A Companion to Curation

Brad Buckley, John Conomos, Brad Buckley, John Conomos, Dana Arnold

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119206903, 9781119206859
• eBook ISBN: 9781119206873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The definitive reference text on curation both inside and outside the museum

A Companion to Curation is the first collection of its kind, assembling the knowledge and experience of prominent curators, artists, art historians, scholars, and theorists in one comprehensive volume. Part of the Blackwell Companion series, this much-needed book provides up-to-date information and valuable insights on the field of curatorial studies and curation in the visual arts. Accessible and engaging chapters cover diverse, contemporary methods of curation, its origin and history, current and emerging approaches within the profession, and more.

This timely publication fills a significant gap in literature on the role of the curator, the art and science of curating, and the historical arc of the field from the 17 th century to the present. The Companion explores topics such as global developments in contemporary indigenous art, Asian and Chinese art since the 1980s, feminist and queer feminist curatorial practices, and new curatorial strategies beyond the museum. This unique volume:

• Offers readers a wide range of perspectives on curating in both theory and practice
• Includes coverage of curation outside of the Eurocentric and Anglosphere art worlds
• Presents clear and comprehensible information valuable for specialists and novices alike
• Discusses the movements, models, people and politics of curating
• Provides guidance on curating in a globalized world

Broad in scope and detailed in content, A Companion to Curation is an essential text for professionals engaged in varied forms of curation, teachers and students of museum studies, and readers interested in the workings of the art world, museums, benefactors, and curators.

Part I
An Overview: The Origin and Provenance of Curating

1
A Selective History of Curating in Pittsburgh: The Recent Story of the Carnegie International¹

David Carrier

The Art Department should not purchase “old masters”, but confine itself to the acquisition of such modern pictures as are thought likely to become “old masters” with time.

Andrew Carnegie²

Andrew Carnegie’s decision to give away all he earned … encouraged him to be even more ruthless a businessman and capitalist. Recognizing that the more money he earned, the more he would have to give away, he pushed his partners and his employees relentlessly forward.

David Nasaw³

The Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, first held in 1896, is the second‐oldest ongoing international survey art exhibition.⁴ The rival Venice Biennale was founded just a year earlier, in 1895. And so a great deal can be learned about curating by considering the history of this exhibition. Thanks to a remarkable self‐critical book recently published by the museum, we have a fully illustrated record describing the origin and development of this important exhibition (Clark 1996). And because I have lived in Pittsburgh since 1973, I have reviewed almost every International since 1979, and so have had a front row seat on this local history. My reviews thus provide one writer’s ongoing record of this major exhibition. In this selective account, I skip a couple of recent shows, which I saw but did not review in adequate ways.

As Andrew Carnegie explained in our epigraph, the goal of the Internationals was to bring to a provincial audience a sample of the best contemporary art. But the ideas about how to do that have, not unexpectedly, changed radically over time. Carnegie didn’t provide any detailed instructions. Nor did he provide an adequate permanent endowment for the exhibition. And so, it was up to the museum to choose how to organize the show and to obtain funding. The history published by the museum effectively tells this long story up to 1996. It is convenient here to take it up in 1979 both because that year marked the beginning of my personal knowledge of these exhibitions and because analysis of the more recent exhibitions is most relevant for our purposes.

My commentary sets the activity of the Carnegie International curators in a historical and philosophical perspective. This essay has six parts. Part one is historical. I describe the recent Internationals, noting the changing styles of these exhibitions by listing and describing some of the artists. The rest of the essay draws the lessons from this history. Part two considers the context of this exhibition. Some features of this large survey exhibition are common to all such shows; others, however, are specific to Pittsburgh. I describe the place of the Carnegie Museum of Art in relation to the history of Pittsburgh. Part three presents the general concerns involved in curating such survey exhibitions. How, I ask, can the best contemporary art be identified? And I identify the ways in which the changing art market has affected the practice of curators. We want to understand why these exhibitions have changed so much in the past thirty years. Part four looks at the political background of the Carnegie Internationals. Then part five asks what perspective art history and philosophy can provide for the curators; can we offer a usable theory of contemporary art? Finally, part six, which is brief, presents a personal perspective. My goal is to describe this exhibition, placing it within a larger perspective with reference to contemporary art and aesthetic theory. Only by shifting between the concerns of an empirical history and this broader conceptual analysis is it possible, I believe, to adequately understand this ambitious exhibition.

The Origin and History of the Carnegie International

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), a poor immigrant from Scotland, made his fortune in late‐nineteenth‐century Pittsburgh. By the start of the twentieth‐century he was the richest man in America. Resolving to give away most of his fortune for the public good, he wanted that the museum he created, the Carnegie Institute, should present the most significant contemporary art. At this time, in New York and elsewhere, newly rich American industrialists were assembling the collections, which made the United States a leading art museum culture. Carnegie’s goals were different – he did not aspire to form an old master collection; rather, he was interested in displaying recently created art. In the 1890s, this was a very original idea. Until 1929, when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was founded in New York City, the major American public museums were not much devoted to contemporary art.

Traditionally, the International had been a large group show. In 1977, there was a one‐person show, and in 1979, because the museum was unhappy with the press response to recent exhibitions, the show was divided between Eduardo Chillida and Willem de Kooning.⁵ Then, after Gene Baro curated an exhibition, which was much criticized in 1982, a young museum director, John R. Lane, was appointed, and set out to revive the International. The 1985 Carnegie International was co‐curated by Lane and the new adjunct curator of contemporary art who came with him to Pittsburgh, John Caldwell.⁶

Their 42 artists included the populist John Ahearn, who does sculptures of figures from the Bronx; such then well‐known New York City figures as Eric Fischl, Jenny Holzer, Neil Jenney, Bill Jensen, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, and also Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Julian Schnabel, and Frank Stella. And it included a number of Germans who also were prominent in New York galleries: Georg Baselitz, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. Also, a number of their Italian peers: Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Luciano Fabro, and Jannis Kounellis. And, finally, some English figures who also were well known in American galleries: Richard Deacon, Barry Flanagan, Lucian Freud, Gilbert and George, and Howard Hodgkin. It was a good survey of the most prominent figures of the day: short on women, with no one from Asia. (Japan had been a major exhibitor during the mid‐ to late 1950s, with 25 Japanese artists represented in a show in the late 1950s.) In his introduction to the catalogue, a survey of then‐influential writing about contemporary art, Lane rightly observes that there is no consensus about

the appropriate way for a critic to address today’s art, or the relative significance of the various theoretical and stylistic directions now being pursued by artists.

(Lane and Caldwell 1985: 17)

The show, like the writing in the catalogue, provided a good introduction to the best‐known figures, Americans and Europeans active in the American art world.

The 1988 International was selected by Lane and Caldwell, with the aid of an advisory committee.⁷ Thirteen artists were in both shows. “While the works in the 1985 International were aggressive, big and spirited,” Vicky Clark’s essay in the catalogue says, “there is a hushed, muted and almost magical feeling to the 1988 exhibition” (Clark 1988: 8). There were political installations by Siah Armajani, an American, and Lothar Baumgarten, who is German; an important display of Joseph Beuys, who only belatedly was properly recognized in America. And Ross Bleckner and Peter Halley, famous young American painters; and Jeff Koons, whose apotheosis was in progress. Also, the exhibition included some very varied artists who were becoming well known: the Swiss duo Fischli and Weiss; some major senior American painters, Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly; and the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall. Like the previous international, this was, again, very much a New York‐centered show; most of the non‐Americans included were well known from gallery exhibitions.⁸

The 1991 Carnegie International was the most innovative International that I have seen. (My review, I regret to say, showed a complete failure to rise to the occasion.⁹) Going beyond merely presenting a selection of original art in the galleries, the displays extended into the natural history museum, next door to the library at the Carnegie; and indeed, out into the city at large. As the curator, Mark Francis, wrote: “The specificity of the museum has created possibilities and opportunities, and the reality of the museum, rather than a notion of the ideal or imaginary museum, has been our guiding principle” (Cooke and Francis: 19). He and his co‐curator Lynne Cooke offered in the catalogue a suggestive account of the art museum. “Historically,” she wrote in that catalogue, “there have been two principal roles for the art museum: treasure house and so storehouse, academy and so research center” (Cooke and Francis: 213).

A number of the artists used the full resources of the Carnegie: Michael Asher, for example, did an installation in the Hall of Architecture. And because for the first time the exhibition moved outside of the museum, reviewers from out of town couldn’t merely walk quickly through the museum, on a day trip to Pittsburgh; they needed to travel about the city. Tim Rollins + K.O.S., well known political artists, did an installation in the public library of Homewood, a poor black neighborhood. Other parts of the show were on display in downtown Pittsburgh, nearby at Duquesne University and, also, at the Mattress Factory, a major local Kunsthalle. And Christopher Wool’s billboard, Untitled (1991), “The Show is Over” was shown outside the museum and his painting, with a longer version of this slogan, entered the collection. Within the galleries, Louise Lawler and Judith Butler did critiques of museum, as also did Ann Hamilton, David Hammons, and Allan McCollum. There were installations by Ilya Kabakov and Mike Kelley; paintings by Christoph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part I: An Overview: The Origin and Provenance of Curating
• Part II: Movements, Models, People, and Politics
• Part III: The Curator in a Globalized World
• Part IV: Beyond the Museum: Curating at the Frontier
• Index
• End User License Agreement