Mentor Of The Month

Q & A WITH JON TUPPER

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Mireille: What inspired you to pursue a career in the arts?

Jon: Well Mireille, I guess while I was younger, I used to go to a lot of galleries and museums, and read a lot, I was just really interested in anything to do with art it seemed—and contemporary art was really mystifying to me, so I wanted to learn more about it. So i’d always go out to see contemporary art shows. I don’t think my parents necessarily took me to a lot of galleries, i mean once or twice but when I was there I really enjoyed it. I liked the paintings, and liked the kind of feel of being inside a gallery—you’re special, it’s like being inside of a church, but it isn’t really a church and you can do anything. And the big crazy ideas, that seemed to match my crazy ideas.So when I was younger I just loved it, and when as I got older I started drawing, and painting and crafts, more than sport I guess. And continued to read a lot, and look at a lot of pictures, and yeah, after high school I was thinking about what I should do and fine arts appeared, and at least was  a good course at that time in the city I was living in, so I just went from there.

Mireille: What keeps you going?

Jon: It’s the ideas, you know it’s amazing when you’re around art—even if it’s historical art, or if it’s contemporary art, any kind of art, it’s the ideas that come out, they’re always fresh and now when we look back at historical art with Van Gogh or Impressionists, it’s changed, the way we look at them the same way we did ten years ago or twenty years ago, we look at them completely different because our social and political context has changed the way we look at it and we just look at things differently.

So everything evolves, and what I like today about art that I probably won’t like tomorrow or the next day, so it’s always fresh and there’s always new ideas out. There is this deep well of humanity with incredible ideas, rich ideas, for the most part—not always, but for the most part. You get a lot of pleasure, both visual and cerebral-intellectual pleasure out of art, and it continues to do that which is very exciting.

I think that there’s more painters than ever before, and trends come and go. The latest one was “new media”, which sort of came and left in a flash, and when those come and go they always leave a couple serious artists that sustain you for a long time. Right now people are struggling with the art market and how it skews art and makes certain kinds of art more popular and museums are another form of determination of what is “good art” and what is “bad art” so the various things inspire me right now. Really it’s ideas I guess again, and thinking of new art. I’m always reading magazines and keeping on track with things, you know whether it’s ‘Art Forum’, or ‘Canadian Art’, or you know, various magazines. Every year, every week, there seems to be a new art magazines on the racks, and you get different ideas and different viewpoints; European and North American and Asian and African arts, it’s great.

Mireille: You’ve had a great deal of positions. You’ve been artist, you’ve been a curator and you’ve been director. What perspectives have you gained from these varieties of positions?

Jon: Well, you know when I started out, I graduated from Art School and I was involved with a lot of social action stuff. I was involved with a lot of politics and art. I tried to use my savvy, media savvy from the art training to social action, so we did a lot of protests and that sort of thing but I was also in a really awful punk band. I used to produce a lot of events where music would happen, I guess you’d call them “raves” now, you know you’d rent a big sound system and get some really good Dub music or some really heavy Reggae and sell tickets. Or live bands and that sort of thing, I’d do that with some friends…I was never very lucrative, but it was fun. We would do all the advertising and the promotion and print up special tickets and we’d create this sort of sparkle around the event so that people would want to come—and we’d have a good time, it was creating our own party. We didn’t make that much money from it, but we sure had a good time. When I kind of moved from there, I started at an artist-run center. I started volunteering at an artist-run center, until I learned everything I could learn about that place, and when they decided they were hiring a new director, I was a natural choice because I had all of the knowledge about what was going on, and so…

Mireille: You swept the floors, you had painted the walls…

Jon: Yeah! You know, I was cleaning up the bathrooms after openings and things like that. I could take a lot of those skills that I learned as somebody who promoted music (and social action media-work) into the artist-run center so I could create a sparkle, and a buzz around an exhibition, or an event, or a performance, and those sorts of things.

So it was skills that I had picked up, and you know it’s funny business because when you’re curating shows or being the director of a gallery or anything at that level, all of your mistakes are made in public, and so people can see them. So if it’s a stinker show, you have to wear it for the length of the entire show, and if nothing more than the mailman coming once a day to drop off the mail in the office, he’s going to see it or she’s going to see it, so you’ve got to like, hide your eyes like “oh god, this is an awful show”, but the proposal looked good…It’s a place where you really make a lot of mistakes and unfortunately that’s still the case.

I think one of the things we need in Canada, not only in Canada, but all over the world, is a place where curators can actually get training and so, to not necessarily stop making mistakes but we don’t have to invent the wheel every time, you know, we can have a little bit of training. The best kind of training you can have is actually getting into a place and working in a real gallery with people that have done lots of shows or have done a few shows and are stimulating ideas about how to make exhibitions interesting and engaging for communities. So I think over the years I’ve learned a lot about how to engage, and what exciting engagements I can bring to the arts community and people outside of the community, you know, people that are just walking down the street. We want to get those people in the gallery, and when they come in they have a cool time. There’s nothing more rewarding to me than that.

Mireille: What major challenges have you experienced then; moving into a leadership role as director? Moving from, basically a janitor of sorts in an artist-run center to running a national public gallery?

Jon: Well I remember when I first started working in a senior role it went from a very small place where I was doing that: hanging the shows, cleaning the bathrooms, representing the gallery to the media and to public, you know, politicians and that sort of thing to a bigger institution where I was heading up the curatorial department. They brought me into a room, the first day on the job and I had twenty-five to thirty people reporting to me and I was the youngest person in the room, and it made me feel uncomfortable because there were people in their sixties there and I felt weird being their boss. Not only that, but I had a certain reputation in my artist-run center world, but they didn’t know who i was, they weren’t really connected to it, and they don’t really care about the things that I had done, even though I thought I had done some substantial things, they didn’t at all, so was a huge learning curve for me to step into a bigger institution with lots of staff (some of them because they are there for the job, and not because they have a great love or passion for the arts.)

It was a surprise and a big learning curve. I made some success of it, and it was really good but it was a struggle because you know, my management skills weren’t that great and they resisted. A lot of the staff sort of felt that they wanted somebody with a little more experience in my position perhaps. Then after several years (almost a decade) we got to the point where we could engage with one another, we may not have been friends or anything, but we knew where each other sat and I definitely learned a lot. It was like sink or swim.

Mireille: Do you see differences in the art communities you’ve inhabited? You’ve been in it from Winnipeg, Charlottetown, Banff…Where else have you been?

Jon: All over, and I’m on my way to Victoria. I’ve actually been involved in art worldwide, contemporary art worldwide, and I must say it’s a small little family we have in the world. You can basically phone anyon, you can call the top-named curator and talk to them. It’s not that intimidating and it really is a small family. We have our differences, ideological differences or methodological differences but fundamentally we all have passion for arts and culture. I find that pretty well everywhere you go there are languages we speak in art whether we say it’s identity issues or formalist concerns that are pan-national, they’re even post-national. You have a language that abstract painters speak that it doesn’t matter what your verbal language is, everyone can understand it around the world because it’s a shared language that we have. So, I think that for me, that’s a real kind of revelation that we can get beyond nationalism, that is usually an evil thing.

Mireille: Nationalism is evil? Why do you say that?

Jon: Yeah…well, because I think it gets people proud of their heritage or proud of themselves because they’re connected to a certain group of people. Whether they have a certain linguistic characteristic or by virtue of geography happen to be living beside one another, you know, you may have more connections with somebody who lives in Senegal than you do with somebody who lives down the street so it’s finding those shared ideas beyond geographical-political borders. It’s more exciting for me.

Mireille: So how does one call up an international curator? What’s the proper way to approach someone if you’re an emerging artist or an emerging curator?

Jon: Well, you have to have an idea, you’re not just calling for a general idea. Say if you had a show, looked at a show, and you said “what was the point of that show?” (for example) it seemed like you were using… (to a curator), “you were just using that artist and their artwork to make your own artwork, you’re exploiting that artist”, then I think you have something interesting to talk to that curator about. Then you could call them on the phone. Or you just wanted some ideas or you were just interested in something…I try to give. I think giving something as well as expecting something back with general questions, other than “how do I advance my career?”

I think it’s very clear how to advance your career, you just do it, you know? If you’re a graduate from an art school you need to know that there’s a great range of opportunities for you. You don’t necessarily need to be a curator, you could be a registrar or a conservator or an editor of an arts magazine. Or you could put on events, or run an artists-run center, you can run a commercial gallery you can review for magazines, you know, there’s a ton of jobs out there. It’s not just one job. Usually the curators job is the least sexy of the whole lot

Mireille: Really? *Laughing*

Jon: Yeah, because you’re dealing with both ends. You’re dealing with the artists on one side and the public on the other side and sometimes there are different expectations, and you’re having to deal with that. Then there’s putting together the show, and all the economics…Being a curator now is no longer sitting in an ivy-tower thinking then four years later you eject an exhibition that everybody loves. It’s more like you’ve got lots of exhibitions to do every year, you’ve got to engage ideas, you’ve got to fundraise, you’ve got to talk to politicians, you’ve got to paint walls, you’ve got to build sculpture stands. I mean, these are the realities…

I think that in most places there’s exceptions, in fairly large institutions that I’d never work at because they’re like tombs to me—they’re dead, and I think a lot of good ideas are killed by committee, you know? It’s like, let’s get together and discuss exhibitions, so you get ten people together discussing your idea and all of a sudden it’s watered down to the lowest common denominator, then what’s the point? You loose all the thrill of doing it. At smaller galleries you can get away with doing some pretty cool things and fun things and hopefully engage people along the way, and engage your community with what you’re doing. I think some of the most innovative and interesting exhibitions in this country are happening in smaller galleries outside the center, in smaller places taking bigger risks.

Mireille: I have a question about the differences and similarities, that you experience now in comparison to when you began as an emerging artist and curator. How have things changed? You’ve touched on it, but I was hoping you’d expand on it…

Jon: The similarities…as a person who’s hired a lot of curators, I’ve seen the applications across my desk, and what I look for in a curator is…(not that I’m someone who’s full of themselves or anything, i just happen to be the one to hires) I look for someone who doesn’t necessarily have a Phd or lots of academic background but someone who has a on the street experience with putting on a show or someone who can turn a show around in a week or can say “we gotta put a show up in a week”, or “we gotta deal with this in six weeks” (if you’re in a bigger institution or something like that), not someone who’s been working for four years trying to develop a Phd, because that’s not the reality, the reality is you’ve got to put on a lot of shows, and deal with a lot of stuff and you’re not going to have enough time to research, you’ve got to think quick and fast. Those are generally the type of people I look for and hire. People who actually have experience at a variety of levels—artist run centers, or university art galleries, big museums, those are the best people to find. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some people that are very, very good.

Mireille: So when you talk about curatorial training you’re not so much talking about the degrees, you’re talking about the nitty-gritty?

Jon: I’m talking about both. I’m talking about training in general. How do we train curators in this country? So there are the museum studies courses at many universities, unfortunately enough to say, not a lot of them impress me or maybe I just don’t know enough about them. I look at the people coming out of them and there’s not a lot that really informs me and I think that the danger is that they become homogenized. There’s one approach, there’s a standardized approach to museumology that which I don’t agree with. I mean, we need a variety of fresh ideas, and a variety of fresh approaches to how we display art and how we bring art to the public.

Mireille: In terms of the Banff Center for example, they have the curatorial institute, how do you feel about that? How do you think that would be of benefit to emerging artists or curators?

Jon: Yeah, I think it’s of wonderful benefit to cultural workers, not only just artists…because there are no opportunities for us to get together and talk about what it is we do. Sometimes we have panel discussions like CMA conferences and those kinds of things, and curators get together and talk about all the wonderful shows that we do, and I sit there and say “oh, bull…” I’m not interested in hearing how fabulous you are, I’m more interested in hearing those bad points, where you question what you do. You know when you’re thinking, “God, that was a bad exhibition, I should have never put those artists together” or “I should have never come up with that idea” or the shipping turned out to be horrendously expensive, or whatever, these things happen. I’m more interested in that.

When you do get your colleagues together in a closed room, and people start talking, people will say “Yeah, I really questioned myself with that exhibition, I really don’t know if it was successful or not”. That’s a good curator, someone who’s taking risks, and failing sometimes. Like, “Oh god, that was a failure, and this is why it was a failure…” That’s what’s constructive to me, and I know what it is to put on a good exhibition, I know how to put together a good exhibition, or not necessarily me, but I know a good exhibition when I see one. There’s a standard approach to make sure that it’s successful every time but there’s a level there. I wanna see those sparks, that kind of grittiness that I think every museum and art gallery in Canada needs in their program. The kind of sparkle that’s going to shock people, not with the content, but just thinking “Oh that’s an interesting way of installing that!” or “That’s interesting that that artist is beside that artist” so those ideas are being shared.

Mireille: Well based on your mistakes, what advice do you offer to emerging artist professionals?

Jon: I think that the thing that we have, where kids go to school, I  shouldn’t say kids, people go to university with enormous debt and have to find jobs right away and have to pay back the money they owe. I think the thing we need to fund in this country, is two years after that, so they can do internships and really learn the skills they need to for that job, so that they don’t have to pay back their loans right away, so that they can actually get experience. That would be a great learning experience for them I think. It would make for much better culture workers in Canada and that’s what we need. We need more great curators, we have lots of great artists, we need world-class curators, how about one?! *laughs*  That would be enough.

Mireille: Thank-you very much.

This podcast was conducted by Mireille Eagan - National Committee Member (Fredericton) and Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in PEI. Mireille has worked with regional and national arts organizations. These include the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Gallery Connexion, Struts Gallery, FOFA Gallery, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, “School Days” Museum, and Fredericton’s municipal cultural sector. Mireille holds a Masters in Art History from Concordia University. Her primary interest lies with the maritime provinces, particularly in support of its current creative initiatives.  Mireille is a freelance curator and writer, arts columnist with the Daily Gleaner, musician with several bands, and volunteers with a number of grassroots arts organisations. Currently, Mireille is the Interim Curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, but continues her close ties with the Fredericton arts community.