An artwork made of artworks.
An experiment in philanthropy.
An entrepreneurial enterprise.
An investment in optimism.
Like a lot of meanings do, Curatorial Accessories began as a joke.
Born chuckling, CuratorialAccessories.com is a multiplicity. A body (group) emerges under the agency of other bodies, both corporeal and non-corporeal. A curatorial event husbands the emergence of a body of paintings & people
Two years ago my interest in time, process, and evolution got me asking the question, “What would happen if I made as much work as I wanted?”. My local art supply store holds a back to school sale twice a year, where I purchased volumes of 9” x 12” canvases for around $2 apiece. The minimal investment, small size, and my experimental question produced a body of work consisting of over 320 canvases and 300 works on paper, each 9” x 12”. They became, after several months and 150 canvases, a database of objects that others can use to picture a narrative, thus curatorial accessory. It captured the rise of the curator as art star, the growth of curatorial degree programs, and the ubiquitous expansion of the use of the term for everything from lecture series and cocktails, to the design of interiors. This just seemed part of the status of contemporary works of art, that of accessory for another’s production.
In was seduction as well. Since I don’t live along the nomadic trail of the biannual circuit, or in a location with many working curators, local success doesn’t circulate outside of that locality, except perhaps the virtual. It seemed logical, and a bit transgressive to this former modernist, to market work as accessory to curators.
The questions proliferated from there, who curates, what of my production, or who, was an accessory and what/who was not, where was the art, in the making or the choosing, what happens to my meanings when differing meanings are produce, what is the status of a work if not curated during a “curatorial event”… ahhh… all so much fodder to make work from.
For me, most of all, I’m asking are my ideas up to the task of making the humor meaningful rather then just a joke.
Then I thought of the tag line “Paintings for your professional and recreational curating needs.” Which gave me the question; what the hell would recreational curating look like!?
Cocktails?
Bruce Price, Accessory
