42: Sweetness & Power

Dear Tate, 

I’m happy to learn about this position and the possibility of participating more actively in your vibrant community. I recently finished the inaugural Art & Ecology MA program at Goldsmiths. My thesis was on hyperculture, biennialization and the distribution of time; which I understand as very much concerned with ideas of the transnational, particularly the notion of hyperculture. This adjunct Art & Ecology curator position is  highly applicable, and right at the intersection of my research and practice. 

In the following passages I’ll endeavor some nuanced and complex thinking towards these open themes and questions. My hope is this will demonstrate a disposition or approach that will resonate with your desire for the appointment. 

I apprehend and address the world through a provisional ecological frame, including contemporary art, which in my measure has been floundering with the integration of ecological methodologies within ingrained practices and markets. This often results in superficial and thematic engagements with the becoming-ecological. To add to this, Ecological thinking itself is encumbered with a kind of canonization process endemic to western disciplinarity, that results in a rather limited and doctrinaire professionalization which unsurprisingly produces a familiar range of western chauvinism. Put another way; a small, institutionally-ratified canon of ecological thought, predominantly situated in the West with a very gate kept selection of assimilated representational voices from the rest is ecological not at all. A processual and dispositional shift is in order, or shifts rather, and this is an ongoing, many-voiced and more-than-voiced project. This should happen alongside the ongoing project of reckoning with the historical conditions that produced Tate and its responsibility to its unfolding past. 

I see applied ecological thinking, as often performed in western institutions, having a sterilizing effect on practices borrowed from other cosmologies, and can produce some very confusing and contradictory outcomes (not always a bad thing, discursively). By way of an anecdotal example, I had dinner a few months ago in Paris with a self-styled ecological expert and curator and sat through a curious and somewhat misguided lecture on the four definitive types of ontologies and ‘ontological design.’ I’m concerned that Enlightenment hubris and accelerating technocratic thinking cloaks itself in green. 

While beyond the remit of this letter, I could provide many examples of institutional works, born out of this kind of disposition and produced under the aegis of Ecology that have left me with much trepidation, and I do my best to apply an an intersectional evaluation that considers labor, materials, temporalities and a rather under-evolved reckoning with what some call Ethology. There are other epistemic modalities that have even less of an available discourse to draw on that are significant to my thinking around ecology and art as well. To approach the role of a curator of ecology, I’d like to return to their etymological roots. Curate comes from care and ecology from oikos, or the family and home, a concept we can extend as far as possible towards everything we are and share. This care for our family and home is what guides this work for me. 

I see the modest gains of this category, Ecology, which has likely exceeded the limits of its capacity, being taken up and instrumentalized by a stunning array of often highly questionable projects. This requires care and responsibility, to protect the integrity and spirit of many insights collected under this rubric. I maintain that more than a category, ecology is better suited as a disposition. It is likely not expert and authoritative, though perhaps studied and committed. I would suggest its qualities are open, curious, kind, friendly, generous, peaceful, playful and resolved to accompany the many challenges of our time with grace and humility. The opening of these qualities towards the more-than-human is a large part of the work. 

In my understanding, Western modernity’s ecologically-led embrace of nondualism, in concert with the new materialist turn, which reverberates through contemporary art, has hardly led to novel ideas. More apparently, its most advanced claims lead us easily into the very beginning and most basic tenets of cosmovisions existing for millenia and continuing today. This condition, let's say of an adolescent modernity maturing into a more integrated—albeit continually violent and chauvinist—position within history, vis-à-vis the comparative cosmopoetics of international exhibition spaces like Tate, produces an interesting setting, in the heart of waning empire, to which ecological thinking can be applied responsibly. The humility born of this realization might inspire in us the sense there is much already here to learn from and engage with. 

I am particularly interested in this context and position at Tate, because it builds upon a collaboratively engaged, many-year long research project about precisely the product—and its ghastly production processes—that enabled both Tate and this conversation to be happening. My research is on sugar, slavery, plantation agriculture, and visual culture; and their roles as drivers of the so-called Anthropocene. 

Within the spheres of contemporary art, and in relation to this position at Tate, I have particular affinities for practitioners and histories of the kind of ecological art readily assimilable into conventional exhibition-making, and would like to pursue this kind of curatorial practice at Tate. I’m fluent in the ecological art canon, its protagonists and discourse, and despite its many biases and limitations, I find it a fertile and generative space for mutual consideration. I would be happy to share more about the who and how of this. More significantly perhaps, I have a number of exhibitionary methodologies and subjects that radically depart from some of the more-obstinate conventions and received ideas, which I’m also interested in pursuing with Tate. I’m attentive to what we might call media ecologies, as well and how art, or cosmopoetics, are developed outside of the provinces of western neoliberalism, possessive individualism and the increasingly consequential algorithmic determinism that delimit our lives. A resistance to these trends, as articulated in contemporary art, afford a great number of approaches to exhibitions, event-making and the application of institutional resources towards the otherwise. I would, again, be happy to elaborate on some of the projects I have in mind, and will share here that these initiatives are drawn from my research in biennial studies, extrainstitutionality, perennials, open access, remediation and repair, object libraries, hospitality, diverse partnerships, and the connective affordances of new technologies. I welcome the opportunity to bring these possibilities and projects, that are in various stages of development and specificity, into dialogue and collaboration with the experienced and skillful people working in your community. 

Throughout my studies at Goldsmiths I frequented Tate, as an engaged member, and wrote about some of my experiences, including Anicka Yi and Cecilia Vicuña’s Turbine Hall commissions. I’ve also written about other cultural events relating to Tate in a forthcoming manuscript. I remember taking refuge at Tate Modern during the unprecedented heat wave last year, a poignant intersection of art and ecology that inspired a number of ideas relating to these themes and this position.

My final exhibition at Goldsmiths was primarily a curatorial endeavor, though I increasingly feel less of a need to taxonomize a relational practice in these terms. It was a space of hospitality called the Sianne Ngai Becoming-ergon of the parergonal discourse of evaluation library and tea room. I’m interested in how art is metabolized and what practices and conditions support a healthy culture. I’m also interested in what gets excluded from Art and the alternate modes of cultural dissemination. I have another long-term research project dealing with some of these themes through a comparative cosmological approach, rooted in media theory and technology studies. This research, especially in the context of this position at Tate, could benefit from the exhibitionary form. 

I would be happy to be in touch about the possibilities of working together towards these open questions at the porous convergences of art and ecology. I would also like to note that the tone of this letter and language I’m using is more academic and theoretical than I would use for framing exhibitions at Tate, where one of the great and most exciting imperatives is engaging with an incredibly diverse audience community.

In addition to my resume, I’ve included a portfolio, with links to sites that offer many other textual and visual considerations of both art and ecology, particularly in ritualsintime.space

Kind thanks and warm regards, 
Perry Shimon