On Being a Double Agent

Late night conversations with fellow curator-artist (depending on her mood) Anna Paluch

Anna Paluch: I think it’s great to have this experience on both sides – as an artist, we have the curatorial and theoretical background to tie our work into larger conversations and understanding also set up and how galleries work, but from the curatorial side, we then have more empathy and respect towards artists as people, and not just props in some thematic idea.

Bea Rubio-Gabriel: Yeah well this is the thing: I think a lot about how my two practices can’t not exist without each other either. Even on a conceptual level. It makes me feel like this:

Because also exploring what you do as an artist informs all of that theory as a curator, it enriches it and yes, gives greater empathy. It also makes you a better institutional accomplice.

AP: I will be stubborn and think of it as an institutional shift. Sometimes you might curate more, sometimes you might art more. So it depends on what mood I am.

BR: I don’t know why, but the idea of a seasonal shift feels like a breakthrough for me.

AP: We gotta [Trademark] that before some big institution claims it.

BR: I was literally writing about institutions stealing shit! Aside from the usual. Like how they co-opted care.

AP: Yes! I literally spent one part of a lecture showing students Instagram posts that artists made because I wanted to encourage them to not put galleries and museums on such pedestals.

BR: Oh that feels revolutionary. I still struggle, personally, with not exhibiting. I shouldn’t, but I’m total capitalist trash in that way, though I’m trying to not. But I’ve been thinking about that, how we set up the next generation.

AP: Yes! These students are taking the class I took 10 years ago (History and Theory of Photography) and my teaching it is the first time someone is de-Westernising the content and the first time we are talking about consent (in terms of content warnings) and I’m thinking, ‘why is this revolutionary, it’s 2021?’

BR: That’s wild. Amazing that you’re teaching it though! Making these strides, changing how we think about things. But you’re right in that it’s a little disappointing.

AP: We have a great time in class with discussions and I learn so much from them, honestly.

Coming back to the curator/artist talk, I think that’s the relationship maybe? We can be both, because ideally a curator and artist learn from each other, and like you said, the two together in one person feed off of each other so well.

BR: Is this why the idea of the curator-artist feels so…I don’t want to say radical –different?

AP: I want to say, YES.

BR: I’m trying to gather my thoughts…the fact that artists and curators are supposed to learn from each other but haven’t, or haven’t been able to…so to see those two modes of working and being finally having some synergy, albeit in one person…it must be really different to look at because we seldom see it when two separate people embody those roles as it is.

AP: Because there always felt like a weird hierarchy?

BR: [at the same time] And because they’ve ordinarily been separated by power.

AP: And the jokes about failing as an artist so then you become a curator…we were set up from the start.

BR: And how when you’re an artist-curator, it’s a taking back of institutional power. When you’re a curator-artist, you get told it’s the abuse of it.

But it’s funny, someone asked me to write about the curator-artist and I still have no idea what that’s supposed to look like.

AP: I wonder if it should even look like anything? Maybe because we don’t fit and have to switch up the binaries…maybe, this is the first step towards something new?

BR: Essentially what I’m hearing is, we’re the future [laughs]. But that’s the thing, I’d like us…to maybe get rid of the label all together at some point. I feel like curators, at their core, are really just artists. Then again, I can think of a million curators who are not. But then that just feels like an institutional issue to me, not an artistic one. Because we are anomalies, most curators don’t practice like us, at least not yet.

AP: Someone I went to school with, Katherine Lawson, she is now a great curator in Toronto but she started as a Visual Arts student and her work revolved around text a lot. So people say, oh it makes sense she’s a curator, due to her experiments as an artist, but did she ever stop being an artist?

I always say it was thanks to a research paper I did in my Masters that my visual art career started, because I wanted to make an argument but the work for the argument didn’t exist and I struggled to explain my point in words, so I just made art in order to support the paper.

BR: Honestly, my art only started to make sense/come together when I started being more critical as an art theorist, which lead me to experiment with curation and I found all of the shit that was buried there, which lead me to start answering it from the other end as an artist. I think when we practice like this, it is inherently self-reflexive, which is why I’m confused when people get confused. Artists are also self-reflexive, it’s just a different process, a different visualisation of that back-and-forth.

AP: All I can think about is the beginning of Western museology and how people were obsessed with giving everything a title and category and so this whole curator/artist terminology is so deeply ingrained – no wonder we all struggle.

BR: Yeah honestly, why does it always come back to colonisation? It’s not a vibe. Also, I’m totally on a trip because I’m thinking on care and how it’s become co-opted, continuing capitalist and low-key colonial structures and so…the museums ruined Care, too.

AP: I hate them (: And it sucks because there are so many cool things happening in them sometimes, but behind the scenes…

BR: You’re right, because there are cool museums but why are the roots so rotten, you know? We need to plant a new tree…I don’t know.

I’m reminded of this drama [Designated Survivor: 60 Days] I’m watching and it’s wild, watching someone with good intentions, a good heart, a logical brain, have to fight through that crappy bureaucratic system.

AP: Last year I remember I stuck postcards to my office window and called it a Window Gallery and honestly, I’m going to take it seriously now, because why shouldn’t galleries, museums, art spaces be more accessible and less problematic?

BR: Take it seriously! Because why do art spaces only get to be galleries/spaces? Dismantle it all, I say.

AP: I love murals for this reason. A small town I drove through today have a “heritage mural” on the side of their community centre because there’s no infrastructure or need for an institutional museum, but they clearly wanted to create an accessible space of heritage education. I was recently interviewed by a Polish radio here and was asked about murals, and I said “THEY ARE ACCESSIBLE REPRESENTATION!”

BR: ACCESSIBLE REPRESENTATION!

I was reading this great conversation of these artists talking about leaving the artworld and feeling relieved, and sometimes I think about that. I could never, but rather I want it to get to a point where it’s not something you need to leave. When art isn’t a system or held together by markets and museum bureaucracy. It’s just a way of being. I’d give up my job for art to stop being shit.

Also I just wanted to say, you doing everything you do over there brings me so much joy right now, and I’m really glad.

AP: Thankyou! I’m literally a huge fan of you so I’m right here also loving everything you do.

BR: Thankyou so much, I can’t even…I love when you met people you are a fan of who are also fans of you.

AP: Fan(squared). I love this. Especially because I’ve always been in this space of fear around other people in this art world like “omg it’s so and so, the best in this and that” and I never know what to say or do, but then [when] I’m in spaces where we all just respect each other and feed off each other…a little community.

BR: See, I just want this for our art community. I’m also realising I don’t really like the artworld. Like I really don’t.

AP: No no, I feel you. Also! Something I wish, at least for universities, is teaching about alumni. I never learned about any local artists in all of years of art history, so I’m also peppering in artists that the students admire and then dropping that, “they were you 10 years ago, 5 years ago” and they love it. Representation. What a concept. And from that, I hope it tears down those walls of fear and hierarchy. I think I might be taking my teaching job as an activist job [laughs].

BR: No no, that’s so good – I think that’s exactly the kind of teaching we need though. We don’t need more artists coming out of the system only to keep propping it up, because what’s also the point of working so hard to build a better system if we don’t equip the next generation to use it? Let them start from the work we’re already doing, and keep building better.

AP: I tell the students, the only reason I’m making them still read old texts and showing some old white photographers […]is to then understand how other artists replied or how to critique and dismantle. So when I taught about early American landscape photography, I also told them about Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and showed contemporary Indigenous landscape photography.

I drop the word “context” so often but I don’t care [laughs]. I just want them to see that they can and are very encouraged to question the systems they are pushed through.

BR: It’s productive and a great way to teach.

I remember I was on a panel for a Uni thing and someone asked me the piece of advice I would give to students who are about to emerge in the industry. One panellist said, “seize opportunity” and I think the other said, “know how to make your connections” or whatever the fuck you usually get told.—

AP: This is giving me Live Laugh Love energy

BR: —[laughs] And yes sure, that’s how the game works, those were the things I did, but I felt they were so problematic because I totally boiled my worth down to productivity. So I found myself getting angry, they two beautiful white women working for commercial galleries or commissioned as designers, and so I said, “know your worth, and especially for those of you who are people of colour in this room -- yes, opportunity is important, but not every opportunity needs to be taken, and if it is, you gotta know your worth. I don’t want to see any more of that unpaid labour.”

AP: Yes, there it is! Because true, what they said is nice, but they said it from their personal [perspective] and not everyone has the same spaces of opportunity!

BR: I was so mad. “Volunteer everywhere and anywhere”, like yes okay, I did that, you did that - was it fair on us, though? No. So why do we need to make the next generation do that, too?

AP: We don’t need to perpetuate trauma.

It took me a long time to realise that I am worth something in my field and art community. The students who worked themselves to death were chosen for the big conferences and projects, but only because their supervisors needed free labour. And I recently started liking myself more, so I’m not into that all-work-no-happiness vibes anymore [laughs]. I just want to like the work I do and still have some sanity left over, is this so radical?

BR: Apparently. Honestly, I think my goal for next year is just…going to be work-life balance [laughing but also crying]. I don’t need to be rich, or a big artist. I just want to be a good person who doesn’t stress-bake their bread.

AP: Yes! Also though, around my angst with the art world, I’ve been gravitating towards folk art and ‘naive’ art research and I’m this close to finishing my thesis and running off to Estonia to do a folk art masters and just spend the rest of my life teaching people how to paint eggs and make inclusive folk art. The art world equivalent of leaving the office job to start a hobby farm of goats and sell cheese at the market?

BR: Honestly, I’m all for it! I’m a hairline away from running back to the mountains at home and just learning healing practices and living my life in a tree. I will only come out during full moons and new moons and you cannot stop me. That’s where I’m at.

AP: We know where we need to be.

BR: Yeah, we just need to burn down the system a little first, I guess, then we run away.

AP: Like a dine-and-dash, but spicier. We will keep ourselves warm in the trees from the institutional fires.