Publisher's Synopsis
Selected projects by Geir Haraldseth 2005-2012. The independent curator might be independent in name only as there are always certain dependencies on funding, cohesion, sense, and hierarchies. If you want to work in this business, you have to play by the rules. If you want to eat you have to stay in line. The selected exhibitions and essays collected in this publication offer a few possible answers to whether there's a potential agency located in the oft-discussed title of independent curator. The projects featured in Great! I've written something stupid have been selected from a vast pool of endeavors by curator and critic Geir Haraldseth. Most of the exhibitions have been done in project spaces or in artists run spaces, while the writing has been sampled from different sources. The earliest example is from Haraldseth's time as a student at a curatorial training program, and other texts range from contributions to exhibition catalogs to unpublished essays. Writing proved to be one way of gaining a sense of independence for the author. That particular space on paper combined with an interest in methodologies developed by artists and his peers developed into a practice of exhibition making that offer new and exciting ways of thinking curatorially and writing exhibitions. Haraldseth has been inspired by a diverse set of voices such as Witold Gombrowicz, Peter Sloterdijk and Marcia Tucker and the resulting projects on display here in this publication is a cacophony that might not fit a singular narrative nor make much sense, but they are all attempts a staking new ground for the figure of the curator and marry convention with immaturity, spite and inquisitiveness. "Great! I've written something stupid…" reflects Haraldseth's efforts to carve out a space that is critical to contemporary art and its mores. In doing so, they demonstrate how vital it can be to assume the role of an independent curator in an art world bound by its dependency on patronage, on opinion, on its shared acceptance of unspoken rules of behavior. Through the guise of an independent curator, Haraldseth's practice illuminates new ways to perceive artists and curatorial practice, and also to understand the history, problems and potential of contemporary art as a field". - Lauren Cornel
