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On Risk and Learning

“Life is either a great adventure or nothing.” Helen Keller

“Always do what you are afraid to do.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Showing a video in a museum is nerve-wracking and difficult. This is especially true when you’re working within a gallery where sound and visual works aren’t common mediums, and when it’s your first exhibition, and when it’s your first video. Over the course of the past two weeks, our curating team has learned just how complex this process is… between agreeing on loan conditions with the artist and the gallery (Monitor or projector? Headphones, sound shower, or full-room audio? Mp3 or Mp4? Soundproof carpet or no carpet?); working with curators and conservators at the Courtauld (Is there a power site close enough to where we need it? Will the light or heat from the film destroy other works?); to finally getting quotes from audio visual professionals (What’s the throw ratio? How many lumens? Optoma W674 or Optoma EH505? Will you pay for delivery? What about installation? What about the plugs?)

...While working through these issues, you soon learn that there are whole worlds of curating that you haven’t even touched. This is exciting! If curating means such thrilling learning curves for the rest of my life, I’ll take it any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

With this video proposition in particular, I saw how inexperience can be an advantage -- if you know your own limitations, you might not ever take risks. Since my co-curators and I are just starting out, one of our biggest strengths is actually not knowing how things are supposed to be. To put it another way, rather than being scared off of the idea of including a video, our ignorance (or obliviousness or youthful confidence) allowed us to try something we otherwise would not have tried. We have the rest of our lives to be realistic curators (and I imagine realism only grows with age and experience), but the belief that we can handle the challenges and figure out the solutions is half of the struggle of getting things done.

Having the right support around you is everything. To be sure, the most interesting lesson I have learned from this exhibition has been about people. Not only do I have a better understanding of diplomacy, group dynamics, and the persuasive power of candy, but I have first-hand experience knowing how wonderful it is to be on a creative, solution-oriented team. From my past collaborative work, I know that there are some people who immediately see challenges as a problem, and some who see challenges as opportunities. ‘No’ people and ‘Yes’ people. In groups, both can be valuable – you often need the realists to ground the idealists, to ask the hard questions and put ideas through the ringer. And you need the idealists to take artistic risks, to be positive and take on scary challenges. In some groups, suggestions are easily shot down and nearly every idea is birthed into a precarious – or worse, unhealthy -- realm. But when you are working with a group like the MA Curators, with people who instead say, “let’s think about how this could happen,” and when you have a safe space to throw around ideas and play with possibilities… well, that’s when work becomes fun.

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