Curated by Elizabeth Newman, ‘What Makes This Poem Beautiful?’ presented works by individuals and collectives linked by their relationship to the curator and to each other. As the nature of the relationships diverged from familial to professional, the web of connections presented the exact co-ordinates of the social location of the individual at the centre, namely Elizabeth Newman. A practising psychoanalyst, Elizabeth Newman’s visual art and writing are fortified by the weight of theory. But far from being heavy-going, Newman’s tone in all of her work is warm, engaging and affective. In the role of curator, Newman posed a question about the nature of art which precipitated a discussion, in her catalogue essay, about the source of creativity and the role of communities in art-making. Like a child turning over a rock to examine the life underneath, Newman put her own creativity community under a microscope and effectively used herself as a case study in her search for an answer.
The impulse to examine one’s social position is not unfamiliar to members of social networking sites, where the connections between individuals are publicly mapped and codified (‘How do you know Elizabeth?’). Like the data logged in Facebook, What Makes This Poem Beautiful? expanded in a web of insiders’ references to prior exhibitions and works. One example was Neon Parc’s contribution, Homage to Elizabeth Newman, MIR 11, a water cooler in a corner of the gallery with plastic cups free for visitors to help themselves, recalling an earlier work of Newman’s in which she provided a water-cooler to an office space whose inhabitants had invited her to exhibit a work.
Like a series of Venn diagrams, there were