Beyond the Museum Analogy

Sensing sound, sensitive curating

The first part was the easiest to miss. The quiet of the gallery enticed us from the din of LA traffic and into the concrete cool. But the first piece in the exhibition, a large-scale outdoor mural created by artist Christine Sun Kim, watched silently, largely obscured by a parked van. Titled Bounce Back, I wondered if Kim expected visitors to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Los Angeles, to bounce back from the gallery, seeking the work that was initially overlooked.

Here, listening meant attentive looking. Kim creates works that reflect on the multisensory experience of sound, Deaf culture, the limits of language, and systems of power. In Bounce Back, Kim references the word ‘debt’ in American Sign Language, usually signed with one finger tapping the open palm of the other, but here reflected across three empty hands. Between each, a cartoonish trail lingers in the air.

Kim’s work asks questions of community value, mutual aid, and systemic inequality, particularly apt in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood south of downtown LA. It also recalls Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s writings on debt as social force and credit as privatisation and governance. Moten and Harney write,

But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. Debt runs in every direction, scattering, escaping, seeking refuge. The debtor seeks refuge among other debtors, acquires debt from them, offers debt to them. The place of refuge is the place to which you can only owe more, because there is no creditor, no payment possible.¹

When we owe each other everything – without the possibility of repayment – debt becomes solidarity, refuge, escape. But in the city with the highest population of unhoused people in the United States, where is the refuge for those displaced by gentrification? Where is the refuge for those with disabilities who must contend with urban spaces that are hostile to their needs?

Instalacja Bounce Back Christine Sun Kim, fot. Jeff McLane / ICA, LA

The gallery interior was anything but silent: inside, sound resounds. The exhibition Milford Graves: Fundamental Frequency honours the life and work of interdisciplinary artist and musician Milford Graves, whose revolutionary experiments in sound, movement, visual art, and medicine, explored the relationship between rhythm, the body, and the cosmos. While he was perhaps best known as a skilled percussionist in the Free Jazz movement, his interest in rhythm extended beyond music. In addition to teaching as a professor in Bennington College’s Black Music Division, Graves operated a community garden, researching the healing properties of herbs; trained as a cardiac technician to better understand the connection between drumming and the heartbeat; and even invented a martial art form called ‘Yara’ based on the movements of the praying mantis. The ICA retrospective encompasses extensive performance videos, numerous sculptural and mixed media assemblages, listening stations, and documentation from his studies of botany and acupuncture, as well as instruments and other objects from Graves’ life. Straddling archive, exhibition, and project/performance space, a program of live events also served to activate the gallery space and place Graves’ work in dialogue with local artists and musicians.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this exhibition was its ability to unify the many seemingly disparate threads of Graves’ multidisciplinary practice – and multi-hyphenate existence – into a unified, cogent gesture, without subjecting Graves to metanarratives or relegating his work to a certain ‘movement’ or ‘tradition’. This approach of situating Graves’ work outside, beyond, and through various historical lenses recalls Orhan Pamuk’s Modest Manifesto for Museums, which argues against the monolithic civic museum in favour of smaller-scale spaces that uplift individual stories that might otherwise go unheard or unseen. Pamuk suggests that the measure of a museum’s success ‘should not be its ability to represent a state, a nation or company, or a particular history. It should be its capacity to reveal the humanity of individuals.’² The rhythms of the body, of the earth, of the drum, begin first to engage in dialogue, bouncing back and forth – as in Kim’s mural – and later these barriers seemed to dissolve entirely. A cardiologist’s reference vinyl LP demonstrating different types of heartbeats started to sound like a compositional work, while a video performance of Graves in collaboration with Japanese dancer Min Tanaka began to appear as a medical study in energetic flow. It was a human-sized viewpoint, albeit that of a visionary human, and one that gave room for Graves’ multiplicity and complexity to resonate.

In the project room of the ICA, LA-based sound and installation artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork invites us into a choreographic dialogue with sound. Gork’s Into/Loving/Against/Lost in the Loop presents a maze of hanging felted acoustic blankets, acoustic panels, and plastic sheets, saturated with abstracted electronic beat patterns. Curtains of clear plastic reorder the space into a semicircular maze, opening limited pathways for movement with different sonic properties. As one moves through the space, the higher frequencies shift with one’s position, but bass permeates throughout – the omnidirectional subwoofers and hyperdirectional treble tweeters enter into a kind of stilted contrapuntal dialogue. Continually recycling ambient sound from the gallery into a pulsating loop, Gork’s installation is a refraction of the outside world as well as a portal to the subculture of LA’s techno warehouses. In drawing attention to the somatic quality of sound, the work connects disparate bodies in space, while simultaneously allowing an intimate and individual experience of sound.

Three hands, three artists, three approaches to sonic practice. Yet the ICA decided not to frame this as a group show and marshal all under a single unifying umbrella, but rather as two independent commissioned projects that co-existed in dialogue with the Graves exhibition, alongside the ICA’s robust program of talks, readings, and performances.

Kim, Graves, and Gork were unified not by shared identity, background, artistic movement, nor medium; the fundamental frequency was, in fact, the diverse and multilayered nature of their sonic understanding: one which spanned a tactile, cosmological, conceptual, and visual experience of sound, resonating on cellular, somatic, cultural, and intercultural levels.

What can festival programmers and music curators learn from such a rich display of sonic arts in a gallery space? And, to pose a wider question, why is there such a gap between curatorial studies – a field which dates back to the 1980s – and the seemingly novel field of music curating?

Curating, cura, culture

In the emergent field of music curating, there is a sense of a lack of pre-existing discourse. The mission statement of the Sounds Now project – a Creative Europe initiative seeking to initiate conversations and seminars dedicated to fostering conversation around musical curation, and to connect a vast array of contemporary music festivals across Europe – states that its activity seeks to ‘generate a much-needed discourse on music curation’.³ Given the often-invisible role of the musical curator, as well as the ephemeral nature of music festivals, concert series, and performance design, there is a sense of an absence of discourse in music curating. Curators from outside the sonic arts field have also written about this phenomenon; Hans Ulrich Obrist claims amnesia ‘not only obscures our understanding of experimental exhibition history, it also affects innovative curatorial practice.’⁴

However, both curating as a field of study as well as museum studies have been long established. In 1989, Peter Vergo sketched The New Museology, a study of museums that sought a more intentional approach to creating purposeful spaces for art.’⁵ His argument protested against museological discourse that had ‘been too much about museum methods and too little about the purposes of museums’ and that museology had ‘in the past only infrequently been seen, if it has been seen at all, as a theoretical or humanistic discipline, and that the kinds of questions raised… have been all too rarely articulated, let alone discussed.’⁶ This is also the case with musical curation; literature on practice is conspicuously sparse.

While ‘the practice of hanging pictures has long been widely recognized, and the curator has become one of the accepted conductors in the concert of the museums’, the curator remains mostly unseen in the concert field.’⁷

However, as long as modern concert culture has existed, Richard Taruskin argues,

we have implicitly regarded our musical institutions as museums and our performers as curators. […] Curators do not own the artifacts in their charge. They are not free to dispose and use up at pleasure. They are caretakers, pledged to preserve them intact.⁸

Caretaking is embedded in the etymology of the term. Joan Gibbons writes,

(…) the word curate goes back to the Latin word for care, cura, which in the Middle Ages developed a particularly religious inflection as curatus, referring to care of the soul. Although the activities have since expanded to include the care of artifacts in one form or another, traditionally in libraries and museum collections, it is a definition that still carries a lot of relevance — after all, what is the care of our cultural products, if not essentially for the care of our souls?⁹

This care extends to the artefacts of culture that may be found on public display, as well as to the cultural and historical significance we bestow upon our objects. Perhaps more importantly, however, this care extends to the audience itself. Gibbons’ suggestion that the care of cultural products is essentially a form of caring for ‘our souls’ understates the vast importance of a necessary responsibility of the curator to the audience as well as to artistic and socio-political shifts in a complex, fluid culture.¹⁰ Art for the public needs to enter the public space from a point of empathy rather than evangelism, and accessibility requires renewed rigour. As Patricia Phillips writes,

Clearly, public art is not public just because it is out of doors, or in some identifiable civic space, or because it is something that almost everyone can apprehend; it is public because it is a manifestation of art activities and strategies that take the idea of public as the genesis and subject for analysis.¹¹

This selection of objects is informed by dynamic processes that include the evaluation of cultural, political, and aesthetic values, expectations of the intended audience(s), and the spaces in which the presentation takes place.

As we consider how this translates into the role of the curator in music, perhaps a place to start is the crude but useful binary between curator and programmer. Contrasting with cura, the word program is derived from the Greek pro- (before) and -graphein (write), becoming later programma (to prescribe). Rather than prescriptively dictating what an audience is to listen to – a hierarchical, colonised programming – the notion of the curator suggests mindful care for both the selection, presentation, and engagement of the audience. The curator also works as a node within a vast network of agents, contrasting with the related concept of the programmer as it is often understood today — as one who, in solitude, generates computer code which invisibly frames human experience.

Revisiting the museum analogy

Perhaps another reason for the gulf between curatorial studies and discourse on music curating is the museum analogy itself. We’ve heard it again and again. The Musical Museum: dusty, immovable, outmoded, obsolete. A colonial institution, a vault of concentrated power and wealth. A tomb, of sorts.

Conversations about musical curation often invoke an analogous relationship between this aforementioned museum and concert culture. Likening the concert hall to a dusty mausoleum of musical objects, this museum analogy conjures the care and conservation of a static vault of canonised musical artworks. Such a vault is dedicated to protecting E.T.A. Hoffman’s Werktreue – the notion that a musical work has a fixed meaning bestowed by the creator. Such a musical work, Linda Goehr writes, ‘is held to be a composer’s unique, objectified expression, a public and permanently existing artifact made up of musical elements.’¹² Hoffman proclaims that the maintenance of this vault is the responsibility of ‘true’ artists, who ‘live only in the works as conceived in the mind of the master.’¹³ Following from this analogy, the practice of art centres, festivals, concert spaces, music conservatories, ensembles, and orchestras is the ongoing dusting, retouching, varnishing, and care of these musical artefacts, to remain faithful to the vision of the ‘master’. Akin to Foucault’s pendulum, such music will sound into the void until the end of time.

But the mortuarial plastic surgery of maintaining Werktreue is, of course, not the only option. Another museum also captivates and inspires us: a living, breathing space, for meeting, questioning, conversation, debate, and performance. A reclaiming and re-envisioning of public space. A place which reveals the depths of our humanity, that provides the space for play and exchange. In 1918, theologian Pavel Florensky envisioned a museum that could and should reflect the artwork as animate creation, rather than lifeless object.

It is not an immobile, stagnant, dead mummy of artistic creation/activity. It should be understood as an unquenchable, eternally beating flow of creativity itself, as the creator’s living, ulsating activity.¹⁴

Filmmaker Hito Steyerl acknowledges the capacity of the museum as a space for collective inquiry into what lies ahead.

Museums have less to do with the past than with the future: conservation is less about preserving the past than it is about creating the future of public space, the future of art, and the future as such.¹⁵

But in the musical world, Patricia Kopatchinskaja acknowledges the fixed perspective that resists looking to the future as such:

It’s as if we’re all sitting in a car, driving along, and everybody’s looking out the back and saying how beautiful it was back there — and no one is looking out in front to see where we’re going.¹⁶

The museum analogy has reinforced a culture of care and conservation looking only to the past, protecting a static vault of canonised musical artworks and upholding a categorical imperative for ‘authenticity’, while disabling the possibility for a musical culture which both envisions and enacts the future.

But why, then, is there such a discrepancy between the notion of the museum conjured in this dire analogy, and the museums of today – the Tate Moderns, Stedelijks, Guggenheims, and Centre Pompidous, not to mention countless smaller museums, such as Kolumba, MIMA, The Museum of Innocence – which seek to comprehend the present and future, while reconsidering the function of public space?

In 2007, Lawrence Kramer argued,

The classical music world may have something to learn from the success of today’s museums, where the art of the present elicits fascination, and the art of the past impresses visitors as the very reverse of stifling, myopic or merely out of date.¹⁷

Rather than embrace this new, vibrant image of the museum, the classical music institution discourages this possibility through ‘its mimicry of the museum of legend rather than the museum of contemporary fact, the old bones rather than the life and color.’¹⁸

Expanding curation

In the art world, the figure of the curator has already shifted from caretaker of works and invisible arbiter of taste to a demystified position of independent practitioner with a more centralised position in the network of the art world and its discourses.¹⁹ Simultaneous to this changing role of the curator was a shift to re-centre the primary experience of art ‘around the temporality of the event of the exhibition rather than the artworks on display.’²⁰ Just as many music festivals have shifted from focus on the concert itself to the full gestalt of the event – a temporally situated, social and cultural gathering, in which the ‘sanctity’ of the performance event is itself demystified – so, too, has the art world moved from object to event.

Curator Paul O’Neill identities pedagogical, discursive, and dialogical curation as three modalities of understanding exhibition production. Though occasionally overlapping, these other three distinct lenses through which we can reconsider the purpose of music curation.

In the field of classical music, it is generally presumed that education leads to a richer perceptive experience. Dobson notes the recurrent finding that audience members held the belief that in order to enjoy and understand live classical performance it is necessary to possess some ‘special’ knowledge of classical music… unlike the audience members around them, they did not feel ‘sufficiently in the know’ about the music being performed.²¹

The pedagogical approach in musical curation seeks to alleviate this perceived lack of knowledge, educating an audience about the music performed through the presentation, contextualisation, and juxtaposition of musical works.

In pedagogical musical curation, a premium is placed on heightened perceptibility of and meaningful connection with music, occasionally at the expense of the integrity of the complete work, and o(en engaging novel and more casual ways of concert production and audience engagement. In spite of the recent ‘educational turn’ in contemporary art, curating for pedagogical goals has long existed in both musical and visual art fields and has a particularly rich history as a guiding principle for concertising, particularly across the latter half of the 20th-century and beginning in the anglophone world with Leonard Bernstein’s widely televised Young People’s Concerts.²² Institutions should welcome the informality and freedom that comes with pedagogical curation; rather than relegate educational concerts to under rehearsed, daytime endeavours, these should be acknowledged as a rich creative field of exploration. The educational concert – under the guise of friendly educative entertainment – can transcend economic and cultural barriers and celebrate new perceptive modes for adults as well as children.

While it may get at one root of a problem, pedagogical curation is only a starting point. Juliet Hess notes the need to find non-normative approaches to pedagogical concerts, to ‘situate such experiences within a broader global and sociopolitical context in order to decenter them.’²³ Future studies should explore further alternatives to concerts that substantiate the continued belief that Western classical music is inherently ‘good for you’ (or, at least better than other forms of music), perpetuating eurocentrism while ‘othering’ non-Western listeners. Christopher Small asserts that the symphony as a musical form involves the exploration, affirmation, and ultimately the celebration of a set of values.²⁴ Hess continues, responding to Small,

People attend the symphony to see their identities and values a/rmed and celebrated. What are the implications when an audience predominantly composed of students of color attends a concert that affirms and celebrates the values of a white, older, middle/upper middle-class demographic — values perhaps shared implicitly by their teacher?²⁵

A discursive musical curatorship o’ers a possible way forward. Discourse functions on multiple levels and o’ers up multiple levels of analysis. In considering its relationship with curation, discourse can be understood as both the aim and modus operandi of the curator’s act (a ‘discursive curatorship’) and also a means by which the curator understands themselves (that is, curatorial discourse, a larger corpus of knowledge into which this text enters). Both of these notions of discourse are more recent phenomena within curatorial practice; with the ‘supervisibility’ of the curator that emerged in the 1990s (epitomised by the linguistic formation ‘curated by’ and what Michael Brenson called the ‘curator’s moment’, arriving ‘with the emergence of international meetings, curatorial summits, and biennials in the mid- to late 1990s’), a curatorial discourse has proliferated.²⁶ In direct response to the curator’s ‘supervisibility’, discursive notions of curatorship have sought to foster greater autonomy and agency of the artist’s place within exhibition space.

Foucault broadly understands discourse as a collection of ‘statements’ (énoncés) which are, through a discursive function, collectively brought into relation with one another.²⁷ He writes,

…instead of giving a 'meaning’ to these units, this function relates them to a field of objects; instead of providing them with a subject, it opens up for them a number of possible subjective positions; instead of fixing their limits, it places them in a domain of coordination and coexistence; instead of determining their identity, it places them in a space in which they are used and repeated.²⁸

For the curator, this discursive act of constellation-making within a field of objects facilitates the creation of new intersubjective meanings rather than a superimposed thematic frame. If these are the terms by which we come to understand the units of discourse, then the sonic, textual, performative, physical, or scenic énoncé which constitute the corpus of the concert and its aftereffects can indeed be understood as serving a discursive function. This opens the possibility for conceiving the concert as a discursive event via the curatorial act.

This emergent discursive musical curatorship is one in which discourse decentres a surface-level interpretability; this is not a ‘thematic’ concert in the sense of a programme being handed a heavy overcoat that subjugates all the works performed to an externally imposed subject, but rather opens up for all works a multiplicity of ‘subjective positions’. This interpretation facilitates Heiner Goebbel’s desired delight for audiences ‘in making discoveries’, while also maintaining the autonomy of the composer as well as the historical positionality of each work.²⁹ The discursive curatorial act cannot therefore be limited to a purely aesthetic curation, or subjugated to Taruskin’s ‘doctrine of estheticism.’³⁰ Rather, this is an always-already present situatedness within and around the event that others a multiplicity of layers for interpretation. Discourse eschews surface-level interpretability to open up multiple subjectivities which provide space for audiences to make their own discoveries, relating objects to a larger field. Through juxtaposition between musical works, musical meaning can be better located within a larger network of cultural paradigms. In Dobson’s 2010 study of enjoyment and classical music, her study on the OAE night shift noted the robust positive response her participants had to a performer’s comparison between Mozart and jazz. She writes,

[I]t is not the use of jazz per se that made the experience more engaging; more that [the performer’s] analogy served to bridge a perceived chasm between classical music and other styles of music that the participants believe are available and relevant to them.³¹

Discursive curatorship opens a field of possibility for a non-dogmatic and relational understanding between works, leaving open multiple subjective positionalities and granting the audience agency to make discoveries from emergent connections. However, this approach is contained to the performative or exhibitory event, stopping short of considering the multidirectional web of agents involved in both the production and consumption of art. If the goal of curatorial practice is engaging more diverse audiences – as well as artists – and creating meaningful spaces for exchange, methodology must shift from discourse to dialogue.

A dialogical curatorship opens up an even broader understanding of discourse, in which a ‘relational’ approach allows the curator to operate as catalyst and facilitator for social interaction. Rather than operating within purely symbolic or private spheres, Baurriaud declines the relational approach as ‘a set of artistic practices [that] take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context rather than an independent and private space.’³² The resulting spaces of intersection Nicolas Baurriaud terms social interstice.³³

The ‘whole of human relations’ is not reducible to a quantifiable (or even qualifiable!) subject; Baurriaud’s idealism risks a reductive subjectivity. Understanding the relational approach as creating open-ended, non authoritative, non-prescriptive systems is prerequisite for dialogical curation. Only then is there a possibility for enabling social interstice spaces in which ideas can cross-pollinate between disciplines and audiences across social spheres. „ese projects, therefore, are often situated in terms of ‘site specificity, transnationality, transdiscipline, intersectionality’ and de-centre the time-bound nature of the performative event, creating opportunities to welcome unexpected encounters with unexpected others.³⁴

O’Neill articulates how the dialogical can be understood as a durational and evolutionary practice; rather than texts waiting to be read, exhibitions have the potential to activate discursive processes that enable dialogical spaces of connection and negotiation between curators, artists, and their publics. Such an approach to exhibition-making is durational – in the sense that, as ‘discursive exhibitions’ that evolve over time, they do not prioritise the exhibition-event as solely the moment of display. Instead, they allow for open-ended, cumulative processes of engagement, interruption, and possibility.

Such a dialogical process decentres the centrality of the curator and shi(s the event towards impetus, provocation, and prompt, a seed that is planted and germinates through forgetting and remembering, discussion and remediation. It opens a space in which the event – transcending Werk and becoming Wirken – ‘re-sensitizes us to a’ective relations’ and, perhaps, opens us to new connections and ways of perceiving and thinking.³⁵

As Donna Haraway tells us, ‘it matters what stories tellstories, it matters what thoughts think thoughts, it matters what worlds world worlds.’³⁶ Similarly, the event eventuates in the everyday. Beyond the museum analogy lies a field of possibility, diversity, and space for being-with-and-for one another.

1. Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney, ‘Debt and Study.’ E-Flux Journal #14, March 2010, www.e-flux.com/journal/14/61305/debt-and-study. ↩

2. Orhan Pamuk, ‘A Modest Manifesto for Museums’, Betina Museum of Wooden Shipbuilding, https://mbdb.hr/en/orhan-pamuk-a-modest-manifesto-for-museums. ↩

3. Sounds Now. ‘ Sounds Now: About.’ Accessed September 1, 2023, www.sounds-now.eu/about/. ↩

4. Hans Ulrich Obrist, et al, ‘Panel Statement and Discussion’ in Curating Now: Imaginative Practice? Public Responsibility, ed. P. Marincola, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), as cited in Paul O’Neill, ‘The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse’, in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, ed. Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), 25. ↩

5. Peter Vergo. New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989), 3. ↩

6. Ibid. 3 ↩

7. Markus Fein, ‘Musikkurator und RegieKonzert’, in Das Konzert: Neue Aufführungskonzepte Für Eine Klassische Form, ed. Martin Tröndle (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011), 243. ↩

8. Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 149. ↩

9. Joan Gibbons, ‘Curation’, in Hothaus Papers: Perspectives and Paradigms in Media Arts, ed. Joan Gibbons and Kaye Winwood (Birmingham: VIVID/Article, 2006), 170. ↩

10. Karen Gaskill, ‘Curatorial Cultures: Considering Dynamic Curatorial Practice’, ISEA – The 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, (2011), 3. ↩

11. Patricia C. Philips, ‘Temporality and Public Art’, Art Journal 48, no. 4 (1989: 332). ↩

12. Lynda Goehr, ‘Being True to the Work’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 47, No. 1, (Winter, 1989):55. ↩

13. E.T.A. Hoffman, ‘Beethovens Instrumentalmusik’, in Musikalische Novellen und Aufsatze, Band I, 69. ↩

14. Pavel Florensky, ‘Church Ritual as Synthesis of the Arts’, in Avant-Garde Museology, ed. Arseny Zhilyaev (Minneapolis, E-flux, 2015), 205. ↩

15. Hito Steyerl, ‘A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in an Age of Planetary Civil War’ (E-flux, Journal #70, February 2016), www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60543/a-tank-on-a-pedestal-museums-in-an-age-of-planetary-civil-war/. ↩

16. Tobias Ruderer, ‘Upside Down: An Interview with Patricia Kopatchinskaja’, VAN Magazine, May 12, 2016. https://van-magazine.com/mag/patricia-kopatchinskaja/. ↩

17. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Concert Hall? How About Music Museum?’ The New York Times, June 3, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/06/03/arts/music/03kram.html. ↩

18. Ibid. ↩

19. Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 1. ↩

20. Ibid. ↩

21. Melissa Dobson, Between Stalls, Stage and Score: An Investigation of Audience Experience and Enjoyment in Classical Music Performance (PhD diss., University of Sheffield 2010), 22. ↩

22. See Paul O’Neill and Michael Wilson, eds, Curating and the Educational Turn (Amsterdam: Open Editions, 2010). ↩

23. Juliet Hess, ‘Interrupting the Symphony: Unpacking the Importance Placed on Classical Concert Experiences’, Music Education Research 20, no. 1 (2016): 11. ↩

24. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), 2010. ↩

25. Hess, ‘Interrupting’, 16. ↩

26. O’Neill, The Culture of Curation, 35. ↩

27. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, transl. A. M. Sheridan Smith, ed. Jane Collins and Nicholas Till, transl. David Roesner and Christina M Lagao (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2015), 5. ↩

28. Foucault, Archaeology, 119. ↩

29. Heiner Goebbels, Aesthetics of Absence: Texts on Theatre, ed. Jane Collins and Nicholas Till, transl. David Roesner and Christina M. Lagao (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 5. ↩

30. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music: Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2009), 562. ↩

31. Dobson, Between Stalls, Stage and Score, 83. ↩

32. Cited in Connell Vaughan, ‘Contemporary Curatorial Practice and the Politics of Public Space’, in Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice, ed. Debra Benita Shaw and Maggie Humm (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd., 2016), 28. ↩

33. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational aesthetics (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2020), 14. ↩

34. Vaughan, ‘Contemporary Curatorial Practice’, 29. ↩

35. Marissa Jahn, L.M Bogad, ‘Byproducts and parasites: on the Excess of Embedded Art practices’, in Byproduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices, ed. Marisa Jahn (Toronto: YYZ Books, 2010), 8-18, accessed September 06, 2023, www.darkmatterarchives.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Byproduct_Print_LowRes.pdf. ↩

36. Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’ in Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, 05/09/2014, Open Transcripts, accessed September 06, 2023, http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/. ↩