More Articles...
Print
Alternative to an Alternative
by Dean DaderkoThe notion of “the alternative” dogs me. Before I accepted a position a little over a year ago as curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), I was an independent curator based in Brooklyn who produced exhibitions, events, and performances in New York and internationally. From 2000-05, nearly 40 of these happened at Parlour Projects, a space in my home that would have been my living room, but instead was a non-commercial gallery that presented artist s’s work in all media in solo exhibition formats, with specific attention given to work that was experimental, performative, and interactive. References to its programs often described it as “ alternative,” but this begs the question: alternative to what? To collusion with the market? To mainstream success? As I see it, the term “ alternative” operates under the false assumption of some shared or common center. Such a normative notion runs counter to the singularity and uniqueness of artistic vision. The center is wherever I am. The center is wherever you are.
Since starting at CAMH, my exhibition-making strategies have changed little, though the support of the institution and my colleagues has changed how I work a great deal. I’ve quickly adapted to longer production schedules, more generous budgets, and collaboration with inspiring co-workers. What hasn’t changed is that I remain committed to supporting artists to realize their visions, and continue to believe that curatorial work can and should embrace risk taking. I feel fortunate to be working in an environment where this belief is not only shared, but encouraged. My friend K8 Hardy said—and I’m paraphrasing—that artists make the world more interesting, and I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t imagine suffering the alternative.
Contributor
Dean DaderkoDEAN DADERKO is Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His exhibition Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane is on view from March 22 – June 30.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Spaces Together: Alternative Sites for Bay Area Arts
by Sophia WangNOV 2017 | Critics Page
I moved to the Bay Area from New York City in 2000, and went straight to the places producing underground music as entry points into arts communities where I’d feel most at home. In New York in the ‘90s, I’d found these communities at techno parties downtown, escaping the New Jersey suburb where I’d lived as a teen and the Morningside Heights dorms where I’d spent my years at Columbia.
From Center to Middle and Back Again
by Josh RiosOCT 2018 | Critics Page
Chicago has a relatively limited commercial gallery system compared to other major national and global metropolitan areas, which has contributed to an overall context that doesn’t strictly center the commercial gallery as the sole path to a long-term, rigorous practice.
In the Green Chair, Talking Alternative Lives:
PAUL AUSTER with J.T. Price
JUNE 2017 | Books
On an outwardly pleasant day in early April of 2017, the author appears in profile through the glass panels of his front door. When the buzzer sounds, Paul Auster rises from his dining-room table to welcome me. I have arrived, on the dot, at 2 p.m. to discuss his teeming new novel of the 1960s 4 3 2 1. It is a bildungsroman with a speculative twist: four different lives lived in alternating sequence by the same young man.
Entertaining Marx in the Machine of Capital: Skirball Center’s On Your Marx Festival
by Adam R. BurnettOCT 2018 | Theater
Within days of the On Your Marx Festival’s press release going public, the internet was abuzz and The Skirball Center’s twitter account had garnered multiple responses from individuals coloring the institution, housed at NYU, as a propagator of brainwashing communism into the student body.
But this is 2018, and this is where we are, this is what happens.
And on the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx birthday (on May 5th, actually) we might bemuse the thought, “What would Marx think about all this?”
RSS
