The Administrative Turn in Contemporary Art: The Figure of the Arts Administrator — a case study of the Taipei Biennial (1996-2020)

This PhD uses “the Administrative Turn” to describe the specific, but also the more general, changing nature of the local and global administrative networks which support contemporary art. Through a case study of the figure of the arts administrator at the Taipei Biennial (TB), this research examines these changes in three ways – on (1) changes in institutional principles of arts administration, (2) changes in administrative methodology, and (3) changes in function for arts administrators. Taking a transdisciplinary approach drawing on Arts Management, Curatorial Studies, Museum Studies and Art History, this thesis engages critically with the value of “the administrative” as a necessary approach to catalyse a shift in focus away from the highly visible and spectacularised norm of the global contemporary art world, towards the infrastructural significance of the backstage. This change in perspective through the study of the TB arts administrators sets out to present a missing puzzle of what makes that art world functions as it does and how in fact the support network of the contemporary art practices have transformed because of changes in the administrative capacity in terms of its institution, methodology and function. Chapter 1 details the developmental history of the system of arts administration at TB, as an institution situated within a government-backed, museum-based, contemporary art exhibitionary ecosystem, and finds that the institution history and design principles of arts administration are not only a reflection but also an active author of Taiwanese national identity. Chapter 2 demonstrates how arts management and its methodology as a practice-centric tradecraft based on the narrative of professionalism and a stewardship process, is iterative and relies on a balance of control and care. With a close analysis of the administrative capacity, Chapter 3 establishes the figure of the arts administrators as reflexive and its function pedagogical and consultative. This research concludes that acting as critical infrastructure, arts administrators as ascending co-development stewards, possess the transformative agency to radically re-imagine their sphere of practice and re-conceptualise how the support network could better function for a fast-evolving and increasingly multi-stakeholder production reality, which underpins the culture of contemporary art biennials globally

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

Atlantica : contemporary art from Mozambique and its diaspora

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The curator-as-accomplice : a self-reflexive and exhibition history study of contemporary art curation in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Arts, Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa, Te Whanganui a Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand

This thesis contributes a new description of curating termed the curator-as-accomplice which is derived from and tested against examples of contemporary art curatorial practice situated in Aotearoa New Zealand. The ‘curator-as-accomplice’ is defined as a mode of creative and co- operative practice that resists the tendency to centralise curating by working complicitly alongside others to support their unrealised potential. The notion of ‘accomplice’, in association with curating, has received scholarship by Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney but has not previously been developed into a conceptual framework applied to practice. By addressing this gap, this research provides an original contribution to knowledge via a self-reflexive approach analysing four exhibitions together with related exhibition history research surveying exhibitions within Aotearoa (1970–2020). Given the specific focus on practice situated within Aotearoa, this research has additional significance with regard to how to how the curator-as-accomplice performs both within a post-imperial, colonial context and in relation to Pākehā (New Zealand European) bias

Narrativising Dispossessed Histories

The commentary investigates the ethics, politics and mechanisms of the retrospective mining of cultural absences, voids, silences, and blind spots where the condemned artefact or cultural object was forcefully and intentionally disappeared by authoritarian, dominant, hegemonic cultural control systems. Each project in this commentary is a creative and generative counter-performance that grapples with memory and counter-memory to produce and militate a space of appearance - materially, affectively, and experientially. The commentary intends to critically evaluate four of my ongoing historical, artistic, and curatorial projects and consider their formal, methodological, and theoretical frameworks. It will discuss the ideations, methodologies and intentions of each investigation, re-presentation, and the creative steps deployed to retroactively engage and exploit those cultural artefacts to expand knowledge, reconciliation, and justice. It will consider the ethics and politics of such militancy. Processual retracing, assembling, and reintegration – the action – is based on performatively opening a great occasion for asserting the “negative” against the visible ‘positive’ established version of history as told by the victor. Curating-as-practice is designed as forensic investigations, performative militancies, and re-constructive system-makings to escape, bypass or refute authoritarian injuries/injustices and to reclaim their restorative possibilities/potentialities. Creative tension is wrested in narrativising rather than narrating historical discourse, where representation is supplanted by manners of speaking/seeing and being heard/seen. The premise is that the psychodynamic technologies and processes of loss, reconciliation, and justice-seeking correlate with the therapeutic requirement to be seen and witnessed. Negotiations through rituals of collective acknowledgement and witnessing by the wider group are necessary for the voided experiences, traumatised histories, and injured spaces to attain symbolic and real meaning. In line with social constructivist theories, grief, mourning, reconciliation, and cultural healing are considered not primarily interior processes but intricately social ones. The community of spectators are actively implicated as potential witnesses in a dialectical confrontation with historical truth