An essay I wrote for Cura, a publication created by a team of students in my year as part of our degree show offering. The publication explores the diversity of curation, going beyond the traditional idea of the practice as being constrained to the walls of the museum.
“I’d like to be able to weep for once
to be comforted, and anyway I’m really not much more than a child-the short
trousers I wore as a boy are still hanging in the wardrobe. It was such a little
while ago, why did it pass?”
The
twenty-year-old Paul Baumer returns to his childhood bedroom, during a brief
period of home leave.
- Erich Maria Remarque, ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’
(1929)
Rooms are the set designs of our lives;
the bodies that inhabit them act as a mere footnote to their curated
spectacle. The bedroom serves as a
manifesto, a narcissistic pool of water to mirror one’s desired self. Thus, the
space operates as a form of propaganda,
projecting the cult of personality the inhabitant wishes to see in the outside
world, to the secret, sacred, space of the inside world. However, the unbridled
narcissism of the curated performance of the self turns to farce when you are
both the sole curator and the intended audience. This can be identified
in the emergence of the ‘aged child’ in western culture. This is the person
who, whilst inhabiting the age brackets of adulthood, remains in their
infantilised state, still residing in that critical place of development, the
childhood bedroom of one’s family home. A striking example of this can be seen
in the figure of the young, unemployed, graduate. The journalist, Hermione Hoby, explains this stating that:
“One survey suggested that
up to 85% of new graduates in 2011 were likely to move back in with their
parents. In the UK, where youth unemployment is at an unprecedented one
million, it's estimated at 27%. If one of the key tenets of slacking is simply
living with your mum and dad and being unemployed, then we are a nation of
accidental slackers.”
However, rather than
critically responding to the dwindling idealism of youth, contemporary curation
serves to fetishise and idealise this space. Whilst
Tracey Emin challenged the sacred place of the bedroom in her work ‘My Bed’
(1998), Jeremy Deller, who lived with his parents until his thirties, serves a
fastidious archivist of his adolescence, going as far as recreating his teenage
bedroom, in the Hayward Gallery, for his retrospective ‘Joy in People’. Edward
Meadham, of Meadham Kirchoff, acts as an additional example of this curation
model, priding himself on “living in a permanent
1994-1995 time warp.” His office is designed as a replica of his own
teenage bedroom, a mirror of the curated state of youth culture presented in
Meadham Kirchoff’s 2012 S/S collection. The tumblr ‘Teenage Bedroom’ extends this archived state of youth
culture further still. Created because the author’s own teenage bedroom “no
longer exists”, the site encourages readers to post photographs of their own
teenage bedrooms for display on the blog. The creator declares that the
curatorial project “is
my homage to all of us when we were still young and exciting, before we got old
and boring.” Here we find that the bedroom curator retreats
into a dream world, comforted by the misfortunes of the outside world through a
sunny haze of nostalgia.
To understand the significance of the
childhood bedroom it is necessary to consider childhood as an occupied territory.
The adult may enter this state at will, through the culture of childhood, that
is the image representations of the child found in films and literature,
created for and by the adult. Yet, to be reinstated into the bedroom of your
childhood overthrows this structure entirely. It is to find yourself, the
adult, not as the occupier, but the occupied, imprisoned in a fantasy space
that is on longer their own. This, consequently, challenges the fundamental belief
of the self as a constant, anchored by the soul, that essential essence that renders
each individual being unique. Instead, the adult on their re-entry to their
childhood or teenage bedroom is met, not with the feeling of continuity or
comfort but of repulsion and embarrassment. They are a time traveller
encountering an alien landscape. Here they
find there is no original state of being but instead learn that the self is
constructed from a series of tropes, roles to be endlessly recycled until one’s
death. What was once a pleasing twin of the self goes the way of all doubles,
transforming into what Freud regards as the “ghostly harbinger of death” that
seeks to oust the physical self entirely. In entering the room there is an
obligation to re-enter the closet, to lip synch one’s childhood, to perform the
character that your previous self carefully curated through this setting. Thus
the self is rendered, once again, secondary to the space.
For the childhood bedroom
takes on such a profound significance for the young person because their space
in the world is a limited one. Youth is an obscenity that must be shielded from
view, supplemented by the more palatable adult image child, who performs the
capitalist construction of childhood, an impossible web of ideals that the true
child is unable conform to. Thus, the young person is contained to the inside
space of the home, and the school, condemned to a self-constructed fantasy
world. Claudia Elfanzanni Howat, the critically acclaimed eleven year old
‘curatorial prodigy’ who serves as co-curator in the 2012 (BA) Criticism,
Communication and Curation Degree Show at Central Saint Martins develops this point
further. She explains:
“I mean I think that there are a lot of things in the world
that adults can do and I can’t. Lots of places where adults can go and I can’t.
At first that was just a really unfair way to do things. But when I started
curating I wanted to apply my really limited space, my sort of limited world
view of things, to create something really good, something that reflects who I
am. You see what you like is really important, because it helps people know
what sort of person you are. I think curation shows my personality because it
shows everyone the art that I like, and that shows people what I’m like. Like if someone liked things
that are weird and put them on display in a big exhibition it shows everyone
that they are weird! I think the main spaces I look at now are the ones that I
experience, mainly the classroom and the bedroom, oh and also tumblr too, and I
think people really like that, because I’m not trying to be someone I’m not.
Like, for instance, before I started curating actual exhibitions in galleries
and stuff I tried curating my room and my friends room and that sort of thing… I
really want to develop these ideas at the degree show, especially the classroom
one. CSM is a school too so I guess I can share all my experiences in that
sense.”
For the
positioning of Claudia in the contemporary art world is telling, serving as a
critical example of how we perceive the child prodigy, that most beloved myth
of childhood. The child prodigy model of ideology critically denies the class
inequalities of British society through the unfaltering belief that the child,
who is inherently exceptional, may succeed from talent alone. We favour the
young genius over the old master, thus any potential benefits that higher
education and the maturity of adulthood may deliver are rejected outright. Here
the child prodigy sustains the total abjection of the unemployed graduate in
their childhood bedroom. That is not to deny Claudia’s gifts and refreshing
intellectual curiosity. Her unique talent was vividly demonstrated by the bold
curatorial methods she applied to ‘Boom! The New Faces of Manga’. Rather, in the collaboration
between Claudia and the CCC degree show team, we intend to critically
deconstruct the mythic narrative of childhood, utilising Claudia’s original
insight to greater depict the curated state of childhood.
For the bedrooms that are the most
beloved are the ones that closely adhere to our idealised vision of childhood.
These spaces are curated for the pleasure of the parent, for the admiration of
other parents. For, it is the adult, not the child, who created the capitalist
construction of childhood, and the artificial ideology of youthful innocence.
This belief system is reflected in the fact that the bedrooms that most clearly
abide to this aesthetic framework are the adult’s cinematic projections of the
capitalist ideal of the white middle class girl. This model of curatorial
idealism is evidenced in the representations of the bedrooms of Juno in the
Diablo Cody’s film of the same name, Enid Coleslaw in Terry Zwigoff’s ‘Ghost
World’ and the Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Virgin Suicides’. Here the
curated clutter of feminine girlhood provides a guise of spontaneity, seducing
the viewer into a carefully created dream world that poses as reality.
The German philosopher, Ludwig
Feuerbach, supports this interpretation. In his work, The Essence of
Christianity (1843) he argues: “our era prefers the image to the thing, the
copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.” Here
the children’s bedroom remains in accordance with the Platonic critique of the
image, for it is, as Susan Sontag argues, “true as it resembles something real,
sham as it is no more than a resemblance.” For the curated childhood bedroom
can be seen as a critical parallel to the image child found in the family photograph
album. We find that the room is not viewed as simply a likeness to the
inhabitant by mere proxy, instead it is identified as an extension of the
child. Consider the fact that when an unwanted son or daughter departs the
family home the parent takes joy in boasting to their friends and workmates
that they have converted the child’s dwelling into their own personal gym or
office, the posters and keepsakes condemned to the trash. Thus drawing a
parallel to the vengeful ex-lover destroying photographs of their previous
beau.
The room of the child takes on the role
of a soothsayer, the parent as private detective combs the setting to seek an
explanation of the child itself, and to critically confirm their beliefs of what
the child may become. The limitations of this model are evidenced in Lynne
Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’
(2011). The significance of the room as identity model is first signified when Eva,
the mother to Kevin, the child who we learn carries out a high school massacre
in his teens, decorates her personal room with maps, signifying her own desire
to escape from the family home. This model of personal curation is derided by
the young Kevin as “dumb”, and the setting is consequently desecrated by him. Yet,
Eva defends her need for a room of her own, citing her need to reflect her personality
in her surroundings and make the space “special”. His accusing questions of “what
personality?” “what do you mean special?” powerfully overturn this curatorial
model, challenging both the room as identity trope and, consequently, the
constructed space of childhood itself. Later, Eva searches the room of Kevin’s
teenage bedroom to find evidence of his character, whilst ‘In my Room’ by The
Beach Boys plays in the film’s soundtrack. However, in accordance with his
previous mocking of the cult of selfhood, of a unique ‘personality’, she finds
nothing. For Kevin, like all individuals, is the conscious curator of his
setting, the curator only displays what they wish to reveal. Thus, Kevin, in
his minimalist white cube form of curation, reveals nothing.
For the curatorial models that repel us
are those that challenge the fixed narratives of the self. The aged child as
bedroom curator is rendered an abject being, serving as a threatening omen in
their conscious blurring of the distinct stages of life, the child, the
teenager and the adult. Thus, the adult
that retreats to the womb of the childhood bedroom serves as both a critical denial,
and a constant reminder, of one’s own mortality.
