Listing of works

 

This is taken from an exhibition guide of Martin Honert's exhibition at the Hamburger Banhof Gallerie in Berlin. This numbering technique helped me to identify which work I was viewing and gave me the option to gain a further insight into the concept of the work. I think this worked really well as there was a large quantity of work, giving the exhibition a subtle structure. Is this something to consider with our artworks? Do we want our exhibition to feel exclusive rather than inclusive?

By Alice O'Rourke

Amikam Toren: Moving in the right direction

Have a look at Amikam Torens work. Toren uses signs to deliver "subliminal" messages to his audience - really interesting work.

 

-Becky

Atlas

 Yesterday evening I went to see Jenny's groups exhibition 'Atlas'. They had used small, black desk lamps to highlight specific pieces of work which directed you to look more closely at certain aspects of the exhibition. I feel that we need to consider more about how we want to use the space, lighting etc. In particular, I think we need to contemplate how Dale's paper will affect the other work involved as his will take over much of the space. Also, how this will allow the audience to move around the exhibition and whether it will cause them to view the pieces in a specific order.


 

- Lucy Orme

Curing Curation

Stefan Brüggemann, Today I Misunderstood, 2002;
 print on canvas; 58 2/3 x 46 1/16 inches

J.C. Fregnan / Stefan Brüggemann

“[A]ll bricolages are not equally worthwhile.”
— Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology“The pure work of art implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words, set in motion by the clash of their inequalities... Everything becomes suspense, a fragmentary disposition with alternations and oppositions, all working towards the total rhythm of the white spaces, which would be the poem silenced.”
— Stéphane Mallarmé, Crise du versCURATOR has long been a pliable signifier. A direct loan from Latin, it derives from the transitive verb curare, which meant both “to cure” in its various senses and, generically, “to be in charge of.” This pliability was distended further when, some centuries after its import into English, the noun curator was back-formed into the pseudo-Latinate verb “to curate.” While the neologism retained curare’s transitivity, the particular set of objects with which it engaged began to broaden: curare implied the administration of people and bodies (human) or, when curing meat, animals; with the linguistic advent of curation, this subject-object relationship opened up to include the administration or arrangement of things. This transition marks a certain horizon of curatorial signification: suddenly a curator-subject was empowered—indeed, expected—to announce elocutionary presence, to say nothing of virtuosity, in and through the meaningful ordering of objects. 1 Insofar as Modern and contemporary art practices have challenged the specific materiality or substantiality of art objects, the concept of curation has had to accommodate immaterial or insubstantial kinds of artistic projects that might nevertheless be organized into a legible, meaningful order. This historical generalization of the objects of curation has had the effect of reducing its concept to a set of relationships between order and meaning and, consequently, authorizes the designation of any practice of ordering as curation. The programming of a concert series, be it for Lincoln Center or the Vans Warped Tour, meets the criteria of curation. Editing a magazine is curation; writing an essay is curation. Roman Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function of language attempts to specify precisely those relationships between order and meaning that would animate and organize this generalized curatorial locution.2 Poetics, in his analysis, is a production of meaning that establishes an equivalence between two processes: selection and combination. He describes the former as a process in which one element is selected from a series of grammatically (but not aesthetically) interchangeable units. The pronoun “he” would be grammatically interchangeable with the proper noun “Jean-Christophe,” for example; the verb “writes” with “prestidigitates.” In a more conventionally art-specific context, the analogous units of selection would be an individual work of art or, alternatively, the work of an individual artist in a group show. The unit thus selected is then combined with others in a horizontal chain. The poetic value of this combination emerges from the correspondence between the two processes: “he writes” versus “Jean-Christophe prestidigitates.” Or this particular piece of art juxtaposed with that particular piece inscribes a meaning that neither piece could produce in isolation. Such a model of poetics would seem to guarantee a place for a signifying curator-subject. (Indeed, curation is considered deficient when the selection and combination of art too openly narrates the curator’s own subjectivity: that is, when curation is clearly motivated by profiteering or nepotism or careerism or personal taste.) Unacknowledged in Jakobson’s account, however, is the radical consequence that according to poetics reduced to the two-dimensional plane of selection and combination, any and all practices of ordering produce meaning. The categorical distinction between production and consumption thus loses its rigor, and with it the specific subjectivity of the curator: if the program director of a concert series produces curatorial meaning, then so, too, does any bored festivalgoer who ambles idly from stage to stage. So, too, does the engineer who designs the algorithm according to which digital tuners selectively identify radio signals; so, too, does the government administrator who regulates radio stations’ applications for assigned carrier frequencies. And so on. What these examples make clear is that the possibility of curatorial meaning bears no necessary connection to the poetic intention of curator-subject. The generalizability of curation is not something to lament. Nor does the omnipresence of the generalized curator-subject herald the obsolescence or impossibility of curatorial practice. Rather, it should stimulate us, curator-subjects and curator-audiences alike, to develop the signifying possibilities of curation even further. Most urgent for this development is the question of where we might locate an irreducibly curatorial meaning that cannot be assimilated to ordering in general. We might well begin by reexamining the foundations of Jakobson’s model of poetics to better articulate it with curation’s specificities.

Stefan Brüggemann, Nothing at all, 2003;
print on canvas; 58 2/3 x 46 1/16 inches

 

Under certain circumstances, the linear chain of combination collapses two or more simultaneous orders of difference. In spoken or written language—the basis on which Jakobson develops his model—difference is obtained at the level of the (indivisible) word. In the curatorial ordering of music, by contrast, the difference between two adjoining songs might also include a difference at the level of genre: that is, the combination of an R&B song with a pop song potentially inscribes a meaning that two consecutive pop songs do not. Art curation (narrowly defined) works in this additional register of difference when a photographic portrait, for instance, is exhibited alongside a Surrealist photogram. Finally, curatorial combination can signify at yet another level of difference: that of sensory experience. The visual experience of a photograph, that is, can be combined with the auditory experience of a sound sculpture or, unavoidably, with the spatial-temporal experience of a museum, a gallery, a pavilion. A more precise figure for modeling such a multidimensional curatorial poetics might then be something like the molecular structure of a crystal rather than a chain. This forking of the notion of combination also has the effect of recursively throwing into relief the fragile unity of the “individual” works being selected. The experience of observing a photograph while hearing a sound installation (or, inversely, the experience of watching a musical performance) confounds the putative sensory or phenomenal distinguishability of visual art from sound, from touch, from scent. In its radical form, then, curation would elect not to assume the inviolability of individual art pieces or practices on any level. It would then be free to focus its attentions both at the points of the “internal” divisibility of its constituent units, as well as on the flexibility of the peculiar adhesive that acts to fold them into a signifying crystal. The ubiquity of generalized curator-subjects would dis(re)solve as curation—would work toward its own syntax, its own total rhythm of spaces, of spacing. In order to suggest somewhat more concretely the forms such a curatorial poetics of the in/between might take, I close these reflections with a brief set of passages excerpted from the memoirs of Juda Treulos, a Swiss engineer based in Schaffhausen during the middle part of the twentieth century. Although the objects about which he wrote were gramophone sound recordings, his observations unwittingly describe a powerful model for shuffling curation loose from the strictures of a two-dimensional plane of ordering. In his account, the unintentional, nonsubjective and multidimensional disordering of an archive produces a set of multisensory experiences that confounds a straightforward, linear poetics. On April 1, 1944, the United States Air Force mistakenly bombed Schaffhausen, resulting in over a hundred deaths, causing millions of Swiss francs in property damage and violating Swiss neutrality during World War II. At the time, Treulos served as Technical Director at a regional Schaffhausen radio post. His duties included the administration of a collection of state and commercial recordings, which included a modest library of classical music pressed by Deutsche Grammophon in Hanover. While the radio station itself was not hit by any of the misdirected ordnances, the same was not true for the factory immediately adjacent, home of the famous International Watch Company. Miraculously, the bomb did not detonate. The shock of its impact, however, and damage from the numerous fires in the vicinity effectively gutted the Schaffhausen radio station. Visiting the site on April 2, Treulos wrote: From the street I could detect the disturbing rumor of a complex smell—first the sharpness of wood smoke but then, hovering beneath, something like the burning of a candle. Inside the station the smell of resin was more pronounced and eventually I realized it had risen from the poor gramophone discs... The white walls of the vestibule have been painted with soot. All but one of our posters were burnt down—even the one that remains hangs curled at the edges and horribly distorted, the players and instruments of the Berliner Philharmoniker blackened and bubbled... The great hall clock had been dislodged—canted against the wall, the movement of its hands lugubrious, marking some irregular unit of time... [In the studio] it was strangely quiet, though my ears continued to ring from the force of last night’s percussions. It seemed somehow that the place had opened up, though all of its walls continue to stand—there was a new echo in the studio that cut away all the intimacy I have come to feel in that space, so accustomed there to a closeness [Geschlossenheit] of sound. I felt the irrational urge to keep silent, as though I were stepping lightly and respectfully through a mausoleum. But the floor was littered with the remains of most of our library—I could not avoid crushing loudly underfoot those precious brittle discs to which I had previously attended with such care and tenderness—each step became as a knife in me, I did not want to add to the destruction already wreaked. For a moment I thought I spied, on a corner shelf, a cache of undamaged discs. When I moved to lift these, however, I discovered that some of them had been fused together—two, sometimes three discs forming a hybrid creature... I could not help but utter a mournful chuckle at some of the strange bedfellows this unconscionable attack had united—Strauss fused to Durey, imagine! A devilish curiosity as much as my technician’s responsibility motivated me to test one of these hybrids... it sounded as though the recording [of Die Fledermaus] had been achieved at some great distance. The surface of the double-disc undulated, and as the needle rode along the disc’s curve the orchestra slid madly in and out of time... [T]he heat of the flames that had fused the two discs [had] softened [the waxed coating of] the tracks in the shellac... What terrible new music was this, rained on us from above? 3

1. The medical ordering of bodies, too, was—and is—a signifying practice. The possibility of signification in such cases, however, inheres bilaterally in the subjectivities of both curator and cured.
2. See “Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics” in Semiotics: An introductory anthology, edited by Robert Innis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985).
3. I am grateful to Andrea Paasch for her swift and able translations. Emphasis are mine.

-Rachael

The Bias of the World Curating after Szeemann & Hopps

Pablo Guardiola, Untitled, 2007; LightJet print; 20 x 30 inches; c
ourtesy Little Tree Gallery, San Francisco

 

David Levi Strauss

What Is a Curator?
That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity, Commodity, the bias of the world… — Shakespeare, King John 1Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts. In the Middle Ages, the role of the curator shifted to the ecclesiastical, as clergy having a spiritual cure or charge. So, one could say that the split within curating—between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest. For better or worse, curators of contemporary art have become, especially in the last ten years, the principal representatives of some of our most persistent questions and confusions about the social role of art. Is art a force for change and renewal, or is it a commodity for advantage or convenience? Is art a radical activity, undermining social conventions, or is it a diverting entertainment for the wealthy? Are artists the antennae of the human race, or are they spoiled children with delusions of grandeur? (In Roman law, a curator could also be the appointed caretaker or guardian of a minor or lunatic.) Are art exhibitions “spiritual undertakings with the power to conjure alternative ways of organizing society,” or vehicles for cultural tourism and nationalistic propaganda? 2 These splits, which reflect larger tears in the social fabric—certainly in the United States—complicate the changing role of curators of contemporary art, because curators mediate between art and its publics and are often forced to take “a curving and indirect course” between them. Teaching at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, I observed young curators confronting the practical demands and limitations of their profession armed with a vision of possibility and an image of the curator as a free agent, capable of almost anything. Where did this image come from? When Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps died in February and March 2005, at age 72 and 71 respectively, it was impossible not to see this as the end of an era. They were two of the principal architects of the present approach to curating contemporary art, working over fifty years to transform the practice. When young curators imagine what’s possible, they are imagining—whether they know it or not—some version of Szeemann and Hopps. The trouble with taking these two as models of curatorial possibility is that both of them were sui generis: renegades who managed, through sheer force of will, extraordinary ability, brilliance, luck and hard work, to make themselves indispensable, and thereby intermittently palatable, to the conservative institutions of the art world. Each came to these institutions early. When Szeemann was named head of the Kunsthalle Bern in 1961, at age 28, he was the youngest ever to have been appointed to such a position in Europe, and when Hopps was made director of the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1964, at age 31, he was then the youngest art museum director in the United States. By that time, Hopps (who never earned a college degree) had already mounted a show of paintings by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Jay DeFeo and many others on a merry-go-round in an amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier (with his first wife, Shirley Hopps, when he was 22); started and run two galleries (Syndell Studios and the seminal Ferus Gallery, with Ed Kienholz); and curated the first museum shows of Frank Stella’s paintings and Joseph Cornell’s boxes, the first U.S. retrospective of Kurt Schwitters, the first museum exhibition of Pop art and the first solo museum exhibition of Marcel Duchamp, in Pasadena in 1963. And that was just the beginning. Near the end of his life, Hopps estimated that he’d organized 250 exhibitions in his fifty-year career. Szeemann’s early curatorial activities were no less prodigious. He made his first exhibition, Painters Poets/Poets Painters, a tribute to Hugo Ball in 1957, at age 24. When he became the director of the Kunsthalle in Bern four years later, he completely transformed that institution, mounting nearly twelve exhibitions a year, culminating in the landmark show Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, in 1969, exhibiting works by 70 artists, including Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long and Bruce Nauman, among many others.

Karen Mahaffey, Still Life with Fruit, 2005; digital video;
courtesy the artist

 

While producing critically acclaimed and historically important exhibitions, both Hopps and Szeemann quickly came into conflict with their respective institutions. After four years at the Pasadena Art Museum, Hopps was asked to resign. He was named director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1970, and then fired two years later. For his part, stunned by the negative reaction to When Attitudes Become Form from the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann quit his job, becoming the first “independent curator.” He set up the Agency for Spiritual Guestwork and cofounded the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) in 1969, curated Happenings and Fluxus at the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1970 and became the first artistic director of Documenta in 1972, reconceiving it as a 100-day event. Szeemann and Hopps hadn’t yet turned 40, and their best shows were all ahead of them. For Szeemann, these included Junggesellenmaschinen—Les Machines célibataires (Bachelor Machines) in 1975–77, Monte Veritá (1978, 1983, 1987), the first Aperto at the Venice Biennale (with Achille Bonito Oliva, 1980), Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk, Europaïsche Utopien seit 1800 (The Quest for the Total Work of Art) in 1983–84, Visionary Switzerland in 1991, the Beuys retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1993, Austria in a Lacework of Roses in 1996, and the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001. For Hopps, yet to come were exhibitions of Diane Arbus in the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972, Robert Rauschenberg’s mid-career survey in 1976, retrospectives at the Menil Collection of Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol and Max Ernst, and exhibitions of Jay DeFeo (1990), Ed Kienholz (1996 at the Whitney), Rauschenberg again (1998) and James Rosenquist (2003 at the Guggenheim). Both Szeemann and Hopps had exhibitions open when they died—Szeemann’s Visionary Belgium, for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and Hopps’ George Herms retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum—and both had plans for many more exhibitions in the future. 
What Do Curators Do?

Szeemann and Hopps were the Cosmas and Damian (or the Beuys and Duchamp) of contemporary curatorial practice. Rather than accepting things as they found them, they changed the way things were done. But finally, they will be remembered for only one thing: the quality of the exhibitions they made; for that is what curators do, after all. Szeemann often said he preferred the simple title of Ausstellungsmacher (exhibition-maker), but he acknowledged at the same time how many different functions this one job comprised: “administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.” I have heard curators characterized at different times as:
Administrators
Advocates
Auteurs
Bricoleurs (Hopps’ last show, the Herms retrospective, was titled The Bricoleur of Broken Dreams… One More Once.)
Brokers
Bureaucrats
Cartographers (Ivo Mesquita)
Catalysts (Hans Ulrich Obrist)
Collaborators
Cultural impresarios
Cultural nomads

Diplomats (When Bill Lieberman, who held top curatorial posts at both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died in May 2005, ARTnews described him as “the consummate art diplomat.”)
And that’s just the beginning of the alphabet. When Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Hopps to name important predecessors, the first one he came up with was Willem Mengelberg, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, “for his unrelenting rigor.” “Fine curating of an artist’s work,” he continued, “that is, presenting it in an exhibition—requires as broad and sensitive an understanding of an artist’s work that a curator can possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well beyond what is actually put in the exhibition….To me, a body of work by a given artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as possible.” 3 But around this calm and peaceful center raged the “controlled chaos” of exhibition-making. Hopps’ real skills included an encyclopedic visual memory, the ability to place artworks on the wall and in a room in a way that made them sing,4 the personal charm to get people to do things for him and an extraordinary ability to look at a work of art, account for his experience of it and articulate this account to others in a compelling and convincing way. It is significant, I think, that neither Szeemann nor Hopps considered himself a writer, but both recognized and valued good writing and solicited and “curated” writers and critics as well as artists into their exhibitions and publications. Even so, many have observed that the rise of the independent curator has occurred at the expense of the independent critic. In a recent article titled “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” Mark Spiegler opined that “on the day in 1969 when Harald Szeemann went freelance by leaving the Kunsthalle Bern, the wind turned against criticism.” 5 There are curators who can also write criticism, but these precious few are exceptions that prove the rule. Curators are not specialists, but for some reason they feel the need to use a specialized language, appropriated from philosophy or psychoanalysis, which too often obscures rather than reveals their sources and ideas. The result is not criticism but curatorial rhetoric. Criticism involves making finer and finer distinctions among like things, while the inflationary writing of curatorial rhetoric is used to obscure fine distinctions with vague generalities. The latter’s displacement of the former has a political dimension, as we move into an increasingly managed, post-critical environment. Although Szeemann and Hopps were very different in many ways, they shared certain fundamental values: an understanding of the importance of remaining independent of institutional prejudices and arbitrary power arrangements; a keen sense of history; the willingness to continually take risks intellectually, aesthetically and conceptually; and an inexhaustible curiosity about—and respect for—the way artists work.

Cristoph Keller, Cloudbuster Project, 2008; installation view;
Kunstverein Braunschweig; courtesy the artist

 

Szeemann’s break away from the institution of the Kunsthalle was, simply put, “a rebellion aimed at having more freedom.” 6 This rebellious act put him closer to the ethos of artists and writers, where authority cannot be bestowed or taken but must be earned through the quality of one’s work. In his collaborations with artists, power relations were negotiated in practice rather than asserted as fiat. Every mature artist I know has a favorite horror story about a young, inexperienced curator trying to claim an authority they haven’t earned by manipulating a seasoned artist’s work or by designing exhibitions in which individual artists’ works are seen as secondary and subservient to the curator’s grand plan or theme. The cure for this kind of insecure hubris is experience, but also the recognition of the ultimate contingency of the curatorial process. As Dave Hickey said of both critics and curators, “Somebody has to do something before we can do anything.” 7 In June of 2000, after being at the pinnacle of curatorial power for over forty years, Harald Szeemann said, “Frankly, if you insist on power, then you keep going on in this way. But you must throw the power away after each experience, otherwise it’s not renewing. I’ve done a lot of shows, but if the next one is not an adventure, it’s not important for me and I refuse to do it.” 8

Michelle Monseau, Gone Again II (Ocean), 2007; digital video diptych;
dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

 

When contemporary curators, following in the steps of Szeemann, break free from institutions, they sometimes lose their sense of history in the process. Whatever their shortcomings, institutions do have a sense (sometimes a surfeit) of history. And without history, “the new” becomes a trap: a sequential recapitulation of past approaches with no forward movement. It is a terrible thing to be perpetually stuck in the present, and this is a major occupational hazard for curators. Speaking about his curating of the Seville Biennale in 2004, Szeemann said, “It’s not about presenting the best there is but about discovering where the unpredictable path of art will go in the immanent future.” But moving the ball up the field requires a tremendous amount of legwork. “The unpredictable path of art” becomes much less so when curators rely on the Claude Rains method, rounding up the usual suspects from the same well-worn list of artists that everyone else in the world is using. It is difficult, in retrospect, to fully appreciate the risks that both Szeemann and Hopps took to change the way curators worked. One should never underestimate the value of a monthly paycheck. By giving up a secure position as director of a stable art institution and striking out on his own as an “independent curator,” Szeemann was assuring himself years of penury. There was certainly no assurance that anyone would hire him. (Anyone who’s chosen this path knows that freelance means never having to say you’re solvent.) Being freelance as a writer and critic is one thing: the tools of the trade are relatively inexpensive, and one need only make a living. But making exhibitions is costly, and finding “independent” money, money without onerous strings attached to it, is especially difficult when one cannot, in good conscience, present it as an “investment opportunity.” Daniel Birnbaum points out that “All the dilemmas of corporate sponsorship and branding in contemporary art today are fully articulated in the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. Remarkably, according to Szeemann, the exhibition came about only because “people from Philip Morris and the PR firm Ruder Finn came to Bern and asked me if I would do a show of my own. They offered me money and total freedom.” Indeed, the exhibition’s catalogue seems uncanny in its prescience: “As businessmen in tune with our times, we at Philip Morris are committed to support the experimental,” writes John A. Murphy, the company’s European president, asserting that his company experimented with “new methods and materials” in a way fully comparable to the Conceptual artists in the exhibition. (And yet, showing the other side of this corporate-funding equation, it was a while before the company supported the arts in Europe again, perhaps needing time to recover from all the negative press surrounding the event.)” 9 So the founding act of “independent curating” was brought to you by…Philip Morris! Thirty-three years later, for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02, Szeemann designed a pavilion covered with sheets of gold, containing a system of pneumatic tubes and a machine that destroyed money—two one-hundred franc notes every minute during the 159 days of the exhibition. The sponsor? The Swiss National Bank, of course. When Walter Hopps brought the avant-garde to Southern California, he didn’t have to compete with others to secure the works of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still or Jay DeFeo (for the merry-go-round show in 1953) because no one else wanted them. In his Hopps obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight pointed out that “just a few years after Hopps’ first visit to the [Arensbergs’] collection, the [Los Angeles] City Council decreed that Modern art was Communist propaganda and banned its public display.” 10 In fifty years, we’ve progressed from banning art as Communist propaganda to prosecuting artists as terrorists.11 The Few and Far Between
It’s not that fast horses are rare, but men who know enough to spot them are few and far between. — Han Yü 12The trait that Szeemann and Hopps had most in common was their respect for—and understanding of—artists. They never lost sight of the fact that their principal job was to take what they found in artists’ works and do whatever it took to present it in the strongest possible way to an interested public. Sometimes this meant combining it with other work that enhanced or extended it. This was done not to show the artists anything they didn’t already know but to show the public. As Lawrence Weiner pointed out in an interview in 1994, “Everybody that was in the Attitudes show knew all about the work of everybody else in the Attitudes show. They wouldn’t have known them personally, but they knew all the work….Most artists on both sides of the Atlantic knew what was being done. European artists had been coming to New York and U.S. artists went over there.” 13 But Attitudes brought it all together in a way that made a difference. Both Szeemann and Hopps felt most at home with artists, sometimes literally. Carolee Schneemann recently described for me the scene in the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1970, when she and her collaborator in Happenings and Fluxus (having arrived and discovered there was no money for lodging) moved into their installations, and Szeemann thought it such a good idea to sleep on-site that he brought in a cot and slept in the museum himself, to the outrage of the guards and staff. Both Szeemann and Hopps reserved their harshest criticism for the various bureaucracies that got between them and the artists. Hopps once described working for bureaucrats when he was a senior curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts as “like moving through an atmosphere of Seconal.” 14 And Szeemann said in 2001 that “the annoying thing about such bureaucratic organizations at the [Venice] Biennale is that there are a lot of people running around who hate artists because they keep running around wanting to change everything.” 15 Changing everything, for Szeemann, was just the point. “Artists, like curators, work on their own,” he said in 2000, “grappling with their attempt to make a world in which to survive….We are lonely people, faced with superficial politicians, with donors, sponsors, and one must deal with all of this. I think it is here where the artist finds a way to form his own world and live his obsessions. For me, this is the real society.” 16 The society of the obsessed.Where Do We Go from Here?
Although Walter Hopps was an early commissioner for the São Paulo Biennal (1965: Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Richard Irwin and Larry Poons) and of the Venice Biennale (1972: Diane Arbus), Harald Szeemann practically invented the role of nomadic independent curator of huge international shows, putting his indelible stamp on Documenta and Venice and organizing the Lyon Biennale and the Kwangju Biennial in 1997 and the first Seville Biennale in 2004, as well as numerous other international surveys around the world. So, what Szeemann said about globalization and art should perhaps be taken seriously. He saw globalization as a euphemism for imperialism and proclaimed that “globalization is the great enemy of art.” In Carolee Thea’s 2000 interview, he said, “Globalization is perfect if it brings more justice and equality to the world…but it doesn’t. Artists dream of using computer or digital means to have contact and to bring continents closer. But once you have the information, it’s up to you what to do with it. Globalization without roots is meaningless in art.” 17 And globalization of the curatorial class can be a way to avoid or “transcend” the political. Rene Dubos’ old directive to “think globally but act locally” (first given at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972) has been upended in some recent international shows (like the 14th Sydney Biennale in 2004 and the 1st Moscow Biennial in 2005). When one thinks locally (within a primarily Euro-American cultural framework, or within a New York-London-Kassel-Venice-Basel-Los Angeles-Miami framework) but acts globally, the results are bound to be problematic, and can be disastrous. In 1979, Dubos argued for an ecologically sustainable world in which “natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity yet interplay with each other through a rich system of communications.” At their best, the big international exhibitions do contribute to this. Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI certainly did, and Szeemann knew it.18 At their worst, they perpetuate the center-to-periphery hegemony and preclude real cross-cultural communication and change. Although having artists and writers move around in the world is an obvious good, real cultural exchange is something that must be nurtured. Hopps said in 1996: “I really believe in—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have… So just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some.” 19 The Silence of Szeemann and Hopps Is Overrated
Art is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situations, and it is the more artful (artistic) the less probable the situation that it produces. — Vilém Flusser 20Harald Szeemann recognized early and long appreciated the utopian aspects of art. “The often-evoked ‘autonomy’ is just as much a fruit of subjective evaluation as the ideal society: it remains a utopia while it informs the desire to experientially visualize the unio mystica of opposites in space. Which is to say that without seeing, there is nothing visionary, but that the visionary should always determine the seeing.” And he recognized that the bureaucrat could overtake the curer of souls at any point. “Otherwise, we might just as well return to ‘hanging and placing,’ and divide the entire process ‘from the vision to the nail’ into detailed little tasks again.” 21 He organized exhibitions in which the improbable could occur and was willing to risk the impossible. In reply to a charge that the social utopianism of Beuys was never realized, Szeemann said, “The nice thing about utopias is precisely that they fail. For me failure is a poetic dimension of art.” 22 Curating a show in which nothing could fail was, to Szeemann, a waste of time. If he and Hopps could still encourage young curators in anything, I suspect it would be to take greater risks in their work. At a time when all parts of the social and political spheres (including art institutions) are increasingly managed, breaking out of this frame, asking significant questions and setting the terms of resistance are more and more vitally important. It is important to work against the bias of the world (commodity, political expediency). For curators of contemporary art, that means finding and supporting those artists who, as Flusser writes, “have attempted, at the risk of their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden.” 23This essay appeared in Brooklyn Rail (December 2006) and in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, edited by Steven Rand and Heather Kouris (Apex Art, 2007).  
 
1. Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, Act II, Scene 1, 573-74. Cowper: “What Shakespeare calls commodity, and we call political expediency.” Appendix 13 of my old edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by G. B. Harrison (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 1639–40, reads: “Shakespeare frequently used poetic imagery taken from the game of bowls [bowling]…The bowl [bowling ball] was not a perfect sphere, but so made that one side somewhat protruded. This protrusion was called the bias; it caused the bowl to take a curving and indirect course.”
2. “When Attitude Becomes Form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann,” Artforum (Summer 2005), 55.
3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Volume I, edited by Thomas Boutoux (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), 416–17. Hopps also named as predecessors exhibition-makers Katherine Dreier, Alfred Barr, James Johnson Sweeney, René d’Harnoncourt, and Jermayne MacAgy.
4. In 1976, at the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington, DC, Hopps announced that, for thirty-six hours, he would hang anything anyone brought in, as long as it would fit through the door. Later, he proposed to put 100,000 images up on the walls of P.S. 1 in New York, but that project was, sadly, never realized.
5. Mark Spiegler, “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” The Art Newspaper, no. 157 (April 2005), 32.
6. Carolee Thea, Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, 2001), 19.
7. “Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility,” proceedings from a symposium addressing the state of current curatorial practice organized by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (October 14–15, 2000), edited by Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), 128. Both Szeemann and Hopps passed Hickey’s test: “The curator’s job, in my view,” he said, “is to tell the truth, to show her or his hand, and get out of the way,” 126.
8. Carolee Thea, 19 (emphasis added).
9. Daniel Birnbaum, 58.
10. Christopher Knight, “Walter Hopps, 1932–2005. Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists,” Los Angeles Times (March 22, 2005).
11. At the time this article was written, the U.S. government was actively prosecuting artist Steven Kurtz for obtaining bacterial agents through the mail, even though the agents were harmless and intended for use in art pieces by the collaborative Critical Art Ensemble. After a four-year legal battle Kurtz was acquitted in April 2008. See www.caedefensefund.org for more information on this case.
12. Epigraph to Nathan Sivin’s Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
13. Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, edited by Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 315.
14. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps—Art Curator,” Artforum (February 1996).
15. Jan Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann,” Metropolis M: Tijdschrift over Hedendaagse Kunst, no. 3 (June 2001).
16. Carolee Thea, 17 (emphasis added).
17. Carolee Thea, 18.
18. With cocurators Carlos Basualdo, Uta Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya.
19. Hans Ulrich Obrist, 430.
20. Vilém Flusser, “Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion,” in Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 52.
21. Harald Szeemann, “Does Art Need Directors?” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, edited by Carin Kuoni (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), 169.
22. Jan Winkelman.
23. Flusser, 54.

-Rachael

You Kant Always Get What You Want

Saul Alverez, Primary ventures in house-breaking
or Pissing my pants while wearing a coyote pelt, 2005

 

Joao Ribas & Matt Sheridan Smith

Joao Ribas: As curating becomes more and more “visible,” that is, as the field constructs its own history and the charge of the curator expands beyond its traditional role, a certain antagonism seems to have arisen. This revolves around the ostensive division of labor between artist and curator and the denotation of meaning this implies. There seems to be a resistance to the supposed intrusion of one into the other—something that I think comes from a desire for a “zero degree” condition, in which the autonomy of artworks is somehow not intruded upon by any interpretative imposition. This desire for the unmediated impact of an artwork—a certain iconophilic need revolving around access to the unadulterated value of an art object—seems akin to the desire for the primal scene versus the interpretative gesture. Matt Sheridan Smith: This antagonism you speak of often relies on an assumption that the “unmediated impact of the artwork” in the end equals an unmediated communication between the artist’s subjectivity—which should of course be “radical” or “visionary” or, in the very least, singular—and the viewer: a one-to-one line from genius to viewer. Although I guess that description is a bit outdated in all but the most old-fashioned circles by now, so really, we should assume that there is some consensus about the discursive or dialogic role of art. In any case, it’s interesting to me that a dialogue between artist and viewer or critic is seen as valid according to the current understanding of how to interact with a work of art, but a high level of dialogue between an artist and curator in the presentation—or even in the production of work, which I admit can be problematic (but also interesting)—is sometimes seen as compromising. This idea of intrusion is really baffling to me. Is interpretation after the exhibition by viewers any less “intrusive” in this sense than the interpretive/contextualizing role a curator plays in making an exhibition? If anything, I think that position actually overstates the role of the exhibition itself in the life of an artwork. J Ribas: There are two things you mention that bare developing. One is a change in the models of production, which in an odd way have partly veered off into a blurred territory on both sides in the last three decades. The distinction between “studio” and “exhibition space” that defines some of the inherited hierarchy in the roles of artist and curator—think of the trope of the studio in nineteenth-century painting for example—doesn’t quite hold up in contemporary terms…and some curatorial models revolve around the notion of producer rather than organizer of exhibitions. Certainly, ideas of “postproduction” or “site specificity” or “collectivity” undermine a clear distinction between traditional roles. The second is the nature of the interpretative gesture itself, which is always characterized in the history of aesthetic thought (at least since Kant) as a deferral, a reflective judgment after the fact. But, then, why should the curatorial gesture be negatively defined as dismantling a supposed line between artist and viewer rather than the other way around, as if an artwork were an utterance—already a terrible fallacy—and curating amounts to an interruptive stutter? M Smith: Maybe it’s nostalgia for that very brief period (relatively speaking) where art really was seen as an object of pure contemplation: a transcendent object, etc., which wasn’t really that long ago if you look at the whole history of aesthetic production, to use a broad category. There’s just a couple hundred years between “art” as the production of artisanal objects that had a deeply ingrained social function (Roman sculpture, nobility portraits, religious art) and art for art’s sake or modernism, where it turns in on itself. J Ribas: All of your examples are of highly mediated forms, which predate any clear articulation of themselves as “art” proper; that is, something made by an artist within the subjectivity that you rightly historicized. Rather, these things were subjected to a high degree of dramaturgical emphasis—to an actual rhetoric of display which rigidly positioned their value as objects, both within an economy of desire as well as within relations of power and knowledge. Modernism, in its more normative offshoots, simply took “autonomy” as its own specific frame, which is, of course, itself produced through an entire order of interpretation through exhibitions and institutions. One of the things the debate about the nature of curatorial mediation often doesn’t take into consideration is the extent to which the display of artworks has affected the production and the formation of meaning around them. There are specific historical examples: say, the Entartete Kunst show in 1937, or Harald Szeemann’s Attitudes exhibition…that is, exhibitions and institutions of display shaping the actual valuation of objects, producing an order of knowledge as values and ideals. To your examples, one can add the logical conclusion of the history of discrete sculpture as installation impossible to conceive without institutional architecture and the production of meaning through exhibitions—a basic ordering of objects in spatial terms to produce or elicit meaning from them. Rather, the very subjectivity of the artist is privileged as something reified, much as commodity fetishism dictates that an artwork has intrinsic value that needs no interpretation.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Public Sculpture Tackle or
 Confronting Culture (Beuys), 2007; silver gelatin print;
15 x 15 inches; courtesy the artists

M Smith: Those are significant examples. It would seem that knowing this, the best solution would be the development of a more reflexive and cognizant (and transparent) curatorial practice rather than a diluted one. In other words, it seems to call for a much more involved relationship between artist and curator. J Ribas: An emphasis on mediation itself as integral to the production of meaning… M Smith: The points you bring up tend to apply to institutions and structures rather than individuals. And I think that’s right on because these things, whether the museum, the white cube, display or whatever, are not the kinds of things that we can take for granted or theorize our way out of as easily as people sometimes think. They are very real, hardened aspects of our relationship to art and the fact is, the vast majority of the audience will not have a particularly critical relationship to them. Some artists do an incredible job on their own, but the best projects and exhibitions that deal directly with these issues usually involve a very engaged curator, or else—all too often—you’re back at simple recoupment. J Ribas: But there is a paradox here too. The curator, unlike the artist, lacks the ability to transform “non-art” into art merely through the act of display—that level of ontology resides only in the labor of the artist. Yet, transformation seems to only happen precisely through this labor being placed in the exhibition context. And there are, of course, artists for whom the curatorial mediation is already internalized in their own practice…in a sense, the work already presupposes the idea of an “intrusion,” as in a general shift from object to process to discursive and relational approaches in the last three decades…you can argue that someone like Duchamp, for example, collapsed this distinction in the first place. M Smith: But it’s important to remember that not all artists are interested in engaging this problem, in which case the curator needs to negotiate that for them and their work to some degree or else we’re falling back into the same old traps. I think art’s biggest potential is in its ability to produce ideas beyond the ideas contained within it, or the intended ideas, etc. A good curator can harness and direct those types of discursive potentials.

Yoshua Okón, Coyotería, 2003; digital video;
dimensions variable; courtesy the artist

J Ribas: It’s fascinating to see how wildly things can fluctuate in those terms, historically speaking. Take for example Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation, a fifteenth-century painting that’s been interpreted as everything from a political allegory to a dynastic celebration—even as a clue to a murder—all within the life of the same, small, restrained composition, and shaped by every written description, as well as by every way it’s been cared for. And it’s fascinating to think about the difference in how visual art was written about before the assumed presence of diapositive reproductions. I wonder if part of the problem is really that the issue is so individualized—I mean, in the broader collective sense of meaning that can be articulated by curatorial frames…say, allegorical meaning. Hang a seventeenth-century Dutch still life next to a Morandi, or a Léger next to a Lichtenstein, and you move things in a specific direction. M Smith: They’re like a sort of super-viewer. They can start the conversation—or one of the conversations—which is then immediately in the hands of others (viewers, writers, talkers). Which is great. There are so many more points of intensity that way. We were talking once about this notion of care, of curare. When a work is not about the direct engagement of these issues, there really is a lot of care that needs to be taken. Can you interpret that for me? J Ribas: The issue of “care” is at the origin of the curator…literally, from curare, “to care of.” The Latin origin of the term is an official in charge of public works—in the sense of sanitation and roads, etc. This becomes ecclesiastic in the Middle Ages, but the idea remains someone who takes care of something, whether a road or a soul. In this sense, the question we’ve been skirting around is whether this care should extend to the issue of intention or to a critique of immanent value, which is often what people mean in terms of what I call “zero degree.” M Smith: And a bit of a thorny question at that. Personally, I tend to think art is at its most interesting when intention falls prey, so to speak, to all the different influences at play once the work enters circulation. I think that a sort of collective mutability is generally going to produce a lot more interesting ideas and trajectories than a single “intention” in a puristic sense. It’s because of the cliché that art “takes on a life of its own” that a lot of stuff starts to happen amongst people who haven’t even seen the work or saw it in reproduction. There are suddenly so many more nodes and mutations and rupture points. So no, given all that, I don’t think a curator—or anyone else for that matter—necessarily has to respect an artist’s intention. What we’re really discussing is what is supposed to happen to an artwork after it’s been made and exhibited, and what is supposed to happen to an idea—and whether there are ideal conditions for its circulation. And suddenly we’re talking as much about what an artist is—or does—as much as we are about the role of a curator.

-Rachael

Art as Curating ≠ Curating as Art

Jens Hoffmann & Julieta Aranda

 

 

The following discussion is really interesting when looking at how curation can be considered an art form. The article itself is from Art Lies: A Contempory Art Journal issue 59.

 

Jens Hoffmann: I am entering this conversation from the position of the curator—a curator who has often been accused of taking a very authorial and creative position in the creation of exhibitions. I am emphasizing words like “author” and “creation” on purpose to express my place in this conversation, and my overall standpoint in the realization of exhibitions. I am not an art historian—the traditional background of a curator—nor did I study curating. Rather, I consider myself an exhibition-maker in the tradition of Harald Szeemann and Hans Ulrich Obrist, both of whom have had to deal with similar critiques in regard to their creative approaches when organizing exhibitions. The group show is our medium, but none of us has ever done anything to a work of art that was not appropriate or forced artists into a context they did not want to participate in. Criticism usually comes from the outside—never from the artists we collaborate with—and skepticism is particularly strong in the United States. I recently had a conversation with a young writer and curator who said he did not want to be progressive in his work as a curator but focus his energy on curating large-scale monographic shows of established artists. I thought that was very telling about the role of the curator in an institutional setting. I see my own trajectory, which grows out of Szeemann’s practice, as forming temporary alliances with artists to produce grand narratives that are bigger than the sum of their parts: exhibitions with an epic dimension, if you will, which reconnect to my formative years as a theater director. My points of reference are Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht and filmmakers of postwar France and Italy. Jean-Pierre Melville and Michelangelo Antonioni are especially important influences in their authorial approach to filmmaking. In the field of contemporary curating, I think that Okwui Enwezor is the most gifted, but I am also a big fan of the curatorial work of Ydessa Hendeles. She has been a big influence on me, perhaps more so than any of the other people mentioned here. Her way of making exhibitions is certainly on the border of artmaking. What I like about her is that she brings very personal elements to her exhibitions—emotional, almost romantic—and she is very interested in the staging of her shows. She is the best installer of exhibitions that I know. Her shows are more than perfect, if you ask me. Julieta Aranda: Since you entered this conversation as a curator, I should state my position too and say that I am entering it as an artist. Yet, I am an artist that has often been mistaken for a curator, since I frequently create participatory projects. In the beginning, it was quite frustrating to constantly encounter skepticism for my work, but over time I came to realize that there is a place in which the lines between what constitutes artistic practice and what constitutes curatorial practice can be blurred. I would like to use this conversation to try to define this blurred space—this intersection—and how it can be productive on both sides of the blur. I am very curious as to how you understand the relationship between artist/curator—the important differences and the place in which these roles are perhaps even complementary. J Hoffmann: What you say is interesting, as there is a history of what you describe as a “blurred space” of intersection. Just think about people like Seth Siegelaub, for example, or more recently Matthew Higgs—an artist as much as a curator. Then there are artists who curated exhibitions, at times even run art spaces. This “blurred space” has a long history. I have learned a lot from watching artists curate. Most recently, I invited Paul McCarthy to curate a show at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, where I am now the director. It was a terrific experience: seeing him select the pieces, seeing him install work in very different ways as compared to a curator. Artists have a different approach to curating—one that is less conformist and often more creative and unpredictable. There have been fantastic shows curated by artists that I always mention as some of my favorite exhibitions: The Play of the Unmentionable (curated by Joseph Kosuth), Americana (Group Material), Mining the Museum (Fred Wilson) or before that, in the late 1950s, This is Tomorrow (Independent Group) and many more. All of them influenced me enormously, probably more than exhibitions curated by what we would call “proper” curators. I have always considered myself a proper curator, though even that has been disputed at times. People have said I am so creative that my work really borders on artmaking, but these kinds of comments miss the point as they overlook what my work actually says about curatorial practice. Someone who is important for me here is Liam Gillick, with whom I’ve had fantastic discussions about exhibition-making and the roles of artists and curators. I remember him saying once that he thought that it was curators who changed art in the 1990s, not so much artists. I am not sure if that is right—he probably went a bit too far—but it was an interesting point to consider and speaks to the importance of curators in the field of art today. J Aranda: Sometimes I wonder if there is really a need to keep roles so strictly separated or if curating is an entrenched practice merely because of tradition. I would be very curious to know what you consider to be the difference between artist-curated shows and curator-curated shows. In my case, I think more and more about the possibility of an extremely flexible approach in which it would be possible to articulate polysemic positions that can be either artworks or exhibitions. Somehow the idea of exploring the intersecting space between both practices seems more interesting to me than it is to delineate the boundaries of each. A good example is Obrist’s DO IT exhibitions, which I find incredibly successful as artworks. J Hoffmann: I think you have a point there in regard to the separation of curating and artmaking. It has a lot to do with tradition, habit and the historical development of art and museums. Do not forget that until recently, curators were mostly art historians. The majority of curators today still are art historians, but you also have a new kind of curator that follows the model of someone like Szeemann, for example, and works very closely with artists. I think Obrist played a big role in this development as well, and you already mentioned DO IT, one of the most interesting shows in recent history in terms of its innovative qualities. I am not sure, however, if it would be innovative with regard to the history of art. That is why I would always vote for a separation of these practices—artmaking and curating. Curating is not really an artistic practice. At best, it can be called a creative practice. Also, most of the time, the boundaries between these practices are being crossed more by artists than curators. I have not found one curator yet that considers her or himself an artist. If they do, they cease to be curators. Perhaps all of this will not matter much in the future, but one needs a different set of skills to make shows than to make art. Artists I’ve worked with are always surprised about the amount of work they have to do as a curator, apart from the selection of artworks. All the administrational elements are really shocking to them! J Aranda: Something that is odd to me is to see how the crossing of boundaries changes modes of working for both artists and curators. Of course, there is a long tradition of curators coming from art history, and the same long tradition of rational, well-thought-out survey exhibitions to illustrate art-historical topics. It is very good to see that linear mode interrupted by a more intuitive approach to curatorial practice, which complicates the relationships between works or that articulates a point altogether different from what could be said by historical analysis. However, I also notice that there have been more and more artists that are making use of investigative methodologies common to an art historical approach. This can be interesting ground for productive confusion, and thus it makes me wonder why you think that the moment a curator might consider him/herself as an artist, they would not be a curator. 


pages 32–33: Julieta Aranda, Untitled (Death of the Curator), 2008; newsprint on paper; 18 x 12 inches

   J Hoffmann: Of course artists have heavily influenced curators, not only through the work that they make when they curate but, more often, simply through their own artwork. Look at how much influence the practice of institutional critique and conceptual art have had on curators over the last forty years. It is interesting that you would call new ideas in the field of curating more “intuitive.” I disagree with that, but I think what you mean is that they can be, perhaps, more personal. It is difficult to generalize. People still tend to look at new forms of exhibition-making as one movement—as one overall idea—even though the efforts of most curators that fall into this category can be quite different in their methodology and, in many cases, do not even relate to one another. But to answer your question, if a curator considers his or her work to be art, then he or she is not a curator anymore simply because exhibition-making, as I understand it, is not an artistic practice. It is still about some form of scholarship, even if it is very creative and personalized. But you are right in that it is becoming harder and harder to define. J Aranda: I think I should clarify. When I say “intuitive,” I don’t mean misinformed, but I also don’t mean strictly personal. What I find fascinating about the curatorial approach that we are discussing is that it is not following the logic of art history as we know it but is also not using work to serve a personal logic. In some way, it seems to be structured around relations of complicity, where all the parts involved remain active as the statement is articulated. That doesn’t talk to me only about exhibition-making but also about artmaking and about how these two things are becoming inextricably tied at a certain level. J Hoffmann: Yes, I understood that you did not mean “misinformed,” but I would be careful with the use of the word “intuitive” in the context of curating. I think what you mean is nonacademic—idea-based. Looking at my own work, I think I am intuitive to some degree but perhaps less when it comes to making an exhibition and more when it comes to an initial response to artworks that I analyze intellectually. I understand your ideas of the blurring of these boundaries, and they make a lot of sense; it is just a very particular discourse that I am personally not so fond of. In some funny way, I sometimes think I am a conservative curator: I like objects, I like to work in gallery spaces, I like all the details associated with exhibitions. The things I fundamentally reject are common forms of exhibitions and the categorization of exhibition genres, and that alone calls everything into question. J Aranda: The way in which you describe your relationship to curating is often with regard to the group-show format. I am curious as to how you see the one-to-one relationship between a curator and an artist. For example, I know that you often work with Tino Sehgal. How does your process change in such a case, if at all? J Hoffmann: I think that the group show is the exhibition format in which curators can be the most creative. Here she or he can bring in their vision in regard to artists, artworks, themes, etc., and tie all the elements together following one larger concept. I have looked extensively at this particular exhibition format and worked—especially in earlier exhibitions—on conceptualizing the process of making an exhibition. Today, my exhibitions continue to contain a self-reflexive element, but that is only one of many concerns. I am much more interested in the idea of staging exhibitions as an overall creative and artistic environment that the audience can immerse themselves in on a number of levels. When a curator is working with an artist on a solo exhibition, the one-to-one relationship is always different and entirely dependent upon who one works with. But usually, when working on a solo show—and I have to say that all the ones I have done are not survey exhibitions but project-based solo exhibitions—I try to look very carefully at the artist’s work and then try to find a format for the exhibition that is based on a particular element of the artist’s practice. It is a long process, and it is one of the most interesting things for me: the challenge of how to find the most adequate form of exhibition for a particular type of work. Artmaking has changed so radically over the last century; yet, we still use display strategies—exhibition formats that have been with us even longer. I am trying to challenge this by looking at the artwork, by talking to the artist, in order to find the best possible format for a solo presentation. But now we are talking too much about exhibition-making from the curator’s point of view. Tell me more about your thoughts in this respect. How do you start thinking about curating an exhibition, for example? How is that related to your work as an artist? Are there very strong connections, or is it more of a fluid form of exchange between the two? J Aranda: I understand your affinity for the group show. The format is interesting to me as an artist because it allows one to see how work functions in a certain context. Why I ask about your role when working one-on-one with an artist is because I used to think about curators in the classical, art-historical sense—as the keepers of the record—those in charge of making sense of the world around them, much like the function of one in charge of continuity in filmmaking. However, when I think about what I call “intuitive” curators, things shift. When I mentioned before relations of complicity, it is because I have come to realize that this becomes a very strong and important component of the working process—at least in my case—much more so than the directives and guidelines of art history. As to your questions, I don’t think I have ever curated an exhibition. What happens is that some of the projects that I have worked on with Anton Vidokle tend to be confused with curated exhibitions. I believe this is because we were using a participatory model so that the content would come from people that were complicit with a certain idea, while we could focus on the structure. These projects are completely related to our preoccupation with the notion of circulation and its aesthetic potential. In the case of our video rental store, this became the idea of making a structure that would complicate the terms of access and display of film and video work, while trying to lay the groundwork for the creation of an open archive. And in the case of Pawnshop, we tried to focus on the moment in which value is generated within the processes of exchange and circulation of artwork. Obviously, we were relying greatly on the participation of all the people that have taken part in these projects, but I really don’t consider this approach curatorial, nor do I consider these projects to be curated exhibitions. I would be open to say that they sit in a gray zone of confusion where disciplines intersect, and maybe this is why I am interested in talking to you about this in detail. J Hoffmann: I would not consider the video rental project or Pawnshop an exhibition or an artwork. The first was a platform for the dissemination of works by other artists for which you invited many curators to select videos; the second was a structure that would offer artists an opportunity to expose and circulate their work within the particular circumstances of a pawnshop, where pieces were reduced to their commodity value. You do not ever say that these were artworks or exhibitions. You always refer to them as projects. J Aranda: In the case of the video rental project, the work does function as a platform. To me this doesn’t take anything away from the understanding of it as an artwork, as I believe that the status of what is and what is not an artwork is not related to formal qualities. As you know, there are many other artists that are working with archival models and exploring the restructuring of certain situations by way of other works. I think that at this point, we can say that an artwork can take the form of a structure, especially in the case of this work, which was chiefly concerned with the aesthetic potential of circulation more than with its own content. With Pawnshop, again the idea was not to offer visibility to other artists but to explore the structure within which value is constructed, which needed the participation of others in order to function. I think that it is possible to make work that contains work by other artists but is independent in meaning from the work that comprises it. I understand that it can be tricky to analyze such projects, but I also think that this model of production makes things interesting. Maybe this is why I am now more interested in complicating the boundaries between disciplines—not because I am interested in becoming a curator or because I think that curators should define their role in a more or less ambiguous way—but because I think that the potential of this constantly shifting ground is turning the field that we share into something incredibly interesting, far more interesting than anything else going on right now. J Hoffmann: I understand exactly where you are coming from, and it makes perfect sense. I am intrigued by your desire to create the new and to form alternative ideas of all of these practices. I see that what you do is a clear continuation of works that I would also connect to some artists involved with so-called relational aesthetics, but expanding the idea of outside participation and widening the idea of an exhibition as an artistic medium. It is interesting to me that I needed you to elaborate on it further in order to be able to fully understand your intentions. I am not sure if the overall idea was really apparent to everyone who followed these projects. I have also always thought of The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist as an exhibition and not so much as a book, and I think that was also not clear to many people. For me, curating is always about widening the understanding and formats of exhibitions and never so much about doing the same for art. That is the artist’s job!
 
-Rachael

Creative Floor Plan

I am not convinced that this would work for our own floor plan, but it's quite an interesting and fun way of approaching the floor plan idea. It's from the Foyles Bookshop in London and they have used Lego to signify different characters or members of their team on the plan.

 

If you're interested (like I am) in the iconic independent bookshop Foyles you can find all about them on twitter. The handle is @foyles or you can find them by searching #futurefoyles

 

Creative use of Lego on floor plans #futurefoyles twitter.com/Foyles/status/…

— Foyles Bookshop (@Foyles) February 11, 2013

 

-Rachael