Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith
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