Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith
does this Houdini-like identity-swapping of roles across the spectrum relate to the idea of “the exhibitionary complex”—as described by Bennett, historicized by Lorente, and theorized by Duncan and Wallach, among many others—that undergirded the growth of modern art, linked it to the modernizing city, provoked the avant-garde into existence, and subsequently sustained modernism for many decades?5 These authors identified the system that was initiated most influentially for Europe and its cultural colonies by the addition, in 1818, of an annual showing of new works to ongoing displays of works from the permanent collection at the Luxembourg Palace, Paris. Entrants to the Museum of Living Artists were chosen by members of the Academy, a professional organization led by artists that operated under the patronage of the Emperor and later the state. Works deemed worthy of entering the national collection were passed on to the Louvre Museum ten years after the artist’s death, while others went to provincial museums, to storage, or were returned to the artist’s estate. Artists sold works from these annual exhibitions or direct from their studios. By the mid-eighteenth century in England a number of independent auction houses had been established and commercial galleries began appearing throughout Europe in the 1890s. This apparently competitive, but mostly cooperative system is the core of the multimuseum and gallery spectrum that we have inherited. Role swapping has been endemic since the beginning, especially as the system was adopted in city after city throughout the modern world. This is still occurring, as new art distribution centers are created; China during the 2000s is a striking example, with the Arab states in the Middle East the most recent.
Yet the framework is changing, leading us to ask why, and what would change for the better look like? If French artists in the early nineteenth century faced the problem of how to effectively distribute their work and solved it by institutionalizing, proliferating, and varying the venues for doing so, artists in the Middle East today are small players in local art worlds that seem primarily dedicated to selling works drawn from all over the world to targeted buyers from their region and to anchoring large-scale real estate projects. In the longer-established art centers, the issue for curators is rather different. If the selecting, collecting, and exhibitionary ensemble, however chameleon-like in its capacity to change, tends, like all institutional structures, to prioritize self-perpetuation, slow down time, and incline toward the securities of repetition, are sets of practices, such as those that Lind labels “the curatorial,” examples of emergent, more inventive, and more critical alternatives? Or are they the latest supplement to a structure quite capable of generating its own transformations—as it has done in the past, is doing now, and will do for the foreseeable future?
A third, pivotal element pushes itself into this mix: the repeated mega-exhibition, or biennial, now so widespread as to have become an institutional form in itself. We may situate it, logically, in between concrete institutions, such as museums, and supplementary ones, such as Kunsthalles and online sites. Indeed, biennials have evolved into internally diverse displays that occasionally, but regularly, spread themselves out across the range of exhibitionary venues of the city that hosts them, occupying each site, making each site different from what it normally is, while also connecting them, at least for the duration. Biennials, therefore, may be considered structural—they have become fundamental to the display of contemporary art. For historical art, the parallel is the blockbuster. Since Treasures of Tutankhamun, which toured England, Europe, Japan, and the U.S. between 1972 and 1979, attracting millions, blockbuster exhibitions have become so regular a part of museum programming that they, too, may be considered structural. The major museums seem to be incorporating the mega-exhibition into themselves: they have become so large, so internally various, so full of attractions, and so crowded that we might regard these institutions themselves as megamuseums.
Our galleria-like infrastructural array might, therefore, be seen as concentrating its energies into three realms: the institutional, the alternative (or the supplement), and the link. These are the forms taken by its urge to territorialize. At the same time, as we have shown, there is an incessant urge on the part of each type of venue and each exhibition format to imitate the vital practices of the others, to absorb some of their enabling energies (in the case of institutions), to counter them with previously unimagined activity (in the case of the alternatives), and to embody projective versions of both (in the case of the biennial). Stasis is always vitiated by change; storms are vital to the regular patterning of the weather. To fully grasp the settings in which curating is done, we need to keep in mind the interplay between the art system’s slow moving yet constant regeneration of structures and its fast moving proliferation of artworks and exhibitionary ideas.
In this section, I will reflect further on this interplay by thinking first about museums, then about biennials. What has been happening to both, and what do the changes mean for curating? We have come to a pass in which the museum seems no longer to be the limit setter, perhaps not even the default, for contemporary art and contemporary curating. Biennials have become the major vehicles of contemporary art, yet their very success has brought problems for curators, their primary custodians, not least the challenge of constant reinvention. Are these the indicators of infrastructural shift? I will explore these issues while continuing to ask: What kinds of contemporary curatorial thought are in play in each instance?
THE EXPERIENCE MUSEUM
In recent times the status of the museum as a site of permanent collection is gradually shifting to one of the museum as theater for large-scale traveling exhibitions organized by international curators and large-scale installations organized by individual artists. Every exhibition or installation of this kind is made with the intention of designing a new order of historical memories, of proposing new criteria for collecting by reconstructing history. These traveling exhibitions and installations are temporal museums that openly display their temporality.6
Boris Groys’s remarks in his book Art Power highlight the modern transformation of the art museum from that of repository of a collection to site of exhibition, its transmogrification from a place that held history in stasis, presenting it as a stilled panorama, to one in which everything—including the collection rooms—has the status of an event in the process of happening. As he goes on to say, contemporary art may be distinguished from that which prevailed during the modern era precisely in its core commitment to radical temporality: it makes every element in the situation utterly and only temporary.
In the modernist tradition, the art context was regarded as relatively stable—it was the idealized context of the universal museum. Innovation consists in putting a new form, a new thing, into this stable context. In our time context is seen as changing and unstable. So the strategy of contemporary art consists in creating a specific context that can make a certain form or thing look other, new, and interesting—even if this form has already been collected. Traditional art worked on the level of form. Contemporary art works on the level of context, framework, background, or of a new theoretical interpretation.7
This is an acute description of key aspects of the situation—not least because in late modern and contemporary circumstances, and in line with a history I will sketch in the next essay, when it comes to the radical renovation of exhibition forms, curators have mostly followed artists.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона,