Terms of engagement: Lima Gillick on Chris Gilbert

CURATOR CHRIS GILBERT has resigned from his position at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Mobility among art institutions has been an increasing feature of art mediation and presentation over the past twenty years, but Gilbert doesn't seem to have left in order to write a book, research a group exhibition, or move on to a bigger and better place. What is uncommon is his decision to resign on a matter of political principle and then call for a radical rethinking of the role of the curator and the artist in a contemporary-art context. This is a highly unusual step for someone working within a mainstream museum environment. In his May 21 letter of resignation--which is still circulating on the Internet and has been further distributed by e-mail--Gilbert writes that art institutions

  will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist values, will celebrate
  private property and deny social solidarity, and will maintain a
  strict silence about the control of populations at home and the
  destruction of populations abroad in the name of profit, until that
  imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not be
  dismantled by cultural efforts alone: A successful reform of a
  cultural institution here or there would at best result in "islands"
  of sanity that would most likely operate in a negative way--as
  imaginary and misleading "proof" that conditions are not as bad as
  they are.

These assertions have prompted some serious reflection and caused a few eyebrows to be raised into the stratosphere. As the controversy unfolds, it highlights the void between rhetoric and practice within a developed and striated art discourse. During a period of social and political strife, within the context of a superheated art market, there is an increasing gulf between those artists and curators who have carved out a path of resistance via ongoing critique of social systems and those who function in a more complicit relationship to the contradictory impulses that affect art production and mediation. For some it is increasingly difficult to follow Deleuzian aims toward complex understandings, the subtle likes of which may be said to have oriented artistic and critical discourse for decades. To quote the philosopher in his Two Regimes of Madness (1977), "We've been trying to create concepts with fine articulations, extremely differentiated concepts, to escape gross dualisms." For Gilbert, it seems that such critical self-consciousness in relation to art production can no longer be productive within a society that, as he sees it, is inured to the delicate probings of the super-self-conscious artist, curator, or critic. It is a time of gross dualisms once more, and it is necessary to take a stand and make a careful choice about who will be there alongside you.

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On the face of it, it appears that Gilbert resigned over the issue of a wall text for an exhibition he curated this past spring titled "Now-Time Venezuela: Media along the Path of the Bolivarian Process." But, of course, no one ever really resigns over a wall text. The title gives you an idea of the political theme of the show--a complex collection of video material that creates a layered view of emergent models of social formation in Venezuela today. The museum's administrators were by all accounts fully supportive of the exhibition, and provided a forum for discussions that were dynamic and open to many voices. What seems to have agitated them is best explained by quoting from Gilbert's letter: "Their plan was to replace the phrase 'in solidarity' with revolutionary Venezuela with a phrase like 'concerning' revolutionary Venezuela--or another phrase describing a relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity." Institutional information and guidance conveyed via didactic wall texts are a contested territory that fragments opinion among artists, curators, and critics who would otherwise agree about generalized issues concerning art display and presentation. Commenting in the New York Times about the May 9 Judd Foundation auction at Christie's, Roberta Smith praised the auction house for avoiding the temptation to present anything much more than the work itself. In other situations, artists and curators have collaborated on reclaiming and newly complicating the institutional voice, as, for example, through the (non)information accompanying the work at the recent exhibition "Grey Flags" at the SculptureCenter in New York. Some artists don't care about wall texts, and some curators just leave things to the education department, washing their hands of responsibility for the text and intervening only when the generally anonymous voice of the museum or art center appears to have slipped into a parallel universe of muddled rhetoric and overreaching claims about the painfully obvious. In this instance, it seems pretty clear that Gilbert was the one who wanted to impose an overt institutional voice and specific reading on the exhibition. This is an inversion of the normal tension between the contemporary curator and the institution, wherein the curator's need to make a precise claim is in direct conflict with the museum's desire to generalize and take a soft yet critical approach to the contents of its space. But we're talking about Berkeley, not Beverly Hills, and the "administrators" did finally agree to retain Gilbert's wording. Nevertheless, by then he had apparently reached his limit and decided to quit a system and structure he felt would always be looking to restrict his increasing desire to agitate and present while at the same time determine viewers' reading of work.