Curating as Ethics by Jean-Paul Martinon (review)

The problem with Curating as Ethics starts right at the beginning. Initially I was led to believe that this is yet another historical overview of curating, starting with its origins, as the image on the cover shows a fragment of someone opening a door toward a Wunderkammer. Reading the introduction, however, it becomes clear that Jean-Paul Martinon questions the current state of affairs of curating, surprisingly stating that it is "now a practice without any form of institutional anchoring" (p. vii, my emphasis) due to the advent of the so-called content or aggregator curator. The old-school curator is defined by Martinon as selecting artists or artworks following specific institutional aesthetics, whereas the content curator is mainly interested in images, videos or sounds with a quasi-immediate return in terms of finance or viewer numbers.

To attempt to criticize or at least critically study this evolution and to try and develop an ethics for curating is in itself praiseworthy. It's mainly the way in which this is done that I have a problem with. Although Martinon has been teaching the curatorial course at Goldsmiths since 2015, he has, as far as I could find, no actual experience in curating (exhibitions) as such, and that shows. Of course, it can be argued that this is, in principle, not necessary for teaching on this subject, which could be briefly (and too quickly) be explained as everything surrounding curating except for the actual making of an exhibition. But in this case, Martinon develops such an otherworldly view on the practice, losing all possible connection with it, that it becomes indeed problematic.

In the introduction he extensively positions the problems himself. His strategy for inconvenient incongruities consists however mainly out of perverting them—yes, it's awkward to choose Heidegger and his "polylogical" concept of the fourfold (gods, mortals, earths, skies) for the basis for a book on ethics, let alone curating, but let's just take the fourfold in itself. Yes, it's explicitly awkward to discuss gods as part of this fourfold, but let's just equate them with mortals because "mortals exceed themselves beyond death throughout their lives, and this is why … they also happen to be gods. The crucial thing about this excess is therefore the never-ceasing supplementary process that always occurs in thought" (p. xvii). Referring to Jean-Luc Nancy, Martinon finally equates the ability to exceed thought with the name "gods" (p. xvii). And that's that issue solved. Only that it remains, as Martinon admits himself, a problematic statement to which he dedicates a considerable part of his introduction. Instead of at least briefly presenting Heidegger's own intent with the fourfold, Martinon instead points to other literature on the matter, leaving the reader fairly empty-handed. To explain his insideoutside way of argumentation, using a relatively random concept to start with, Martinon then introduces the idea of curating philosophy, although I would argue that this is a fancy way of indicating what practicing philosophy actually means. It's maybe because I am an actual curator that I'm not particularly shocked by it. Martinon however indicates that his approach to philosophy doesn't follow a conventional structure but instead reads authors' texts explicitly outside of their domains: Spinoza outside Spinozism, Heidegger clearly outside of Heideggerianism, etc. He then explains he takes this approach even a step further by "push[ing] the argument in a completely new direction. For example, the most antitranscendentalist philosopher imaginable, Quentin Meillassoux, is placed in dialogue with the least materialist thinker conceivable, Emmanuel Levinas" (p. xxi), which is in itself commendable and again not overly shocking as far as I am concerned. I am certainly not in favor of "reactionary pseudo- or postdisciplinary distinctions" where "curating is an indeterminable activity with diverse disciplinary heritages and little scholarly impact" and "philosophy is too dry, textual, and abstract for curating" (p. xxi). I frankly wouldn't even know why this would be the...