I’m conflicted about this term because it belongs to a gallery-oriented world that hardly overlaps with the practices I developed. My work with non-art museums has been entirely negotiatory and interventionist, and I wouldn’t want to call this curating. Years ago, Michael Bracewell reviewed an exhibition John Hyatt and I organised at Manchester Museum (Divers Memories – Company of Things, 1996). He observed that our interventions worked better if they weren’t seen as artworks. In doing this he was reflecting the way I pitched my projects. The exhibitions confronted the authority of museum display, but the host collection often came out on top. Bracewell liked this idea. He saw that practices designed for white cube galleries wouldn’t necessarily prevail in a collection-holding environment.
By the mid-1990s I had accumulated a large slide archive of exhibition-making projects that were neither of the museum or the art world. Because I acted on this evidence, and the results looked like arts-based research, Northumbria University aggrandised my activities with the title ‘artist-curator’. But I had problems with this. After all, museums have distinctive roles for curators that this term usurps. Additionally, I didn’t want authorial control. Which is why I used the name Divers Memories (‘divers’ being an old way of saying ‘many and different’). Now that the Pitt Rivers Museum has my slide archive, I’d like to support doctoral research on this topic. The non-aligned dimension of these exhibition projects remains, I think, an unexplored concept.
Coincidentally, the very first use of the title Divers Memories has resurfaced at https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/divers-memories.