One term that recurs in the study of modern and contemporary art is that of alienation. This socio-economic condition that divides people, nature, and even things from one another is also manifest in the way that thought and practice have been gradually isolated and rendered into separate categories of area specialisation. What this implies is that skill and knowledge are not, according to the logic of our times, valued as synchronic entities unless knowledge satisfies the repetition of a given skill and skill evolves according to the utilitarian application of knowledge.
Without wanting to sound too deterministic, it seems that alienation has grown into a pervasive force that is difficult to recognise precisely because it has been naturalised by the ideology of global neo-liberalism. If we took a moment out of our work-laden days to observe this occurrence, it would become apparent that every step of our daily lives is regulated by a decentralised system of multiple factions. Whilst decentralisation is a favourable democratic principle, its application as a bureaucratic method of social functionality has tainted the way we think and act.
The effects of this human distancing were made explicitly and neatly clear last week when assisting in the running of a curatorial workshop organised by the Department of Art and Art History, University of Malta that was coordinated by Dr Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci. The workshop was held for students of the aforementioned department and also for those from the Department of Digital Arts at the APS Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale, which came to a close last Sunday. The students were asked to consider a list of curatorial and technical questions to be able to constructively analyse and debate exhibition categories; space, composition, lighting, the relationship of contemporary pieces with the Mdina Cathedral Museum's permanent collection, audio-visual aspects, and other fundamental exhibition components.
When gathering in the rectangular Refectory in the museum, the two groups of students from the separate departments instinctively sat at opposite ends of the hall, a rift that is quite significant given that their disciplines intrinsically require collectivity and exchange. Having witnessed this (and heavily suspecting that it would happen) Dr. Schembri Bonaci duly pointed out the problem to the students. This, he underlined, was not solely about personal interaction but an artistic obstacle, as the three disciplines of History of Art, Fine Arts, and Digital Arts must strive for interdisciplinarity to flourish. The current infrastructure does not permit such exchange to take place. Students have separate timetables, work spaces, and exhibitions and projects, and are not part of a centralised art academy. Schembri Bonaci had proposed an alternative to this problem a couple of years back, but to no avail (see 'Yesterday's, today's and probably tomorrow's disaster: art schools and 'Art City'', Malta Independent on Sunday, 25 January, 2015).
This discussion was relevant to the workshop because the Mdina Biennale is an artistic project that repudiates the contemporary drive for isolation. The exhibition is an intervention into a museum with artworks produced across a large span of time that are displayed according to historical periods, media, and special collections. Contemporary pieces must coexist within this time-space journey and rescue it, so to say, from stagnation. The workshop participants were asked to discuss how this historical dialogue could have been further accentuated to ensure that the art and objects inside the museum would be portrayed coherently. This question posed an exciting and demanding challenge when curating the Mdina Biennale.
One of the Digital Arts postgraduate students, Tony Cassar, unaware of the philosophy of the next Mdina Biennale edition, suggested that the video installations be projected directly onto the museum walls, linking the old architecture of the place with the immateriality of images formed by light. This, he commented, would prevent the exhibits from becoming static and would bring the entire museum to life by establishing an organic link between past and present. His observation is a relevant one that tackles one of the most obvious but difficult problems, that of the emptiness of space, or, rather, the feeling of bareness that can sometimes still be sensed even if the walls are lined with hanging artworks and freestanding objects.
A curator's job is not about filling space but about studying its compositional elements; colour, light, dimensions, physical particularities, and so many other details that need to be tackled in the exhibition space itself. No amount of prior preparation would be able to prevent or resolve these issues because the physical details must work harmoniously with the non-physical ones that regard the quality and character of artworks.
All this means that curators and artists, in trying to achieve a synthesis of all these parts, are sometimes at loggerheads to solve that which is of greater priority; space or the individual art object respectively. As Dr. Schembri Bonaci explained, artist or curator must give in or compromise their position for the exhibition to come together, and those who have worked with both or either are aware that this is not a straightforward task.
There were several lesser or greater problems to resolve on-site during the exhibition setup, and it is only by experiencing these that similar ones be avoided in future. Although problems will never absent themselves, maturity would negate the more trivial from arising, thus allowing time for those that are more intellectual or challenging in nature.
Practice is the essential key to exploring such knowledge, and curatorial practice is still generally on an amateur level in Malta. The term 'curator', differentiated to the role of 'artistic director' as Dr Schembri Bonaci states, is now essential for all public funding applications and may be encountered with the vast majority of exhibitions, as well as the country having an annual international curatorial school. However, it is through an evolutionary approach to practice that strives for continuity and growth that knowledge be developed. Schembri Bonaci has made this objective to cultivate a school of curatorial thought central to the Mdina Biennale that hopes to continue this dialogue innovatively. Alienation suppresses continuity from happening and traditions from forming. In 2019, this question will be tackled from a new angle with the plan to engulf the museum in an incandescent sea of audio-visual projections.