Alessio Cavallaro Independent Curator, Director of ReelDance IncThe role of the curator in planning an exhibition involves building a bridge for artwork and viewer to share a meaningful, integrative experience... A lot of museums these days are planning exhibitions that combine with aspects of popular culture, but I think the important job of the curator/exhibition producer is to look at more experimental and innovative possibilities and present them to the public. With popular art forms, it's always possible to use media like television, radio, film. But it's difficult for anyone outside an art museum to survey the pioneering art of a particular age.

There is no bad art, only bad curators

This past December 3 saw the beginning of the five-day Curating in Asia 2012 program, a fascinating and unique attempt to gather five Korean curators and five overseas curators to share their ideas over a tightly packed three-day schedule -- a much different approach from the typical format in which "communication" consists of exchanging prepared questions and answers on predetermined topics. People from very different curating backgrounds brought their unique experiences to bear in sharing existing issues, introducing new ones, and trading a rich variety of perspectives. One of the invitees from overseas was

Alessio Cavallaro

a veteran Australian curator who has long played a leading role in the development of his country's contemporary experimental media arts scene, serving as senior curator for the Australian Center for the Moving Image (ACMI) and director of ReelDance. He was the most experienced of a diverse crop of overseas invitees who also included another independent curator (Shankar Barua, who is really more of a creative director), a national museum director (Tan Boon Hui of Singapore), a private museum curator (

Natsumi Araki

of Japan), and a festival planner (Tarek Abou El Fetouh, an Egyptian based in Belgium). Cavallaro's concerns about the curator's role are evident both in his enthusiastic descriptions of his values and approach and in the bold, experiment projects he has staged. The following interview is a combination of excerpts from a written interview with Kim Yeong-min(a fellow participant as an emerging curator), Cavallaro's presentation during the program, and conversations with him.

Soo-youn LEE (L) : What are your impressions after participating in the Curating in Asia 2012 program?

Alessio Cavallaro

(A) : Expectations are great in that it was a gathering of curators from several nations with a variety of differing cultures, despite being tied together under the regional name of “Asia and Oceania.” As the political and social background of each nation is different, we should be able to compare and discuss commonalities and differences. In particular, Asian nations are experiencing differing processes in the direction of the development of their modern art, even though all are impacted by Western culture. I believe that when gathered together, these experiences regarding Asian processes will become a strength for leading contemporary art trends anew. Korea, India, the Middle East, Japan, and others are receiving particular attention in the European and American art worlds as alternatives that can lead a new discourse. Through full-scale cooperative processes like this seminar, we may also open up new possibilities. Firstly, at this gathering, each curator shared his or her character, major issues, and fields of research, and shared?even if briefly?opinions on each issue. I hope these will not end as a one-off gathering but rather yield even greater fruit, such as exhibition cooperation, artists’ exchange, and pilot programs, through persistence.

[Curating in Asia 2012] Cavallaro explains his project at a workshop.

L : What exhibition of yours do you see as the most important and memorable?

A : Ever since I was young, I've been much more interested in experimental and avant garde music and art than in popular culture. In that sense, the most effective and influential exhibition for me would have to be Transfigure, which was my first planning effort the year after ACMI opened in 2003. It had to do with the body's perceptions - sight, hearing, and so forth - together with technology and phenomenology, and it also captured something of the identity of the newly opened ACMI. The idea was that this was an institution that studied moving images of every kind, and the exhibition included works of every type, heralding the arrival of a new visual culture: 16 mm film, music videos, biomedical visual equipment, interactive computer animation. It also had innovative artists like Char Davies who are pushing the boundaries of video and film with their perceptual experiments. [Editor's Note: Char Davies is a former painter who developed the 3D software company Softimage in the 1980s out of an interest in digital images. Since the 1990s, she has been a pioneer in virtual reality, exploring nature and the essence of existence. Her 1995 exhibition contribution Osmos is a virtual reality program that uses 3D graphics and sound to interact with the viewer, who gains an awareness of him- or herself within three-dimensional space through interacting with the virtual environment and sounds. Many have viewed this as a pioneering achievement in digital art.] Fittingly for an exhibition that actively incorporates and applies new technology, its collection remains available today as the website TRANSFIGURE, which received a Museums Australia Publications Design Award in 2004.

L : People often talk about exhibitions or projects being "experimental and innovative." How do exhibitions and work like this connect with audiences?

A : The role of the curator in planning an exhibition involves building a bridge for artwork and viewer to share a meaningful, integrative experience. No exhibition can make every viewer have the same exact experience with every work. There are just individual experiences, informed by our own thoughts and sensibilities. Even the most experimental work reflects the time and place it emerged from, so that as the viewers see it, they reflect on their own experience, which affects each of them in different way. For a media exhibition, the viewing environment is especially important in generating these emotions. You have to work to form an environment for serious appreciation of experimental and novel work within the exhibition space - like putting a black box in a white cube specifically for a media collection exhibition. [Editor's Note: In talking about media exhibition environments, Cavallaro mentioned Out of the Silent Planet, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea's first media collection exhibition, for which the museum's gallery was modified into a black box, giving it the optimal light and sound quality for the media work to take on the aura of painting or sculpture for the viewer.] When I'm developing an exhibition, I tend to observe closely to see how the resonances of sound and light are perceived differently as the viewer moves around. As a result, I can relate experiences like seeing a solitary viewer in their 70s talking to Stelarc's Prosthetic Head (2002) for over an hour, or a little girl from Brussels becoming entranced by the new ecosystem of Jon McCormack's Eden (2000) and being unable to leave the gallery. [Editor's Note: Stelarc is an artist who uses the body for performance art. His Prosthetic Head is a 3D avatar of a head programmed with software to answer questions from its viewers. Even though it is only a program, viewers end up anthropomorphizing the software, somehow coming to expect something more as the head - with a face modeled on the artist -- makes gestures such as nodding or cocking to one side. Jon McCormack is a digital media artist with a strong interest in artificial life. Eden was inspired his experience with nature visiting Litchfield National Park in Australia; the natural system within its virtual space interacts with the viewer and responds to sounds and light from the surrounding environment. It is also self-generating and self-propagating, so that this fantastic natural system grows larger and larger as the exhibition continues.]

L : What is the most important job of the curator?

A : [Editor's Note: Cavallaro talked a lot about the curator's "job" and "role" during the three-day seminar. This is something he has given a lot of thought to over a career serving as senior curator at ACMI, director at ReelDance, and an independent curator. With the curators gathered together for the program, he hoped to continue sharing and discussing the role of curator as producer, collaborator, and even patron in contemporary culture.] A : A lot of museums these days are planning exhibitions that combine with aspects of popular culture, but I think the important job of the curator/exhibition producer is to look at more experimental and innovative possibilities and present them to the public. With popular art forms, it's always possible to use media like television, radio, film. But it's difficult for anyone outside an art museum to survey the pioneering art of a particular age. A good example was ACMI's retrospective in 2009 on Len Lye, an artist who made some of the most revolutionary achievements in film, painting, poetry, and sculpture in the early 1900s. National and public institutions that receive public funding need to be especially cognizant of this duty. [Editor's Note: In conversation, Cavallaro said that the curator needs to be able to usher an artist's experimentation and contemporariness into the public sphere, i.e., the exhibition space. He used the example of Vincent Van Gogh, saying that if there had been a publicly supported museum at the time he was working, a curator would have been able to reflect his discourse even if his work was not popular with the period's public. This, according to Cavallaro, is where the curator's expertise comes into play.] When ACMI was holding its Tim Burton exhibition, I said there had to be a section off to one side showing contemporary experimental art from Australia or Asia. I felt that having an experimental exhibition side-by-side with a popular exhibition would create an opportunity for more viewers to encounter modern art. I can't stress enough what an important role and job the curator has as someone who shapes the discourse of contemporary culture. Especially as modern art undergoes an increasing integration of the production, installation, and exhibition process, the ways in which contemporary art communicates with the public are often decided by the direction chosen by the curator. That's why I always stress the importance of the curator whenever I meet other curators. "There is no bad art, only bad curators."

Soo-youn LEE / Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea/ PhD candidate in the Art History Department at Seoul National University Soo-youn LEE was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1979. She studied linguistics at Seoul National University and received an M.A in art history; her master’s thesis was entitled, “Nam June Paik: Performance to Video Art, Expanding of Perceptions.” Her research interests include contemporary media art, screen studies, and performance. Since 2010 she has curated various exhibitions, including Out of the Silent Planet (2010), the first media collection show at the museum; Public Project Chonggye (2011); Art of Communication: Anri Sala, Yang Ah Ham, Philippe Parreno, Jorge Pardo (2011); and a performance exhibition with Hayward Gallery in London, Move (2012).