This Collaboratory is the first in a series of ‘Curious Conversations’ with Carreg Creative in which we’ll explore [how to get] into and out of the cabinet.

This ‘curious conversation’ will of itself be part of, and will lead into the creation of work for and beyond the cabinet in Storiel. Part of our collective activity will involve various forms of documentation to [collect? Represent? Make visual?] and reflect on the nature and location of the engaged art – how is it manifest?

Programme

11.00 Welcome and introduction to the commission and what we’ll be doing today

11.20 Discussion/individual mapping to explore ‘flow’: how do you [or we as Utopias Bach] make ‘engaged’ art/get it into or beyond a ‘cabinet’?  How do we feel our flow is around institutions: What’s supporting it and what challenges us -which places feel dead-ended, which open doors?

11.45 Break

12.00 Show and discussion

12.45 Reflection and what next

13.00 Close

Carreg Creative (Lisa Hudson and Lindsey Colbourne with Wanda Zyborska) are inviting creatives whose practice focuses on collaboration, process and engagement to take part in a ‘curious conversation’.

Sgwrs Chwilgar 1 - Utopias Bach Collaboratory (zoom) 21.3.24

Sgwrs Chwilgar 2 - Utopias Bach Collaboratory (zoom) 18.4.24

Sgwrs Chwilgar 3 - Y Padlet (yma! Here!)

Sgwrs Chwilgar 4 - Storiel/Zoom 27.4.24

Sgwrs Chwilgar 5 - Cabinet yn Storiel/Website (Sept - Oct 24)

I want to pick up a couple of threads.

As you have said in your voice note Sarah, there are such subtle questions about the ethics of visibility & hiding - as that relates to the word cabin, and to the function of shelter.

To me, those ethical questions extend to visibility & hiding as that relates to what feels like related but separate questions - the matters of care and of cure.

The cabinet for a dispersed contemporary art museum is such a clear illustration of the difficulties that we are in the thickets of - in “the art world” and all of the arguments about what we are actually seeking to do in our work. I especially think that now that I see a photo of it. What I see immediately is that a box made of glass, situated inside the doors of an institution. Which of course is the essence of a museum - objects behind glass, inside prestigious & most lockable doors. Visibility, curation and terms of access are at the core of the whole set of ideas and practices, to good and to ill.

I thought a lot in the last few years about curation, and what that might mean or be, and how it relates to the work I am doing, or think I am doing. This conversation is very much related to the questions that I have. My questions feel a bit naive, a bit unsophisticated. This is not an apology, but an observation. Probably the work of Joseph Beuys is relevant to a lot of my questions.

Some questions :

In what way is curation related to curing? To the work, for example, of a curate? Can curing, and tentatively curation, be equated with healing? Are we therefore speaking about facilitating bodily encounters or creating places or moments where healing could potentially occur?

What is healing? Can we understand healing as repair of the universal by way of repair of the local, so for example a person becoming or being made more whole - as a being who is woven in, a part of a wider wholeness?

When a bodily wound heals, there is scar tissue, which is thinner, tougher, more flexible. What is the significance of this to the cabinet?

Don’t we tend to hide our scars? What about our wounds? Why? It feels generally right that we would do so, but is it always right? What happens when the scars are revealed in the correct moment or in the correct way? (For example, Odysseus is recognised by his nurse by the scar on his thigh & this seems necessary in the story. Or again, the Fisher King has his mysterious wound and suffering, and Parsifal fails to ask him the question that needs to be asked about the suffering - and this failure to ask is disastrous.)

In the narrative of the poem I made, for example, the transformation (if there is one), necessarily happens invisibly, and inside what might be imagined as a small dark place, obscured, and far away from the glass cabinet. I would find it difficult to imagine how a transformation of that kind could be accomplished in full view in a glass box. This goes very deep. If it is an allowable word in this context, I would like to say this kind of hiding seems to be a matter of soul.

And there is a converse and equally difficult question, in matters of care at least , if not of cure - which is the question of invisibility. The work (and it is gendered work) of care : this work is and historically has been invisible. (Cure tends to be a bit more glamorous. Eg doctors get paid a great deal more than nurses.) One of our most painful experiences is the experience of being invisible. I’ve been an independent advocate for many family or “informal” carers over the years. There is a side of it that must be spoken - the invisibility & lack of recognition of the work of care , it just hurts. It is an open wound.

So there seems to be a responsibility - to not look at certain moments, to not put them on view.

And there seems to be another responsibility, to be at the very least asking good questions about some of the things we are not seeing.

I thought of bandaging it, swaddling or shrouding it. The cabinet. Maybe.

There is no conclusion to this note, I just wanted to put these thoughts down, 💛.

cysgodi, be. bod mewn cysgod, tywyllu, gwasgodi, noddi, amddiffyn, ymochel. TO SHADE, TO SHELTER, TO SCREEN.

( Y Geiriadur Mawr)

Sian, I can´t wait to talk to you in person. The references to Beuys resonate to me, however in the past year I have engaged with Beuys more critically and developed an affirmative scepticism towards Beuys . I appreciate his campaign for challenging the heroic society of post war Germany, however that society fell in love with him as it allowed them to perceive themselves as victims (and not perpetrators). Instead of facing the atrocotoes committed by Germans, Beuys' art philosophy invited Germans to deviate from the historic dimension of there past into a metaphysical spirituality and receiving healing from there - rather problematic, I feel. For me, this results in the urge to test his concepts, rhetorics and aesthetics by confronting it with material realities (and avoiding simply reproducing the concept or discourse). I have to admit, that I have not yet succeeding in doing so.

You are very right when linking Beuys' dada-blabla (he could speak for three hours and afterwards no one could have said, what he was all about) with the material and strucutral reality of/for care and cure in the UK (and beyond) today. And maybe this might be a pathway to continue beyond the cabinet-destination?

I feel, the cabinet conversation allows us to immediately challenge structures that are at risk to disenable an ethics of visibility (as the glass cabinet suggests a regime of visibility) - challenge the structures but not on a meta-level but in practice - and considering time, money and space only, a practice on a very small scale terrain. Often practice proves our conceptual wander/wondering wrong (or better: not quite right). Very exciting.

I wonder whether we might see that within the given material situation (glass cabinet, concrete stone museum, corridor = transitional location), we can use all these factors not for presenting a "new ethic of exhibiting in the museum cabinet" but for showcasing (haha, what a word: showcasing!) techniques/tactics/strategies/aesthetics towards an ethic of "hide and seek"?

Maybe Wanda or Anna Powell might have some ideas as they are familiar with Deluze/Guattari? But I think also in feminist thinking we will find such tactics?

I would like to close my post - similar to Sian - with questions:

Why do we feel we need to cure vulnerability?

Why do we associate glass with transparency (and not - remember the circus/fairground links) with a "Spiegelkabinett" and illusion - things always appear larger/smaller thanks to looking through glass?

Where is the limit of transparency?

Are secrets a good thing?

What does the carer know about the cared for?

What does the cared for know about the carer?

I've since read more of your compelling posts and insights here which have prompted much deeper thoughts around secrets, pain, invisibility - and at this time following Easter about living with wounds - but perhaps more of this for another thread or conversation.

In the meantime I'll leave my initial response to the recording here just now ...

I loved their meanderings, igniting the imagination and animation of time, objects and place.  I wanted to unmute and join in! Here are just a few thoughts and ramblings.

Wanda's evocative grounding of being in the museum for me evoked dust and glass, whispering, echoes, domes and the opening and closing of doors.  I took part in Suzanne Lacy's Cleaning Conditions, a live performance in 2013 at Manchester Art Gallery. Lacy's homage was to Allan Kaprow as we swept the gallery floors,

Sweeping the dust from the floor of a room. Spreading the dust in another room. So it won't be noticed. Continuing daily.

- there were discussions raising awareness of domestic and immigrant labour, minimum wage and feminism. 

The invitation to bring small things and to place them in a space of choosing wherever that might be, rather than handing them over, giving them up to a curator was an early thought that resonated.

Joseph Cornell's boxed assemblages prompted me to create memory boxes made of glass and wood for my parents, part of a span of each life, some years ago - and they were much smaller than I'd imagined when I saw them in real life in Wanderlust (2015) at the RA filled with all kinds of curiosities.  He collected what he chose to find significant, the every day, the extraordinary from his dreams and imagination and ephemera from within the boundaries of his life in New York, sealed in as visual artefacts, perhaps perceived as precious; capsules of time and memory a century later. 

The items and objects we choose and collect or make or deem precious are multi-dimensional in time and space.  What is the longevity of the cabinet and its contents physically and virtually? Who are the likely visitors, viewers, audiences in the museum - and in the wild?

Mark Dion and his Tate Thames Dig (1999) was another artist who came to mind - and mention of the original word Wunderkammer for Cabinets of Curiosity - Sarah will know, the idea of wonder, wondrousness, wonder-filled objects, words, images and ideas - wondering about the contents and how to get them and us in and out of the cabinet, dispersed as we already are by our locations.

I love the idea of blurring boundaries.  Setting the objects free, however contained they or we might be - unsealing them from the cabinets, unlocking the doors, taking out the glass, letting them fly, run wild, hide in other secret places.

Exhibitions are of fixed duration in galleries; temporary, fleeting, soon forgotten and not always accessible to all - so an unleashing of constraints through the website is also invaluable - to hold the conversations, objects, images and other documentation, as already so wondrously made and held for Utopias Bach.

I would love to be involved as other ideas are rising like sound recordings of voices whispering clues and directions around the gallery to outlying places and spaces.

I look forward to coming to Storiel on 27 April and to more curious conversations.

Carreg Creative (Lisa Hudson and Lindsey Colbourne with Wanda Zyborska) and Utopias Bach are inviting creative people whose practice focuses on collaboration and engaged practice to take part in a ‘curious conversation’, as part of our commission by the new Wales Contemporary Art Gallery and Storiel.

Dydd Sadwrn 27.4.24 Saturday

Ymuno â ni! Join us!

Am ddim! FREE! Mwy o wybodaeth - more information click on the image

• what you’d like your /UB relationship to be like with the cabinet

• what we should do with our cabinet in storiel in August (inc ideas for what to signpost)

Sian Barlow

We already discussed that, but I also want to share the conclusion of one scholar about the invisibility of Reinecke’s artistic ideas in the world of art (because she opted to not be part of it): ‘Reinecke's career has shown that the consistent step out of the art system leads to an almost traceless disappearance. The comparable approaches of the 1990s, however, remain linked back to the system insofar as they utilise a double strategy. Here, the exit from the system is simultaneously a message to the system and is reflected in concept books or international exhibition contributions. In this respect, Reinecke's demand KUNST MUSS SEIN is still up for discussion.’ (original in German, this quote is translated by me)

The way the (female) author of the quote concludes Reinecke’s (non-)career might sound sad, but for me, there is more to think about:

1. What does visibility/invisibility mean?

2. Who is the author of visibility (who sees who?)

3. Are forces of influence, learning, continuing that come with process-oriented art always invisible if they are embodied (and thus un-authored/un-signed)?

4. Do we have to re-think the concept / practice /value / benchmark /criteria of (in-) visibility for acknowledging practices, movements, learning outside of the museum/gallery/theatre/film/ etc. – as institutions of visibility?

5. Is keeping the cabinet completely empty a possibility for addressing the regime of visibility and invisibility?

Inside out

Tu mewn allan

Come in

Dewch (i) mewn

(i) mewn a ni

Clearing (out)

Clearance

Sold out

Closed

Open

Ar gau

Ar agor

To me, curation seems to be tied in with questions of trust, and how we build it / how we betray it.

I looked up “trust” in the online dictionary of etymology and I found this linked page, which takes us back to the wood of the cabinet:

*deru-

also *dreu-, Proto-Indo-European root meaning "be firm, solid, steadfast," with specialized senses "wood," "tree" and derivatives referring to objects made of wood.

It forms all or part of: betroth; Dante; dendrite; dendro-; dendrochronology; dour; Druid; drupe; dryad; dura mater; durable; durance; duration; duress; during; durum; endure; hamadryad; indurate; obdurate; perdurable; philodendron; rhododendron; shelter; tar (n.1) "viscous liquid;" tray; tree; trig (adj.) "smart, trim;" trim; troth; trough; trow; truce; true; trust; truth; tryst.

It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit dru "tree, wood," daru "wood, log, timber;" Greek drys "oak," drymos"copse, thicket," doru "beam, shaft of a spear;" Old Church Slavonic drievo "tree, wood," Serbian drvo "tree," drva "wood," Russian drevo "tree, wood," Czech drva, Polish drwa "wood;" Lithuanian drūtas "firm," derva "pine, wood;" Welsh drud, Old Irish dron "strong," Welsh derw "true," Old Irish derb "sure," Old Irish daur, Welsh derwen"oak;" Albanian drusk "oak;" Old English treo, treow "tree," triewe "faithful, trustworthy, honest."