Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith
Nonetheless, they are actualities, and we must see them straight if we are to find answers when we ask: Is this or that change, however inevitable it might seem, a change for the better?
THE GRAMMAR OF THE EXHIBITION
When Storr wants to specify “the basics” of exhibition making, he is led to this merging of terms:
Now to the basics. The primary means for “explaining” an artist’s work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling. Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and commentary, documentation and interpretation. Galleries are paragraphs, the walls and formal subdivisions of the floors are sentences, clusters of works are the clauses, and individual works, in varying degrees, operate as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and often as more than one of these functions according to their context.13
He does not pursue this metaphor any further. A recent issue of Manifesta Journal attempts to do so by devoting itself to “The Grammar of the Exhibition.”14 It features not only a variety of ideas about what the underlying structures of exhibition making might be but also some quite antithetical perspectives concerning whether anything approximating a grammar is possible. Efforts to define a grammar are attempts to discern whether there is a set of rules (syntax) that works on the raw material (art practice, or some aspect of the world, seen as a generative base) to shape the language of the exhibition (on analogy to written or spoken language). Of course, for curatorship every aspect of these operations is spatial (it presumes a setting—physical, mental, imagined, affective) and then temporal (it presumes reflexive movement through that setting). Thus each particular exhibition would be an array of speech acts; the exhibition is, in this analogy, a conversational setting. A more accurate metaphor would call up the semantics of the exhibition, that is, how it generates meaning by the relationships between its parts. This obviates the elaborations necessary to keep alive the metaphorical connection between languages and exhibitions, one that almost no one pursues anyway. From this perspective, the most useful essay in this issue is Mary Anne Staniszewski’s account of the curatorial thought underlying Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo’s exhibitions at Exit Art since the early 1980s.
Installation view, Reactions, Exit Art, New York, 2002. Curators: Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo
Putting it this way (as philosopher and critic Peter Osborne does in his opposition to the very idea, expressed in the same issue of Manifesta) moves us away from the tendency toward rule-bound formalism that is implicit in most appeals to systematic structures such as grammar, and instead toward a critical curatorial tendency that is closer to the spirit of Maria Lind’s original proposition.
Is there something we can call “the curatorial”? Something that manifests itself in the activities of a curator, whether employed or independent, trained as an artist or an art historian? It is clear that curating is much more than making exhibitions: it involves commissioning new work and working beyond the walls of an institution, as well as what are traditionally called programming and education. But can we speak of “the curatorial” beyond “curating in the expanded field”: as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education, and fundraising?15
The changed conditions within which curators practice is evoked here, but this does little more than name as curating a number of activities that have been to date considered subsidiary, feeder, educational, or publicity—roles that may or may not be carried out by the curator, depending on time, inclination, and the availability of others to take them on. Acknowledging the inspiration of site-specific practices, context-sensitive art, and institutional critique, Lind goes on to evoke the importance of consciously “curating” these activities in order to link “objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourse in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.” This description could apply to populist programming, such as the Mixed Taste series at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver,16 but Lind has something more serious in mind:
Rather than being the product of the curator’s labor per se, curating is the result of a network of agents’ labor. The outcome should have the disturbing quality of smooth surfaces being stirred—a specific, multilayered means of answering back in a given context. Rather than representing, “the curatorial” involves presenting—it performs something in the here and now instead of merely mapping it from there and then.17
A distinction between curatorial and art-historical thinking is being suggested here. A closeness to artistic creativity and perhaps to that of engaged public education is sought instead. The critical aspect of her concept comes out more distinctly in a recent formulation:
I mean a practice that goes beyond curating, which I see as the technical modality of making art go public in various ways. “Curating” is “business as usual” in terms of putting together an exhibition, organizing a commission, programming a screening series, etcetera. “The curatorial” goes further, implying a methodology that takes art as its starting point, but then situates it in relation to specific contexts, times, and questions in order to challenge the status quo. And it does so from various positions, such as that of curator, an editor, an educator, a communications person, and so on. This means that the curatorial can be employed, or performed, by people in a number of different capacities in the ecosystem of art. For me, there is a qualitative difference between curating and the curatorial. The latter, like Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the political in relation to politics, carries a potential for change.18
Irit Rogoff offers a more deconstructive version, one that moves the idea more firmly beyond its efforts to first recognize, then “unbound,” the various art world roles:
In a sense “the curatorial” is thought, and critical thought at that, that does not rush to embody itself, does not rush to concrete itself, but allows us to stay with the questions until they point us in some direction that we might not have been able to predict…. Moving to “the curatorial,” then, is an opportunity to “unbound” the work from all of those categories and practices that limit its ability to explore that which we do not yet know or that which is not yet a subject in the world.19
These formulations have achieved some currency among curators—rightly so, because they pick up on major shifts in art practice, in art institutions, and in the constantly changing conditions of those who work within them and in relation to them.
Maria Lind at the panel discussion "Extending Infrastructures, Part 1: Platforms & Networks," March 12, 2011, The Now Museum conference, March 10-13, 2011, presented by the PhD Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International, and the New Museum, New York
What would it be like to stay with the questions, as Rogoff suggests, and to follow them as far as they can go? Perhaps it would enable us to be a little more exact as to how we might define the kind of curatorial insight needed now. This is what I will attempt to do in these essays. I believe that something like this is what João Ribas is seeking in his essay “What to Do With the Contemporary?”20 He is alert to the variety of ways of being in time that constitute contemporaneity as I have described it. He ends up, as many others do, with Agamben’s (and Žižek’s, but first Nietzsche’s) paradox that the most contemporary person is he who is most out of joint with his time.21 Archiving this contemporaneity from a position alert to its darknesses is Ribas’s recommendation. To me, Agamben’s paradox marks both the strength and the limit of the most advanced thinking on these matters.
Here is another recent example of such thinking:
Among the more puzzling preoccupations of dialogues around art during the past five years has been “the contemporary,” a seemingly self-evident description that, to date, has operated largely in reverse—that has been put forward, in other words, as a meaningful