Starting in the 1980s, curators or curators played a fundamental role in the visual arts process. Figures such as Germano Ceellant in Italy, Richard Armstrong or Robert Stort in North America and many others, chose as their pre-profession the dissemination in the main art media of the artistic currents that were formed from the second half of the 20th century. In the 90s, curators continued to be a key piece of the work that guaranteed the discourses that introduced many artists into the art circuit, where the work can be seen and appreciated beyond or outside the studio where it was conceived.
There are very few academic centers that include curatorial studies in their programs; traditionally art historians, philologists, and art critics are seduced and committed to venturing into curatorial activity. However, institutions such as MOMA, THE George Pompidou Center and any museum in the world cannot do without the research work of curators.
The curator's job not only consists of researching the work of artists, but can also become an indirect promoter of these or become a mediator between the works and the institutions that art needs to become a product of exchange with society. society, not only as knowledge, but also as merchandise. The representation of artists by commercial galleries, exhibitions in museums and important alternative spaces, inclusion in the "dominant discourse", belonging to public or private collections depend largely today on the support that an artist receives from curators, a double-edged sword in the artistic process because many times the artist's work can only be legitimized and oxygenated in the discourse of this figure always expected and welcomed in the studio for an exchange of ideas between the two parties.
Whether we like it or not, whether we understand it or not, whether we accept it or not, the curator is a logical component of the art process, who, although he creates a discourse of subjectivity, sometimes doubtful, also organizes the relationship between art and events. socio-cultural cultures that nourish it.
The goods and evils that come from this subject and his activity, also a creator, also an artist, responsible for the first steps of the work of art outside the studio, have been absent in the Dominican artistic context. Over the last two decades, this absence has left unfillable voids that still affect the activity of contemporary creators who have tried to insert themselves into the international context without achieving a result that benefits them in the development of their careers.
For this reason we have titled the exhibition Curator Curated, proposing a reflection on this absence, perhaps parodying a lack that no longer makes sense to point out if it is not assuming a distant stance that allows us to address a criticism clearly to, in some way, leave a symbolic record in the history of contemporary Dominican art of what was one of the causes that prevented the artistic production of the decades of the 80s, 90s and current decade from not having, nor having, due representation and deserved international promotion.
Our proposal attempts to represent the figure of the absent curator from the figure of the artist. We will be curators and artists, promoters and creators, we will prepare the work and organize a discourse around each other's work. Curator Curado, consists of a self-sufficient triad, where the artist extends his creative role beyond his limits, on this occasion, not to pretend what we are not, but to self-supply a necessary process that consists of selecting and purifying a discourse. before exposing himself. If we represent the artists with the letters A, B and C, the scheme would behave as follows:
A and B make up a curatorial proposal that focuses on the work and creation process of artist C.
B and C are curators of the work and creation process of artist A.
C and A would curate B's work and creative process.
The curatorial procedure with which we try to work on this project will be governed by the research that we as artists have been currently developing. This process includes conversations, exchange of ideas, monitoring of the changes that occur in the ideas and preparation of the works, taking into account that from the beginning there is a considerable curatorial element due to the very fact that the members of the exhibition were elected and voters.
If we have been proposing in this document-proposal what have been the conditions that have marked the plastic arts of the Dominican Republic both nationally and abroad, we must propose with the same honesty what have been the artists' responses to the different demands for quality, quantity and dynamism demanded by international artistic institutions and their different trends. All the levels that make up art have a specific role and if one of these levels does not work, or works half-way, the final result is affected by the parts that have not known how to perform their role in the most appropriate way.
If we are ready to criticize our artistic context, we must be ready to receive the criticism that this context has in relation to us. We artists have to play the rules correctly, our responsibility should not be only in artistic practice for its development.
The discipline and rigor that must accompany an artist's career is as important as the ideas, which in the end can be sterile if these aspects are not taken into account, which although extra-artistic, are still essential.
It is important to include in this same reflection some points that are capital to address the issue of the absences that have marked contemporary art in the Dominican Republic in recent times, because it would be unfair to blame only the little curatorial activity that exists in our artistic context. of the vision that the international contexts of contemporary Dominican art have today. It is essential to point out the political and economic conditions that during these two decades characterized the support of general culture. As an example of this, we have the few local institutions, for-profit or not, that dedicate their professional work to contemporary art or to works that have proposed aesthetic and transdisciplinary ruptures, not to mention the absence - yet again - of a cultural policy that establishes strategies, responding critically or uncritically, to the demands that the art centers established and establish towards the peripheries. It is worth mentioning the figure of Gerardo Mosquera in Cuba, who despite the political and anti-democratic conditions in which his work as a curator arose, is one of those responsible for the great dissemination of contemporary Cuban art outside and inside the island, a work that places him as one of the most important Latin American curators of the moment. As any process of centralization runs the risk of incurring exclusion, it would be important that the curatorial work of a country not rest on a single person. There should be as many curators as there are discourses to represent or, failing that, curators willing to defend diverse artistic trends within the same context.
In the economic order, culture in third world countries is not a priority, neither for the state sector nor for the private sector, and if we have to be absolutely clear about something, it is that without economic support or sponsorship from these two sectors, culture It is positioned between the sword of non-being or the wall of being. Artists have traditionally had to balance between creation and the institutional support that art and culture require in any society.
