Notes On Curating Autobiographical Art

What we would now call curating, in effect this organizing of displays and publics, had constitutive effects on its subjects and objects alike1 1  - Simon Sheikh, “Constitutive Effects: The Techniques of the Curator” in Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2007), 175.

Little has been discussed concerning the curation of contemporary autobiographical art and the particular set of responsibilities that often accompany it. The word “autobiography” is an amalgamation derived from the Greek “auto” meaning self, “bio” meaning life, and “graph” meaning to write; since the 1960s it has become somewhat of a discursive battlefield for academics and thus continues to elude concrete definition. However, one of the most cited examples is that proposed by French literary theorist Philippe Lejeune, who suggests, “[ce] defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name.”² 2 - Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1996 [1975], p. 33.Autobiographical art, as I understand it, is a mode of representation whereby an artwork’s subject matter or formal appearance is sourced from events or happenings in the artist’s lived experience and personal history. Here, the artist translates (or captures) fragments from the ephemera and storied conditions of their own vernacular life into the stuff of aesthetics. It represents an altogether distinct category of the visual in that it implicates the curation of lives-as-art rather than the curation of art-objects. “But,” sceptics ask, “isn’t all art autobiographical?” No, at least I don’t think so, in the same way that not every song is a ballad. To this end, much of the work of Bas Jan Ader, Nan Goldin, AA Bronson, Meryl McMaster, and Awol Erizku provide compelling precedents through photography, sculptural objects, and video, though this list is by no means comprehensive. Taking various patterns and appearances, these disclosures of the self played, and still play, an integral role in the constitution of the artist’s identity and the curator’s duty in articulating it.