Who is Mark Beasley?

Mark, welcome to Creative Time!  You came to curating from an unusual vantage point -- that of an artist. Tell us a bit about your artistic practice.

Many thanks for the invite to be here and the opportunity to work with Creative Time.

As an artist and curator I look to create situations that enable diverse forms of artistic collaboration. Early work with the artist and curatorial practice FlatPack001 resulted in a series of projects and collaborations between artists, musicians, writers, architects and choreographers. Later projects that I’ve organized range from the production of poster works and book publishing with UK artist Mark Titchner to audio and written collaborations with UK musician Nicholas Bullen (Napalm Death, Scorn, Black Galaxy). 

My interest and focus very much stems from the DIY culture that I initially experienced as a kid in bands and through reading music zines. It was by far the strongest draw in my teens: playing in bands; discussing music; and seeing friends who’d been playing gigs in local bars for years in Birmingham getting international record deals, playing on TV shows, and organizing labels. It all seemed very possible.

I’m always drawn to the interests of other artists and much of what I do is led by conversation with practitioners. In London some of my key influences included artist-projects like ‘Bank’ who over a ten-year period created any manner of critical curatorial environments, exhibitions and art works from Zombie Golf to the occasional Peter Doig painting, to later work with Art & Language; also artist-run spaces and publications such as City Racing and Matthew Higgs Imprint ’93. Similarly, publications and projects in the US like Wallace Berman’s Semina and Dave Mullers Three Day Weekend. Perhaps it’s the ongoing question of what constitutes the frame that remains interesting and challenges the relationship between art its audience. I think the relationship between maker, producer, organizer, and curator is much more fluid now and at the point where these things intersect lies differing possibilities and other conversations. 

You first started curating as a graduate student. What were your first impressions? In other words, what didn't you like?  What excited you?

For my final undergraduate show at art-college I invited people I’d met in the local area to work with me on the installation.  In typical Northern English fashion, my Grandmother described an art-degree as a Mickey Mouse degree: essentially useless. Somewhat perversely, I invited a bunch of people from town--who might have been described as “useless” by the more conservative elements—to participate because I recognized some kinship or level of creativity. I remember working with a musician I’d met at a squat party—he carted a number of records into the space that we eventually used to make twisted, warped sculptures that looked like Mickey Mouse ears. It turned out he was the drummer with the space-rock band Hawkwind and it was his back catalogue we were turning into vinyl gloop. I think at the time I enjoyed the activity of producing work collectively, although as I recall that show was overtly authored as my show-- collaborative projects as final degree exhibitons weren’t encouraged.

I think the first point at which I understood the potential of curating and what it constituted as an activity was much later on while working at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham installing other artists exhibitions: Mark Wallinger, Nancy Spero, Mark Dion and Rigo 23. What excited me at the time was the level of discussion between artists and curators, and that that discussion resulted in a tangible experience through the exhibition.

What have been some of the favorite projects you curated over recent years?  Why?

My favored projects are those when there’s something at stake, when it feels like something’s addressed and it has a timeliness. So something like Meeting At Conway Hall, with Mark Leckey, Bonnie Camplin, Mark Titchner and the band Jack too Jack started for me with a discussion about artists’ lecture formats. It seemed like there was a lot of artists’ documentary video work or photo-essays around and I wondered what the experience of information-sharing would be like as a blown-up and blown-out out real-time lecture and event.

Earlier this year I worked on and edited a catalogue for friend and San Francisco artist Rigo 23 (Rigo 23 Vol. 1). Working with someone in order to present twenty-five years of their practice to the world was very much like curating a retrospective exhibition on the page. It also meant a lot, as Rigo’s was one of the first off-site projects I worked on back in the day at the Ikon and [he?] was someone that I’ve kept in touch with and who’s been supportive ever since. His work was included in the first group show I curated.  He made a road sign with a double headed arrow with the word ‘boring’ written through it which essentially pointed at all of other work in the show. I’ve since found out that this particular piece had been excluded from an exhibition in a key space (the Drawing Room) in New York as too risky a suggestion. So somehow what troubled New York made it to Birmingham.

If it’s not too hokey a suggestion (sheesh, is that American a term? I never use it), the projects that excite me the most relate to whatever’s needling me or giving me sleepless nights at any one given time. I’m currently organizing an event with UK artist Mark Titchner at Tate Britain that includes talks by Nicholas Bullen the founder member of Napalm Death and Shami Chakrabarti, director of the UK human rights and civil liberties organization Liberty; filmwork by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and Mark Titchner; and a performance by Penny Rimbaud, co-founder of the British anarchist punk band Crass.  The opportunity to create, suggest links, and direct associations and tensions between practices is something I value.

Tell us a bit about your interest in curatorial practice.  For example, what makes it a creative and powerful form of expression and communication for you?

As suggested it’s the ability to connect strands of interest, to suggest a fuller reading of a situation and the critical relationships between artists and art works, to map out and consider specific areas of culture and its interconnectedness. It’s also a form without overt rules, where the amateur enthusiast can present their version and have it work, although as with all things it feels like there is an increasing pressure to produce the rule-book.

Brian Eno described himself as a better collaborator than producer, someone who would “work with you to try to make the music he wanted to hear, rather than the producer who has no personal vision and wants to disinterestedly help someone else to realize theirs”. It’s an approach I find of interest in terms of curation: in part, whatever we do as cultural producers stems from the desire to nurture and maintain our own interests as well as those we choose to work with.

Lawrence Weiner once described the curator as a ‘cop’, presumably someone who polices the life out of free expression with every swing of the billy-club. When it works-- and I’m hoping I’m right-- the curator is more of a willing accomplice, a collaborator of sorts.

What impact do you hope to have at Creative Time?

I think these are interesting times to be an artist and a curator, whether you choose to respond directly to the dictating political situation or take sidesteps and work out a counter-position and find a different type of space. In my short time in New York I’ve found that there are a number of camps and approaches to art production. As a curator at Creative Time I hope to be able to respond to some of those approaches and to the form that the discussion takes and be true in my account of them.

In terms of method and approach, borrowing again from Eno I like his description of production, wherever possible to employ the ‘good ingredients and fast cooking approach’.  As a curator you have to wait till someone  does something before you can do anything, as an artist-curator sometimes it’s possible to make the first move.