Boris Oicherman
Curator for Creative Collaboration
United States (residence), Israel (citizenship) °1973
research interests: Collaboration, institution
affiliation: Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota
en
I am an artist, a museum curator and an engineer - but I've always had a hard time answering the "what kind" questions about what I do. What's your field of engineering? (Color Science..?) What art medium? (Conditional art..?) What kind of curating? (Curator for Collaboration..?) Answering a "simple" question with a conversation seemed the only way. It took me some years to realize that what I'm having hard time with is the very idea of a "kind of": disciplines, media, professions, the ways we break down and demarcate our practices, cultures and ways of knowing to make them manageable, controllable, digestible - invariably at the expense of the inclusive, shared, emergent. I have also had a hunch that, of all Western professions, artists are the only ones who can attach their work to any other practice, truly absorb themselves into any other discipline. The reverse is also true: today, any practice can become art. So, I thought, this incredible freedom of artists can catalyze connections between disciplines, and perhaps - one day - do away with disciplines altogether.
But freedoms always come with responsibilities. Artist Robert Irwin pointed out, some 50 years ago, "One interesting thing about being an artist now is that everything is a possibility. Which means you start out of the state of total chaos, and you have to assume the responsibility for every single thing you do or do not do." I am lucky as hell having a full-time job supporting artists who do this work.
For a brief summary of my thoughts on the matter of art and disciplines, see my essay “Unlearning the Elephant: Against Multidisciplinarity”