The Missing Noun

There is supposed to be another word.

A curatorial practice. A curatorial approach. A curatorial eye.

Curatorial is an adjective. It describes the manner in which something has been selected, arranged, or presented. Ordinarily, it does not stand alone.

A Refined Curatorial does.

I named this publication years before I understood exactly what I meant by it.

I liked the way the words sat beside each other.

Refined suggested something considered.

Curatorial suggested the act of choosing.

Together they seemed to describe the thing I wanted to make before I completely understood what that thing would be.

Years later, the grammatical incompleteness feels more appropriate than I could have intended.

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To refine something is to remove.

We refine oil. Sugar. Metals. An idea.

The process is one of reduction. Something unnecessary is taken away until what remains is clearer, more precise.

To curate asks for the opposite.

It asks us to gather.

A curator moves through a world already crowded with things and begins making connections between them. This beside that. A photograph beside a chair. A record beside a memory. Something made fifty years ago beside something made last Tuesday.

Sometimes the meaning isn't contained entirely in either thing.

It appears in the space between them.

One word reduces.

The other gathers.

I didn't know that tension was inside the name when I chose it.

Maybe I couldn't have.

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When I started A Refined Curatorial, I knew mostly what I wanted it to feel like.

I wanted somewhere to put the things I kept finding.

Music. Art. Clothes. Food. Wine. Objects. Places.

Things that interested me but did not necessarily belong to the same category.

For a while I thought the category was the problem.

Eventually I understood that the connection was never the category.

It was the act of putting one thing beside another.

There is something else inside the word refined that I didn't notice then.

It sounds finished.

A thing has been worked on until it has reached its proper state. The excess is gone. What remains is the final version.

Curatorial points in the other direction.

There is always another thing to encounter.

Another connection to make.

Another reason to reconsider the arrangement.

Pay attention to almost anything for long enough and it begins pointing somewhere else.

One record leads to another record. An object leads to its designer, then its material, then the place and time that produced it. A bottle leads to a grape, a farmer, a piece of land.

The closer you look, the more there is to see.

The eye gets narrower and the world gets bigger.

Maybe that is the contradiction inside the name that I like now.

A Refined Curatorial.

One half suggests arriving.

The other suggests continuing.

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When I first chose the name, I could not have explained any of this.

Maybe that matters.

Names are usually expected to contain some declaration of intent. We imagine the person naming something already understands what it will become.

Sometimes the name arrives first.

Then you spend years growing into it.

A Refined Curatorial began as a phrase I liked.

It became a publication, an archive, and a way of accounting for things that had no reason to sit together.

Which brings me back to the grammatical problem.

There is supposed to be another word after curatorial.

Practice.

Approach.

Perspective.

Something to complete the thought.

For years, there wasn't one.

I don't think there should be now.

A finished sentence closes itself.

The missing noun leaves somewhere to go.