BIENNALE OF SYDNEY SYMPOSIUM AFTER THE EVENT: REWRITING ART HISTORY
A motivating factor behind the ‘Zones of Contact’ concept framing the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, as outlined by Charles Merewether, is the necessity to ‘break with the canon’, to disrupt or rupture the way that contemporary art is read.1 The July Symposium of the Biennale, titled ‘After the Event: Rewriting Art History’, reiterated this same need for a break from the Western linear narrative of art history. Although one left with an understanding of the need for rupture, whether the Biennale provided this was questionable.
The key note lecture for the July symposium was given by theorist and critic Boris Groys. Groys drew parallels between the ‘undecidable’ roles of the pharmakon in Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy and the contested role of the curator (or cure-ator according to Groys).2 The cure-ators, in their hope to heal art, frame works in a way that makes visible what was previously invisible. However, the conceptual framework that the cure-ator administers to art is its cure and simultaneously its poison, much like the pharmakon.
In the digital age, images float free in cyberspace and are thus liberated from the cure-ator. Since the digital image is an image that speaks for itself, the role of the museum curator has become significantly diminished. Groys himself acknowledges that web pages and routes of access are not without a curatorial conception: the image exists as ‘invisible’ data that manifests itself in a visual form for the viewer. Inherent in the multiple routes of access of electronic data are differences between each manifestation of an image; therefore, there are histories of an image. The image fragments into images, creating a narrative of the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline