Q: How can you tell there is an elephant in your refrigerator?
A: There are giant footprints in the Jell-O.

Q: Why do elephants wear red toenail polish?
A: So they can hide in strawberry patches.

Friday evening my wife and I visited the TBA Exhibition Space to view One in Eight, a project conceptualized by Helidon Gjergji. The idea was intriguing: eight curators “curate” a single video piece by Derek Fansler, Cell. Instead of curatorial practice pretending to hide behind the work like an elephant wearing red toenail polish, this show would call attention to the looming presence of the curator in the gallery. To where curatorial practice plays a large role in the context of an artwork. The TBA Exhibition Space states:

As one of the most important rings in the institutional chain, curators from eight different spaces have been invited to independently curate a single video entitled Cell by artist Derek Fansler within the same space. As curating a video involves a myriad of decisions, be they conceptual, aesthetical, financial and/or political, the curators will unavoidably end up with eight distinct pieces. Far from offering an analysis of how curatorial-cum-institutional mediation works, the show deliberately and loosely reverses the roles of the curator and the artist, as in this case it is rather the artist who binds together the creativity of the curators.

At this point, I would like to mention what I did the night before. I had dinner with some friends, after which we played a game of Scattergories. Scattergories is a parlor game where you must come up with 12 words, one for each category. Every word have must begin with the same letter, but answers that duplicate any other in the group yield no points. We would moan when others in the group had our same answers, so we would try to veer as far away from the obvious as possible. Occasionally our originality would get the better of us and our answers would be too far off-topic to get us any points. For the category School Subject, we avoided Algebra entirely figuring that someone else would choose that and negate our point. Instead we opted for Anatomy, Astronomy, and I bombed with Abacus. Apparently the ancient Chinese art of calculating isn’t taught in our schools these days. Shameful.

One in Eight reminded me of the curatorial version of Scattergories. Each curator was aware of the inclusion of the other curators and the singular subject. Originality in display seemed to be the goal, sometimes a bit off-topic, but restricted to the category of the video. The video was shown on various types of televisions with props - blank video tapes, a futon with pillows, a cake tray. A TV sat on a table with a VCR and DVD player at its side, another TV was mounted to the wall, wires leading down to the DVD player on the ground. In the bathroom, only the audio was played. Artifacts from the video were framed and displayed on a wall instead of displaying the video. On the opposite wall, only the DVD jewel case was mounted.

Each take on Cell was an attempt not to mimic the other curators’ choices while playing in the fringe of the video. As I walked around the space, each piece struck me as an entry in a contemporary curatorial lexicon - an idea book of gallery display. What the video was depicting was almost irrelevant. The curators didn’t seem to allow the content to trickle over to the display. This is what interested me. It wasn’t really about the piece at all.

In the rise of the Curator, curatorial practice has become more opaque, more noticeable, a larger footprint in the Jell-O. I am not saying this is a bad thing in every case. Many times curators have revived a work from mediocrity through thoughtful display choices, or managed to rescue an interesting work from dusty obscurity in a storage shed. However, I have often seen curators stampede through a gallery leaving the work in a chaotic mess. One in Eight removes the pretense that the curator’s mark is never left on the work before it is transmitted to the audience, but instead shows the curator as the handler of every artist/viewer transaction.

This exhibit reminded me of one other thing. There is a story of three individuals trapped in a dark room, each describing what is in the room with them - a rope, a large leaf, a tree trunk. When the light is turned on, it turns out they were all touching part of an elephant - it’s tail, an ear, a leg. Each incarnation of Cell was just an piece of the curatorial practice. When seen as a whole, it is very apparent what you’re in the room with. The elephant is in the gallery and always is no matter how nice the pedicure, and I hope it treads lightly.