Curating and Pedagogy in the Strange Time of Short Film and Video Exhibition

Flirtation, if it can be sustained, is a way of cultivating wishes, of playing for time. Deferral can make room.

Adam Phillips, On Flirtation

In the fall of 2003, I was asked to curate a program of short film and video for the academic symposium "Terms of Address." This essay will serve as a chronology, of sorts, of the process of devising and presenting a program of short work that needed to operate simultaneously on aesthetic and analytic levels. The title of the program, "Waiting...and Wanting,"¹ positions this chronology in the inchoate and desultory time of unconscious desire.

I will argue that curating and pedagogy have in common the problem of belatedness of acting without fully knowing or being able to articulate what one is doing in advance.

I use this formulation to consider some qualities of pedagogy in the strange time of time-based media art. I will suggest that programs of short film and video can serve as models for thinking about the unconscious dilemmas and conflicts that are enacted and worked through in learning.

While reading the proceedings from a recent symposium on curating in the visual arts, I became curious about how Matthew Teitelbaum understands curating as a pedagogical project: "Curating," he writes, "...is a process of learning in public" (1996, 40). Here, Teitelbaum positions the curator as student within the pedagogical context of public exhibition. In this view, curatorial practice calls for a sense of epistemological humility. Can not knowing become a method? What does it mean to make a practice in the messy time of feeling out of step with oneself? If curating is a process of learning in public, perhaps this is why I had so many difficult conversations with distributors, programmers, and colleagues about the sort of work that I wanted to preview in the months leading up to the screening. In part, these conversations were awkward because they invoked the at times uneasy relationship between the academy and the independent media arts sector ("Oh, another dull panel discussion"). These conversations also felt awkward because they made painfully public a series of questions that were as yet internal, nascent, and unformed. I recalled works seen years ago that continued to resonate. There were memories of light and shadow, of dissonance, of inexplicable responses: frustration, fascination, love, grief. I wanted to see these works again, recontextualize them, share them with others. I started looking for new works that would move me closer to something I could begin to articulate.

Curating, Pedagogy, and Unconscious Processes

These echoes between past and present bring to mind the dilemma that Sigmund Freud offers to our thinking about pedagogy: learning takes place at a time that is at once too early and too late. The works in the "Waiting...and Wanting" program suggest that learning does not follow predictable paths. They share an interest in ambiguity, nonsense, and provocation. Approaching from the past, from the peripheral limits of perception, their impact is unforeseen. Take, for instance, the first work in the program, a one-minute film called Moohead (2001) by Deirdre Logue. In this film a woman standing motionless in an open field is repeatedly struck in the head by a basketball. The film cuts between this scene of impact and snippets of television commercials in which adorable children giggle over their spoonfuls of wiggly Jell-O. In this symptomatic return to the schoolyard, in which the taunting laughter of children echoes across a bizarre game of dodgeball, the relation between action and sound is deferred.² At the screening, the film was met with tentative laughter giving way to silence as the audience struggled to figure out what exactly is funny about a woman being hit in the head. Moreover, the repetitive nature of the impact in this film provokes a persistent question: "Why doesn't she move?"