Re: FW: Syndicate: DEMAND FOR NEW SELECTION OF VIDEONALE 9

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de>]

dear darko and others,

i can see some curators with itching fingers resisting the kind of response
that i am going to give to justified yet difficult claims.

the problem is, as you point out, the large number of submissions for
festivals and competitions and, related to that, the limited time that
juries have to evaluate them. sure, it would be ideal to have a jury that
can sit for a month and watch all the tapes, explore all interactive
projects and, even better, travel to see installations and performances. in
this way you would still get partial, yet fairly informed jury judgements.
it would also cost a fortune and explode most festival budgets.

alternative 1 is not to have open calls but curated programmes which
completely rely on what the curators see, like, or find interesting enough.
very often, this system creates good, consistent programmes, yet it also
tends to create forms of nepotism and often a lack of surprises (which you
do not necessarily circumvent by open submissions). financially, it is
manageable because you save money on a jury and on sending back tapes.

alternative 2 is to restrict the submission of works (thematically, per
genre, technically, age/sex/nationality of the artist, ...); however you do
this, artists will complain that they have interesting new work which does
not fit the categories, a fact that curators are aware of and often also
not happy about. but what do you do with 1500 entries when you have an
audience that expects quality evaluations? they do not want to see 600
tapes, but 30, maybe 60. they also cannot look at 500 websites, they want
to see 10, maybe 20 particularly good ones. and the artists in the festival
also want the appropriate attention - we can all imagine what it is like
when you are in a 'democratic' show with 1499 other artists ...

so, what to do?

i think that curators will continue to make their choices, and artists
should also make their choices about where and what to submit. many
submissions are done in a careless manner, and often juries think, 'why is
this artist wasting our time like this? does s/he have no standards to see
how bad the work is?' at other times, they may or may not miss important
work for one reason or another [btw, Duchamp ... the impressionists were
refused to participate in the academy exhibition in paris and created the
'salon des refusees'; there are probably many many duchamps we don't know
about] - there is no way ultimately to prevent this from happening, though
i think that juries and festivals must make an effort to properly view and
evaluate the work; multiplying technical standards and non-standard
applications don't make things easier, and artists must make sure that it
is actually possible within a reasonable amount of time to understand what
is necessary to look at a certain project.

i'm sure that many curators will be happy about realistic suggestions for
how to deal with the problems of quality and quantity;

greetings,
-a


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