Michael Connor responds to Charles Leadbeater (transcript)

Participants
SP = Sarah Perks, Interviewer
MC = Michael Connor, Interviewee

Recording starts

SP: Hi, I’m Sarah Perks, programme and engagement director here at Cornerhouse in Manchester. We’ve embarked on a five year action research project called The Art of With, which investigates the use of technology and open source principles to a contemporary arts centre. We started by commissioning Charles Leadbeater to write an essay, The Art of With, and then we’ve invited people to respond to that, both formally and informally. I’d like to introduce Michael Connor, international curator based in New York and he’s written a response to that Art of With called A Manual for the 21st Century Gatekeeper. So I’d like to ask Michael, first of all, what did you initially think of Charles Leadbeater’s The Art of With essay.

MC: Well, I found Charles Leadbeater’s essay quite provocative. I think one of the interesting things about it is that he makes such broad brush stroke statements, and he gives you a lot to argue with. But I remember one of the reasons I wanted to respond is that I was sort of afraid that his essay was going to be used to write massive funding bids by people that kind of saw a way to tap into the public support for a technology based social media project; and part of the reason I wanted to write was to say, that’s not really a good way to innovate in terms of participatory media.

SP: So you do mention a few specific incidents or projects that you think interrogate The Art of With.

MC: The Brooklyn Museum did an exhibition called Click where they invited members of the public to submit works, in response to the theme ‘The Changing Face of Brooklyn.’ It was a photography exhibition, and then they invited members of the public to judge the works for inclusion in a gallery exhibition. So it was very much about throwing open the curatorial process to the public and seeing whether the crowd, so to speak, could make as good a selection as a curator. When they asked members of the public to make the selection, they asked them to rate works from most effective to least effective. But the question comes up: what does that even mean? So eventually what you end up with when you look at the works is a kind of understanding of what people mean by most effective and least effective, rather than something which is really about the work itself. So it’s much more interesting as a kind of portrait of the minds of the selectors than it is as a ……

SP: It doesn’t really tell us anything more about crowd curation.

MC: I think it kind of reveals that when you go to an exhibition, you are kind of looking for subjectivity, and the subjectivity of a crowd is I think very difficult to represent through a voting system which aggregates everyone’s individual eccentricities and strange predilections into patterns.

SP: There’s definitely still a lot of curators out there working in a really traditional way, so why should they change?

MC: The art world is incredibly globalised now, and being able to stand up and say ‘we are doing something new’ means that you have to be a person with an awareness of what’s happening everywhere else.

SP: Do you think that people really want to participate? Do they want to join in? Is there a real demand for it? Or are people quite busy and they want to just come and maybe even be a little bit passive sometimes?

MC: The expectation of participation is sometimes a burden for the audience, and Jacques Rancière has a great article, I think it’s called The Emancipated Spectator, where he talks about how, in the realm of theatre, there have been all these iterations of trying to break down the wall between performer and audience. Rancière kind of argues that actually there’s a shared experience created in just the act of being there together. He was trying to redefine that as an act like a job, to watch and think as a job.

SP: So how practical is it for galleries and organisations like Cornerhouse to really harness the specialisms and the perspectives of any given crowd or any given group of people?

MC: In the talk today I showed this chart which is about audience numbers versus how much dialogue people expect, and I think it’s true. Cornerhouse serves the kind of regional audience, for the most part, so it’s a major venue that serves mostly a regional audience. So there is an expectation of responsiveness but at the same time, you’re a small team all stretched to the max. But I think partly it’s about attitude and that kind of happens within the organisation as well as out. So I would say Cornerhouse in its structure internally seems to have a very lateral kind of conversation going on, which actually helps a lot in terms of engagement with the public.

SP: For me, there’s a little bit of expectation that sometimes the projects that we’re setting up or working on feel a little bit like, you might call them education or community art or things like that. How do we get over that feeling that, in working with lots of people, in some ways quality has to be sacrificed?

MC: I’m not really arguing against the role of the gatekeeper, and after doing a lot of research and thinking about this, I kind of concluded that, within the gallery space, there is a need for subjectivity to come across. I actually think that that perception of quality relies on the belief that someone has taken a risk on behalf of the work. That someone has said ‘I believe in this work, I’m going to put it out there and I have a lot to lose if you don’t believe in it.’

SP: Charles mentions quite a lot in The Art of With the idea of innovation, ways of working and combining intelligence does lead to innovation.

MC: Yes, I think Charles is a bit wrong about innovation because I think the hardest part of innovation is not the generation of new ideas, which he focuses on a lot. I think a lot of it is about trying out ideas and having a good way of evaluating them. But for me, I think if we’re looking at developing new institutional models or new ways of working, there’s a need to try out new things. And I think institutions often have a habit of when they’re ready to try a new initiative, making a big deal of it and putting a lot of investment over years of time into proving or failing a new idea. But when an idea is new, I think you need to prove it or fail it as cheaply as possible. British funders should I think learn from Silicon Valley venture capitalists; it’s that they should value people that accept funding that admit that they’ve failed and share their results. Because I don’t think that people that receive funding in Britain ever admit that they’ve failed, which puts a huge damper on innovation across the cultural sector.

SP: Definitely. We’ve become experts at concealing failure. So The Art of With is still in its relatively early stages, and what we want to do is not just influence our organisation, but hopefully influence other people and inspire other people. What will you so far take away from The Art of With and maybe reflect in your practice?

MC: I think there’s really two things I would take from my research into The Art of With. The first one is a sense that, in terms of engaging audiences, what technology an institution uses is maybe less important than its DNA, from the way that people even inside the organisation relate and communicate with one another, everything else in terms of audience engagement seems to follow. The second thing I would say is that thinking so much about how art works get selected for inclusion and how cultural value gets assigned has kind of liberated me a little bit as a curator, to where now I feel like I’m sort of, in terms of curatorial practice, the subjective accident is really important. The project I’m working on now in New York, Marion Spore, is really very much about creating an institution exactly the way he wanted, that enables these subjective accidents. So it’s definitely something that is going to take me forward into the next phase of my career I think, this project, which has been really cool.

SP: That’s great – subjective accidents, I like that. I think it’s a great place to end our conversation. So I’d like to thank Michael Connor for chatting to me about this and, more importantly, putting his opinions and effort into The Art of With. Thank you.

Recording ends 8:29