4 on 1 - Four curators each curates Stephanie Syjuco

4 on 1 - Four curators each curates Stephanie Syjuco

A project by Michael Zheng for the July Pavilion of the Garage Biennale.
Curators: Clark Buckner, Terri Cohn, Joyce Grimm and Steven Wolf

July 29 - August 25, 2006
Four opening receptions: 7/29, 8/5, 8/12, and 8/19, all Saturdays 6 - 11 pm.

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

curate       tr.v.    To act as curator of; organize and oversee.

What does it mean to curate an art exhibition today? The recursive nature of the dictionary definition above is quite revealing. As more and more curators decide not only the theme and artists, but also the form of the art work for exhibitions, curators engage in creative work of a different kind. Not only do curators create cultural phenomena, today they also create art phenomena, using artists as materials. In many cases, they have become meta-artists.

No less significantly, curators have risen to the helm of the major international biennales, major museum exhibitions, privileging themselves with exclusive views of the landscape of art. Are curators today in a more probable position to shape art movements? Do they have more opportunities to create a situation where major art works can be created and exhibited that would otherwise be impossible? Or, at worst, do they run the risk of (mis)leading practicing artists by occupying the art scene with unprecedented authority and insurmountable theoretical backing?

Michael Zheng initiated this project Four on One - Four Curators Each Curates Stephanie Syjuco, as part of the Garage Biennale to explore and expose these issues. By reversing the paradigm, the project seeks to acknowledge the creative effort in curating and to explore its effects on the art being presented. For the July Pavilion, Zheng, an artist himself, has invited four professional curators to choose one artist together and to each curate a show about the same artist. Each curator is given full freedom and responsibility to independently curate a show that includes an opening and one-week's duration. The documentation of each show will be exhibited along with the subsequent shows. By the end of the exhibition, the viewers will have witnessed four different views of the work of one artist, reflecting not just the multiple facets of the artist's oeuvre, but the differences resulting from the different approaches for curation.

The four curators are Clark Buckner, Terri Cohn, Joyce Grimm and Steven Wolf. While all have extensive curatorial backgrounds, each of them has a very different attitude and approach to curating. The invited artist is Stephanie Syjuco, whose diverse and broad body of work lends itself naturally to multiple angles of viewing.

The Garage is an alternative art space organized by Justin Hoover. The Garage Biennale is intended to "act as a receptacle of hopes, dreams, and ephemera from each new Pavilion."

For more information about this project, including the biographies of the curators and the artists involved, as well as the Garage Biennale, please visit the websites noted above.

Press Coverages:
Chronicle
SF Weekly
Neighborhood Public Radio
Cited in the book "Museums and the Public Sphere" by Jennifer Barrett

Week One

Terri Cohn curates Stephanie Syjuco
7/29 - 8/3: opening reception 7/29, Saturday 6 - 11pm
6 - 7:30 pm: General socializing
7:30 - 8 pm: Salon-style conversation between Stephanie Syjuco and Terri Cohn
8 pm: Unveiling of the work
8:20 -11 pm: Party with music and food and drink

The owner of the Garage and the initiator of the Garage Biennale, Justin Hoover

Michael Zheng speaking about the project and introducing the curator and artist

The curator Terri Cohn conducting the salon conversation

Transitioning to a different room for the unveiling

The unveiled work (Interpersonal Relationships Based on Fact, Rumor, or Hearsay, and Depicted as Either Molecular Compositions or Constellation Maps (To the Best of My Knowledge))

Week Two

Clark Buckner curates Stephanie Syjuco
8/5 - 8/10: opening reception 8/5, Saturday 6 - 11pm

The second installment of the project was curated by Clark Buckner. The show consists of twenty images divided into five groups. Within each group, there is a leading text recounting the process of the curator interviewing/interacting with the artist, which is also the subject of the four images after the text. The four images are shown in two diptychs. These five group of images are displayed on three walls. On the third wall, the photographic documentation of Week One's event is displayed alongside with the 5th group of Week Two's images.

The glare on some of these images is a result of an effort to faithfully document the effect of the plastic covers on each of the photographs.

Curator Clark Buckner and the artist Stephanie Syjuco

Group I Statement by curator Clark Buckner

Documentation of the Week I show and the announcement of Group II side by side

Week Three

Joyce Grimm curates Stephanie Syjuco
8/12 - 8/17: opening reception 8/12, Saturday 6 - 11pm

The third installment of our project opened on August 12 to a large crowd. We were again surprised to see no actual work of the artist Stephanie Syjuco. Joyce Grimm curated the show based on her assignment-based curatorial model, in which she was asked by the artist to choose objects from the artist's house and display them in a way the curator chose. The objects included the artists household personal objects, her own art work, her art collection, among others. A second but critical component of the show was an audio record of the dialogue between the curator and the artist about the reason why the curator chose each object and the artist's own recount on the same object. This being in a separate room came as an inevitable surprise when after the viewer had seen the objects first, their impression was contrasted by the factual recount on these objects.

Curatorial Statement by the curator Joyce Grimm.