Curators' Series #5. Bouvard and Pécuchet's Compendious Quest for Beauty.

Curators' Series #5. Bouvard and Pécuchet's Compendious Quest for Beauty.

Long revered as a literary cult classic, Flaubert's last, unfinished novel bears a remarkable relevance to the general ethos of today. In this precursor to Samuel Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, two middle-aged, Parisian copyists meet, become dear friends, and mutually stoke each other's indefatigable curiosity to know the world and its post-enlightenment ways better. They become autodidacts of a dozen different orders, teaching themselves everything from agriculture to medicine. However, despite their best intellectual intentions, almost any application of the often contradictory knowledge they recklessly accumulate and apply almost always ends in disaster. Yet success is not entirely elusive. That which leads them to continually cry in vain, "Où est la regle?" (Where is the rule?). When all is said and done, theirs is a methodology of hasty expertise, systematic failure, rare and inexplicable success, and disillusionment.
    In a time when any one individual can access and accumulate vast and sometimes even arcane stores of information, Flaubert's hapless antiheroes seem like prescient harbingers of our era. Such a methodology can also be said to implicitly describe a good portion of what takes place in contemporary art today. Seeking to render this implicit tendency explicit and examine its implications, Bouvard and Pécuchet's Compendious Quest for Beauty will see curators Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp applying the methodology of the perplexed copyists to the still nascent and increasingly polemical discipline of curating, as if they were Bouvard and Pécuchet themselves, in a thoroughly foredoomed and hubristic attempt to locate and define one of the most protean and subjective qualities of all: beauty.

Supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council England, www.artscouncil.org.uk.