Читать книгу Thinking Contemporary Curating - Terry Smith - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIn a recent essay, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” I track the usage of the term “contemporary” in art discourse during modernity and propose an art-historical hypothesis about contemporary art. I try to set out a framework in which we might identify the precise shape of the act of thought—the affective insight—that contemporary life requires of its art, of the criticism of that art, and of the history of that art: the (necessary, but never sufficient) kernel from which, via many vicissitudes, art must be made and criticism and history written. All kinds of inherited inspirations, medium constraints and possibilities, and many still-vital artistic trajectories remain relevant to such making and writing. Nevertheless, our experience of contemporaneity—of the multiple, various ways of being in time today, contemporaneously—is disposing art, criticism, and history in different ways, and is requiring fresh concepts, mediums, and languages. This is my conclusion:
Place making, world picturing, and connectivity are the most common concerns of artists these days because they are the substance of contemporary being. Increasingly, they override residual distinctions based on style, mode, medium, and ideology. They are present in all art that is truly contemporary. Distinguishing, precisely, this presence in each artwork is the most important challenge to an art criticism that would be adequate to the demands of contemporaneity. Tracing the currency of each artwork within the larger forces that are shaping this present is the task of contemporary art history.1
Is it possible to be as concise about what contemporaneity—our current condition—is asking of art curatorship? Perhaps it is. If so, the first step is to recognize that the object of contemporary curating is much larger than contemporary art. It must encompass all other art: art from any and every past, current art that is not contemporary, as well as projective, future art. (Some artists, in fact many, envisage art that is not subject to this past-present-future triad. Curators will follow; some are already on this trail.) Like contemporary art, contemporary curating is embroiled in time, but not bound by it; entangled with periodizing urges, but not enslaved to them; committed to space, but of many kinds, actual and virtual; anxious about place, yet thrilled by dispersion’s roller-coaster ride. It does not follow a set of rules; rather, it adopts an approach arising from an emergent set of attitudes. Can we say that the purpose of curating today is something like this: To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) contemporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as these are manifest in art present, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal? It follows that what is understood in the art world as “Contemporary Art,” while it does in fact inspire contemporary curating of all kinds, including exhibitions of art from previous periods, does not bind curators to its time-bound imperatives.
By art, to put it at its minimum, I mean any intentionally created existent that, following processes of searching self-reflection and including consideration of previous and other imaginable art, embodies its being and establishes its relationships with its anticipated viewers, primarily through visual means. To exhibit is—again following such processes—to bring a selection of such existents (along, perhaps, with other relevant kinds), or newly created works of art, into a shared space (which may be a room, a site, a publication, a web portal, or an app) with the aim of demonstrating, primarily through the experiential accumulation of visual connections, a particular constellation of meaning that cannot be made known by any other means. Of course, such meaning may be parsed in terms other than strictly exhibitionary: art critical, art historical; literary, philosophical, cultural; personal or idiosyncratic; ideological or programmatic—the list is long. But exhibitionary meaning is quite specific because it is established and experienced in the space of an exhibition, actual or virtual (virtual includes memory).2 The parsings, therefore, are translations from curatorial into other expository and interpretative languages.
It follows from what I have said thus far that, broadly speaking, contemporary curating aims to display some aspect of the individual and collective experience of what it is, or was, or might be, to be contemporary. Thus there is a spatial and phenomenological horizon for contemporaneity within the exhibition: it is a discursive, epistemological, and dramaturgical space in which various kinds of temporality may be produced or shown to coexist.3 Enabling viewers to experience contemporaneity in an exhibition setting (taking “exhibition” in the broad sense mentioned, and “setting” to mean any appropriate situated context) would, through this reading, be the curatorial equivalent of making contemporaneity visible in the case of art and of capturing it in writing for publication in the case of criticism and history. I am assuming that exhibiting artistic meaning is the main task of the contemporary curator, to which all other roles are subservient.
Yet while this might bring us to the same kernel of meaning that I got to (I hope) for contemporary art criticism and history writing, it does not fully distinguish what is unique to curatorial thinking. To do so would be to identify the kind of act of thought, the sort of affective insight, that contemporary life requires of curating in a way that it asks it of nothing else. What, then, is contemporary curatorial thought?
THINKING CONTEMPORARY ART
In the Art Bulletin article, as well as in What is Contemporary Art?, there is a crucial step in my argument where I set out, under the headings “Curators in Contention” and “Curators Stage the Debate,” the ways in which, in the years around 2000, Kirk Varnedoe, Okwui Enwezor, and Nicolas Bourriaud offered competing perspectives on the prevailing direction of contemporary art.4 Their insistence, respectively, on a continuity of modernist values within contemporary art, the arrival of a worldwide postcolonial constellation, and the small scale yet portentous emergence of a relational aesthetics, are examples of the kind of curatorial insight into contemporary art that I am talking about. Note that these are different kinds of ideas: the continuity of modernism is an idea about the current profile of art’s autonomous evolution (how art develops by persisting through all the non-art forces that act upon it); the postcolonial constellation is an idea about the current overall shape of human history, to which artistic developments are assumed to be subject; while relational aesthetics is an art world tag, a term for an emergent, imperfectly grasped, but nonetheless interesting way of making art, tossed around between artists, which after a while surfaces as one among a plethora of others to become a critical descriptor, and is then adopted by a curator who believes that curating is a practice of working closely with artists to enable them to manifest their intentions in exhibitions in the optimal possible form.
These three curators already knew, or quickly recognized, that each of these tendencies—although vastly different in scale, ambition, and impact—required a distinct kind of exhibition making, respectively understood as: expand the white cube, decolonize the biennial, domesticate the gallery space. Taken together, in their very contention, these tendencies, along with the ongoing evolution from institutional critique to critical institutionality—to which I will return—shaped debate about what was happening in the years around 2000 more than any other set of ideas coming from art criticism, history, or theory at the time, more even than the unthink that sustained the art market then and does so still.
At that time I understood these curatorial ideas as key indicators (among a plethora of others) of a larger art critical—and, I soon realized, art historical—idea: the contemporaneousness of three powerful currents that, I believe, surge through the bewildering, beguiling variety of contemporary art. My reading would have been impossible without the insightfulness of curators such as these. Their thoughts became crucial elements in a broader argument that I will now briefly summarize. It begins from the realization that, during the 1980s and 1990s, art had come to seem markedly different from what it had been during the modern era: it seemed, above all, and before anything else, contemporary. In art contexts, during the past century or so, these two terms were used interchangeably, usually with “contemporary” as the default, secondary reference to “modern.” Recently, however, usage has nearly equalized and the buzz is with “contemporary.”5 I asked myself what kind of change was this: Illusory or actual, singular or multiple? Why did it happen? How deep does it go? Why is it at once so easy yet also strange to itself, so estranged from itself? How come it had, so soon, a history or, already, many histories? In What is Contemporary Art? and Contemporary Art: World Currents I offer an integrated set of arguments in response to these questions, each of them identifying a different kind of contemporaneity within the totality of the world’s art.6
Here are these arguments, in a nutshell. A worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art was prefigured in the major movements in late modern art of the 1950s and 1960s, was unmistakable by the 1980s, and continues to unfold through the present, thus shaping art’s imaginable futures. These changes occurred and continue to unfold in different and distinctive ways in each cultural region and in each art-producing locality around the world, the specific histories of which should be acknowledged, valued, and carefully tracked alongside recognition of their interaction with other local and regional tendencies and with dominant art-producing centers. This diversity has fed into a worldly (not global or world) contemporary art, within which, I suggest, three currents may be discerned. Remodernist, retro-sensationalist, and spectacularist tendencies fuse into one current, which continues to predominate in Euro-American and other modernizing art worlds and markets with widespread effect both inside and outside those constituencies. Against these, art created according to nationalist, identarian, and critical priorities has emerged, especially from previously colonized cultures. It came into prominence on international circuits such as biennials and traveling temporary exhibitions: this is the art of transnational transitionality. The third current cannot be named as a style, a period, or a tendency. It proliferates below the radar of generalization. It results from the great increase in the number of artists worldwide and the opportunities offered by new informational and communicative technologies to millions of users. These changes have led to the viral spread of small-scale, interactive, DIY art (and art-like output) that is concerned less with high art style or confrontational politics and more with tentative explorations of temporality, place, affiliation, and affect—the ever-more-uncertain conditions of living within contemporaneity on a fragile planet.
Continuing modernism, the postcolonial constellation, and relational aesthetics—the signature ideas of the curators mentioned above—are labels for complex and subtle curatorial insights into a cluster of values, practices, and effects that were definitive ten or fifteen years ago. For me, as a historian of contemporary art, my ongoing questions are these: How have the currents I identified in 2000 unfolded since? How have they changed relative to each other? What other kinds of art and art-like practices have emerged, and how do they impact on these currents or suggest the growth of others? I present my ideas in my teaching, in public talks, and in essays and books. Critical thought about these phenomena demonstrated by inventive curators (those already mentioned, as well as Dan Cameron, Catherine David, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist and many others) builds on their insights into the current state of art in order, above all, to present them in the format of an extended, expanded exhibition of some type. Exhibiting might range from rehanging part of a permanent collection through various kinds of temporary exhibition to the staging of an event, the creation of a sequence of sites, or the orchestration of a discursive interaction, such as a public dialogue. The exhibition—in this expanded, extended sense—works, above all, to shape its spectator’s experience and take its visitor through a journey of understanding that unfolds as a guided yet open-weave pattern of affective insights, each triggered by looking, that accumulates until the viewer has understood the curator’s insight and, hopefully, arrived at insights previously unthought by both.
If we can say that a historian, critic, or theorist searches for a conceptualization (usually a mental image) that encapsulates the apparently disparate elements of his or her analysis into a definable “shape,” a discursive figure that holds up when explicated (thought through, written out, contested in dialogue, measured against the works) in detail, then the equivalent kind of curatorial insight might be one that gathers all of the elements under consideration into a previsualized exhibition or, more explicitly, into a projective imagining of the viewer’s journey through such an exhibition, or of the participant’s likely accumulative experience if it is an event. While many curators still envisage one (ideal?) viewer’s pathway, others prioritize a number of possible routes for that viewer, or the passaging of numbers of viewers, moving in parallel or in concert. And of course these projective imaginings are modified in the planning, in the mounting, in response to the exigencies of available elements, to the limits, but also the potentialities, of the time, space, and persons involved. The how of selecting the artworks and other materials and of mounting the exhibition as an arena of experience is as crucial as what it is for and why it is consequential.
To many curators, it is precisely the necessity of having to forge an exhibition in the crucible of practical contingencies that distinguishes what they do from the empathetic insight required of the critic, the speculative bent of the theorist, and the historian’s commitment to arm’s-length research into art that is becoming consequential. (Let us leave aside for the moment that critics, theorists, and historians have their different, but equally demanding, pragmatic crucibles; thus this distinction is poorly conceived.) In What Makes a Great Exhibition? Paula Marincola argues that:
Questions of Practice places its emphasis on and asserts the value of how concepts surrounding curating are filtered through lessons derived from repeated performance, from thinking and doing, or, perhaps more accurately, thinking based on doing. It is in practice that a priori theories and closely argued theories meet with the resistance of the empirical and the contingent. Various factors, many beyond the curator’s control—insufficient budgets, recalcitrant lenders, space constraints, competing institutional imperatives and priorities, ancillary resources or the lack of them, to name a few—defy the most carefully cherished ideas and ideals. Curatorial intelligence, invention, improvisation, and inspiration are developed and refined by effectively engaging and reconciling these constraints as the inevitable limitations that accompany most exhibition making.7
Every point made here is absolutely true. As an ensemble of statements, however, this implicitly identifies curatorial thought with the conditions in which it is exercised. It is as if to “think and do” within such constraints is unique to curators. Yet the metaphorical comparisons for which Marincola and others reach suggest that the same holds for many other kinds of cultural producer and interpreter. She cites Walter Hopps as saying, “The closest analogy to installing a museum exhibition is conducting a symphony orchestra.”8 For his best analogy to exhibition making, Robert Storr cites the film director when it comes to ultimate responsibility (he or she who controls “the final cut”), while the process, for him, is closest to that of “the literary editor who negotiates with publishers and writers on behalf of the ‘best’ version of the work that can be obtained.”9 While these are suggestive analogies they do not, in themselves, isolate the unique features of curatorial thought. They are, however, helpful in pointing to one of its essential (necessary, but not sufficient) qualities: whatever else curatorial thinking is, it is always deeply embedded in the practice of actually mounting the exhibition. On analogy to the thinking within a medium that artists must do in order to create a work, it is praxiological.
ART CRITICAL, CURATORIAL, AND
HISTORICAL THINKING COMPARED
In her review of Performa 11, “So Big, Performa Now Misses the Point,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith chastises RoseLee Goldberg for not pushing hard enough at programming events that, in contrast to those that blur the boundaries between theater and the visual arts in some vague or haphazard manner, fully exemplify and at the same time push at the boundaries of “visual art performance.” This is an art critic holding a curator to account, demanding explicitly that her exhibition be “a kind of argument about what is and what is not performance art or, more specifically, what constitutes a particular kind of performance art that is implied by the term ‘visual art performance.’”10 Is this a fair comment on a real shortfall within an enterprise that is essentially shared by both curator and critic or an example of an art critic missing a curatorial point?
Perhaps, if we take a historical perspective on the Performa project, we will find it to be an interesting disagreement about what counts as “visual art performance.” Since 2005 these biennials have consistently pursued and expanded Goldberg’s conviction about the centrality of performance art to the history of modernist avant-gardism and have sought to revivify the flagging energies of this tradition. She has done this through deliberate commissions, thus infusing performance art as a category of practice with the visual intelligence, production values, plentitude, and embracing affect so evident in the works of certain installation artists, such as Shirin Neshat and Isaac Julien, who have absorbed cinematic poesis. Each iteration of Performa has sought to advance this quest by testing it against one or more of the other arts adjacent to performance and by reviving a relevant historical connection: contemporary dance and Happenings in 2007, architecture and Futurism in 2009, and theater itself in 2011. As with any experimental event, especially those that are festive in character, there is overreach, confusion, and failure. However, the interesting outcome, still emergent, is a compelling hybrid form, a kind of performative installation, the shifting shapes of which we can glimpse in William Kentridge’s I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, Mike Kelley and Mark Beasley’s A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality, both from 2009, or Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss from 2011, the 12-hour-long performance of repeats of the last act, two minutes in duration, of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Is Smith sensing a project that, however successful at its best, is hitting up against the limits of its initial conception? Or must art-critical priorities always undervalue the instinct within performance to exceed its own terms, an achievement of theatricality only possible if performance contrives to court failure? Has this instinct, so fundamental to theatrical performance, but questioned in favor of the neutral or the natural in late modern experimental performance art, returned to color contemporary performative installations?
What do examples such as these suggest for our quest to distinguish the qualities that are distinctive about curatorial thought? Provisionally and schematically, we might posit that art-historical thinking typically seeks to identify the concerns, techniques, and meanings that shape works of art made during the time and in the place under consideration and that connect these works to the social character of their time and place (how they come from it, what they return to it). Taking an art-historical perspective also means constantly assessing the significance of each work or grouping of works in comparison to those made before and after in order to identify the profile of that time through its major and minor forms, styles, and tendencies. We might then say, again too schematically, that art-critical thinking seeks to register the ways form is figured into meaning in individual works of art at the moment that they are first seen by the critic, to compare these immediate impressions with memories of elements in works that the same artist has made to date, in others made recently by other artists, and, if relevant, those made earlier. If these reductive characterizations are (provisionally) acceptable, then perhaps we could go on to say that curatorial thinking about the art of our time, or another time, is also devoted to making manifest the same elements that preoccupy art historians and critics, but differs in its relationship to the elements. Above all, curating seeks to encourage or enable the public visibility of works by artists either by assembling a selection of existing works for exhibition or by commissioning works for display so that they may be seen by a disinterested audience for the first time or be seen differently by such an audience because of the ways the works are presented. In this ideal, imaginary model, curating follows the response to a new work of art by the artist’s immediate circle, and in many cases by those interested in making it available for sale or wishing to buy it (thus the word “disinterested” in the previous sentence), but curating precedes art-critical response, audience appreciation, and the eventual assessment of art-historical significance.
William Kentridge, I am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, 2010. Image from performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
Of course, each of these practices is deeply dependent on the other. If we can say that from the 1940s to the 1960s critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg gradually moved from working within what was essentially a literary genre—a belle lettrist writing of essays, commenting on events, and reviewing of books—to providing regular responses to the shows presented (we would now say, softly, curated) by the art dealers shaping the emergent commercial gallery scene in New York, then we might also say that the height of Robert Hughes’s art writing was achieved as he grappled with the blockbusters staged by the major public galleries in the city during the 1970s and 1980s, notably those presented by curators such as William Rubin, Walter Hopps and Henry Geldzahler. Critics active since then who seek to place their immediate responses within larger, unfolding frameworks have focused on the biennials and the internationalization of contemporary art (that can, and should, include readings of regional and local creativity against these broader horizons). Many other art writers have been content to serve as mouthpieces of the spectacularization promoted by the auction house-led art market. Unfortunately, this kind of writing prevails today in most art publications. Fortunately, it is being assailed on all sides: by a growing awareness of the historical resonances within contemporary art and by a dispersion of interest in art and visual creativity that spreads across social media. While criticality drives the first of these, it is a rare, occasional spark in the second. Here is an interesting challenge for curators: to think past the invitation to assist in the uncritical immediation of consumerized subjects that capital now offers (the much-celebrated interactivity that Slavoj Žižek correctly caricatures as “interpassivity”) and to curate experiences in which subjects exercise the kinds of creativity required by their contemporaneity.
In this context, the exhibition is a selective offering of art to an audience, to art’s future, and to the world to come. The curator is a crucial handmaiden not necessarily to the creation of an artwork (although that is becoming more often the case) but certainly to its becoming public beyond a narrow circle, to its entering the art world, its reaching (in recent times) the expanding audiences for art, and thus its circulation to the world at large. In this comparison, curators are likely to be more tentative, more provisional about their ideas of what is meaningful about the work than art historians and, to a lesser, but still appreciable degree, more circumspect about specifying the significance of art than art critics. They will certainly have a strong sense that the work is meaningful, albeit in ways yet to be fully defined. Storr puts it this way:
A good exhibition is never the last word on its subject. Instead it should be an intelligently conceived and scrupulously realized interpretation of the works selected, one which acknowledges by its organization and installation that even the material on view—not to mention the things that might have been included, but were not—may be seen from a variety of perspectives, and that this will sooner or later happen to the benefit of other possible understandings of the art in question. In short, good exhibitions have a definite, but not definitive, point of view that invites serious analysis and critique, not only of the art but also of the particular weights and measures used in its evaluation by the exhibition maker.11
Critics and historians, in comparison, seek stronger, more definite statements about the nature and the significance of the art they encounter and study. Curators do everything necessary to bring works up to the point where they may become subject to critical and historical judgment. They exercise a very similar repertoire of skills and competencies and are moved by a closely similar set of passions and commitments, but curators, on this reading, are appraisers, not judges. Nor are they mainly chroniclers, as art historians must be (even of the present and especially of the immediate past). Curators certainly may leap to attempt both judgment and claims of significance, but will do so with a conscious sense of how provisional their proposals must be.
What is being emphasized from these perspectives is curating as a profession, one that proffers art and offers fresh work or a fresh presentation of known work. To whom? To what? Making the work available to appreciation, understanding, interpretation, and impact. A corollary is holding back from articulating any of these things at the time of presentation and being reticent about doing so in the place of presentation. Interpretation remains in the wings, as a second order of knowledge awaiting the viewer who is imagined standing in front of the work in the context of an exhibition staged by the curator or as a participant in the work enabled by the curator, if that is its form. Within the space of the exhibition itself, the curator’s interpretation remains unstated, implicit. In its explicit form, it usually becomes available to the viewer later—in the catalogue, for example—as a supplement to the understanding that he or she already arrived at while taking in the exhibition.
While this sequence of events may benefit the exhibition visitor, it could be seen to disadvantage the curator. As many curators say, the preparation for an exhibition is governed by two deadlines: that of the catalogue being sent to the printer and that of the opening night. The gap between these dates can run to many months. This schedule deprives the curator of the chance to learn from the exhibition itself and to share that knowledge with the visitor. No matter how well the curator knows the work that is to be shown, no matter how suggestive the model, however experienced he or she may be, when writing in the catalogue the curator can state only a belief about the subject of the exhibition. No claim to be able to share its exhibitionary content can plausibly be made. In practice, most curators write as if this gap did not exist. To others, it is a root cause of the reticence that pervades their texts. It is extraordinary that a widely shared solution to this problem has not yet evolved.12
What is the role of wall texts within this model of curating? Modernist conceptions of the autonomy of the art object, expressionist theories of instinctive, unmediated empathy, and the more general reluctance among curators to, as it was often put, “interpose themselves between the artwork and the viewer’s direct experience of it” led to decades during which exhibitions received no more than the most minimal title (and then a purely descriptive one) and nothing more was to be found inside a gallery than wall labels with the name of the artist, title of the work, its date of making, and perhaps its medium, always in plain, nine point type. With the recent boom in audiences (the majority of which are unfamiliar with art) and the increasing display of art that is unfamiliar even to knowledgeable visitors, the provision of information within exhibitions has become essential. Even when the work of the exhibited artist or group of artists is well known, most exhibitions open with a general statement as to the main content and relevance of this exhibit. If, as we have already established, the curator is a creative producer of exhibitions, it is a deception to pretend to be absent.
Therefore, this raises a question about the second-person voice used in nearly all introductory texts, an issue that can only be resolved in the circumstances specific to each exhibition. In general, the challenge is to calibrate the information precisely to that needed for each stage of the experience: thus the general introductory text, the room text or those related to a cluster of works, the wall labels beside individual works, and, sometimes, a take-out reflection. Many of these tasks are now migrating to rentable audio devices, where they are supplemented by the voice of the curator (or often the director, but sometimes, regrettably, the collector). They are also appearing, via apps, on the mobile devices that increasing numbers of visitors bring to galleries, which deeply mediate viewers’ reactions to the work on display. Making exhibitions will more and more become an activity conducted at least in part online. Viewers will expect a variety of voices in the exhibition, as they do in most contexts outside of it: there will be fewer divisions––territories, hierarchies––within the consumption of culture. This will diversify the curator’s role and spread laterally his or her voice.
The same will be true for art critics and art historians. So far, I have been writing as if there were basic, core, ongoing tasks for all art world players and that these tasks, however intimately interdependent, are also to an important degree distinctive in each case. I have concentrated on curators, critics, and historians, but similar comments could be made about the roles of artists, gallerists, agents, collectors, auctioneers, museum directors, arts administrators, and so on. Our challenge is to identify what is ongoing and what is contemporary about each of these tasks—that is, what remains and what has changed during the shift from modern to contemporary art. Given the drift of exhibitionary venues toward more and more experimental, open, virtual, and temporary forms, and the constant, even accelerating switching of roles between players from every node, we know that these efforts to identify core concerns and distinct competences for each player are doomed to become outdated as soon as they are identified. Nonetheless, they are actualities, and we must see them straight if we are to find answers when we ask: Is this or that change, however inevitable it might seem, a change for the better?
THE GRAMMAR OF THE EXHIBITION
When Storr wants to specify “the basics” of exhibition making, he is led to this merging of terms:
Now to the basics. The primary means for “explaining” an artist’s work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling. Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and commentary, documentation and interpretation. Galleries are paragraphs, the walls and formal subdivisions of the floors are sentences, clusters of works are the clauses, and individual works, in varying degrees, operate as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and often as more than one of these functions according to their context.13
He does not pursue this metaphor any further. A recent issue of Manifesta Journal attempts to do so by devoting itself to “The Grammar of the Exhibition.”14 It features not only a variety of ideas about what the underlying structures of exhibition making might be but also some quite antithetical perspectives concerning whether anything approximating a grammar is possible. Efforts to define a grammar are attempts to discern whether there is a set of rules (syntax) that works on the raw material (art practice, or some aspect of the world, seen as a generative base) to shape the language of the exhibition (on analogy to written or spoken language). Of course, for curatorship every aspect of these operations is spatial (it presumes a setting—physical, mental, imagined, affective) and then temporal (it presumes reflexive movement through that setting). Thus each particular exhibition would be an array of speech acts; the exhibition is, in this analogy, a conversational setting. A more accurate metaphor would call up the semantics of the exhibition, that is, how it generates meaning by the relationships between its parts. This obviates the elaborations necessary to keep alive the metaphorical connection between languages and exhibitions, one that almost no one pursues anyway. From this perspective, the most useful essay in this issue is Mary Anne Staniszewski’s account of the curatorial thought underlying Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo’s exhibitions at Exit Art since the early 1980s.
Installation view, Reactions, Exit Art, New York, 2002. Curators: Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo
Putting it this way (as philosopher and critic Peter Osborne does in his opposition to the very idea, expressed in the same issue of Manifesta) moves us away from the tendency toward rule-bound formalism that is implicit in most appeals to systematic structures such as grammar, and instead toward a critical curatorial tendency that is closer to the spirit of Maria Lind’s original proposition.
Is there something we can call “the curatorial”? Something that manifests itself in the activities of a curator, whether employed or independent, trained as an artist or an art historian? It is clear that curating is much more than making exhibitions: it involves commissioning new work and working beyond the walls of an institution, as well as what are traditionally called programming and education. But can we speak of “the curatorial” beyond “curating in the expanded field”: as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education, and fundraising?15
The changed conditions within which curators practice is evoked here, but this does little more than name as curating a number of activities that have been to date considered subsidiary, feeder, educational, or publicity—roles that may or may not be carried out by the curator, depending on time, inclination, and the availability of others to take them on. Acknowledging the inspiration of site-specific practices, context-sensitive art, and institutional critique, Lind goes on to evoke the importance of consciously “curating” these activities in order to link “objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourse in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.” This description could apply to populist programming, such as the Mixed Taste series at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver,16 but Lind has something more serious in mind:
Rather than being the product of the curator’s labor per se, curating is the result of a network of agents’ labor. The outcome should have the disturbing quality of smooth surfaces being stirred—a specific, multilayered means of answering back in a given context. Rather than representing, “the curatorial” involves presenting—it performs something in the here and now instead of merely mapping it from there and then.17
A distinction between curatorial and art-historical thinking is being suggested here. A closeness to artistic creativity and perhaps to that of engaged public education is sought instead. The critical aspect of her concept comes out more distinctly in a recent formulation:
I mean a practice that goes beyond curating, which I see as the technical modality of making art go public in various ways. “Curating” is “business as usual” in terms of putting together an exhibition, organizing a commission, programming a screening series, etcetera. “The curatorial” goes further, implying a methodology that takes art as its starting point, but then situates it in relation to specific contexts, times, and questions in order to challenge the status quo. And it does so from various positions, such as that of curator, an editor, an educator, a communications person, and so on. This means that the curatorial can be employed, or performed, by people in a number of different capacities in the ecosystem of art. For me, there is a qualitative difference between curating and the curatorial. The latter, like Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the political in relation to politics, carries a potential for change.18
Irit Rogoff offers a more deconstructive version, one that moves the idea more firmly beyond its efforts to first recognize, then “unbound,” the various art world roles:
In a sense “the curatorial” is thought, and critical thought at that, that does not rush to embody itself, does not rush to concrete itself, but allows us to stay with the questions until they point us in some direction that we might not have been able to predict…. Moving to “the curatorial,” then, is an opportunity to “unbound” the work from all of those categories and practices that limit its ability to explore that which we do not yet know or that which is not yet a subject in the world.19
These formulations have achieved some currency among curators—rightly so, because they pick up on major shifts in art practice, in art institutions, and in the constantly changing conditions of those who work within them and in relation to them.
Maria Lind at the panel discussion "Extending Infrastructures, Part 1: Platforms & Networks," March 12, 2011, The Now Museum conference, March 10-13, 2011, presented by the PhD Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International, and the New Museum, New York
What would it be like to stay with the questions, as Rogoff suggests, and to follow them as far as they can go? Perhaps it would enable us to be a little more exact as to how we might define the kind of curatorial insight needed now. This is what I will attempt to do in these essays. I believe that something like this is what João Ribas is seeking in his essay “What to Do With the Contemporary?”20 He is alert to the variety of ways of being in time that constitute contemporaneity as I have described it. He ends up, as many others do, with Agamben’s (and Žižek’s, but first Nietzsche’s) paradox that the most contemporary person is he who is most out of joint with his time.21 Archiving this contemporaneity from a position alert to its darknesses is Ribas’s recommendation. To me, Agamben’s paradox marks both the strength and the limit of the most advanced thinking on these matters.
Here is another recent example of such thinking:
Among the more puzzling preoccupations of dialogues around art during the past five years has been “the contemporary,” a seemingly self-evident description that, to date, has operated largely in reverse—that has been put forward, in other words, as a meaningful denomination and subject of inquiry in advance of any actual, deductive relationship to the surrounding world. The hope, it would seem, is that the term employed by itself and evocatively will help tease out some general understanding of the conditions for art making and its reception today. Yet, unlikely as this might seem, the impulse is easy enough to fathom: artists, art historians, curators, and critics alike wish to find historical trajectories in art today where none immediately announce themselves; a disorienting air of atemporality prevails instead. Indeed, the imperative for historical precedence or distinction becomes only more urgent in light of the speculative obsessions with the “new” in a radically expanded art system whose borders have become so porous as to erode the very ideation of art. If there is a substantive sense of “the contemporary” to be employed here, it is likely to be the “out-of-jointness” that philosopher Giorgio Agamben ascribed to the term: Something is contemporary when it occupies time disjunctively, seeming always at once “too soon” or “too late,” or, more accurately in terms of art now, seeming to contain the seeds of its own anachronism.22
These remarks open Tim Griffin’s review of the 2011 Venice Biennale, from which he goes on to contrast the “quietness” with which Central Pavilion curator Bice Curiger displays this condition to the urgency with which Francesco Bonami presented it in 2003: “The volatile symptoms of Bonami’s exhibition have by now settled into general conditions. Like so much art today, each individual work might reflect the cultural moment, but one asks whether reflection is enough, or whether there is some other job left to do.”23
Asking about “some other job” is, I believe, more challenging than retreating into Agamben’s paradox, which is limited by its being an evocation of the affective experience of an intellectual’s experience of contemporary conditions that, however poetic and accurate, has little to say about many other ways of world making and unmaking that are in play today. The philosopher is, however, absolutely right about the world condition that has thrown down this kind of challenge to (European and U.S.) intellectuals:
Irit Rogoff at the panel discussion “From Discursive Practices to the Pedagogical Turn,” April 29, 2010, Deschooling Society conference, April 29-30, 2010, presented by the Serpentine Gallery and the Hayward Gallery/Southbank Centre, London
The fall of the Soviet Communist Party and the unconcealed rule of the capitalist-democratic state on a planetary scale have cleared the field of the two main ideological obstacles hindering the resumption of a political philosophy worthy of our time… . Thought thus finds itself, for the first time, facing its own task without any illusion and without any possible alibi.24
Griffin’s question is one for artists, certainly. It is also a question for curators, otherwise curating is merely the provision of “reflections”—more acutely, see-through mirrors—of “the times.” This is not what is meant by curating contemporaneity.
Ribas notes the practice of a number of artists who are concerned with tracking the “modalities of the past in the present,” and that some recent exhibitions—Formalismus at the Hamburger Kunstverein (2004), Modernism as a Ruin at the Generali Foundation (2009), and Modernologies at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009)—amount to “an ongoing process of archiving the contemporary.”25 He takes these artists and philosophers, such as Agamben, as raising a challenge to curators: “It is a fundamental necessity of curating to situate itself within those contemporaneities that remain in darkness, untheorized and unlived.”26 This gets us closer to one of the key imperatives driving curatorial thought in contemporary conditions. Its boldness and grit expresses much about the kind of attitude needed now. But Griffin’s comment reminds us that, while the darkness is, necessarily, a component of the deep dwelling of such thought, it is not its only one, nor its end point.
This brief review of some of the key ideas behind current talk about curating indicates the vitality of the discourse, its close engagement with art practice, and its willingness to grapple with changes in contemporary life. It also suggests that the ground of what it is to be a curator in contemporary conditions is shifting, a fact that is glimpsed in the discourse, but remains dimly understood. We need to push a little harder at this darkness and see what light might flash within.
8 Paula Marincola, “A List of Questions Leading to More Questions and Some Answers,” insert in What Makes a Great Exhibition? See also David Levi-Strauss, “The Bias of the World: Curating After Szeemann and Hopps,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2006–January 2007, http:/brooklynrail.org/2006/12/art/.
9 Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in Marincola, What Makes a Great Exhibition?, 14.
11 Storr, “Show and Tell,” 20.
13 Storr, “Show and Tell,” 23.
14 “The Grammar of the Exhibition,” Manifesta Journal, no. 7 (2009/10).
16 See Carol Kino, “Puppies, Paintings, and Philosophers,” New York Times, March 4, 2012, AR23.
17 Lind, “The Curatorial,” 65.
18 Lind, in Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011), http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=759#top
19 Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en. This is very close to her description of turning, and of contemporaneity. See “Turning,” e-flux journal 0 (November 2008), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/.
22 Tim Griffin, “Out of Time,” Artforum 50, no. 1 (September 2011): 288–89.
