Issue 11: Curator and Context (2007) Mara Gladstone A person discerns meaning, significance, or value from every aesthetic encounter, as each art object is presented to the world laden with ideas. Yet the contexts of experiencing art, by working within or against authorial intention, affect one’s impressions of it, perhaps producing incomplete or imperfect interpretations. Contexts can be personal, physical, architectural, natural, artificial, and textual. They range from the subjective perspective of the viewer and her physical stature in a space, to the structural and architectural dynamics of the viewing site, the flow of its galleries, color of walls, tactility of floors, and quality of light from the sky. Other contextual factors might include the placement of the object, its relationship to adjacent objects, and the atmospheric properties that emerge from the overall installation of an exhibition, such as communal responses from visitors, or the mood of the space given the functions of the environment and the actions of its users. Contexts can also be textual, particularly in the museum or in institutionalized exhibition spaces, …

Issue 11: Curator and Context Austen Barron Bailly This paper takes as it starting point two related projects: The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950 (October 2006-June 2007) and “Two Edges” (April 12, 2007).1 The Modern West was a major exhibition curated for Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) by Emily Ballew Neff, Curator, American Painting and Sculpture, and it traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).2 “Two Edges” was a virtual exhibition (never mounted) curated by artist Diana Thater for her participation, with LACMA Director Michael Govan, in the museum’s “Conversations with the Director” series, part of the suite of free public programming associated with the presentation of The Modern West at LACMA. Thater’s alternative “modern west” exhibition, created using “Virtual Gallerie” software and PowerPoint and presented digitally in a verbal “walk through,” was fully realized conceptually and functioned as a critique of Neff’s The Modern West, which she believed perpetuated and celebrated the mythology of the American West. Austen Barron Bailly, author of this paper, coordinated and installed The Modern West …

Issue 11: Curator and Context (2007) Vince Dziekan The article is written in two formats: a dynamic .pdf and printable .pdf format. Click here to see article as dynamic .pdf and here to see it as printable .pdf. © Journal of InVisible Culture, 2007

Issue 11: Curator and Context Amy L. Noell A bicycle does not often function with two flat tires and dismantled handlebars, but for myself and the seven co-curators of Visualizing TRANS, fifty bikes in this condition served as a meaningful introduction to our curatorial project of mapping trans movements and identities.1 Throughout this project, trans will be treated without quotation marks or capitalization. I make exceptions when I refer to the exhibition title, its concurrent conference, or when I explicitly call trans a prefix (“trans-”). While I foreground the multiplicity and incompatibility of trans manifestations in my description of the exhibition’s theme, this paper is not concerned with articulating all of the different theorizations of trans, including trans as an embodied practice (although this was certainly a compelling component of some of the exhibition’s objects). For more on trans, and specifically, how to write about trans as embodied practice, see “Jacob Hale’s Rules for Non-Trans Writing about Trans,” at http://sandystone.com/hale.rules.html .2 Our unconventional bike treks traced the Kupfer Center’s multiple historical and physical transformations. The …

Issue 11: Curator and Context (Fall 2007) Lucia Vodanovic The work of the British architect Cedric Price appears to revolve around an unusual relationship between preservation and demolition. Insisting that architecture has to be contemporary in absolute terms, he destroys any traces that the past and its demands have left. Accordingly, most of his projects take the form of flexible structures that can be built, un-built, changed, re-organized, or dismantled. The architect believes that buildings should not be aimed at lasting functionally or aesthetically into the future and, for this reason, demolition plays an important role within his projects. Yet this formulation is also able to act as a form of preservation, not related to a particular building or structure but rather to the capacity of Price’s constructions to be transformed and exchanged, to become one thing or another, and to continue to be contingent. Price’s ideas and works aim to relate architecture to other areas or even to dissolve it into other practices; architecture becomes just a means of connection, a few gestures that …

Issue 11: Curator and Context Alison Mandaville A story about erased genitals on William Blake’s sketches made my first encounter with Sandra Kroupa during a presentation on Blake’s work in 1998 especially memorable. Since then, I have found ways to incorporate the art of the book — and whenever possible, Sandra’s presentations — into my own teaching. For nearly forty years, from her initial job as Library Technician to her current position as Book Arts and Rare Books Curator at the University of Washington Seattle, Sandra has played a key role in shaping one of the world’s finest Book Arts collections. The collection includes over 14,000 pieces, both historical and modern, from all over the globe. It also contains supporting artifacts such as sets of type, paper samples and artists’ realia. For me and for many others in the university community, Sandra’s deep connection to the aesthetics and physicality of story has opened the world of literature from one of mere prose and poetry “texts” to one in which all senses are fully engaged. Indeed, …