Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith

      The starting point for Thinking Contemporary Curating occurred on March 11, 2011—day one of The Now Museum conference that Independent Curators International (ICI) produced in collaboration with The Graduate Center, CUNY and the New Museum in New York. Involving artists, art historians, curators, and museum directors in a series of panel discussions and conversations, the three-day event looked at the diversification of the notion of the “museum of contemporary art,” providing intergenerational perspectives on recent developments across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

      While topics in the spotlight included the reconsideration of historical narratives (or their abandonment), recent alternative models to traditional museum infrastructures, and burgeoning international collaborations, the subtext to the whole event was a revelation of the various positions the speakers held in relation to the contemporary museum as a place and/or concept. What became evident was a slightly uneasy breakdown in communication among speakers (and at times audience members)—in particular between curators and art historians—who, even when talking about the same thing, frequently could not tell that this was the case, causing a slippage in establishing what was at stake, let alone any cooperative game plan in moving ideas forward.

      The breakdown became palpable on the afternoon of the first day, during the discussion “Contemporanizing History/Historicizing the Contemporary,” led by Claire Bishop (Associate Professor, PhD Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY) with panelists Okwui Enwezor (Director, Haus der Kunst), Annie Fletcher (Curator, Van Abbemuseum), Massimiliano Gioni (Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions, New Museum), and Terry Smith. It continued as a fascinating glitch in the proceedings of the many sessions that followed.

      A month or so later, over dinner, I brought up this slippage to Terry Smith, asking him what he thought lay at the root of it. I suggested perhaps it was a difference in style and use of language. Art historians are trained (and expected) to propose a unique observation (no matter how minutely different) on any given topic, outline the facts and problems that pertain to its specificities, and present their solutions before providing a conclusion that proves they are right. Curators, on the other hand, take a far more speculative (and often meandering) approach, outlining the issues at stake from personal experience, describing a project and various artists’ practices that test ways to understand key points, then making an open-ended proposition for consideration with the conclusion that research is ongoing.

      Smith did not totally agree with my reasoning, but concurred that there was something in the “glitch,” particularly as a result of the increasingly multifarious production modes of curators. While it is widely accepted that the role has been professionalized and given independence from bureaucratic mandates, with a “coming of age” occurring in the 1990s, we are still fumbling to pinpoint what really constitutes contemporary curating. If the curatorial position remained fixed, as it was historically—behind the scenes, pragmatic, and ostensibly service oriented—this belaboring of specifics and terminologies would be unnecessary, but as the curatorial imperative gains momentum around the world, its form is mutating and becoming untethered from its modern precedent. Furthermore, the notion of a language around curating is still nascent, or at best tentative, as evidenced by the anecdotal fallback position so often used by practitioners. After much back and forth and a few glitches in our own conversation, by the end of the night we were left with yet another question, though one that was pertinent to getting to the bottom of the first: What is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought?

      And so Thinking Contemporary Curating became the first book-length text to lay the groundwork for articulating specificities in this still-forming field. As described in his acknowledgments, Smith has actively (and I would add generously and thoroughly) engaged with numerous exhibitions, conversations, and projects around the world—often as they are occurring—and gained an overview of both emerging and established curator’s ideas, practices, and outcomes, with one pivotal closed-door group discussion between professionals triggering the form of the text in front of us now. Divided into five chapters that loosely define five facets or operatives, Smith considers what contemporaneity means for curating, and examines the curator’s position in relation to the artist,