects, the material and disciplinary scope of contemporary art has continued to expand exponentially. In the context of post-minimalist American sculpture, American art theorist Rosalind Krauss calls this widening of the substance and content of art “the expanded field”. The notion of an “expanded field” has been installed in the common language of art discourse in such a way that curators, writers, artists and other inhabitants of the art world use the term to speak of, and justify, a seemingly limitless scope of actions, objects, disciplines and expertise available for appropriation in the name of art.
In this light, are artists and curators today serial “amateur professionals”, moving from one conventionally “non-art” specialist skill-set to the next as projects come and go? While to me, at least, artists seem to show more constancy in their fields of appropriation, many contemporary curators seem to “check in” and “check out” of specialist fields like flâneurs moving from one part of a city to the next.
In some cases this itinerant amateur specialisation is born of circumstantial necessity (such as financial or institutional limitations); in other cases it is conceptually appropriate to a project, and in others still it occurs just because there is no reason it shouldn’t.
I would like to propose two short readings prior to our discussion both of which relate to this topic literarily and anecdotally, rather than theoretically. The first is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), which is the literary origin of the figure of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin discusses this story extensively in his theorizing of the flâneur in The Arcades Project. The second is a short extract from Charlotte Birnbaum’s On the Table: Three Banquets for a Queen, which is a sumptuous read. There is a bonus “reading” as well, which is a recipe passed down to me from my great grandmother. I use it a lot in professional contexts, mostly to thank people for favours. If you would like, you are welcome to try the recipe out, and bring your batch of baked goods with you to the study circle.
Please make reservations with B-open: toril.johannessen [at] gmail.com
The texts are provided to participants who register.
Free and open for all.
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Anthea Buys is a curator and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She works at the South African National Gallery, as curator of contemporary art, and likes to keep fit by doing plenty of independent projects on the side.