You're The Artist Now, Dawg!

Curated by Patrick Lichty
plichty at colum dot edu
http://www.voyd.com/ytand

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

Curatorial Statement:
You’re the Artist Now, Dawg!

YTMND.com, or “You’re the Man Now, Dawg!” is a participatory social media site where participants create single webpage art sites that consist of a couple lines of text, often as a large, “zooming” style, some background graphic, animation or video, and a sound clip of some sort.  The classification of YTMND as an art site is based mainly on context, as many of the pieces there would not be considered as “art” by  any means, except as perhaps a form of digital folk or creative practice.  However, many of the pieces on YTMND are amazing works, and the constraints of text-image-sound create a simple framework for formal exploration of digital forms and culture.  But how does one create a curatorial project around a subject like YTMND.com?

In considering curatorial practice as a filtering and reframing of cultural production (Schleiner), one has to consider the function of the curatorial gesture and the body of content that the curator “shapes”.  That is, why does the curator take interest in a given body of work, or set of artists, frame them in a given context and then who do they present the content to?  This may seem extremely simple and perhaps even pedantic when looking at the traditional white box curatorial model, but what of practices outside of the easily objectifiable, or the idiosyncratic?

For example, at VideoVortex I in Amsterdam, Geert Lovink asked me what the function of the curator was in the age of affine social media structures like YouTube?  When the community self-curates, what is the role of the curator? At first, my answer was to say that outside of the milieu of “art-world” contexts, the curator is the custodian of a public trust.  This economy of trust is built out of community interest for that curator’s point of view and trust in that curator’s desire to give their audience(s) a meaningful/enjoyable/provocative experience.  But upon reflection, I felt that although this is a valid statement, I also felt it too passive or simple as just that communities just want a “friend” to put on a good show for them. 

No.  In the age of YouTube, 4Chan, YTMND.com, Deviantart, SomethingAwful and other community-based online sites (note that I did not say “art” sites, as this is a bit too slippery), the curator is an intervener.  Why? Because these are sites that are clearly outside the realm of the “White Box”, and the role of the curator is to frame an alternative discourse.  This is not to say that this is an improvement or not, but is merely different; a provocation to the space the curator is engaging with.  The curator then is an interrogator whose work is to reframe the existing discourse in a critical fashion.

This reframing can be more or less radical, and reify the site’s discourses as such or not.  In the case of “You’re the Artist Now, Dawg!”, I also have to mention Paul Slocum’s “And/Or Show #22: YTMND” which recontextualized curated YTMND pages and placed them within a gallery context.  Conversely “YTAND” is a show that does not use found objects in a new frame, but asks artists, the supposed “legitimate” voices, to make pieces for YTMND.  This has multiple functions.  First, it places the artist in the cultural context of YTMND, which is often somewhere between what I call “digital folk” with a little bit of “troll” (online antagonisttics) culture thrown in.  Secondly, it places certain constraints upon the work, as with the single piece of text, the background image, and the sound clip as a form of Digital Minimalist gesture. Lastly, it places/questions art discourse in the space of YTMND, a space that has the qualities of art, but is not founded on its agendas.

This leads us to the issue of audience, and this can be stated from the curator’s position as well as asking who is the intended audience.  By asking established artists from the New Media field to do works for this show, does that mean it frames it as being aimed for that community?  In part, yes.  But it also frames it in terms of the YTMND community, asks about the issues of popularity of “art” pages in a social media site, and perhaps opens possibilities for people using search engines to look for content related to YTMND. So, YYTAND does not necessarily radically rethink the idea of audience, but it does bring two or more distinct subcultures and create a dialogue.  This, as my second answer to Lovink, is the role of the curator in the age of social media – interventionist dialogue producer.

Therefore, YTAND.com as a project is in part response to the challenge of curation where it is performed by community that exists outside those of the accepted “White Box”, It looks at what happens when works are called for/curated between multiple communities, and wonders what happens when artists are given certain social and formal constraints.