Читать книгу Thinking Contemporary Curating - Terry Smith - Страница 12

Sites of exhibition are the most visible elements of the infrastructure within which art curating is practiced today. We might set them out as a spectrum, an array, ranging from the traditional (in the minimal sense of having been around the longest) to the most recent, and from those thoroughly invested in landmark and location to those that presume mobility and transience. At one end, there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: a mother-ship among megamuseums that—like its few comparators, such as the British Museum, London, and the Louvre, Paris—has recently included contemporary art within its treasure troves, appointed a specialist curator of twentieth and twenty-first century art (Sheena Wagstaff, who arrived from the Tate Modern), oriented its collection rooms toward making vivid the contemporary circumstances surrounding the creation of at least some of the items, and heralded, where appropriate, the continuing vitality of cultures that had previously been regarded as having reached their aesthetic highpoints at some time in the past. We could place at the other end of the spectrum venues that focus on the work of one artist or even, as is the case with The Artist Institute, New York, a slowly changing program of exhibitions of just one work of art at a time. Yet the real other is not concentrated versions of the same thing but the proliferation of open-ended curated projects, short and longer term, that seek to work from within the creativity already present in the everyday life of small, but constrained, communities. Between 2000 and 2005 Oda Projesi (Room Project), a collective formed by three women artists, staged thirty community arts projects in their apartment and the courtyard of a building in the Galata section of Istanbul, continuing their work since then in more mobile and virtual formats, as well as pursuing projects in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Since 2003 in Yangon, Myanmar, Networking and Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (NICA), founded by two artists, Jay Koh and Chu Yuan, has nurtured a variety of local possibilities and international connections for Burmese artists and spun off other independent arts spaces. Meanwhile, in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, the Waffle Shop is a community building, consciousness raising location, performance space, TV studio, and blog site, conceived and run by artists associated with Carnegie Mellon University, that also offers a full menu of edible waffles. A related project, the take-out restaurant, Conflict Kitchen, only sells food from nations with which the United States is in conflict.¹

Façade with banners, detail of main entrance and steps, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006

What are the exhibitionary venues that fill out the infrastructural spectrum between these two ends? Having begun with the universal history of the art museum that holds pride of cultural place in most metropolitan centers, we soon shift our gaze to the huge variety of more specialized collections—the period museum, the national collection, the geopolitical area or civilization museum, the city museum, the university gallery, the art school gallery, the private collection museum, the museum of modern art, the single artist museum, the museum of contemporary art, the one-medium museum, and spaces dedicated to large-scale commissioned installations. Continuous with these, in well served cities, are various venues that do not have collections as their basis but are devoted above all to changing exhibitions: Kunsthalles, alternative spaces, artist-operated initiatives, satellite spaces, and the exhibition venues of art foundations (some of which have collections). Finally, we visit institutes of various kinds that include exhibitions as one part of their research, publication, and educational activities, and check out temporary and online sites. With these last, and with many emergent quasi-institutions, the focus shifts from physical location and on-site continuity as the literal grounding to situations in which the event and the image prevail over place and duration. Each of these venues or operations has distinct features and purposes, and they often spring up in response to perceived shortcomings of already existing institutions. At the same time, traffic in ideas, objects, and people has always flowed between them. These days it is becoming very dense indeed.

Oda Projesi (Room Project) collective (Gunes Savas, Secil Yersel, and Erden Kosova), October 2005

To this long—and, it must be said, impressive list (how many other arts spin off new infrastructure so often, and so variously?)—we should add the growing interest of many commercial galleries, collector museums, and art fairs in certain kinds of public-oriented, “art historical” exhibitions. This has not displaced their basic commercial orientation, nor is it likely to, given the seemingly endless boom (at least at the top of the market), especially for contemporary art. With a narrower set of costs and far greater financial resources than most public museums, Gagosian Galleries has taken to presenting “museum-quality” shows of artists such as Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kasuma, Pablo Picasso, and Lucio Fontana. Staged by in-house curators, these shows sometimes include among the works for sale a number of not-for-sale works borrowed, or loaned for a fee, from museums. In their Miami location, Mera and Don Rubell regularly present theme shows drawn from their collection: their focus, since 2000, on young artists from Los Angeles helped propel that city to its current return to prominence as an art center. Certain private collectors have always known that they can influence the development of art itself, not just the direction of the market, simply by the weight of their attention: Charles Saatchi is merely the most notorious recent example of the collector become museum director. There are many precedents, going back to the first large-scale private collections made available to select circles of invited viewers that were assembled during the seventeenth century by certain Italian cardinals and German princes. Closer to our times, and still very influential, are public museums oriented around the values of the original collector, such as the Menil Collection and the associated Rothko Chapel, Houston, which are constantly curated to promote relationships between “Art, Spirituality, Human Rights,” so dear to the founders, John and Dominique de Menil.

Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010–present

Some collectors are beginning to see that they can become not only museum directors and de facto curators but artists as well. Toronto foundation director Ydessa Hendeles curates exhibitions aimed at creating “an experience that precludes words” by establishing “new metaphorical connections” between artworks that she collects for this purpose.² Since 2001 she has worked on Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), a vast accumulation of found photographs that include teddy bears, usually from family albums compiled between 1900 and 1940. In the versions shown at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2003), and the Gwangju Biennale (2010), the multilevel central rooms were filled with thousands of these images. Installation style, they were preceded by smaller rooms that displayed a range of vernacular artifacts including a 1950s Minnie Mouse doll and artworks such as a small Diane Arbus self-portrait taken in 1945, and were followed by a room that included one item that the viewer approached from behind: Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001), a child-sized figure, on its knees praying, with the unmistakable features of the adult Adolf Hitler. In this installation, one of Cattelan’s typical visual one-liners suddenly resonated with multiple, darkly explicit meaning.³

In 2011 Hendeles was invited to curate an exhibition in the Chelsea space of the dealer Andrea Rosen. The only stipulation was that she include at least one of the Polaroid images that Walker Evans shot in the last year of his life (1973–74), which the gallery was licensed to sell. The result was The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project), shown between December 2011 and February 2012. Subtitled A curatorial composition by Ydessa Hendeles, she used certain items from her own collection and borrowed others from museums and dealers: the final installation included eighty-three Evans Polaroids, including some from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Rosen Gallery consists of a narrow entrance area that opens on to a large central space topped by an impressive skylight mounted on a wooden frame and supported by steel beams. Hendeles cleverly negotiated the affective distance between this imposing environment and the modest Polaroids through selections that laid out a set of affinities.

Ydessa Hendeles, The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn. Installation view, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, December 10, 2011–February 4, 2012

In the first room visitors were greeted by a model of a cooper’s workshop crafted in France in the nineteenth century set on a child’s table manufactured by Gustav Stickley around 1904. The center of the main space was dominated by a monumental birdhouse made in England in 1875 from mahogany and wire, around which were arrayed, pew-like, wooden child’s settles based on a design by Stickley. The Polaroids lined each wall of the main space, their subdued grays, blues, and greens offering mute witness to the existence elsewhere of the buildings or architectural details that Evans recorded. Imitation architecture squared off against reproductions of absent architecture, leaving an emotional gulf between them.

The gap was filled by imagery of movement, of living things, albeit elusive ones. The cardinal points of the main room were marked by four pairs of images from Roni Horn’s Bird series shot between 1998 and 2007 that show close-ups of birds seen from behind, their folded wings betraying no signs of their identity, except as singular, and singularly beautiful, creatures. We now understand why the first room contained two photographs: Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 record of the running flight of the adjutant bird and Eugène Atget’s photograph, taken around 1900, of a shop front, an old boutique on the Quai Bourbon, Paris. In the doorway of the latter we glimpse the blurred shadow of a young girl. Is it she who has imagined these spaces? Is it her house of memory, her dream world, into which we have been invited?

In the explanatory booklet (designed somewhat like a child’s notebook), Hendeles is quite explicit about her process:

In my practice, my approach is to develop a site-specific work, conceiving and executing each show as an artistic embodiment of the particular exhibition space. I start with the context and search for ways to develop a relationship with it that is expressed through layered metaphorical connections. I use an artistic process to create a site-specific curatorial composition that interweaves narratives from disparate discourses using disparate elements. These elements are in no way aligned art historically, and I regard each as a fundamental component of the composition that bears no substitution, not even from the same body of work.⁴

Ydessa Hendeles, The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn. Installation view, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, December 10, 2011-February 4, 2012

A clearer statement of the contemporary convergence of artistic and curatorial impulses and constraints is difficult to imagine. Every key artistic idea since conceptualism and minimalism is amalgamated into a seamless, pure, J. K. Rowling-kind of “curatorial composition.” That this statement comes from a collector who sees no boundaries between any place on the spectrum is typical of our times. Nor is it a surprise that Hendeles’s projects excite the interest of young curators more than most other models out there.

THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX

How does this Houdini-like identity-swapping of roles across the spectrum relate to the idea of “the exhibitionary complex”—as described by Bennett, historicized by Lorente, and theorized by Duncan and Wallach, among many others—that undergirded the growth of modern art, linked it to the modernizing city, provoked the avant-garde into existence, and subsequently sustained modernism for many decades?⁵ These authors identified the system that was initiated most influentially for Europe and its cultural colonies by the addition, in 1818, of an annual showing of new works to ongoing displays of works from the permanent collection at the Luxembourg Palace, Paris. Entrants to the Museum of Living Artists were chosen by members of the Academy, a professional organization led by artists that operated under the patronage of the Emperor and later the state. Works deemed worthy of entering the national collection were passed on to the Louvre Museum ten years after the artist’s death, while others went to provincial museums, to storage, or were returned to the artist’s estate. Artists sold works from these annual exhibitions or direct from their studios. By the mid-eighteenth century in England a number of independent auction houses had been established and commercial galleries began appearing throughout Europe in the 1890s. This apparently competitive, but mostly cooperative system is the core of the multimuseum and gallery spectrum that we have inherited. Role swapping has been endemic since the beginning, especially as the system was adopted in city after city throughout the modern world. This is still occurring, as new art distribution centers are created; China during the 2000s is a striking example, with the Arab states in the Middle East the most recent.

Yet the framework is changing, leading us to ask why, and what would change for the better look like? If French artists in the early nineteenth century faced the problem of how to effectively distribute their work and solved it by institutionalizing, proliferating, and varying the venues for doing so, artists in the Middle East today are small players in local art worlds that seem primarily dedicated to selling works drawn from all over the world to targeted buyers from their region and to anchoring large-scale real estate projects. In the longer-established art centers, the issue for curators is rather different. If the selecting, collecting, and exhibitionary ensemble, however chameleon-like in its capacity to change, tends, like all institutional structures, to prioritize self-perpetuation, slow down time, and incline toward the securities of repetition, are sets of practices, such as those that Lind labels “the curatorial,” examples of emergent, more inventive, and more critical alternatives? Or are they the latest supplement to a structure quite capable of generating its own transformations—as it has done in the past, is doing now, and will do for the foreseeable future?

A third, pivotal element pushes itself into this mix: the repeated mega-exhibition, or biennial, now so widespread as to have become an institutional form in itself. We may situate it, logically, in between concrete institutions, such as museums, and supplementary ones, such as Kunsthalles and online sites. Indeed, biennials have evolved into internally diverse displays that occasionally, but regularly, spread themselves out across the range of exhibitionary venues of the city that hosts them, occupying each site, making each site different from what it normally is, while also connecting them, at least for the duration. Biennials, therefore, may be considered structural—they have become fundamental to the display of contemporary art. For historical art, the parallel is the blockbuster. Since Treasures of Tutankhamun, which toured England, Europe, Japan, and the U.S. between 1972 and 1979, attracting millions, blockbuster exhibitions have become so regular a part of museum programming that they, too, may be considered structural. The major museums seem to be incorporating the mega-exhibition into themselves: they have become so large, so internally various, so full of attractions, and so crowded that we might regard these institutions themselves as megamuseums.

Our galleria-like infrastructural array might, therefore, be seen as concentrating its energies into three realms: the institutional, the alternative (or the supplement), and the link. These are the forms taken by its urge to territorialize. At the same time, as we have shown, there is an incessant urge on the part of each type of venue and each exhibition format to imitate the vital practices of the others, to absorb some of their enabling energies (in the case of institutions), to counter them with previously unimagined activity (in the case of the alternatives), and to embody projective versions of both (in the case of the biennial). Stasis is always vitiated by change; storms are vital to the regular patterning of the weather. To fully grasp the settings in which curating is done, we need to keep in mind the interplay between the art system’s slow moving yet constant regeneration of structures and its fast moving proliferation of artworks and exhibitionary ideas.

In this section, I will reflect further on this interplay by thinking first about museums, then about biennials. What has been happening to both, and what do the changes mean for curating? We have come to a pass in which the museum seems no longer to be the limit setter, perhaps not even the default, for contemporary art and contemporary curating. Biennials have become the major vehicles of contemporary art, yet their very success has brought problems for curators, their primary custodians, not least the challenge of constant reinvention. Are these the indicators of infrastructural shift? I will explore these issues while continuing to ask: What kinds of contemporary curatorial thought are in play in each instance?

THE EXPERIENCE MUSEUM

In recent times the status of the museum as a site of permanent collection is gradually shifting to one of the museum as theater for large-scale traveling exhibitions organized by international curators and large-scale installations organized by individual artists. Every exhibition or installation of this kind is made with the intention of designing a new order of historical memories, of proposing new criteria for collecting by reconstructing history. These traveling exhibitions and installations are temporal museums that openly display their temporality.⁶

Boris Groys’s remarks in his book Art Power highlight the modern transformation of the art museum from that of repository of a collection to site of exhibition, its transmogrification from a place that held history in stasis, presenting it as a stilled panorama, to one in which everything—including the collection rooms—has the status of an event in the process of happening. As he goes on to say, contemporary art may be distinguished from that which prevailed during the modern era precisely in its core commitment to radical temporality: it makes every element in the situation utterly and only temporary.

In the modernist tradition, the art context was regarded as relatively stable—it was the idealized context of the universal museum. Innovation consists in putting a new form, a new thing, into this stable context. In our time context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context that can make a certain form or thing look other, new, and interesting—even if this form has already been collected. Traditional art worked on the level of form. Contemporary art works on the level of context, framework, background, or of a new theoretical interpretation.⁷

This is an acute description of key aspects of the situation—not least because in late modern and contemporary circumstances, and in line with a history I will sketch in the next essay, when it comes to the radical renovation of exhibition forms, curators have mostly followed artists.