Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith
for more, a wonderful vista opened in both directions: vigorous battle scenes, lustrous figures, and dreamy landscapes. This was the National Gallery of Victoria, then as now stocked with a major collection of art from Europe, courtesy of the Felton Bequest, and from Australia, courtesy of local donors, mainly artists. The images that had attracted me on that stairwell were drawn from the gallery’s unmatched collection of William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy and its set of Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job. Years later, Dr. Ursula Hoff, Curator of Prints and Drawings, told me that she placed them there in the hope that they would do for the youth of the city exactly what they did for me.8 This is curating as laying out the lure.
In these essays, I think alongside the thoughts about curating expressed by a number of curators, looking for traces of the constituents of contemporary curatorial thought, such as those listed a few paragraphs back. These essays are also a set of provocations. They urge curators to complicate thinking about “the contemporary” and to grapple with the challenges of curating contemporaneity.
1 Steven Rosenbaum, Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), http://curationnation.org/pages/aboutthebook.
3 On-Curating.org 11, no. 11, “Public Issues,” n.d., www.on-curating.org/documents/oncurating_issue_1111.pdf.
1.
What is Contemporary Curatorial Thought?
In a recent essay, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” I track the usage of the term “contemporary” in art discourse during modernity and propose an art-historical hypothesis about contemporary art. I try to set out a framework in which we might identify the precise shape of the act of thought—the affective insight—that contemporary life requires of its art, of the criticism of that art, and of the history of that art: the (necessary, but never sufficient) kernel from which, via many vicissitudes, art must be made and criticism and history written. All kinds of inherited inspirations, medium constraints and possibilities, and many still-vital artistic trajectories remain relevant to such making and writing. Nevertheless, our experience of contemporaneity—of the multiple, various ways of being in time today, contemporaneously—is disposing art, criticism, and history in different ways, and is requiring fresh concepts, mediums, and languages. This is my conclusion:
Place making, world picturing, and connectivity are the most common concerns of artists these days because they are the substance of contemporary being. Increasingly, they override residual distinctions based on style, mode, medium, and ideology. They are present in all art that is truly contemporary. Distinguishing, precisely, this presence in each artwork is the most important challenge to an art criticism that would be adequate to the demands of contemporaneity. Tracing the currency of each artwork within the larger forces that are shaping this present is the task of contemporary art history.1
Is it possible to be as concise about what contemporaneity—our current condition—is asking of art curatorship? Perhaps it is. If so, the first step is to recognize that the object of contemporary curating is much larger than contemporary art. It must encompass all other art: art from any and every past, current art that is not contemporary, as well as projective, future art. (Some artists, in fact many, envisage art that is not subject to this past-present-future triad. Curators will follow; some are already on this trail.) Like contemporary art, contemporary curating is embroiled in time, but not bound by it; entangled with periodizing urges, but not enslaved to them; committed to space, but of many kinds, actual and virtual; anxious about place, yet thrilled by dispersion’s roller-coaster ride. It does not follow a set of rules; rather, it adopts an approach arising from an emergent set of attitudes. Can we say that the purpose of curating today is something like this: To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) contemporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as these are manifest in art present, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal? It follows that what is understood in the art world as “Contemporary Art,” while it does in fact inspire contemporary curating of all kinds, including exhibitions of art from previous periods, does not bind curators to its time-bound imperatives.
By art, to put it at its minimum, I mean any intentionally created existent that, following processes of searching self-reflection and including consideration of previous and other imaginable art, embodies its being and establishes its relationships with its anticipated viewers, primarily through visual means. To exhibit is—again following such processes—to bring a selection of such existents (along, perhaps, with other relevant kinds), or newly created works of art, into a shared space (which may be a room, a site, a publication, a web portal, or an app) with the aim of demonstrating, primarily through the experiential accumulation of visual connections, a particular constellation of meaning that cannot be made known by any other means. Of course, such meaning may be parsed in terms other than strictly exhibitionary: art critical, art historical; literary, philosophical, cultural; personal or idiosyncratic; ideological or programmatic—the list is long. But exhibitionary meaning is quite specific because it is established and experienced in the space of an exhibition, actual or virtual (virtual includes memory).2 The parsings, therefore, are translations from curatorial into other expository