How to Curate a Life
By: Kaaron Briscoe
I have a love/hate relationship with my social media accounts. I love looking at the lives my family and friends are leading. There are pictures of adorable kids, posts about exciting trips, and lots of inspirational quotes…lots. Everyone’s life looks so perfect. Even our messes are perfect. At 2am, when I’m doubting my life choices (because that is what you do at 2am) that perfection mocks me. I wonder why I cannot get it together. Why don’t I have a house and car? Shouldn’t I be running a marathon? Why am I not engaged!?!
Luckily, the warm light of 10am rolls around and I remind myself that I live in NY and cannot afford the upkeep of a house, I love having a Metrocard, I hate running, and if I were engaged my husband would probably not take it well. Curating a life is nothing new. It is something we already do for ourselves. I find it fascinating.
Walter Kirn, the author of “Up in the Air”, has been quoted as saying:
You’ve got two options when you find out you’re under surveillance, and only two: one is hide, and the other is perform. We’ve picked perform.
Our social media accounts allow people to have access to our political views, our family dynamics, our dietary concerns, our religious beliefs, our romantic history, etc., etc. I have seen a couple break up and get back together via Facebook posts. Our social media is our life as performance art. It makes sense that we want to put on our best face.
But, what happens when a person allows someone else to pick and choose the narrative of their life?
The first thing I had to do was find a patsy…uh…I mean…a willing subject. Someone willing to let me wander through their life and handle it with my grubby little hands. I was extremely fortunate to find a friend willing to go along with this experiment. He trusted me with his story, I have a trustworthy face. We set aside a couple of two hour sessions (which was way too short) where he told me his life story from his first memory until age 18.
To listen to someone tell me his life story made me realize how seldom I actually just listen. The only reason I would have to interrupt him was to ask for clarification. I found it freeing to put my attention fully on someone else. Also, it was so engaging! Hearing how someone becomes the person sitting in front of you is enthralling stuff.
After four hours of recording I thought I had a good idea of what I wanted to do: A gallery setting with 100 curated objects and two performance pieces all coming together to give the viewer an impression of my subject… hahahahahahahahahaha{deep breath}hahahahahahahaha!
I was so young and silly then.
To his credit, when I told Moe at TMT this he did not tell me no. He kindly let me come to see it myself.
There is nothing wrong with that setup. Outside of the time issue such an undertaking would create, it is a perfectly sufficient way to curate someone’s life. But, if I’m being honest with myself, I was being lazy.
To curate someone’s life means that you have to make decisions on the story you want to tell. It involves editing. It feels weird to edit someone else, but I have had to divorce the affection I have for my friend from the work that I’m creating. I’m not telling his life story. I’m creating a story from his life. The gallery setting was a way of avoiding the editing.
So, I went back. I thought about the impression I got from all that I heard from my subject. I made a decision about who he was during that period of his life and I’ve tried to distill my decision down to its essence. Is my impression of him accurate? I don’t know. Does it matter?
In a few weeks I will present my project. I have no idea how it will turn out. For me, this is just a first step. I feel as if I am only skimming the surface of what a curated life can be. I think that I can dig deeper into this project and I plan to use the experience to help me mold the next iteration of this experiment. Can a life truly be an exhibition, an art project? It leads me to wonder what makes us the people we are.