23rd February 2007 — 18th April 2007
'Mum
and Dad Show' is curated by Tom Morton. Tom's parents are artists, and
Tom himself is a curator currently working at Cubitt. In a rather vague
press release we are told that Mum and Dad, that is Rose Scott and Jack
Morton, studied together at Norwich School of Art and Goldsmith's
College, London, where they were taught by an impressive list of
artists. They married in 1970 and separated in 1982, when Tom was 5
years old. They have had a series of exhibitions in the Cambridge area
and taught art in different schools. The show features work from the
early 70s to the present in a variety of media. The works in the
exhibition have been arranged with taste and care, and there is an
overall Surrealist and at times Joseph Cornell-like feeling to it. But,
unfortunately, this exhibition is not about Mum's and Dad's works, it
is about their son, the curator.
In an interview with the Wrong Gallery, Morton recalls the dramatic
experience that is to undergo the painful events of separation and
divorce. Certainly, as Botho Strauss once put it, "no common failure,
whether it be sickness, bankruptcy or professional misfortune, will
reverberate so cruelly and deeply in the unconscious as divorce". There
is no denial of the despair and frustrations that divorce brings along,
but it should not become an excuse to endlessly spout platitudes about
the curator's psyche and his infant traumas. It is only at the end of
the interview that we learn the real purpose of the show. No, it is not
a new form of therapy as one might expect, it gets much better, this is
a new approach to curatorial practice. At that point, I could certainly
do with some therapy.
'Mum and Dad Show' intends to put forward a curatorial process that
combines 'very personal stuff with the notion of the public gallery,
and with the idea of curatorial responsibility, professional
friendships, favours and cronyism' (1). Put it how you like, for me
this is just a clear display of nepotism and we are tired of seeing it
all over, and now it turns out, it has become a new form of
institutional critique. The problem with putting your personal life on
display is that although it might mean lots to you and those close to
you, it's difficult to engage with for a broader audience, unless you
are a celebrity, or unless you have the ability or genius to turn
sludge into gold or anecdote into drama. For the biographical approach
should allow one not to talk so much about one's own life, but to show
others their own lives.
By putting together his parents' works, Morton doesn't make them a
generous gesture. Their works remain silent, framed only by the event
of the divorce, the disintegration of the family and the implications
for the curator to confront his parents' works in one of London's
contemporary venues. Morton seems to be more concerned with his own
gesture of transposing objects that belong to the 'wrong art world to
that of the right one' (2), but the criteria to determine what is wrong
or right remains unresolved. So dazzled is the curator by his own self
that he is taking the chance to display his own gesture, wishing only
to look fine for his own sake.
(1) Tom Morton in an interview with The Wrong Gallery, the texts accompanies 'Mum and Dad Show'
(2) Idem
CJ