Methodology: “The Reflective Practitioner”

who applies a highly centralized and subjective control to many aspects of a collaborative creative work.33 The artist and critic, Robert Storr proposes the term “exhibition-maker” in relation to the activity of exhibition production as an alternative to curator because; “…it acknowledges the existence of a specific and highly complex discipline and separates the care or preservation of art - a curator‘s primary concern - from its variable display.”34 Storr‘s definition implies a possible compression of activities traditionally seen as being the remit of distinct individuals, the curator and the exhibition designer.

In response to a practice under scrutiny and a growing discourse on the subject, Sarah Pierce asks, “How did we get to a place where the curatorial means so much? Does it matter? How? To when? Is the curatorial a condition? A device? Is it a field or subject?”35 As a museum professional trained in the “traditional” duties of the curator and witnessing these changing definitions of the term over the course of my career, I return to Kate Fowle’s observation that opened this section. There is a need to understand what constitutes this multifaceted practice, specifically in relation to curating design.

Methodology: “The Reflective Practitioner”

The mode of investigation employed in this thesis is that of a “reflective practitioner”, an approach pioneered by Donald A. Schön, a leading social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His study published in 1983, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, presents a useful model for research into practice. Schön’s professional background as an industrial consultant, technology manager, urban

33

Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, ‘From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur’ in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, Thinking about Exhibitions, London: Routledge, 1996: 231-250.

34

Robert Storr, ‘Show and Tell’ in Paula Marincola (ed.), What Makes a Great Exhibition?, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Press, 2006: 14.

35

Sarah Pierce, ‘The Simple Operator’ in Jean-Paul Martinon (ed.), The Curatorial. A Philosophy of Curating, London: Bloomsbury, 2013: 97.

planner, policy analyst and teacher formed the background to his research which aimed to question the relationship between the kinds of knowledge honoured in academia and the kinds of competence valued in professional practice. Schön argues for the need for an inquiry into the epistemology of practice, based on a close examination of what practitioners actually do, as he explains:-

“What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage? How is professional knowing like and unlike the kinds of knowledge presented in academic textbooks, scientific papers and learned journals? In what sense, if any is there intellectual rigour in professional practice?”36

Over the course of Schön's research, he examined five professions - architecture, engineering, management, psychotherapy and town planning to show how professionals working in those fields approached problem solving. He argues that, in order to meet the challenges of their work, professionals working in these areas relied less on formulas learned in graduate school and more on the kind of improvisation learned in practice, a knowledge that is experiential and rarely verbalised or theorised. Schön defines this largely unexamined knowledge as “reflection-in-action” to show precisely how the process works and how it might be fostered in future professionals.

As a conceptual methodology, the “reflective practitioner” is relevant for my research as it provokes a process of self-questioning into my practice as a curator and into the ways in which design exhibitions are curated. As Schön argues, “the reflective practitioner” engages in reflective conversations with their situations by reflection on their patterns of action, on the situations in which they are performing and on the know-how implicit in their performance. They are reflecting on action and, in some cases, reflecting in action. They draw on repertoires of cumulatively

36

Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, USA: Basic Books Inc., 1983: viii.

developed knowledge and build up a repertoire of new cases, maxims and methods.37 Not infrequently, their experiments yield surprising results that cause them to reformulate their questions and which contributes to an existing store of knowledge:-

“What I want to propose is this. The practitioner has built up a repertoire of examples, images, understandings and actions. A practitioner’s repertoire includes the whole of his experience insofar as it is accessible to him for understanding and action.38

Schön argues that it is necessary to demystify professional knowledge39, a view supported by Paul O’Neill some thirty years later when he notes that demystification is now widely accepted within curatorial discourse as a method of defining and representing a curatorial position.40 Curator Annie Fletcher took the debate a step further when she called for “a level of mediated super visibility.”41 In Fletcher’s view, there is an assumption that an exhibition has been curated. The curator’s stated remit now incorporates the process of demystification as an inherent part of the practice in which to supply information, to be open and to be transparent is paramount. The effects of such super visibility helps to shape the conversations around curatorship and maintain a dominant discourse.42

The discourse continued in January 2014 at a symposium organised in Amsterdam by the Stedelijk Museum in collaboration with the De Appel Curatorial programme. The premise, What Do We Do When We Are Doing It?, recognised that most cultural producers feel a need to re-evaluate how they work and how processes can be optimised, even if the methodologies

37

Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action, USA: Basic Books Inc., 1983: 265.

38 Ibid.: 138.

39 Ibid.: 340.

40

Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT, 2012: 34.

41

Annie Fletcher cited in Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT, 2012: 34-35.

42 Ibid.: 34-35.