Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Judith Rugg, Michèle Sedgwick, Judith Rugg, Michèle Sedgwick

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781841505367, 9781841501628
• eBook ISBN: 9781841502151
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

To stay relevant, art curators must keep up with the rapid pace of technological innovation as well as the aesthetic tastes of fickle critics and an ever-expanding circle of cultural arbiters. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance argues that, despite these daily pressures, good curating work also requires more theoretical attention.

In four thematic sections, a distinguished group of contributors consider curation in light of interdisciplinary and emerging practices, examine conceptions of curation as intervention and contestation, and explore curation's potential to act as a reconsideration of conventional museum spaces. Against the backdrop of cutting-edge developments in electronic art, art/science collaboration, nongallery spaces, and virtual fields, contributors propose new approaches to curating and new ways of fostering critical inquiry. Now in paperback, this volume is an essential read for scholars, curators, and art enthusiasts alike.

PART 1: FORMS OF THINKING IN CONTEMPORARY CURATING

THE CURATORIAL TURN: FROM PRACTICE TO DISCOURSE

Paul O’Neill

Introductory context:

It was in the late 1960s that Seth Siegelaub used the term ‘demystification’ in order to establish the shift in exhibition production conditions, whereby curators were beginning to make visible the mediating component within the formation, production and dissemination of an exhibition.

I think in our generation we thought that we could demystify the role of the museum, the role of the collector, and the production of the artwork; for example, how the size of a gallery affects the production of art, etc. In that sense we tried to demystify the hidden structures of the art world. (O’Neill, P. and Siegelaub 2006)

During the 1960s the primary discourse around art-in-exhibition began to turn away from forms of critique of the artwork as autonomous object of study/critique towards a form of curatorial criticism, in which the space of exhibition was given critical precedence over that of the objects of art. Curatorial criticism differed from that of traditional western art criticism (i.e. linked to modernity) in that its discourse and subject matter went beyond discussion about artists and the object of art to include the subject of curating and the role played by the curator of exhibitions. The ascendancy of the curatorial gesture in the 1990s also began to establish curating as a potential nexus for discussion, critique and debate, where the evacuated role of the critic in parallel cultural discourse was usurped by the neo-critical space of curating. During this period, curators and artists have reacted to and engaged with this ‘neo-criticality’ by extending the parameters of the exhibition form to incorporate more discursive, conversational and geo-political discussion, centred within the ambit of the exhibition. The ascendancy of this ‘curatorial gesture’ in the 1990s (as well as the professionalization of contemporary curating) began to establish curatorial practice as a potential space for critique. Now the neo-critical curator has usurped the evacuated place of the critic. As Liam Gillick pointed out:

My involvement in the critical space is a legacy of what happened when a semi-autonomous critical voice started to become weak, and one of the reasons that happened was that curating became a dynamic process. So people you might have met before, who in the past were critics were now curators. The brightest, smartest people get involved in this multiple activity of being mediator, producer, interface and neo-critic. It is arguable that the most important essays about art over the last ten years have not been in art magazines but they have been in catalogues and other material produced around galleries, art centres and exhibitions. (Gillick 2005: 74)

Accompanying this ‘turn towards curating’ was the emergence of curatorial anthologies. Beginning in the 1990s, most of these tended to come out of international meetings between curators, as part of curatorial summits, symposia, seminars and conferences, although some of them may have taken local curatorial practice as their starting point. Without exception, they placed an emphasis on individual practice, the first-person narrative and curator self-positioning – articulated through primary interviews, statements and exhibition representations – as they attempted to define and map out a relatively bare field of discourse.

Alongside this predominantly curator-led discourse, curatorial criticism responded with an assertion of the separateness of the artistic and curatorial gesture – when such divisions are no longer apparent in contemporary exhibition practice. I would argue that such a divisive attempt to detach the activity of curating from that of artistic production results in resistance to recognition of the interdependence of both practices within the field of cultural production. Moreover the mediation of hybrid cultural agents through the means of the public exhibition is overlooked.

The curatorial turn

‘Exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known.’

(Ferguson, Greenberg & Nairne 1996: 2)

Exhibitions (in whatever form they take) are always ideological; as hierarchical structures they produce particular and general forms of communication. Since the late 1980s, the group exhibition has become the primary site for curatorial experimentation and, as such, has generated a new discursive space around artistic practice. The group exhibition runs counter to the canonical model of the monographic presentation. By bringing a greater mix of people into an exhibition, it also created a space for defining multifarious ways of engaging with disparate interests, often within a more trans-cultural context. Group exhibitions are ideological texts which make private intentions public. In particular, it is the temporary art exhibition that has become the principal medium in the distribution and reception of art; thus, being the principal agent in debate and criticism about any aspect of the visual arts.

Exhibitions (particularly group exhibitions, art fairs, temporary perennial shows and large-scale international art exhibitions) are the main means through which contemporary art is now mediated, experienced and historicized. Just as the number of large-scale, international exhibitions increased since the 1990s, so has the respectability of the phenomenon of curating been enhanced. Similarly, writing about exhibitions has further reinforced the merit of curatorial practice as a subject worthy of study. As a tactic: ‘This may either be a compensatory device, a politicized attempt to consider works of art as interrelated rather than as individual entities, or a textual response to changes in the art world itself’ (Ferguson, Greenberg & Nairne 1996).

The critical debate surrounding curatorial practice has not only intensified, but as Alex Farquharson has pointed out, even the recent appearance of the verb ‘to curate’, where once there was just a noun, indicates the growth and vitality of this discussion. He writes: ‘new words, after all, especially ones as grammatically bastardised as the verb “to curate” (worse still the adjective “curatorial”), emerge from a linguistic community’s persistent need to identify a point of discussion.’(Farquharson 2003)

Indicative of a shift in the primary role of curator is the changing perception of the curator as carer to a curator who has a more creative and active part to play within the production of art itself. This new verb, ‘to curate…may also suggest a shift in the conception of what curators do, from a person who works at some remove from the processes of artistic production, to one actively “in the thick of it”.’ (Farquharson 2003) Ten years previously, when writing about cultural production, Pierre Bourdieu noted that the curator (inter alia) added cultural meaning and value to the making of art and artists:

The subject of the production of the artwork – of its value but also of its meaning – is not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality, but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field. Among these are the producers of works, classified as artists…critics of all persuasions…collectors, middlemen, curators, etc.; in short, all those who have ties with art, who live for art and, to varying degrees, from it, and who confront each other in struggles where the imposition of not only a world view but also a vision of the art world is at stake, and who, through these struggles, participate in the production of the value of the artist and of art. (Bourdieu 1993: 261)

As cultural agents, curators and artists participate in the production of cultural value, exhibitions are intrinsic and vital parts of what Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer termed the ‘cultural industries’ associated with: entertainment; mass culture; the communications enterprise of mass reception; and as part of the consciousness industry (see Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 120–167). Exhibitions are, therefore, contemporary forms of rhetoric, complex expressions of persuasion, whose strategies aim to produce a prescribed set of values and social relations for their audiences. As such exhibitions are subjective political tools, as well as being modern ritual settings, which uphold identities (artistic, national, sub-cultural, ‘international’, gender-or-race-specific, avant-garde, regional, global etc.); they are to be understood as institutional ‘utterances’ within a larger culture industry. (See Ferguson 1996: 178–9.)

Biennial culture and the culture of curation

One of the most evident developments in contemporary curatorial practice since the late 1980s has been occurring on an increasingly inter-national, trans-national and multinational scale, where the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are in constant dialogue. In Contemporary magazine’s special issue on curating, published in 2005, Isabel Stevens produced a substantiative list of 80 official Biennials/Triennials throughout the globe to be held between 2006 and 2008. Terms such as ‘biennial’, ‘biennale’, or ‘mega-exhibitions’ no longer refer to those few exhibitions that occur perennially, every two years or so: they are now all encompassing idioms for large-scale international group exhibitions, which, for each local cultural context,, are organized locally with connection to other national cultural networks (Stevens 2005). Biennials are temporary spaces of mediation, usually allocated to invited curators with support from a local socio-cultural network. They are interfaces between art and larger publics – publics which are at once local and global, resident and nomadic, non-specialist and art-worldly.

In what Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic call the ‘biennial phenomenon’ such ‘large-scale international exhibitions’ reflect the cultural diversity of global artistic practices and call into question the inertia of public art institutions that are unwilling or too slow to respond to such praxis (Filipovic & Vanderlinden 2005). Biennials have become a form of institution in themselves; their frequency has resulted in an index of comparability. In a rather prophetic essay, written in the early 1990s, Bruce Ferguson, Reesa Greenberg and Sandy Nairne had already begun to question the fundamental idea of international survey exhibitions. Their collective essay ended with the paragraph:

However progressive the political or economic intentions behind them, international exhibitions still invite a presumption that the curators have access to an illusionary world view, and that spectators may follow in their wake. But a more specific and sustained engagement with communities and audiences, creating meanings beyond the spectacular and mere festivalising of such occasions, may produce a new genre of exhibition. It seems that in order to accommodate both artist’s needs and audience demands, the new exhibition must have reciprocity and dialogue built into its structure. How successfully this is accomplished will determine international exhibition maps of the future. (Ferguson, Greenberg & Nairne 2005: 3)

As was predicted, these event-exhibitions have shaped new social, cultural and political relations in a more globalized world, where the traditional biennial model is maintained through discourse on cultural policy, national representation and internationalism, thereby enabling cultural travel, urban renovation and local tourism. Alternately, it is arguable that they have become polarizing spaces to legitimize certain forms of artistic and curatorial praxis within the global culture industry.

Very few biennials are of the scale of Documenta, Johannesburg, Venice or even Istanbul. Many tend to be improvisatory, localized and modest in their aims. Here I am interested in the general-specific homogeneity produced by the institution of the biennial, not the heterogeneity of the myriad of localized cultural statements. The populist perception of the activity of curating has changed in large part due to the spread of biennials in the 1990s, whereby new degrees of visibility and responsibility were placed upon the curator. Apart from the particular issues of scale, temporality and location, the activity of curation made manifest through such exhibitions is articulated as being identity-driven; therefore, an overtly politicized, discursively global and fundamentally auteured praxis prevails, in spite of the many variable forms they have taken on. The biennial form as a global exhibition model has driven much of the art world’s global extension since 1989, when Les Magiciens de la Terre began the process. Biennials have become the vehicle through which much art is validated and acquires value on the international art circuit. Now such ‘global exhibitions’ often have as their main theme, ‘globalization’, whilst questioning the ideological underpinning of the exhibition itself as a product of that process.

Despite any curatorial self-reflexivity in recent large-scale exhibitions that may exist towards the global effects of ‘biennialization’, the periphery still has to follow the discourse of the centre. In the case of biennials, the periphery comes to the centre in search of legitimization and, by default, accepts the conditions of this legitimacy. Charles Esche suggests that the globalization of art within large-scale exhibitions has, through a process of standardization, absorbed the difference between centre and periphery. According to Esche, the ‘centre first’ model of global art, largely begun in 1989, still holds sway over much of the museum and biennial culture. It requires ‘the key institutions of contemporary culture officially to sanction the “periphery” in order to subsume it into the canon of innovative visual art.’ (Esche 2005: 105). Even though many of the artists in each exhibition may have developed their practice on the fringes of the recognized art world, ‘their energy is validated and consumed by the centre and therefore the relationship between rim and hub remains in place. This is, of course, how globalisation generally operates – sometimes to the economic benefit of the patronised but rarely in the interests of maintaining their autonomy and sustainability.’ (Esche 2005: 105).

The exhibition’s ritual of maintaining a given set of power relations between art, display and reception is particularly true of, what John Miller called, the ‘blockbuster exhibition’, which tends to incorporate anachronistic elements whilst recuperating any dissent from viewers as part of the totality of the overall event. In consequence, a ‘cycle of raised expectations and quick disillusionment’ is both predictable and over-determined. Miller argues that the ‘mega-exhibition’ is an ideological institution that reifies social relations between artworks and spectator. As the explicit purpose of these shows is to offer a comprehensive survey of artworks on a demographic basis, the terms of discourse are treated as pre-determined, rather than being ‘transformed in the course of art production and therefore subject to contradiction and conflict.’ (Miller 1996: 270)

According to Miller, a critique of these exhibitions on the basis of curatorial choices made within the established framework would be to ignore the ideologies underpinning the institutions that are responsible for them. He suggests that such institutions often treat and address audiences as a concrete social constituency, whereby artworks are relegated to mere ‘raw material’ within the ‘total artwork’ of the exhibition (Gesamtkunstwerk), thus privileging the curator’s subjectivity, so that the outcome of the exhibition-form is naturalized as an organic inevitability within the organization’s institutional framework producing an illusion of curatorial inspiration and genius (Miller 1996a: 272).

I woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Forms of Thinking in Contemporary Curating
• Part 2: Curating and the Interdisciplinary: Encounter, Context, Experience
• Part 3: The Role of the Curator: Contestation and Consideration
• Part 4: Emergent Practices: Subverting the Museum
• Notes on Contributors