Six Years

curatorial creation tool

 

Creative, cognitive and informative, the online curatorial platform SIX YEARS borrows its name from the seminal work of American writer, art critic, curator, activist and feminist activist Lucy R. Lippard. Lippard (born April 14, 1937) is one of the first art historians to recognize the dematerialization at work in conceptual art.

In 1973, Lucy R. Lippard published “Six Years”, a reference book on the “dematerialization of the work of art from 1966 to 1972”. Six Years, sometimes considered as a conceptual object, embodies a new artistic movement that Lippard personally wanted to identify and analyze, as well as a new approach to art criticism. Nearly forty years later, the Brooklyn Museum celebrated this experience by organizing an exhibition, transforming the book that resembled an exhibition into an exhibition materializing the initial ideas of the book. (Source: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/materializing-six-years, translated by C-E-A, France).

CEA / French Curators Association wishes to pay tribute to Lucy R. Lippard by respectfully borrowing the title of this reference book to name its new dematerialized curatorial experimentation platform whose primary objective is to develop and give visibility to the current and future potentialities of the exhibition curator.

 

WHAT DO CURATORS CARE FOR?

 

Over the last ten years, curating has been the object of an epistemological shift which scholars have named the ‘curatorial’ (Martinon, 2013). This defines a set of practices that go beyond curating-as-exhibition-making to embrace various other formats that are collaborative, open-ended and processual – research or archival projects, ‘educational’ forms such as talks and workshops, or curating in the digital space. Therefore, the ‘curatorial’ has become an expanded practice that produces fresh knowledge and alternative meanings.

In the same way that Conceptual art strategies of dematerialization of artworks could not totally bypass the question of their commodification, artists working with digital technologies are reviving the question of the economic, as well as the symbolic, focus on knowledge.

SIX YEARS’ current program draws on the question: “What do curators care for?” to prompt a critical reflection about practices and principles of “care ethics”. Joan Tronto (2009) highlights how “care ethics” is based on a system of interrelationships, empathies, mutual responsibilities and communications.

Besides, Claire Bishop (2012) points out that since the emergence of the Web 2.0, in 2002, art, notably socially engaged art, has appropriated “a language of platforms, collaborations, activated spectators, and ‘prosumers’ [= informed consumers] who co-produce content (rather than passively consume information designed for them).”

SIX YEARS’ “What do curators care for?” aims to explore how the practice of “care” can be used as a tool for analysis or provocation. How can we apprehend “care ethics”, within the frame of the ‘curatorial’ while using the interrelational potentialities of the digital realm?

Only Commissioners can use the curatorial creation tool