The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Between Work and World

Sue Spaid

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350114913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This book walks us through the process of how artworks eventually get their meaning, showing us how curated exhibitions invite audience members to weave an exhibition's narrative threads, which gives artworks their contents and discursive sense. Arguing that exhibitions avail artworks as candidates for reception, whose meaning, value, and relevance reflect audience responses, it challenges the existing view that exhibitions present "already-validated" candidates for appreciation. Instead, this book stresses the collaborative nature of curatorial practices, debunking the twin myths of autonomous artists and sovereign artistic directors and treating presentation and reception as separate processes. Employing set theory to distinguish curated exhibitions from uncurated exhibitions, installation art and collections, it demonstrates how exhibitions grant spectators access to concepts that aid their capacity to grasp artifacts as artworks. To inform and illuminate current debates in curatorial practice, Spaid draws on a range of case studies from Impressionism, Dada and Surrealism to more contemporary exhibitions such as Maurizio Cattelan "All" (2011) and "Damien Hirst" (2012). In articulating the process that cycles through exploration, interpretation, presentation and reception, curating bears resemblance to artistic direction more generally.

1

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s approach, various terms and summarizes each chapter.

1.1 Philosophical orientation

For too long, the artworld has lacked its own theories for understanding how people experience visual art. To grasp such experiences, artworlders initially adapted literary theory and then folded in film theory, given its additional capacity to accommodate imagery. In emphasizing the wordless interplay between work and world, The Philosophy of Curating aims to furnish the artworld its relevant model, such that exhibitions ‘bring the work [emphasis mine] in contact with the external world [emphasis mine] by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications’ (Duchamp 1973: 140). No doubt, exhibition titles, object labels, explanatory panels, brochures, guided tours and catalogue essays literally envelope exhibitions in words. Despite this plethora of words, curated exhibitions avail requisite references sensorially, thus tethering work to world – in other words, enabling audiences to access and assess contents of otherwise ineffable artworks. The telltale sign of the curator’s invisible hand is spectators’ ready capacity to infer concepts. If inference fails to flow, the exhibition is probably not curated!

Although this book arises out of the philosophical tradition known as analytic aesthetics, it effectively bridges both traditions, since continental philosophy permeates the artworld. When I moved to New York City in 1984, the artworld was already awash in theories proposed by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Although most of these authors never really address curating or exhibitions, per se, their views have grounded the artworld’s understanding of visual art experiences since the 1960s. For example, exhibitions and artworks that demonstrate the falseness of prevailing views are said to deconstruct earlier positions (following Derrida), while Barthes (following Marcel Duchamp) challenged authorial authority. Foucault demonstrated how nineteenth-century scholars employed the archaeological (or rule formation), a methodology familiar to curators.

The naturalists, economists and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories. It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, archaeological. (Foucault 1994: x)

Thanks in part to continental philosophy, most artworlders share a wholesale suspicion of authorial authority, institutional theories of art, autonomous artworks and artists’ intentions, a view that was less true of analytic aesthetics until quite recently.

Around the millennium, literary scholar Roger Seamon summarized analytic aesthetics’ models as having passed through the chronology of Mimesis, Expressionism, Formalism and Conceptualism. Each of these author-centred models presupposes the possibility that the artist’s intentions are determinate rather than determinable (Margolis 2009: 136), and cast spectators in the role of attempting to ascertain the creator’s intent. They suggest that visual artists make artworks with some intent to prod viewers to see, believe, feel or consider something in particular. The spectator’s pet project then is to determine what the artist must have wanted him/her to see, believe, feel or consider, in light of the artwork’s construction and the artist’s historical circumstances. Focused on presentation, these paradigms presume some symmetry between presentation and reception, even though viewer responses vary from person to person and often overwhelm presentation. In fact, vision scientists have identified three distinct exhibition experience types, as discussed in Chapter 3.

This book aims to challenge views that privilege presentation over reception, since such views place undue weight on various contributing factors, such as (1) the artwork, (2) the artist’s intentions, (3) the curator and (4) the viewer’s cognitive stock, since the viewer with the greatest cognitive stock is believed to be best suited to grasp what the artist intended when he/she created the object at hand. How thus can we explain that ordinary school children are often quite capable of finding artworks meaningful in ways that elude their parents and teachers? Is it a question of cognitive stock, or could it be something else far more profound, perhaps unteachable or even unlearnable?

Analytic aesthetic’s tendency to overemphasize artists’ intentions has led some philosophers to view each artwork as having only one accurate meaning, though many legitimate interpretations. The philosophical trick, then, is to engender the method that determines which legitimate interpretation is the correct meaning. But who gets to adjudicate this? The artist? An artwork’s owner? Some ‘meaning umpire’? And if there is only one correct meaning (or best meaning), how is it that the same artwork continues to appear in different exhibitions, some with even contrary hypotheses? Is the curator who dares to challenge the artwork’s correct meaning an imposter, or at best a prankster, keen for fun at the public’s expense? Is the artist who lends his/her artwork a willing accomplice to this prank, or just a desperate co-conspirator, eager for some quick publicity?

A similar dilemma arises for the philosophical puzzle regarding classifying art. Arthur Danto theorized that the artworld develops theories that enable its members to determine what qualifies as art. George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art presumes that artworks undergo a baptism, whereby someone acting on behalf of the artworld confers the status of art on some artefact that was created for the artworld. Danto’s view problematically fails to capture how artworld theories originate, while Dickie’s position elevates the artwork’s status prior to its actual presentation to an artworld public. All of these aforementioned philosophical explanations neglect actual factors, which this text aims to reinstate.

Philosophers working in the analytic tradition have tended to treat visual art experiences as distinct experiences with discrete objects (singletons), something that is rarely true since spectators typically experience artworks in particular contexts, whether specific sites or exhibitions. Curated exhibitions typically feature numerous artworks working in concert with one another either to test the curator’s hypotheses about the exhibited artworks o r to convey the curator’s view concerning some novel way to approach some artist’s oeuvre, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the artist’s intention. Hardly singular experiences, over time, spectators encounter the same artworks in multiple exhibitions, granting them access to varying contents, which defeats the strategy of appealing to particular contents, let alone titles, to distinguish artworks.¹

Analytic aesthetics’ advancing verificationist schemes such as expression and depiction presume autonomous artists who both create and present their artworks (Kulvicki 2006). Given the ideologies underlying the twin myths of the autonomous artist – deserving full credit as the lone author – and the sovereign exhibitor – who discovers ‘greatness’ – I worry that such polarizing roles collude to exclude all of the influential collaborators along the way. What are the philosophical ramifications of crediting the many behind-the-scenes collaborators, all the while keeping the roles of curator and artist distinct, given their separate projects and aims?

My approach is alternatively enactivist (Thompson 2007: 13). I view artworks as inviting spectators to grasp something particular given the world at hand, which includes first and foremost the artwork’s immediate environment, its relationship to nearby things (art and nonart), either installed on some permanent site or temporarily presented in some exhibition or art-fair booth. Monroe Beardsley defined object-directedness as ‘a willingly accepted guidance over the succession of one’s mental states by phenomenally objective properties (qualities and relations) of a perceptual or intentional field on which attention is fixed with a feeling that things are working or have worked themselves out fittingly’ (1982: 288–90). In light of Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘actants’, which refers to entangled human and nonhuman actors alike, Beardsley’s object-directedness is cast here in a dynamic relationship with Edmund Husserl’s notion of ‘directed consciousness’, originally inspired by nineteenth-century philosopher Franz Brentano’s phenomenology (Brentano 1995). Not surprisingly, Foucault rejected Husserl’s privileging:

[The] observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. (1994: xiii)

Those who consider curating a discursive practice are likely under Foucault’s spell. As we shall see, artworks are relational objects, bar none, whose contents reflect myriad influences. In fact, art’s capacity to inspire imaginations over centuries is what makes art so invaluable.

Having already itemized so many of analytic aesthetics’ shortcomings, readers may wonder what value it holds for the artworld. The analytic tradition proves helpful for grasping (1) cognition (e.g. Immanuel Kant’s first critique), (2) meaning-making (e.g. Gottlob Frege’s sense/reference distinction, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Gareth Evans’s analysis of reference, Roger Scruton’s generative symbols and Danto’s indiscernibility thesis) and (3) reception (e.g. John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Husserl’s directed consciousness and Richard Wollheim’s twofold seeing). When assembled as they are here, these views demonstrate collectively how curators create contexts and spectators infer concepts from curators’ presentations. When possible, I identify links between the analytic and continental traditions.

Although I can find no good reason to explain why philosophy has overlooked curators’ efforts, I do imagine that some curated exhibitions leave spectators feeling as though they have lost all autonomy.² Still, most art forms, save improvised skits, have artistic directors who mediate spectatorial experience. Like most performances, art exhibitions remain incomplete and are entirely transient. Despite insufficient material resources, research time or access to the most fitting examples, exhibitions still feel whole (like a complete set). Unlike a symphony whose digital recording or radio broadcast serves as a stimulating substitute, art exhibitions lack ‘stimulating’ surrogates. Even travelling exhibitions, whose checklists basically remain the same, vary dramatically from site to site, since team members, environment (e.g. exhibition layout), facility (e.g. physical building) and milieu (e.g. particular community) play such crucial roles.

Once an exhibition ends and the artworks have all been returned, all that physically remains are exhibition documents – the checklist, brochure/gallery guide, catalogue, installation shots, video documentation, critical reviews, exhibition archive and oral histories – most of which were generated prior to public engagement, yet they are relied upon to explain, sustain and bear witness to the curator’s original hypotheses. Moreover, once the curator finally has the opportunity to stand back and experience the exhibition, his/her hypotheses may very well have evolved. Comparable to science experiments, the exhibition’s art historical impact rests on its capacity to transform the curator’s initial hypotheses into a publicly tested, peer-reviewed outcome that survives as institutional memories.

1.2 Aspect-seeing

Change an artwork’s context and the spectator is prompted to focus on different aspects. Wittgenstein termed this ‘aspect seeing’, since the thing doesn’t actually change, yet we see it differently (Wittgenstein 1968: 195e). To my lights, his emphasizing that interpretations are not properties of things frees interpretations to be as imaginative as possible, so long as work (an artwork’s varying interpretations) remains tethered to world. Even so, interpretations have a job to do, so they must be accurate and apt, which led me to Scruton’s Art and Imagination, whose differentiating ordinary and imaginative perception lies at the heart of the curatorial enterprise.

Ultimately, Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘aspect-seeing’ provided me my way in. All things, whether art or not, have numerous aspects (scale, imagery, parts, colours, details, etc.), whose particular functions/meanings/purposes are not immediately identifiable. And this is especially the case for artworks. When a thing’s aspects appear to lack contents, one tries out various references in order to see which one makes some otherwise ineffable aspect meaningful. Indeed, this approach proves particularly relevant for curators, who invite spectators to focus on particular aspects that might otherwise seem like abstract blobs, but become meaningful if people can connect them to apt references sited in their immediate environment. For example, Joan Miró painted many colourful paintings whose titles suggest birds, yet their imagery does not. A curator who wants to prompt a Miró painting’s bird-aspect could place it adjacent more vivid bird paintings, thus availing a bird-reference.

To explore an artwork’s meaning, one begins by comparing its various aspects, though typically one at a time, to references present in the world. In the opening words of the Tractatus Logicos-philosophicus, Wittgenstein identifies world as the totality of facts, not of things. For our purposes here, world comprises the set of references that are already conceptualized and are thus easily articulated. Being things, artworks are comprised of both conceptual and nonconceptual contents (aspects that currently eschew articulation). Artworks glean meaning by connecting to the world, yet this same relationship lets artworks pinpoint worldly matters that are otherwise obscured by all that is happening in the world. And in fact, each artwork’s work reinforces the...