C O N S ID E R IN G .
..
Google
Curates
By Glenn Adamson
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w ere p r im a r ily v a lu e d f o r th e ir
k n o w le d g e a n d th e ir n etw o rk s.
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float G o o g le p r o d u c e s.
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It’s hard to believe that Google, the most
powerful aggregator of information ever
conceived, has only been around for a de-
cade. Not only has the company become
a verb in its own right, it has colonized vast
areas of human experience: Google maps.
Google images. Google books.
There may not be a tab on the search
engine’s home page, but Google curates,
too. Every museum has been deeply affect-
ed by the advent of searchable culture.
Once upon a time, curators were primarily
valued for their knowledge and their net-
works. That’s still true to an extent, but no
curator can hope to keep up with the facts
and contacts that Google produces. More
and more, curators aren’t so much those in
the know; they are professionals who shape
what we all know already (or can know at
a moment’s notice).
Contemporary artists have grasped the
implications of this shift more quickly than
museum curators themselves. Tw o of the
most spellbinding exhibitions staged in
London recently have been “The Russian
Linesman: Frontiers, Borders and Thresh-
olds” (at the Hayward Gallery) by Mark
Wallinger, and “The worst condition is to
pass under a sword which is not one’s own”
(at Tate Modern) by Chicago-based artist
Michael Rakowitz. In both of these cases,
the artist/curators gave themselves permis-
sion to follow their nose around the Inter-
net. Each project was a dizzying play of
intuitive associations: connections ranging
from the purely visual to the merely coinci-
dental to the positively conspiratorial.
Wallinger’s show was a meditation on
the condition of liminality—'when one state
passes into another. Google informs me that
the title refers to the 1966 World Cup soc-
cer final, where England was judged by a
possibly biased official, Tofik Bakhramov,
to have scored a winning goal against Ger-
many. Was the ball over the line or not? By
such close calls is history made or averted.
Wallinger’s installation explored that idea
through a bewildering diversity of objects,
taken from museum collections as well as
websites such as YouTube. The show was
a product of Internet searching, both logi-
cally and logistically.
Rakowitz, meanwhile, treated visitors
to an alternative history of Saddam Hus-
sein’s rule in Iraq. In his breathless, Inter-
net-fueled landscape of facts and images,
the iconography and brutality of the Iraqi
regime seems more connected to George
Lucas’s Star Wars films than to the geopoli-
tics of oil and Islamic radicalism. An open-
ing wall of innumerable American soldiers,
all adopting the same Darth Vader-like pose
in front of a giant monument of crossed
swords, could only have been made using
the W eb.©
So what does this have to do with craft?
An indication is provided by the recent
activities of the Museum of Arts and De-
sign
(MAD)
in New York. Chief curator
David McFadden and his colleagues have
staged a series of shows based on tech-
niques, including “Radical Lace and Sub-
versive Knitting”; “Pricked: Extreme
Embroidery”; and “Slash: Paper Under the
Knife.” Superficially, these shows have
appeared rather conventional in approach.
m a d
seems to have returned to along-es-
tablished craft paradigm in which material-
ity and process are held to dictate content.
But none of these projects could have been
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