While pondering just what it meant to be a curator the editors at Radar decided to invite three accomplished curators currently working in Baltimore to share their viewpoints. In an informal round-table conversation at a local coffee shop, Jack Livingston and David Crandall spoke with Chris Gilbert, the new Curator of Contemporary Art at Baltimore Museum of Art, George Ciscle, Curator in Residence at Maryland Institute College of Art, and Laura Burns, former curator of the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College and a member of the Photography Faculty at Goucher. The following is a transcript of that recorded discussion, with minimal editing.

LIVINGSTON: The last thing Laura asked was actually my next question. Which was, how did you come to being a curator?

CISCLE: I came to it originally as an artist, and wanting that in my own life–working six or seven years as an artist. Then, coming to the disheartening conclusion that I was not an artist. So that's how I did it, that initial experience of being an artist and realizing that that drive, that insatiable desire one needs to be to be an artist, was not there. But having gone through that process, what the creative process means and how I might translate that in some other way through a creative act–that obviously meant working with artists and artwork. It was obviously a world that I wanted to be in and to respond to it in some way.

GILBERT: I said each curator should bring something different to curating and I think the thing I bring that's somewhat different is my academic training in philosophy–analytic philosophy, including logic and aesthetics as well. And I think there are some interesting connections between philosophical practices and artistic ones. But my entry into institutions was through the normal means: I initially worked as in intern at the Hirshhorn and then was hired there and worked for a second institution [the Des Moines Art Center] before I came here.

BURNS: For me it came about by mistake but it was distinctly connected with becoming a teacher and coming out of graduate school and having questions about what art making could be, and I really did see curating as artistic process. Not only was the act of curating not unlike my own art practice, but it allowed me to think about my own practice through questioning others and looking at how they thought about ideas. It was actually one of the reasons why I felt I had to stop–because I wasn't doing my own work anymore and I wanted to go back to it.

LIVINGSTON: Maybe we could go around the table and talk about what particular project you're working on now and how it relates to some of the things we were just talking about.

CISCLE: My next project is with an artist from Nigeria named Lawson Oyekan in whom I'm very much interested in terms of an artist who has left his home country for another country (England in this instance) and in terms of how his past has informed his work, both perceptually and literally, in terms of the landscape and African traditions. My hope is that all the unanswered questions that I'm posing to myself as a curator will be an opportunity for me and my students. After meeting and interviewing him there will be an opportunity for me and my students to explore that and then present, both an exhibition and a companion contextual exhibition, so that the students' research will manifest itself in the gallery.

GILBERT: I'm working on a series of four group exhibitions called Cram Sessions. They're called "cram sessions" partly because although they're exhibitions, they also have some of the temporality of an event. Each exhibition is a month long, so on one level the timeframe is quite brief–but on the other hand, each of the sessions is hooked into a larger whole, so there is a second, slower timeframe. Then there is a final time frame in the sense that all the Cram Sessions together prepare for a future project cycle.

Each Cram Session has a theme and the first one is called "Collective Effort" and will take place this spring. Each of the three…participants deals with the notion of collectivity in some way in this exhibition. One is archiving, one is imagining a future collectivity, and one is enacting a simulated activity in the space, but each of them distances themselves from the notion of collectivity. And that's important because I think collectivity is often treated as a fetish in contemporary practice, and yet a meaningful collective practice is realized with a quite a great deal of difficulty. So part of the effort of this show will be to make the space and the experience of the space into one where there is a discussion about collectivity including its significant absence within current practice. As far as tying it to some of the things we discussed earlier, one of the things that will happen in Cram Sessions is that the exhibition will take place in an unusual place–an interior courtyard with columns that I often refer to as referencing an Agora–so there is already this idea of discussion: a space of discussion or a market place of ideas. There will also be a strong design for the exhibition including such features as a shag carpet and some rather weird benches. It will be a "third space" that is neither work nor leisure, with specific allusion to a suburban basement–which I consider to be a space that escapes from normal schedules of leisure and work. I think of the way children define the suburban basement as a place of unexamined liberty. I should mention as well the time factor–the fact that the participants also create their own schedules, their own temporal frameworks that are rather different than the normal timeframes assigned to exhibitions.

LIVINGSTON: Is this the first project that you've done for the BMA?

GILBERT: That's correct.

LIVINGSTON: And did you design it specifically for the BMA, is it a project you've had in mind for a while?

GILBERT: No, it's actually designed quite specifically with the BMA in mind.

BURNS: I am curating an exhibition that's going to happen at Park School, but at the same time it's going to be a much more classic environment in that it's a typical enclosed gallery space: it's an exhibition that's made with a particular audience in mind–an audience of teenagers, boys and girls, looking at ideas of gender identity. That's an old artistic idea…that you can't talk about enough with young people, so it's really actually looking at contemporary work that really pushes the idea. I feel this is a little bit more slanted towards young women, but that's all I can say about it right now, because I'm not completely clear on it and I actually have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks.

LIVINGSTON: Do you have any questions amongst each other about the projects that you're working on?

CISCLE: Chris, you said that these projects would follow one after the other?

GILBERT: No, they're actually spaced by about six months between them, so the entire project takes place over two years. They're four one- month long exhibitions spaced apart by about six months.

CISCLE: And can you explain why it's only a month? I'm just curious in terms of the time frame. I like that idea, I'm just curious what you're reasoning is.

GILBERT: I think the main principle behind that is the idea that the space will be active. People often make a lot of the idea of shifting a space from passive to active. And that's an idea that's central to me, but I think the one thing that I bring in addition is a realization that when you talk about shifting the poles of a visitor's experience from passive to active you have to also expand the kind of activity you offer to people. That's why so called "active" exhibitions are so often disappointing, because people fall back into a kind of default activity: actions and a repertoire of behavior they're already familiar with. The first of the Cram Sessions will try to expand the repertoire of activities offered to a museum visitor. And that's where the notion of collectivity comes in, because acting together becomes the new paradigm that's offered or at least under examination.

CISCLE: How do you see that transferring to the visitor, or to the rest of the museum experience while they're there?

GILBERT: I think it would be great if it were transferred to the rest of the museum experience. I can only hope that by proximity that will happen.

CISCLE: I'm just curious if any of the curators in the past were trying to address the collections in some way.

GILBERT: No, an idea that I've been working is that of creating a contemporary lens through which to see the rest of the collection and what I mean by that is that people often associate contemporary practice with a more engaged and immediate experience. And what a contemporary lens will do for the rest of the museum is try to carry the experience over to the other parts of the museum, contemporary and otherwise.

CISCLE: And is there a sort of collaborative push with the other curators that you're looking to?

GILBERT: I'm actually looking at work with a particular artist in mind, but the shape of the art project has yet to be determined, because it will depend on that artist's evaluation of the situation, of the museum situation.

LIVINGSTON: I've got a couple more quick ideas I'd like to try out. One: most of the pieces that you're curating have to do with traditional visual arts and as we at Radar thought about this issue–"what are curators?" Of course curators in the broader sense are people who book bands and do all kinds of different things–I was wondering if you've ever considered that a curator is something beyond just the realm that what it is you do–a larger expanse of that world and if you did, if there were other areas that you would be interested in working in.

CISCLE: I think there are definitely other possibilities, not just because of what artists today are doing in terms of expanding media and incorporating everyday experiences into their work (you can look at their music as a perfect example of that in terms of how artists view objects). It is certainly an interest of mine, currently and in the future and an interest previously in terms of the Contemporary looking at what artistic practice was. Our mission was not to limit what we were doing to visual arts, but to look at other possibilities, in terms of installation or performance art, and also through technology, music, theatre, dance or any of the arts.

GILBERT: Certainly, a curator who was uninterested in a broader notion of artistic practice would pay for his or her ignorance because really, most visual artists today are working with a great deal of interest in those kind of boundary crossings and cross fertilizations. For me, an interest outside of visual arts would be music, because I'm strictly an amateur in music–and cinema. The power of cinema is quite fascinating–there are a great many movies out there that can make you weep and there are only a small percentage of paintings that do so. Also, the man on the street has a great deal of expertise in understanding the language of cinema that far exceeds the expertise many professionals have about traditional art. People interested in the visual arts can't fail to grapple with cinema and its position in the culture. With regard to music, I think everybody (except those few social deviants who don't like music at all) necessarily becomes a curator of music by developing a small collection of his own. And I'm interested in some day taking that amateur interest of mine and trying to turn it into something more formal.

BURNS: For me, one of the things that I've always thought about in terms of being a curator, was wanting to be someone like, [Russian ballet impresario Serge] Diaghilev, who brought musicians and visual artists and dancers together and maybe one of the best things that you can do as a curator is just to introduce people to one another. Also, I'm stunned and shocked by advertising on television and in the world and I'm interested in advertising blocks as curatorial experiences perhaps. In a place like Times Square, it could be really interesting to purposely set up an urban space using advertising, but in a purposeful way.

CRANDALL: I'm currently writing a piece on "A&R" which is in the music realm, and what an A&R person does is to collect things that then go into people's everyday lives rather than into museums.

CISCLE: My son, who is 31 years old and has collected music since he was a kid and has my collection of music, now works part-time as a DJ, sampling and mixing and all those things. And he's the one who has initiated me and opened my eyes to himself as a curator. He's paralleling his dad as a curator in the rock world and he's doing this in another world in terms of LPs in his archive. So it has opened my eyes a lot in terms of helping people collect, what can you do with that, making decisions about not just what you listen to but also put together in samples.

LIVINGSTON: Is there anything else that anyone would like to address?

GILBERT: You asked a question about audience. I'm always fascinated by the example of Immanuel Kant who thought his philosophical books would be extraordinarily popular, like they might have appeared, say, in every 7-11. [laughs] This approach to the audience, I think, could be the model for the curator in the sense that the curator should put together challenging shows–the show should be for everybody, but for everybody transformed. The show in some sense creates or recreates its audience.

CRANDALL: Anything to add about addressing the Baltimore audience particularly?

GILBERT: I'm certainly the wrong person to ask about the Baltimore audience, though I can see that it's a big city and that's certainly desirable. I think that art thrives on urbanism and the dialogues that happen in urban situations. So for me it's gratifying to be in a truly urban situations. However the particulars of this urban situation are the ones that you should ask me about in six months.

LIVINGSTON: We'll do that.

CISCLE: I certainly see the Baltimore audience, in terms of the arts, growing and developing with the exposure it has to not just what the museum does but all the arts organizations, especially the community based organizations that we have. To me, the community based arts organizations–the mid sized groups–are really the ones that are doing more of the development of the Baltimore audience than anyone else. And I think it's phenomenal that in the past five, ten years has happened here in Baltimore and we're seeing the results, not just in terms of attendance and support, but we're seeing it in terms of shows that the museum has and the audiences that are coming to those. I'm certainly very encouraged by that.

BURNS: I guess I would just echo that, I mean I've been here for five years, but I do think that it's incredible to see the growth of places like the Creative Alliance and to see the addition of places like Area 405 and Gallery Four and Maryland Art Place's new building. There's actually quite a range of spaces and places and they're usually fairly busy, which is exciting.

CISCLE: But I think to me the most important thing is all of the places we're talking about is that they're looking for an audience that is not the art audience, they're not the audience that already exists in terms of other spaces or museums in town. They're really looking to reach out and to expose art to neighborhoods in Baltimore basically.

BURNS: Exactly, well that seems to be one of the primary things about particularly the Creative Alliance.

LIVINGSTON: When I looked up "curating," it was much more used as a scientific term than in the fine arts. There are probably many more botanical curators than there are visual curators. And the more I researched it, it was really about science, and its advent came on with ideas of science and collecting and museums and how one collects information and gives it back, either collects it for ones own experience or puts it back into the public.

GILBERT: One of the great curators of the 20th century was Vladimir Nabakov, a butterfly curator.…It was his primary interest rather than secondary.

LIVINGSTON: I will finish with one final thing, when you go home do you bring some of this to your living space or does it reflect within your living space?

CISCLE: Listening to music, or when you're cooking at night, putting things together, yeah definitely. I don't see at as a separation. In terms of just the process I don't see it as separate from me.

BURNS: It just never occurred to me.

GILBERT: My living space is a void, I take nothing home–it's just completely empty.

LIVINGSTON: Really, so you keep it as empty as possible?

GILBERT: I like to have room for my imagination.

LIVINGSTON: Do you think that's partially a reaction to what you do or …?

GILBERT: It doesn't have to do too much with that. I think it's probably a result of childhood trauma or something personal!

[laughter]

LIVINGSTON: Well I think that's a really good place to end, and thanks, everyone, for participating in the discussion.

The Editors of RADAR