Manifesta Journal 4

MJ - Manifesta Journal

MJ - Manifesta Journal Journal

journa jou rnall of contem contemporary porary curato curatorshi rshipp

N°4, Autumn / Winter 2004 Teaching Curatorship

N°5, Spring / Summer 2005 Artist & Curator

N°6, Autumn / Winter 2005 Archive: Memory of the Show

SilvanaEditoriale

MJ Manifesta Journal is the international journal of contemporary curatorship, based on the ideas and aims developed over the course of the consecutive Manifesta biennials and all related activities. The main scope of MJ focuses on issues of curatorial work - its strategies, conditions, dilemmas, and contexts. MJ aims for curatorial self-reflection and self-examination. From 2003 to 2005, MJ was produced as a series of six issues, which were titled The Revenge of the White Cube?; Biennials; Exhibition as a Dream; Teaching Curatorship; Artist & Curator Memory of the Show. and Archive: Memory The former publishers of MJ Manifesta Journal, the International Foundation Manifesta in Amsterdam and Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, have agreed to allow Silvana Editoriale to reprint the six issues of MJ in honour of the former editor, Igor Zabel, who passed away in July, 2005. This book forms the second part of the reprint Curator and of MJ. The last two issues of this volume, MJ nrs. 5 and 6 titled Artist & Curator and Archive: Archive: Memory of the Show Show respectively, are published for the first time. The International Foundation Manifesta and Moderna Galerija would like to thank the authors, translators, designers and editors, who kindly and generously contributed to MJ Manifesta Journal. A special thanks goes to Saskia van der Kroef and Viktor Misiano for all their work in final editing the last two issues of MJ. We are also grateful to Silvana Editoriale, who has made it possible to launch the reprint of MJ as two books on the occasion of Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, which takes place in the North-Italian North-It alian region of Trentino Trentino Alto Adige from July Jul y 19 until November 2, 2008. MJ Manifesta Journal will continue to exist. The concept of MJ will be in line with the model of the Manifesta Biennial: continuously changing and reinventing reinventing itself. Thus, the editorial board of MJ changes every two years, allowing each team to produce a new series of six issues. Hedwig Fijen

International Foundation Manifesta Zdenka Badovinac

Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana


journal of contemporary curatorship curatorship N°4, Autumn / Winter 2004 Teaching Curatorship

Although the figure of the contemporary art curator is a relatively new feauture in the world of contemporary art, it has developed and es tablished itself very quickly. An important part of this process has been the development of an educational system for curators. There have been a growing number of curatorial schools and courses, from short workshops to full programs of graduate studies. Just as it is the case with art eduaction, however, curatorial education seems to be a complicated issue. What can be taught and learned in such a process? Can curatorial schools transmit merely technological skills and general information or can they shape and develop one’s fundamental positions and understanding of art? Are such schools merely a system of self-reproduction of the system, or do they enable their students positions that oppose conventions and routines? A number of people involved in the process of curatorial education are invited to reflect upon these and similar issues.

Teaching Curatorship


journal of contemporary curatorship curatorship N°4, Autumn/Winter 2004 Teaching Curatorship

Contents no. 4

Cloe Piccoli 68 Playing Playing with Serendipity

no. 4

Zoran EriÊ and Stevan VukoviÊ 70 Curating the Curators

no. 4

Pip Day 76 “Site-specific” Curatorial Studies

no. 4

Robert Fleck 24 Teaching Curatorship?

no. 4

Saπa Nabergoj 80 World of Art in the World of Art

no. 4

Alice Vergara-Bastiand 28 Key Words

no. 4

Mercedes Vicente 86 The Central Place of Discourse in Curatorial Studies

no. 4

Viktor Misiano in Discussion with Teresa Gleadowe 30 Terms Terms of Engagement

no. 4

Karina Ericsson Wärn 90 Okwui Who?

no. 4

Catherine Hemelryk 38 Salad Days

no. 4

Måns Wrange 94 Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Curator?

no. 4

Nataπa Petreπin 40 Interview with Saskia Bos

no. 4

Richard Flood 96 Questions Re: Internships

no. 4

Rainer Ganahl 44 When Attitudes Become - Curating Paul Brewer 58 On the Quasi-Dilemma of Enrolling in a Curatorial Studies Program

no. 4

Kate Fowle 98 Curating as a Process

no. 4

no. 4

no. 4

no. 4

Angela Vettese 10 Why Young Curators Should Be Taught How to Watch TV Pier Luigi Tazzi 16 A Short Report on My Former Involvement in Raising Little Monsters

Dominic Willsdon 62 Curating as a Profession?

The editors gratefully acknowledge the help of Teresa Gleadowe in preparing this issue.

PROFESSOR’S REFLECTIONS

Angela Vettese

Why Young Curators Should Be Taught How to Watch TV Angela Vettese

is the president of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice and the director of the Corso di Laurea Specialistica in Arti Visive (CLASAV) at the Università IUAV in Venice. She teaches history of contemporary art at the Università Bocconi in Milan. She has been writing since 1986 for the Sunday supplement of the Italian daily newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. She has organized several exhibitions and published a number of catalogue essays. Among her books are Artisti si diventa , Carocci, Rome, 1998, A cosa serve l’arte contemporanea,

Allemandi, Turin, 2001 and Invertir en Arte, Piramide, Valencia, 2003.

To choose, to negotiate, to organize. These would appear to be the specific areas of expertise ne eded by the curator of experimental ar t. Until recently, curators have been decidedly self-taught, even though their work involves multiple disciplines and may call for ongoing training. Is it pos sible, then, to teach something that comprises such different skills and abilities as those of intellectual, manager, publisher, writer, and so on?1 Academic training in art history leads only to an ability to prepare texts. The aspects of curatorial activity that involve decision-making are so vast that they require a wide range of different types of knowledge: on the theoretical level alone, it would be unthinkable for a curator not to have a background in sociology and philosophy. But theoretical understanding is but one aspect of curating, just as the expertise of the connoisseur is but one of the many areas of knowledge a curator nee ds. The Latin root of the word “curator,” which is also the root of the English word “care,” sheds light on the main difference between the curator and the critic, as the latter was once defined. The curator, in fact, is not concerned with a body of work, but with the activity of living artists with whom one may, and indeed, must, collaborate. In general, the exhibition is the moment in which a series of decisions and cultural approaches congeal so as to produce a result that demonstrates an ability to “take care” of artists, works, and places. In fact, from the viewpoint of the cultural aims an exhibition seeks to express, the curator even “takes care” of the world. The at titude of the curator derives directly from that of the artists who, in the early 1900s - from such exhibitions as the Russian constructivists’ 0-10 to the shows of the surrealists - conceived of the moment of the exhibition as a statement in itself, and not merely a display of paintings; here the impersonal genre of the Paris salon gave way to the practice of the exhibition as a place in which values were determined through works and acts, not words. First of all, then, the curator must know how to identify the theme around which to focus the exhibition, and to base the selection of the artists on the chosen theme. This involves a series of related actions, such as choosing a suitable location to be the hypertext of the show, guiding artists in the installation of their work, and

10

MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

conceiving and preparing a catalogue (with the full awareness of the implications of particular formats, kinds of paper, typefaces, and so on). Each of these steps, including those related to publicity, means adopting a cultural position. N othing is a side issue, and nothing is supplementary. Choosing the topic on which to focus implies, above all, a sensitivity to the phenomena that characterize our time. Unlike the museum conser vator, the curator is also a dynamic figure in ethical terms; rather than maintaining the state of things as they are, he or she encourages change. The curator acts as a tuning fork through which vibrate the pertinent changes that take place around us. In order to refine a capacity for picking up on even the weakest signals - the strong signals, that is, those emanating from trends already in motion, will have already been noted by others - it is important to know how to read the images of the past as well as those of the present, from the design of automobiles, to emerging architecture, to television programming. An international television format like Big Brother , for example, tells us how certain elements of experimental ar t have found their way into entertainment - in particular, the voyeurism that characterized much of the performance art of the 1970s. On the other hand, this same phenomenon also informs us about the present and potential aspects of the social dynamic we must come to grips with in the future: compulsory coexistence due to a lack of living space, accompanied by a dramatic loss of privacy, due also to advances in telephony. Obviously, in order to capture what we have called “weak signals,” one must implement a critical approach, which may be either taught or nurtured.

These observations have become clear to me through my teaching experiences at the Università Commerciale Bocconi in Milan which for five years has presented a course that includes the training of curators - and, above all, at the IUAV of Venice, where I head the degree program in visual arts and where such curators as Francesco Bonami, Carlos Basualdo, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and others have been and are teachers. 1

Decisions about related factors, such as the location or the installation approach, are also, as we have s aid, part of the work of the curator. To cite just one example, Arnold Bode, for his first Documenta in Kassel, selected as his location, with full awareness of its significance, the ruins of the Fredericianum (1955), covering them (with equal lucidity) with a nomadic, post-war installation of black plastic. Over and above the history of these types of location, future curators may also be taught to interpret the language of places and to recognize their declarative potential.


11

Rikrit Tiravanija and the students from CLASAV (Venice) during a project in Florence on 25 June 2004 On the possibility of reducing the choice of artists to a banal ranking accepted both by critics and dealers, see such works as Cream (London: Phaidon Press, 1998); Fresh Cream (London: Phaidon Press, 2000); Cream 3 (London: Phaidon Press, 2003); Louisa Buck, Moving 2

Targets: A Users’ Guide to British Art Now

(London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1997); and Burkhard Riemschneider and Uta Grosenick, Art at the Turn of the Millennium, (Cologne:

Taschen, 1999).

12

It is clear that behind each proce ss of choosing lies the capacity to negotiate: this is true in the economic sphere since the construction of a budget implies the balancing of different expenditures - for the catalogue, travel, productions, etc. This is a f unction that involves not only the ability to bargain, but also specifically cultural aspects: a typical question is, which sponsors, forms of support, and alliances are acceptable and desirable and which are not, whether because of ideological considerations or because of the imposed demands of return on the investment. Negotiation is a way of establishing a relationship with those politicians who may, in certain cases, actively help promote the exhibition or, in others, at least tolerate it. With such political figures, too, a give-and-take relationship is established that will make an impact on the outcome and significance of the exhibition. Negotiating also involves such things as knowing when to go along with an artist who wants to expand his share of the space or the budget, deciding how to allot space in a group show, and being able to impose a schedule. In this sens e, negotiation is continuously interwoven with organization, becoming a way of co ordinating persons, things, and concepts, and maintaining them in a constant relationship.

in which the exhibition takes place or for the genuine inclinations of the curators themselves. Such “charts” can become a dictatorial instrument at the service of a highly commercialized art system, and resistance can be difficult.3 Another kind of violence that can easily taint the work of the curator is that of superimposing his or her own theoretical positions on works or artists who have nothing to do with them.4 In particular, there can be ghastly results when the “theoretical pabulum” of reference is the international koine of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, a gruel that is as common as it is indigestible, or when the curator succumbs to the temptation to establish a relationship with the public by leaning in the direction of spectacle and infotainment.5 Curators may also start to take themselves so seriously that they feel independent of the artists and the works for which they are, in effect, mediators.6 If today it is possible to teach young curators how to avoid these traps, it is precisely because of the process of self-analysis by curators, especially in the 1990s: there exist no canons to be respected or proposed for this happily spurious calling, just as such do not exist for the artistic material that is its focus. What we do have is a great mass of cases for thought and discussion and an awareness of the central role visual culture is acquiring in our time7 - a culture for which the curator is standard-bearer and spokesperson. In addition, there is the finally consolidated conviction that the curator is neither seer nor guru, but a highly creative technician. All this must be taken with the proviso that sensibility, like qualities of leadership and charisma, cannot be taught from scratch but merely nurtured; as in any other discipline, the teaching stops where the talent of the apprentice begins.

Joseph Kosuth with his students from CLASAV, Venice, 2004 (Photo: Luca Vascon) On the coercive nature of certain mechanisms of the art system and their repercussions on the career of the c urator, see Raymonde Moulin, 3

L’artiste, l’istitution, le marché (Paris:

Flammarion, 1992); my Artisti si diventa (Rome: Carocci, 1998) and A cosa serve l’arte contemporanea (Turin: Allemandi, 2001); Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Karsten Schubert, The Curator’s Egg (London: One-Off Press, 2000).

While it is possible to make future curators aware of the side-ef fects of their activities, a teacher can do little more than anticipate a range of operative options, while drawing on examples from the past. Curatorial activity, after all, even when conducted with the best of intentions, can find its elf transformed into something violent. In the choice of artists, there is the danger of simply perpetuating the “top ten,” that is, the repeated inclusion of the hottest talents,2 with a consequent lack of respect for the territory MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4


13

Joseph Kosuth with his students from CLASAV, Venice, 2004 (Photo: Luca Vascon) On the birth of the exhibition as a device used by twentiethcentury artist groups for declaring their particular aesthetic, see Bruce Altshuler, The Avant Garde in Exhibition (New York: Abrams, 1994); for the art of the second half of the century, see Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996). On the intersection of this trend with the career strategies of artists and curators, parallel with the accentuation of the role of the market for art and infotainment, see two classic works: Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and Guy Debord, The 4

Society of the Spectacle

(English translation, London, Black and Red, 1977). For a more recent discussion, one that takes account of developments in marketing, see Oskar Bätschmann, Ausstellungkünstler: Kult und Karriere im Moderner Kunstsystem

1997). For a discussion that looks at how these phenomena also effect postcolonial areas, see Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, eds., Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Marketplace (London:

Iniva, 1999).

The phenomenon of the exhibition as infotainment does not relate only to contemporary art but also, and even more, to ancient and pre-modern art, for which it is necessary to implement an even greater process of spectacularization: see Francis Haskell, The 5

On the development of visual culture, which does not necessarily involve experimental art, see Charles Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), and Nicholas Mirzoeff, An 7

Rikrit Tiravanija and the students from CLASAV (Venice) during a manifestation in Rome on 6 June 2004

Introduction to Visual Culture, (London:

Routledge, 1999).

Ephemeral Museum: Old Masters Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (London: Yale

University Press, 2000), and Thomas Hoving, Making the Mummies Dance (New York: Simon

and Schuster, 1993).

On the self-analysis of curators with respect to their role, see in particular Mika Hannula, ed., 6

Stopping the Process, Contemporary Views on Art and Exhibitions

(Helsinki: NIFCA, 1998) and Carin Kuoni, ed., Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art

(Cologne: DuMont,

(New York: Independent Curators International, 2001).

14



15

POSITIONS

Pier Luigi Tazzi

A Short Report on My Former Involvement in Raising Little Monsters Pier Luigi Tazzi

is a critic, columnist, teacher and curator, currently based in Capalle, a tiny village in an industrial area of Tuscany. Among others, he was curator at the 1988 Biennale of Venice, co-director of DOCUMENTA IX in Kassel in 1992, cocurator of Wounds, the inaugural exhibition of the new building of Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1998, and of Happiness, the inaugural exhibition of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2003.

In the second half of the eighties and the first half of the nineties, I had the opportunity to work at a number of curating schools in France, Italy, and England, as lecturer, tutor, and advisor. All the course titles were expressed in English, since English was already becoming the dominant language of the art world. Even the word “curator,” though often clumsily translated into other languages, comes from English. This was also the time when the first schools for curators in Europe were getting started. In the United States, a different history had determined a different evolution in the art system, though the relationship between the European and American systems remained constant and close, to the point of near identification, despite evident differences. Just consider the American conception of the museum, and how it differs from its European counterpart. My first assignment related to training curators came from Le Magasin, National Center of Contemporary Art, in Grenoble, France, which was then under the direction of my friend Adelina von Fürstenberg. I was asked to organize a tour of Tuscany for the center’s curating students. The region had not yet become the mythic territory for contemporary art it was to be in the nineties, but it presented certain interesting characteristics regarding the art of the current period. The first of these was the none-too-peaceful coexistence between, on the one hand, a noble and ancient history and tradition that already belonged to the realm of myth and that was perceived as such not only by visitors and other foreigners who lived there for longer or shorter periods of time, from Georg Baselitz to Andrei Tarkovsky, but also by the Tuscans themselves; and on the other, a perhaps less noble, more recent vernacular history mainly determined by the industrialization and urbanization of the territory in an unstoppable process of transformation that was certainly not painless. The second interesting characteristic, closely connected to the first, was the mythic presence of art as the region’s outstanding feature. The Tuscan landscape is celebrated, at various levels of high- and low-brow communication, as the result of a harmonious relationship between nature and culture that was achieved through

16


art. This Tuscan balance, which had developed from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, took on a mythic character, beginning in the late eighteenth century, thanks primarily to the literary works of such authors as Goethe, Stendahl, John Ruskin, and Jakob Burckhardt; artistic contributions also played a role here, though more rarely - Arnold Böcklin is the best example. All of this orchestrated a kind of revival, hailing the Italian, and specifically the Tuscan, model as one of the utmost excellence, virtually the cradle of modern civilization and European aesthetic culture. The mythic image thus formulated, however, was threatened by such inevitable growth factors as industrialization and urbanization, which greatly accelerated after World War II. But since at least the 1960s, the mythology of the place has itself been a factor in producing irreversible change: just consider the profound transformation of the landscape and environment due to the growth of both mass and elite tourism, especially the so-called agritourism. The third interesting characteristic of the region in the late 1980s was of a purely artistic nature. I refer to the presence in Tuscany of such native artists as Remo Salvadori and Marco Bagnoli, who represented, together with Ettore Spalletti from Abruzzo, a type of 1980s European art that presented a clear contrast to the most favored market and mass-media trends of the time. Without themselves ever constituting a movement able to be summed up in a single formula - thus circumventing the temptation of being marketed as a style or fashion - these artists affiliated themselves with other European artists such as the Austrian Franz West; the Germans Reinhard Mucha, Thomas Schütte, Günther Förg, and Thomas Ruff; the Belgians Jan Vercruysse and Thierry de Cordier; the Spaniards Juan Muñoz and Cristina Iglesias; and the Frenchman Jean Marc Bustamante. Through their work, they sought to reflect on the meaning and values of European civilization during its phase of greatest expansion. Salvadori’s Tuscan home was itself a kind of rural Gesamtkunstwerk. Bagnoli’s interpretation of history, especially cultural history and the signs it left on the territory, represented a peerless source of unorthodox thinking. These two Tuscan artists were able to transcend the mythology of the place by recognizing something that, though local in nature, had acquired a universal spiritual value. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

17

Catalogue of Documenta 5, Kassel, 1972 Cover by Ed Ruscha

Finally, the existence of the recently opened Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato had to be considered; this was the first museum in Italy built specifically for contemporary art. The Castello di Rivoli, which had opened a few years earlier near Turin, was situated in a prestigious historical building and seemed almost to cling to the umbilical cord of history, as if contemporary Italian art still needed that mother hen to watch over its growth and ensure the validity of its image, while in the rest of Western Europe, from the German museums to the Beaubourg, the break had already been made. The tour of visits I prepared for the Le Magasin students was based on these considerations. In my view, it was important for the curating student to have a direct relationship with the context in which his or her actions would take place, in all its various historical, social, environmental, economic, and even sensual aspects, as well as with the specific ar tistic setting. The following year I received another invitation from Le Magasin, this time to conduct a seminar at the center in Grenoble. Here I took a completely different approach. I concentrated on supplying elements useful for defining the role of the curator as it had emerged over the previous twenty years in the privileged area of Western Europe. In fact, over that span of time a profound transformation had taken place in the management of art events. Ever since the late eighteenth century, two figures had overseen the relationship between art and society, a relationship that underwent a period crisis with the end of the so-called ancien régime. The first was that of the art historian, in relation to the institution of the museum. Art was part of history, though in an autonomous way with respect to the general systems of production believed to determine its progress, and the museum and the art historian defined its qualities and certified its value. Later, and especially in the period of the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, another figure emerged alongside that of the art historian, namely the militant critic, who encouraged and supported, through the tools of his critical theory, one stylistic and aesthetic trend as opposed to other trends, both historical and contemporary. Despite attacks by the Italian futurists and the alternative projects

18


of the Russian and German avant-gardes, the museum remained the privileged place for the presentation of art. But the museum came under further attack toward the end of the 1950s and throughout 1960s by neo-avant-garde artists who sought a concrete space in which art could manifest itself in all its aspects, a place that was not - as the museum had been and still was - a storehouse (albeit a sublimely sacred one) for the traces of an experience and a practice that were always elsewhere and in another time with respect to the space and time of unfolding reality. Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni, happenings, Fluxus, American minimalism, Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers, Italian Arte Povera - all attempted to reappropriate “real” space. It was at this point that the “major exhibition” began to emerge as the primary place for presenting art, rather than the museum. But this was not the only thing that replaced the museum; there were also the Kunsthalle and similar institutions throughout the Western world (museums without collections, and therefore without history), as well as the commercial gallery, which was no longer just a sales outlet but, along these other new institutions, had become a place where artists’ work was presented to the world. In previous practice, as long as an artwork remained in the artist’s studio, it was still unborn, but once it entered a museum or a collection, whether open to the public or jealously guarded by private owners, it became a sign/relic of a constructive and experiential practice suspended midway between the island of Utopia - an uncertain future - and the archives of History - a past codified by the winners at the expense of the losers. In contrast, the major exhibition, institutions like the Kunsthalle, and the commercial gallery now offered a concrete space rooted in the present, the foundation of which was economics: socio-institutional economics, in the case of the major exhibition; market economics in the case of the gallery; and something in between in the case of the Kunsthalle. The curator, who stood apart from both the historian’s claims of objectivity and the militant critic’s ideological leanings, became the main point of reference in this structural framework, simultaneously creator and organizer of the major exhibition, the person responsible for the artistic programming of the Kunsthalle, and the one who had the inside track to the gallery as both guarantor and “cultural” mediator of the “commercial” values the gallery produced.


19

“The curator, who stood apart from both the historian’s claims of objectivity and the militant critic’s ideological leanings, became the main point of reference in this structural framework, simultaneously creator and organizer of the major exhibition, the person responsible for the artistic programming of the Kunsthalle, and the one who had the inside track to the gallery as both guarantor and “cultural” mediator of the “commercial” values the gallery produced.”

Starting with these premises, I organized the seminar around an analysis of materials relating to a limited number of major exhibitions held during the 1980s, and one show from the beginning of the 1970s that represented the necessary precedent for this type of event. This early show was Documenta 5, held in Kassel in 1972 and organized by Harald Szeemann, a seminal example of the curator. The other shows discussed were von hier aus , curated by Kasper König in Düsseldorf (1984); Sonsbeek ’86, curated by Saskia Bos in Arnhem, the Netherlands; Chambres d’amis, curated by Jan Hoet in Ghent, Belgium (1986); and Skulptur: Projekte in Münster, curated by Klaus Bussmann and, again, König (1987). For all the shows, I supplied the widest range of materials I could find, so we could examine and discuss not only the artistic project, which in any case was fundamental, and the participation of the artists - that is, the live substance of the shows - but also the procedures and products involved in the communication of the event, from newsletters to catalogues, as well as the event’s graphics and “image” - its architecture, budget, and the response it received from the public and specialist and general media. In short, I wanted to introduce the future curators in the seminar not only to project theory, but also to all the other practical factors that combine in constructing an exhibition and gauging its results. In 1991, Amnon Barzel, the first director of the Luigi Pecci Center in Prato, had the good idea of founding the first school for curators in Italy; unfortunately, the school lasted only one year. This was where I devoted my greatest efforts, though I was also very busy at the same time in Kassel as co-director of Documenta 9. The course I taught was for postgraduate students, unlike that at Le Magasin, but most of my students, especially the Italian ones, who represented about half the group, were sadly lacking in the necessary educational background. I decided, therefore, to begin the course by supplying students with a list of artists’ names, so they could then, either individually or in groups, conduct bibliographic research using the archives at the Center for Information and Documentation of the Visual Arts, which I had helped organize in 1983-1988 as part of the Pecci Center. My list included artists who, though of fundamental importance for the history of contemporary art over the last twenty years, were completely unknown to the students - from the happenings movement, to Fluxus, to the 1980s European artists mentioned above. 20


I also added the names of artists I was learning about in the course of my research for the preparation of the Documenta exhibition, such as Eran Schaerf, Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, Ulf Rollof, Luc Tuymans, Rachel Whiteread, and Konstantin Zvezdochetov. I also brought four of my Prato students to Kassel on long-term internships, while other interns came from Le Magasin, the University of Hildesheim, and even from Tokyo. I still consider nearly all these interns to be among the best assistants I have ever had. So the training I proposed was composed of a theoretical-historical-critical part for all the Prato students and work in the field for those I brought to Kassel. Direct involvement in such an important show as Documenta, which ever since Szeemann has been justifiably considered “the mother” of all major exhibitions, provided student interns with an enriched experience that became all the more complex both in their interaction with individual artists (and particularly certain artists, such as Jimmie Durham, Ilya Kabakov, Vera Frenkel, and Mario Merz) - which was at times quite intense, almost to the point of being exclusive - and in their involvement with the directors of various sectors (curatorial, technical, and managerial). In the mid-nineties, I took part in two consecutive courses in the visual arts administration program that had just been developed by Teresa Gleadowe at the Royal College of Art in London. Like the Prato program, this was for postgraduates, but it lasted two years rather than one. In this way, it differed from both the Grenoble and Prato programs, and from the course later organized by Saskia Bos at De Appel in Amsterdam, where I happened to be involved with some of the program’s theoretical and organizational aspects. For the Royal College course, I once again introduced materials on exhibitions for discussion by students, but instead of choosing shows from the recent past, I selected examples from the current year. I attempted, together with the students, to analyze what was happening in the immediate present and what was changing in the world of art events, especially, how “young curators,” that newly defined professional category, were advancing their various operative proposals at a time of great openness and transformation in the art world. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

21

“The very eroticism that had more or less subtly characterized the curator of the 1980s was diluted in favor of the functional success of the enterprise; meanwhile, desire, another fundamental motivation of the old curators, was converted into an explicit thirst for power.”

I think this was the moment when I started to feel fed up with the figure of the curator, in particular, with the up-and-coming “young curator,” whose training I had, to a small degree, been involved with over the previous five or six years. The young curator’s ambition, which at times bordered on convulsion, was to manage a situation that was becoming more open and fragmented by the day and, for precisely this reason, required someone capable of standing up to the power of the marketplace and the mass media or of forming precarious alliances with them. Indeed, over the previous decade, the marketplace and the mass media - one with a shrewd eye on profit, the other recklessly promoting a culture of mass spectacle and sensationalism - had become the sole arbiters of quality and value thanks to the weakening of the filters of history and critical and project theory, which I have described. People attempted to compensate for this loss of memory by using slogans and buzzwords to simulate thought, when no thought existed, on the explosion of the contemporary, which the traditional categories of Western culture were no longer capable of comprehending. Rather than to develop a project, the idea was to grasp opportunities in which to try out one’s operative capacities, with the rewards going to those with the strongest managerial and communicative abilities. In this process, art became comparable, on the management level, to the mass production from which it had always stood apart, shielded by an autonomy historically achieved during the Enlightenment. In this situation, young curators found themselves developing macroscopic egos, equal to that of the artist, but without the artist’s faculty of producing a work that, however subtle, fragile or ephemeral, could never be completely identified with the kind of pure event represented by the exhibition. While the artwork could penetrate into the world and become a part of it - obtaining citizenship, as it were, and providing ballast for the ego of the artist in the reality of his own time while, last but not least, freeing the individual from the prison of his ego - the action of the young curator had the consistency, stability, and durability of an iridescent soap bubble. The very eroticism that had more or less subtly characterized the curator of the 1980s was diluted in favor of the functional success of the enterprise; meanwhile, desire, another fundamental motivation of the old curators, was converted into an explicit thirst for power. The art system itself, which had undergone great transformations in other periods, was no longer being challenged at all but, instead, was being reinforced and confirmed in the solidity of its structure, if not in its individual components. In 22


other words, the system wound up reproducing itself, adapting to new contexts, case by case, in a rapid expansion and multiplication that would soon reach a planetary level parallel to (though not in direct homogeneous conjunction with) the process of economic globalization. In this new situation, the young curator ended up similarly having to conform or, at best, negotiate with the established system. This was when I started to turn down offers for other teaching positions in this sector. Instead, I began to accept another type of offer: to work in art schools, where I would be involved with art students and young artists, who, while they, too, must find a place in this same field of activity, approach the problem through the construction and definition of a work - which for better or worse always has the quality of a gift - rather than through the proposal of a strategy or a tactic whose validity is measured in the quantitative terms of success or failure. Capalle, summer 2004


23

EXPERIENCES

Robert Fleck

Teaching Curatorship? Robert Fleck

is curator and critic. He was director of ERBAN-Ecole Regionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (France) and is currently director of the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

Teaching curatorship? Of course, we all remember the first time we heard someone answer the question, “What did you study?” by saying, “I studied curatorship.” This sentence was first pronounced about ten years ago, not long after the f irst specialized classes in “curatorial studies” appeared. Our first reaction was one of astonishment: “What in the world is this?! Why should anyone study curatorship in an academic context? What can you learn by studying curatorship at a university or art school, institutions that have nothing to do with exhibitions?” But at the same time, those of us who never had an opportunity to go to curating school - simply because such programs did not exist before the 1980s - might feel a kind of jealousy towards these young people who could put “curatorial studies” on their résumés. Today, curatorial studies have become a frequent point of reference for any young art critic or exhibition organizer. Is this good or bad? The first answer might be: neither, it is simply a historical phenomenon. Curatorial training has become a new and important area of investment for both students and educational institutions, and most of the new generation of exhibition curators, both inside and outside institutions, have been trained in such programs. This appears to be one of the main structural phenomena in contemporary art at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The history of art is replete with innovations in art institutions, exhibitions, public relations, and finances, as well as in schools and teaching. The present form of the art academy is only about a hundred and fifty years old. Current forms of instruction in art history are even younger. The teaching of art at universities as a historical subject and empirical science was developed during the second half of the nineteenth century. The exhibition as an independent medium emerged only in the twentieth century, primarily since the surrealist exhibition of 1938. The concept of the commercial art gallery as a place of exhibition is even more recent. Such galleries did not exist before the 1940s. In the fifties and sixties, art criticism developed into a profession, with Clement Greenberg (who was still mainly a painter) and Pierre Restany being the first freelance art critics who exerted a major influence on the evolution of contemporary art without being associated with a particular museum or newspaper.

24


Some years later, beginning around 1968, a new figure did appear: the independent organizer of contemporary-art exhibitions. It was then that the German language, with all the simplicity of the May 68 movement, came up with the perfect word for this new art-world figure: Ausstellungsmacher. The German expression was translated into French as faiseur d’expositions. With the word faiseur, which came from the world of the circus, the French term underscored the implications of the German word Macher, which suggests a practical person without any specific intellectual or academic background. For several years, English-language art magazines used the term exhibition maker. The connotations are clear: the organization of big and independent exhibitions of contemporary or, as we said in the seventies, avant-garde art was associated with pragmatism and experience in the art field. The Ausstellungsmacher was someone who had spent many years in the art world, usually without being employed by a traditional institution, organizing exhibitions outside or inside museums and influencing the way art is considered, created, and looked at. In the eighties, people of my generation considered the designation Ausstellungsmacher to be a honor. Have you ever been told you are an “intellectual”? This implies that you are an independent person who expresses ideas that have an impact on public opinion. When you first hear yourself called an “intellectual,” you may feel a certain commitment to this vocation. If you were designated an Ausstellungsmacher, you might feel a similar sense of commitment. But to do what? To be independent, to stay close to artists, and to show art that goes beyond institutional or commercial interest. In the 1980s, the word “curator” was not part of the European art vocabulary. A “curator” was someone who worked in a museum and was dependent on the institutional administration and the conservative structures that dominate the world of the museum. The Ausstellungsmacher was a counter-figure to the museum curator. By definition, he was free of any institutional dictates and directly connected to artists and their research. During the eighties, only a very few people acceded to the stature of independent Ausstellungsmacher. One of these was Pontus Hulten, a former art student in Paris associated with Jean Tinguely; he became the most significant inventor of new forms of museums and exhibitions si nce the sixties. Then there was Harald Szeemann, a former theater actor. As director of the Kunsthalle MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

25

“It was in 1990 and 1991 that the word “curator” was established in the art world to designate an independent person organizing exhibitions. At the same time, the word Ausstellungsmacher disappeared.”

Bern, Szeemann developed a smooth, very precise, but unspectacular program in the 1960s before organizing at the same institution the legendary exhibition When attitudes become form in 1969 (with the important sponsorship by Phillip Morris). Szeemann then left his job in Bern in order to develop independent projects at other institutions, the first being Happening & Fluxus at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 1970, which was one of the biggest sensations in the history of exhibitions during the second half of the twentieth century (there had never been such an important exhibition about these art movements). By this time, Szeemann had been nominated artistic director of Documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972). While this latter exhibition gave selfconfidence to the marginalized avant-garde art scene of the seventies, it received the most severe response from professional art critics of any Documenta. The American art critic Barbara Rose, for instance, wrote that Szeemann was the sole artist in the exhibition. The idea that the importance of the exhibition curator might overshadow the artists and their work was born with Documenta 5. After Hulten and Szeemann, only a few independent “exhibition makers” appeared during the seventies and eighties. Kasper König ( Skulptur: Projekte in Münster, 1977, with Klaus Bussmann; Westkunst, 1981, in Cologne, with Laszlo Glozer; Von hier aus, 1984, in Düsseldorf) had also worked for Pontus Hulten. Jean-Christophe Ammann organized a brilliant exhibition series at Kunsthalle Basel before moving to Frankfurt. Rudi Fuchs had been very influential thanks to his work in Eindhoven, Netherlands, before his Documenta 7 in 1982. The list of Ausstellungsmacher or “independent curators” was very small during the eighties. Only one person from the new generation emerged during these years, namely, Dan Cameron, with the exhibition Art and Its Double (New York and Madrid). It was in 1990 and 1991 that the word “curator” was established in the art world to designate an independent person organizing exhibitions. At the same time, the word Ausstellungsmacher disappeared. Over the next two years, the collapse of communism and the outbreak of new wars (Iraq) led to a profound crisis in the art world. Many young curators were asked by galleries to make exhibitions with emerging artists whose names were still unknown. Others organized their own independent spaces. These exhibitions were made on a small budget, but several of them had great impact. 26


“Curatorship has always been taught, but it was previously taught in different spheres and institutions: in museums and university classes in art history. What is new is the fact that, just as curatorship is now independent of the museum, so is the teaching of curatorship.”

Something had suddenly changed in the art world. It was the independent curators, and no longer museums and art galleries, who were introducing new artists and trends in the 1990s. This was a paradigm shift that made possible such noninstitutional biennials as Manifesta. And this continues to be the backdrop for the current decade. Where did all these young curators come from? First of all, the Ausstellungsmacher of the sixties, seventies, and eighties were always themselves “teaching” curating, albeit very informally and to unstructured groups of people. For instance, there are a number of us who feel that it was Kasper König who taught us what may be called curatorship, and he did it independently of any traditional institution. How did he do it? In 1987, he became director of the school of fine arts in Frankfurt, transforming it into a hive of activity where one could always meet interesting people; at the same time, he continued to concentrate on exhibitions as the major platform between the artist, the artwork, the curator, the public, and the museum. Though with a different personal background, Szeemann was doing the same thing; he was always “teaching” curatorship to those who worked with him. What changed during the nineties was that curatorial training itself became institutionalized. Or rather, it became better organized. Today, we see a great variety of curating courses. There are good ones and bad ones; some are academically structured, while others have more open structures that follow the flow of art. The second point I would like to make is that curatorship has always been taught, but it was previously taught in different spheres and institutions: in museums and university classes in art history. What is new is the fact that, just as curatorship is now independent of the museum, so is the teaching of curatorship. If you vie w the issue from this perspective, the whole debate over whether “teaching curatorship” is something good or bad just disappears. There are only two questions that remain: Why is the teaching of curatorship now independent of museums? And, what does this tell us about the future of museums, and of art and the art world? Of course, there is also a third question: How, today, can teaching be organized effectively? MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

27

EXPERIENCES

Alice Vergara-Bastiand

Key Words Alice Vergara-Bastiand

is the co-ordinator of the Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble.

28

Key words, (some) didactic aims and pedagogical attitudes: internationalism commitment curator = author + producer curatorial practices are far from getting status, notoriety or position collaborative projects = an effective (always painful) means of “ego limitation” evaluation = be critical!



29

DISCUSSIONS

Viktor Misiano

Terms of Engagement: A Conversation with Teresa Gleadowe Teresa Gleadowe

In a text published a few years ago in is director of the master’s ARCO Noticias, I described curatorial degree program in Curating Contemporary activity in the countries of the European Art at the Royal College East as having a “curator without the of Art in London. system.” In fact, in the process of trying Cofunded by the Royal College and Arts Council to establish this new professional role England, this two-year in a context that never knew it before full-time course is the first postgraduate and, because of the economic and program in Britain to social conditions, could not support it specialize in curatorial practice as it relates institutionally, I very soon came up with to contemporary art. the idea of putting together a curatorial Arts Council funding program. For two years, from 1993provides the core budget for the annual 1995, I ran the Curators’ Development exhibitions presented by students in the Royal Workshop in Moscow, whose aim was College of Art galleries not to teach students how to behave (see accompanying within a system, since this system was illustrations) and also contributes to the costs non-existent, but rather, to develop of overseas field trips the system, to build it up. That school and student placements. was a paradoxical experience, in that I Teaching is provided by course tutors and by a was teaching something that was still wide range of visiting only virtual - was initiating something curators, critics, and artists. The course in a domain that was itself in the also has a teaching partnership with the Tate. process of being initiated. That process was absolutely free and creative, but inevitably, it also was not determined by any articulated professional criteria. In a text you published recently (also in ARCO Noticias), you took issue with a comment made by our respected colleague Kasper König, who suggested that curatorship programs could only institutionalize young curators, teaching them “the roles in the system.” I agree 30


that there is an enormous risk of reducing curatorial instruction to an institutional routine, to the production of art-system managers and bureaucrats. But at the same time, this is the system used to establish the professional criteria of curatorship, so you can’t avoid it. How, in your curating course, do you combine an openness to experimentation and exploration with the unavoidable initiation into a professional discipline? When I wrote the text for ARCO, I wanted to question Kasper König’s rather pessimistic assumption that curating courses can only “affirm what is there” and “propagate a status quo.” As I remarked later in the article, Kasper is a leading member of a generation of curators whose practice was defined in opposition to “the system.” For that generation it was abundantly clear that the status quo had to be overturned, in so far as it represented an understanding of art that denied any possibility of agency in the world. Values shifted from the passive to the active, from protection and preservation to communication and presentation. And the focus of curatorial work shifted from the study of historical objects to an engagement with artists and ideas in relation to a wider understanding of the social and political environment.

Many of the values and attitudes promoted by that generation have now

been absorbed by the contemporary art museums and galleries of Western Europe and it becomes problematic to identify “the system” now to be overturned. Is it the market? Is it the museum? Is it the assimilation of art into the entertainment industry, the ubiquity of the culture of spectacle, the machinations of the media? Is it the whole vast system of shared values and exchanges that now constitutes the global art world? So I am not apologetic about the need for institutional practices. Our students want to find new ways of presenting and looking at art, but they know that they need to follow certain professional protocols if they are to achieve this goal. They are aware that they need to acquire professional competence, but this does not imply acceptance of the status quo. We are often reminded how much the curator’s role has changed in the last two or three decades, but some aspects of curatorial practice have remained constant. For instance, writing and communication remain central to a curator’s practice. You need to be articulate if you are to think with any precision about your intentions and goals. So writing assignments of many different kinds are a key component of our program. We also teach “institutional

routine” so that we can ensure that works of art are transported safely and securely, that handling and conservation requirements are observed, that budgets are adequate, that insurance is in place, that schedules are feasible, that deadlines are met, that publications are accurate and on time. These are not skills that can be acquired in the abstract. A curating course such as ours provides opportunities to learn professional discipline in the context of “live” projects, and to discover the importance of responsibility, honesty, clarity, efficiency, and practicality in all forms of curatorial engagement. These are professional tools, but they do not determine a curator’s values, ambitions, and desires.

I was talking recently to an artist who expressed concern that a curating program might dispel doubt, that it might promulgate certainties and rote responses. But then he corrected himself and observed that artists, too, go to school and there is no expectation that an art college will teach certain “approved” ways in which to make art. I think it can be the same with a curating program; it provides an arena in which to work, an introduction to certain techniques, and a discipline and history to be interrogated. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

31

The exhibition ‘democracy!’, presented in the Royal College of Art galleries in 2000, explored collaborative relationships and socially engaged practice. The Los Angeles-based artist Dave Muller presented his Three Day Weekend in a structure created by the London-based collaborative ARTLAB (Charlotte Cullinan and Jeanine Richards).

32

Let me refer again to my own curator workshop. As I said, my aim was not to instruct students about how to behave in the system but how to build it up. So my effort was not simply to provide them with professional know-how but mostly to seduce them. I was trying to convince my students that the world of art, despite not having a very clear career perspective, is an attractive one and worth dedicating their life to. So while giving students the conditions and opportunities for doing experimental curatorial projects, the major focus was on encounters with participants in the Russian and international scenes. Avoiding any sort of typical theoretical and historical lectures, the whole course was an escalation of flamboyant appearances by artists of various generations, as well as gallerists, museum curators, critics, and philosophers. I considered that the dynamic personality could be a productive example of how an individual who creates him- or her-self in the midst of social chaos is inevitably building the social context. And in fact, not all of my students are curators now - indeed, most are not - but many of them have really changed the scene, by establishing galleries, developing cultural or art sections in daily newspapers, creating new magazines, and so on.


Of course my approach was a response to very specific circumstances, but still it makes me wonder: what is more productive in a course of instruction pedagogical methodology or the presence of a master? In teaching such a specific practice as curatorship, which lies between theory and authorship, what is more important: historical and theoretical knowledge or the personal charisma of an experienced colleague?

Like you, we have always believed in the importance of encounters with inspirational practitioners. We invite a very wide range of visitors, from diverse backgrounds and different generations, to complement the more formal aspects of the course - teaching offered by course staff in art history, critical theory, and curatorial studies. We need to hear how artists, critics, and curators talk about art and ideas. In the early years of the course we were also aware that there was very little literature about the exhibitions of the past, so we needed to collect oral history. I believe, as you do, that these meetings are of central importance to any serious curating program, and are what make the teaching on such programs distinct. Exposure to a wide range of protagonists helps students to determine their own priorities and goals.

But another overwhelming necessity is that a curating program must provide opportunities for the practice of exhibitionmaking; for me this is the most important difference between arts management courses and curating programs. Students involved in working with artists to make an exhibition in a real space and for a real audience immediately confront problems, questions, dilemmas that must be considered not just hypothetically but in actuality. They quickly discover that there are relatively few issues that can be resolved as a matter of routine. There are changing fashions in the curatorial world as in any other and our students also need to be alert to the dominance of certain forms of contemporary practice. Perhaps this is another way of understanding Kasper König’s remark about the status quo. I would certainly agree with him, if he means that a curating program must strive to maintain a critical relationship with whatever emerges as the current orthodoxy. We have to accept, I suppose, that only recently has curatorship (and especially, independent curatorship) finally been recognized as a specific professional discipline. For me, the appearance of curatorial schools is a confirmation of this.

When I started my workshop in 1993, I was conscious of the fact that the final aim of the project was not merely didactic, but also initiatory and promotional. To teach something means to legitimize it publicly as an autonomous practice and science. Was that the same with you when you initiated your program in the early nineties?

Here there is a marked contrast between the context in Moscow and the situation in Britain in the early nineties. When the curating course was initiated at the Royal College of Art in 1992, with funding from the Arts Council, it was set up to fill a gap in the training available to curators of contemporary art. There were already several academic courses and training programs in Britain, in art history, museum studies, and arts management, and these provided an environment against which this new program would define itself. There were also a small number of publicly funded galleries dedicated to contemporary art, some of which had been active since the sixties and seventies. So there were models to examine here, and, from the outset, we also took the students on overseas trips to look at art and institutions elsewhere.

In 2002 the annual course exhibition took the form of an art fair, bringing together fourteen galleries, agencies and artist-run organisations from all over the world. For this exhibition,’ FAIR’, the Cologne-based gallery BQ presented a brief history of the gallery’s activities since its inauguration in October 1988.

Initially, there was considerable skepticism about the idea of teaching curating, and MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

33

Olafur Eliasson’s Room for One Colour , 1998, seen through the central doorway of Sancho Silva’s Wall Intervention which was commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Straight or Crooked Way’ in 2003.

this really only decreased as the program began to present exhibitions and publish catalogues. Once audiences found that these exhibitions asked interesting questions, addressed relevant issues, or simply showed art that they wanted to see, attitudes began to change. The course took on exhibition projects that had not been attempted by other institutions, and this again drew attention to the possibility of new approaches or initiatives. So there is now growing recognition that there is a professional practice called curating, but there is still very little agreement about what this practice constitutes. The idea of a profession implies certain rules of conduct, an agreed code of professional practice. In curating, these have not yet been formalized. We do not set out to teach professional ethics in any formal sense, but we aim to make our students aware of a whole range of issues that impact on contemporary curatorial practice. For instance, we examine the conditions in which art is presented, relationships with the market, funding agendas, the influence of such matters as marketing, interpretation, and publication on the experience of art. We hope that our students will acquire the ability to read what is going on around them, to examine underlying ideologies, and so to determine their own curatorial values.

34


But we also recognize that the majority of our graduates will go on to work in existing institutions, and we try to encourage our students to bring a critical consciousness into these established frameworks. Even if we admit that there is no longer any need to initiate curatorial practice, the theory of curatorial practice is still very weak. You have complained that in the early years of your course there was a lack of literature about the exhibitions of the past and about the work of the curator. I have felt this vacuum until now. Manifesta Journal, in fact, is the first international periodical focused on that practice! Is it possible that curatorial courses and schools will contribute to an interest in curatorial histories and approaches? How have they contributed to the promotion of such values as transparency and self-reflexivity?

There is still relatively little literature of this kind, but curating courses are certainly contributing to an interest in researching curatorial approaches and the exhibitions of the past. Our program encourages discussion of past exhibition models from the perspective of the present, tracing histories relevant to current practice, and we try to counteract a tendency to claim that every new development is without precedent. For instance, the catalogue

essay for The Straight or Crooked Way, an exhibition curated last year by students on the course, drew parallels between the experiential encounters staged by the organizers of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris, and the “immersive” experiences set up by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, and Carsten Höller. Students are increasingly choosing to write about aspects of curatorial history or curatorial practice, and curating schools are developing research in this field. There is a strong interest in artists whose work directly influences curatorial thinking - artists such as Daniel Buren, Joseph Beuys, Felix Gonzales Torres, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Andrea Fraser and Liam Gillick - as well as in artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Group Material, or, more recently, Jeremy Deller, whose practice is “curatorial.”

It’s interesting to me that there has also been a marked revival of interest in artists such as Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Öyvind Fahström, and Ana Mendieta, whose work presents particular problems for the curator because it has to be interpreted and remade if it is to be rendered visible. Curating courses are often very effective at re-presenting work that has disappeared from view and excavating lost histories. They can embrace the complex theoretical, ethical, and technical problems thrown up by such scenarios, using them as a form of active research. A good example is the exhibition You are Here: Re-siting Installations organized by students on the course in 1997, or the re-fabrication of Vito Acconci’s Collision House, 1981, for the exhibition Playing amongst the Ruins , presented here in 2001.

Specially commissioned for ‘The Straight or Crooked Way’ 2003, Ana Maria Tavares’s Kensington Maze

reconfigured the visitor’s encounter with the space, using scaffolding, ladders and walkways that cut through the galleries of the Royal College of Art.

Since the mid-nineties there has been much discussion of self-reflective modes of curating, of the need for a “transparency” or “performativity” that will reveal the curator’s mediation of the exhibition process. Curating courses have been active participants in the exploration of these ideas, many of which can be linked to the discourses of postmodernism. But amongst students on our program there is a persistent interest in more reticent modes of curatorial MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

35

In March/April 2004 the exhibition ‘This much is certain’ brought together work by artists using documents and documentary. Within the galleries a specially constructed cinema for the film programme showed a continuous programme of film documentaries. View of the cinema with still from Pumping Iron by George Butler.

practice, in art-historical research into particular artists’ work, and in the possibilities offered by the rethinking of established exhibition genres. At a time when the curatorial gesture has become increasingly emphatic, our students often appear more interested in discretion. Despite the development of curating schools and programs, there are many curators who have established their position on the art scene without being involved in this educational network. And that is true, I suppose, not only for the East, but for West, too. So let me ask you a tough (and probably my last) question: Are curators who graduate from such programs the most interesting?

I suspect the people you have in mind began their practice before the creation of curating courses and perhaps it is too soon to tell whether the next generation will be the products of curating programs. However, I think your question also assumes that we have agreed criteria for judging the “most interesting” curators, and this seems dangerously close to the adoption of a kind of star system, based on fashion and visibility. As one of our graduates has pointed out, “There are so many curators working underneath the radar of what the conventional art world considers interesting (fashionable). Yet 36


many of these curators are making subtle and sometimes radical changes to their environment.” Our graduates take many different paths - working as curators in different types of institutions, with collections as well as exhibitions, and as critics, editors, private gallerists, commissioners, and educators. In Britain, relatively few operate as independent agents, but this is hardly surprising given the absence of opportunities or support structures for freelance curators. There are only a handful of British institutions that deal seriously with contemporary art and even fewer that commission independent curators to make exhibitions. There are no posts for adjunct curators and very few opportunities of the kind one might find in Italy or France, where a regional government or city authority may invite an independent curator to organize a one-off “event” in a particular location. Until the late eighties the freelance “curator” in Britain was usually a critic (examples are David Sylvester and Guy Brett), who was invited to select an exhibition and to write about it, and who did not necessarily engage with the processes of exhibition-making. The creation of curating programs, with

their emphasis on contemporary art and on critical practice, has undoubtedly contributed to the shift from critic to curator in terms of prominence and power. But, in economic terms, it remains extraordinarily difficult for the independent curator to survive unless he or she is also a writer and teacher. Curating courses have not yet had much impact on this reality.

the other, as offering, in the space of two years, the opportunity to learn what might otherwise take the best part of a decade. But both stress that the curating course is no more than a space, a framework, a gateway, which provides professional knowledge and critical understanding of the workings of the art world. The real work begins later, when the tools provided by a curating program are used to build an individual practice.

Installation view of Gerard Byrne’s New Sexual Lifestyles, 2003, which features a reenactment of a panel discussion published in the September 1973 issue of Playboy, presented in the exhibition ‘This much is certain’ March/April 2004.

However, I believe that our course has had a strong influence at the institutional 22 July 2004 level. Many of our graduates end up working in institutions, many of them in London, and one can discern their influence in numerous ways. Curating programs encourage the discussion of ideas in a non-hierarchical setting, such as is seldom found in working situations. At the Royal College our students work together collaboratively to develop and realize their final exhibitions and so have to learn skills of advocacy and negotiation, to relish debate and the sharing of ideas. Two of our recent graduates, both of whom came to the course with substantial previous experience, have spoken in very similar terms of the opportunities offered by the intensity of the program. One described it as “a kind of curator’s utopia,” a space for research and development; MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

37

STUDENT’S REMARKS

Catherine Hemelryk

Salad Days Catherine Hemelryk

has received her master degree in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London and BA (hons) Fine Art, Newcastle University. She is currently working as a freelance curator before going onto a work placement in 2005.

I came to the Royal College of Art straight from my honors bachelor’s degree in fine art at Newcastle University. I wanted to get a vocational master’s degree that would be both highly academic and practical. Over the past two years, I have received excellent instruction in art history and aesthetic philosophy, and my writing has improved enormously. What I liked about the course was its structure: the first year is largely theoretical, while the se cond year puts it all into practice. Working with a group of twelve is inevitably trying, but it has left me with the capacity not only to think through subjects and find new approaches to ideas and problems, but also to make my own ideas really solid and my ways of communicating clear and coherent. Alongside learning from my teachers, I learned from my course-mates, all but one of whom were older than I and had vastly different experiences; many of them were international students. I was able to share with them areas I knew well, such as how to physically put up a show and install artworks. The course gave us the opportunity to work with a sizable budget, such as is rarely available for a one-off show, especially for someone just out of university. Also, I come from a background where there was not a lot of money, so the college bursaries that covered my fees and living costs allowed me to devote myself entirely to my studies for two years, and the course’s travel budget took us all over the United Kingdom and Southeastern Europe to see work first-hand. For the exhibition This Much Is Certain in addition to working with two of the artists and their contributions to the exhibition and publication, as well as with one of the speakers - I was in charge of the budget and the website. For the exhibition with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which we curated at Ibid Projects, I coordinated the installation and assisted on talks and events. It was a great experience to engage in such roles and try different things, and I am proud of the results, although, of course, there are things I would do differently in the future. As I am about to graduate, I feel that curatorship is something that can be taught only if there is a kernel of talent within the student. If the application interviews to get into the RCA course are so rigorous, it is because the organizers want to have students who they feel will not only gain from the course but will also contribute to

38


it - and this interview was certainly one of my more terrifying experiences. The two years of the course provide you with training in the different areas of curatorship: writing, commissioning, publishing, installation, fundraising, press and publicity, academic research, project management, finances, and history - knowledge that may be applied at any type of institution or agency or in freelance work. The course does not produce clones, thanks to the diversity of the people who participate and because of the variety of interests the course caters to; nor does it teach you to subscribe to some RCA point of vi ew but, rather, to challenge yourself and develop self-confidence. I believe the course is producing some really exciting curators who are working in innovative ways, and I cannot wait to see what some of my fellow students will do in the future. Not everyone is going to be a superstar curator, and many will go into solid, supportive jobs that get little glory but are, nonetheless, essential to the art world and create opportunities for others to shine.

Fom the exibition

This Much Is Certain,

2004 Left to right: works of Gerard Byrne, works of Daniel Baker, the talk by Nick Broomfield

There is a definite added value to attending the course at the RCA, namely, this is a prestigious institution and employers know that its graduates are competent. As art jobs become highly sought after and museum and gallery studies programs increase, I believe the reputation of the course will certainly be an asset for me in the future, especially as it has been in existence for over ten years now and has proved that it produces bright graduates. The last two years have been hard work, but I leave with a sense of excitement about what I can do next. The course has really broadened my horizons, and I am looking forward to what the future brings. Summer 2004

This Much Is Certain

. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

39

DISCUSSIONS

Nataπa Petreπin

Interview with Saskia Bos Saskia Bos

is director of the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam and head of its curatorial training program, which she founded in 1994. Apart from shows for De Appel, she has also curated several larger exhibitions, including among others the 3rd Sculpture Biennial Münsterland in 2003, the 2nd Berlin Biennial in 2001, Jetztzeit at the Kunsthalle Vienna in 1994, Aperto at the Venice Biennial in 1988, and the Sonsbeek International Sculpture exhibition in

1986. She has served on several international juries and was president of International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) from 1999 to 2002. She was a member of the advisory committee for the Yokohama Triennial in 2001, and of the nomination committee for Documenta 11 in 1998. Nataπa Petreπin

is a freelance curator based in Ljubljana. Currently she is curating a media arts festival in Hull, England, collaborating with eflux on its Video Rental Project in New York, and co-curating a computer arts festival in Nova Gorica, Slovenia. 40

a more important reason is that working together is easier in a small group. Our participants travel a lot; they meet the curators of topical exhibitions and discuss shows with them and with the artists involved. Examples from last year include our visits to the Istanbul Biennial curated by Dan Cameron and the Balkan show in Kassel created by René Block. The two shows were completely different but both The program was inspired by the program gave us an insight into what is shifting in in Grenoble, yes, as it once existed - the Europe and into the points of view of the one created by Jacques Guillot. But the curators. That is even more important for Grenoble course is quite different now: an Asian or American student than for a compared to what they do, we offer a student who would be traveling through short and intensive course that is truly Europe anyway. But the analysis and international, focuses on production and discussions are equally fruitful for all. on working with artists, and also provides To see your own continent through the extensive field research through trips to eyes of a colleague who is educated in exhibitions Europe-wide. What is more, a totally different part of the globe but participants form an autonomous zone has learned similar tools and read maybe within the institution they are part of, even comparable books is exciting. And and are thus invited to theorize about to have dialogues about criteria and to fight for an artist you believe in can be practice. something that keeps a participant awake What in your opinion are the most all night. The curatorial training program at the De Appel Foundation was established in 1994, along the lines of a similar program at Le Magasin in Grenoble, and it soon become one of Europe’s most important specialization programs for an emerging art profession. How was the idea for the program conceived and how did the training evolve over the first few years?

distinctive features of De Appel’s program in comparison with some other European graduate curatorial courses or ones in the United States?

Our staff is small and has to be very flexible, and that is one of the reasons we have a limited number of participants. But MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

Throughout the program six or more participants are involved in acollaboratio n or teamwork model; they attend lectures together, do mostly collective work in tutorials, travel together, and in the end produce a final project together. At first

sight, the situation recalls a laboratory environment, but I remember from my own experience that in practice even more emphasis is put on the quality of the group dynamics and collaboration, as well as on the constant negotiation processes that take place through the duration of the program. We see similar processes revealed in the tendency of selecting teams of curators from different backgrounds who then work together on an exhibition, biennial, or festival, culminating in results that are more or less successful. What have you seen to be the most frequent advantages and disadvantages, conceptual or emotional, of this kind of training? The advantages outnumber the disadvantages, but let’s be fair: there is a lot you cannot teach in seven or eight months, so the participants need to have some experience even before they enter the program. They should not expect to learn the complex processes of acquisition, registration, or restoration of art objects. But they do learn to think about models of exhibitions and approaches to catalogue essays, about education formats, about press and communication, and about ways to apply for funding and make budgets according to the money you can generate. Because obviously, the profession of curator has many aspects:

she or he is a theoretician, an agent, a producer of meaning, a manager of people and goods, a talent scout, and a mediator all at the same time. One of the great advantages of such a small group is also that you get accustomed to working as a team, which is both practical for the working environment on a dayto-day basis as well as for the kind of situation you have when you are working on a jury or a committee. I do think that the constant process of negotiating that curators go through - both inside the group and with the outside world - is a reality of the profession. It is very important, though, to remain focused and to avoid compromising or making too many concessions.

In 2003, she was an assistant to René Block at the exhibition In the Gorges of the Balkans

at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel. She participated in the De Appel curatorial training program in 2002. She writes regularly on contemporary and new media art and is a member of the editorial board of the online review Artmargins.

The profile of the curator of contemporary art seems to avoid any more or less firm definition of what the job actually denotes and encompasses. Several of today’s most visible curators come from backgrounds other than the study of art history, which was until recently the primary educational background for curators in contemporary visual arts. The obvious question is: Can one actually learn the curatorial profession?

Obviously one never stops learning, and especially as a curator, you have to adjust to the ever-changing positions MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

41

“To have dialogues about criteria and to fight for an artist you believe in can be something that keeps a participant awake all night.”

of artists and other cultural producers. The art-historical background is not the one and only requirement; we have had students with an impressive knowledge of art history and philosophy who never attended traditional art history classes. I think that a curator has to have a really intimate understanding of the artists’ work, both physically and psychologically. Maybe what counts most is the attitude, an interest in being a sparring partner for an artist, in dealing and negotiating with and for that artist - the ability to visualize through the medium of an exhibition the issues you are pondering and feeling in works of art, to experience how different artists and curators have dealt with works of art and with the spaces around them, with light and shadow, and with audiences and communications. And also with a sense of enigma: a show is not a book you read about art. Recently you have invited former program participants to contribute short essays to an issue of Printed Project, a journal on contemporary art published in Dublin, for which you were a guest editor. Do you maintain a network of former participants in other specific ways? And do you tend to follow their individual careers after they finish the program? 42


I continue to be interested in their careers, in how they develop. And we sometimes meet as we travel to smaller or bigger international shows; that’s when you try to catch up. Also, many of them are eager to meet students of other years from other countries with whom they can exchange notes or make projects together. It is wonderful how this curatorial program has expanded from a platform to a network of collaboration, in a much stronger way than I had initially imagined. This particular network, along with the complex cultural and social position of contemporary art, has produced a kind of young “army” of curators. (The military metaphor is borrowed from Gilane Tawadros, who draws a parallel between colonialist cultural workers - for instance, from the Napoleonic era - who traveled with armies in order to explore still undiscovered geographical regions and curators who explore either Third World contemporary art or new trends and new artists in general.) Nowadays people have a wide range of choices for their curatorial education, either in academia or through contemporary art centers and foundations. I would like to know how you got involved in the curating of contemporary art and what your curating education consisted of?

“I think that a curator has to have a really intimate understanding of the artists’ work, both physically and psychologically.”

It does have to do with my personal background. I had the unique opportunity

to study art history at Groningen University in the Netherlands when there were only six students in a single academic year, who were taught by four professors from different fields. We had the keys to the library and could study whenever we wanted. As to my professional career, there were many opportunities given to me and I had a chance to work with interesting people in different countries. Our students, too, get a key to our institution, and many doors open in other places when they want to meet an artist or a curator or director who is willing to talk about the profession. Quick access to knowledge is the key; you become the proud owner of cultural capital and have to find a way to share it.


43

ARTIST’S VIEW

Rainer Ganahl

When Attitudes Become - Curating Rainer Ganahl

is an artist living in New York. More information: www.ganahl.info “Boeing 747,”

1

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, retrieved

8 November 2004, from . See The Essential McLuhan, edited by Eric 2

McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 53-74.

Title of exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann at Kunsthalle Bern, March-April 1969. 3

The 747 was born out of the explosion of the popularity of air travel in the 1960s. The enormous popularity of the Boeing 707 had revolutionized long distance travel in the world, and had begun the concept of the “global village” made possible by the jet revolution.... The first edition of the jet, the 747-100, rolled out of the new Everett facility on 2 September 1969. 1 In 1969, Playboy magazine printed an interview with Marshal McLuhan entitled “A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.” 2 When Attitudes Become Form 3

One particular day that made a special impression on me as a child was the day we drove to the Zurich airport. Nobody was being dropped off or picked up; we ourselves couldn’t even imagine what it meant to fly on a plane since we didn’t know anybody who lived more than a thirty-minute drive away. We went to the airport in order to see the first jumbo jet, the Boeing 747, which had left the factory in 1969 and was making its first flight for PanAm in 1970. On that same occasion, we went on to visit another novelty of the early 1970s, a newly constructed shopping center next to the highway outside Zurich. Our family never visited a museum or even a bookshop or library. The exhibition When Attitudes Become Form would not have been possible without the jet revolution. Harald Szeemann, who worked at the Kunsthalle Bern, had traveled to the United States, where he became acquainted with contemporary American art. This new art was made by artists who had started traveling by airplane and so were mobile. This mobility changed not only society, but art as well. In my view, conceptual art was the first 747 art form to factor transportation and mobility into the decision-making. Marshal McLuhan’s “medium is the message” conversion soon dominated all conversation that defined art: language- and concept-related works emerged, and artists started to communicate. Although it was Karl Marx who first discussed machines and tools as extensions of organs and the body, it was McLuhan who reworked this idea in the vision of a happily communicating and

44


mass-consuming “global village” in which everybody potentially conversed with everybody else without any special regard for production and class relations. The new era of national protest and racial and sexual liberation took off. The birth control pill, live television news reporting in the field, portable and affordable video cameras, the first computers and consumer electronics made the world fun and promiscuous - until the oil crisis, AIDS, and terrorism darkened the scene. The terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics coincided with the beginning of live TV field journalism, with mobile cameras taking viewers outside the television studio. Artists and intellectuals celebrated this new world. They, too, entered the field with proposals and international exhibitions that were independent of museums and galleries. Ausstellungsmacher - exhibition makers - became welcome and necessary figures who could sort out existing disorders and create new ones. Harald Szeemann referred to his office as “Büro für geistige Gastarbeit” - the Office of Intellectual GuestWork - borrowing the German term Gastarbeit, usually reserved for the then-new phenomenon of unskilled migrant industrial workers from the East who had come to work in Western Europe. Gastarbeiter were perceived as foreigners - as they still are perceived, even after generations, receiving only very meager help with the process of integrating into society. Capital, labor, services, and products traveled and were exchanged from one country to the next, and art, as always, tried to keep up with the pace. Today, curators themselves are, more often than not, free agents without any direct association with an institution. Szeemann, too, defines his role as a free agent, even though he has had loose but consistent institutional associations. The same may be said about many other well-known contemporary-art curators, who, even when employed by a museum or gallery, are still perceived as independent and available to be hired for any show anywhere in the world if the offer is attractive enough, that is, in terms of prestige and remuneration. Today, the art system has become so complex and sophisticated that any role can be adopted by any player in the game. More and more, we see artists who collect, curate, write, and deal in art, as well as collectors, writers, and curators who make art and reflect on artistic production as writers and art historians. Interestingly, even Szeemann - and not only Hans-Ulrich Obrist - was unable to resist taking on the role of the artist: MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

45

Reading Frantz Fanon,

192 books, New York City, November 2003

He participated in the Tirana Biennial 2003, where he had some silk-screens made. Another example of mixing roles is this very text, which was commissioned by Viktor Misiano, a trained art historian who has become a curator, publisher, critic, and director of an art center. (“I am deputy director of the State Center for Museums and Exhibitions. I am editing my Moscow Art Magazine. I am curating, publishing, writing, and so on.”) Misiano commissions me, an artist, to write a text on how to teach curating. He does not ask me for an artwork, he asks for a pedagogical essay.

It cannot be stressed enough that these changes are the product of a dramatically changing society and its constantly improving technologies. Therefore, other domains are also changing. I give here only three basic, unrelated examples, but ones that artists and curators have begun to think about. - Banking: I now pay with money I do not have and make financial transactions by means of my computer and mobile telephone. I shift virtual money - a euphemism for my debts - from one credit card to another and feel that I am being lured into greater debt. I have started to believe that my expanding credit allowance is actually money I own.

- Food: I have food delivered, or I take it out; I freeze it and microwave it. I also supplement my food with highly processed vitamins, proteins, and whatever else I think I need, which does not often resemble anything like “food” or, indeed, anything “natural.” And when I cook my own food, I use easy-to-follow instructions and preprepared substances. Needless to say, part of my foot is now manipulated, designed to certain specifications in size, durability, flavor, and composition. - Work is another basic activity undergoing drastic change: Today, we work at home; we work in teams via computers without ever seeing each other; we work three jobs or more at the same time. We choose, outsource, and subcontract parts of our work or entire productions; we work in multiple places around the world simultaneously with our digital arms, voices, eyes, and brains. Is it any wonder, then, that I - in the role of artist - make my curators paint my paintings and my dealers do my drawings and take on part of my artistic decision46


making? Here at home, I study Chinese and Arabic; I write texts; I try to sell my art; and I frantically try to organize my money, recuperate debts from others, curate shows, advise dealers. I even collect art. Currently, there are up to twenty people producing my artistic work for me in various places, on various continents, for various shows, and with various sources of financial support. All this is partially done by people who are not artists and who do not understand the art. If my computer is an interface, I am an “interbrain,” a decision-making body processing and producing information. In this new, twisted, and multilayered context, curators have to create, too, and not only find their specific niche.

Imported - A Reading Seminar...(Russian Version), Moscow, 1995

Recently, curating has become institutionalized; it has turned into a discipline that is taught academically. Classes in curatorship are now being created everywhere: at universities, art schools, museums, auction houses, and so on. In the current period of deskilling and artistic outsourcing, the question, “What does one teach curators?” is about as impossible to answer as, “What does one teach artists?” I am convinced that the recipe for a good curator is the same as for anybody who succeeds in life, whatever field they are in. It is an elixir I locate in the persons themselves. It is a basic understanding of who we are, of where we are from, of how we are living, of what we want, and of what we can do. This che voi? (Italian, “What do you want?” Lacan) is crucial in shielding us from the things other people want us to want, to do, to buy, to believe, to sell, to say, and to fi ght for. Concerning art and the artist, I really do not have a preference as long as I can see that a person takes a genuine interest in what they are doing, an interest that is not opportunistic, externally driven, or remote-controlled by trends and dominant formations of taste. Curators, too, should learn to distinguish between motivations or interests that are intrinsic and logical and those that are not. On top of that, they have to figure out what kind of art they would like to defend, for whom, and why. They also have to find inventive ways to put their vision respectfully into practice without the total exploitation of the artist or of anybody else involved in the making of a show. Everybody should be able to give answers to the question of why they do what they do. These answers should be intrinsic to the job itself. Money, power, and the love of banking should not dominate curatorial or artistic decision-making, though such MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

47

Imported - A Reading Seminar... (US Version),

Florida, 1994

See . 4

things can never be avoided. But we all know people who are motivated solely by the social context in which they project themselves without any authentic interest in what they do. Many are curators who only work with prestigious artists from highpowered galleries who will bring them a guarantee of status. This merely reinforces the artistic and curatorial status quo without challenging it - and sometimes without even comprehending it. Curators not only should understand artists and know how to listen to them; they should also understand their own role in the constant remaking of today’s complex cultural and political landscapes. Everything we do, as visitors, collectors, curators, artists, or dealers, is part of an ongoing, endless shaping and reshaping of aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual standards that have a broader political, social, and ideological impact. Cultural and intellectual formations may be liberating or oppressive, and may have extensiv e repercussions not only on the psychology of individuals but also on general politics. Right now in the United States, in the post-9/11 period, cultural institutions and univers ities are under greater pressure to be complicit with right-wing politics and to encourage a terrifying culture of general mistrust and eavesdropping. Academic departments that are critical of this lose their funding; political speech is being discouraged and subjected to intimidation; artists are threatened with lawsuits; and independent media outlets risk being silenced. A certain group that opposes the war against Iraq has not yet been able to purchase advertising space on Times Square for a message denouncing war. Currently, there are several lawsuits still pending against artists, and I myself may be one of them, given “my” U.S. postal stamp project, which plays with symbolic civil disobedience.4 Today, everybody must understand that he or she is part of a larger discourse that shapes our public and private spheres. Years ago, I happened to be part of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, which puts artists, curators, and writers together in a course for people who hope somehow to succeed in the highly competitive field of cultural production. During that formational year, we worked together without much discussing art and the usual politics that surrounds it. Art seemed almost a taboo topic that was better addressed in the back rooms and corridors than in the regular and frequent plenary discussions. We were expected to read books and had to work through countless photocopies of articles relevant to the discussion on the cultural front. Art was only

48


one optical device for looking outside our windows. In many ways, this course did change my way of thinking and doing things, if it did not actually change the direction of my life. This was not because of the social contacts I made during the program, but because of what we discussed, what we read, and what we focused on. Eventually, I found a way to reformulate my art-making and thinking that can be traced, at least in part, back to the two years I spent there. A couple of years later, I was invited to Grenoble, where a curatorial “école” was created. Whereas the Whitney program did not provide any funding and was equipped only with a photocopy machine, the Le Magasin program in France offered grants, travel stipends, and other kinds of opportunities lacking in the program in New York. To my surprise, in France, nobody was interested in art or in any subject I proposed for discussion. The only thing they talked about was, “How did you get your book published?” “How do you get in there?” and so on. Traveling and social networking were privileged over reading and discussing culturally important issues. Let’s now look at the question of power for some of these relevant cultural agents. As I pointed out earlier, cultural roles are becoming more diversified, more difficult to define, and somehow interchangeable in this always-shifting landscape. Yet this is not a sign that the power and influence inherent to such roles are evaporating. If artists curate a show or collect art, they produce the same effects on the distribution of power and influence as when someone who is “solely a curator” or “solely a collector” does it. As an artist, I have had some rather troubling experiences with artist-curators. Some of them have assumed the power of the curator but not the responsibilities of curating. During the selection process they were reasoning like curators, but during the organizational phase they acted like artists: that is, they showed little respect to the artists’ work. Artists have the right to see the world through their works and should be allowed to deal with their artworks in whatever way they decide. But when they assume the role of curator, they have to change their viewpoint and need to respect the other artist and their works. Of course, people who are professionally solely curators can act irresponsibly, too. I am going now to be very specific and polemical and use examples from my own experience, both positive and negative. I might risk consternation at both extremes. There are many curators, more than I can list here, with whom I have been pleased and MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

49

See . 5

See . 6

See . 7

honored to work, and the results have been excellent. Also, generally speaking, most curators have treated me with respect, intelligence, and generosity. Experiences on the opposite end of the spectrum, while of course disappointing, have been relatively minimal. Discussing the few times when things went wrong might add a bitter taste to this essay, but these unfortunate experiences have not disenchanted me. Quite the opposite, I have learned to understand that behind such conflicts - which can take on very personal and idiosyncratic forms - there are mostly structural problems that can be traced back to feeble financial support from the miserly communities that host these institutions. For the few negative cases, I have created web pages that describe the exact development and context of the experience and present key correspondence. My worst experience so far has been with the Italian curator Claudia Zanfi, who has been trying to relieve me of one of my artworks by means of very intricate tactics. We are still in the midst of the dispute, since my piece has not yet been returned. This case has been documented to the point that it almost amounts to a sociological study.5 It might well serve as a cautionary example of an entire network of exploitation and self-exploitation in the midst of a rich city that refuses to give enough money to the arts despite its attempt to use them to boost its image. Zanfi made herself a complicit agent in this mechanism of disrespect and abuse. Maike Pollack, from the Southfirst Gallery in Brooklyn, is another person who tried to extort artworks from me and even kicked me out of an ongoing group show I was in. 6 Alongside some minor cases of frustration, which I list here in the hope of pressuring a solution through the power of free speech, I have to mention the well-known Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci, who heads a respected art space in Florence entitled BASE. After three years of empty promises, he has not yet reimbursed my airfare, nor has he returned my artworks. Another petty case, not even worth describing here, can be found online; it involves some artist-curators in Amsterdam who did me in financially as well as on the level of presentation. 7 My last example of remarkably disappointing curating at a large and respected institution concerns Christian Bernard, who inv ited me to do a one-person show i n a part of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO) in Geneva in 1997. Though funding was guaranteed and a time for the show was chosen, it was abruptly canceled for rather ludicrous reasons

50


only two months before the scheduled opening. No rescheduling. In place of my show, Bernard exhibited the work of an artist who fit much more smoothly into the social context of the other artists then occupying his chic museum. In that case, the conflict was not about money or financial support, though Bernard used the funding argument as a pretext. He had my written assurance that all costs would be covered by resources other than his own.

Left and center:

Before I go into the positive territory of my best experiences with curators and museum programmers, I would like to address the funding issue, a permanent source of potential conflict. There are artists who reject participation when there is no funding, that is, when they have to pay for things themselves. I do not share this position, and differentiate between various situations. I sometimes participate in a show even when I myself have to pay. But I have learned to insist that funding be discussed in a clear and comprehensive way up front. Years ago, I accepted the no-funding conditions of the Contemporary Art Center Moscow, when Viktor Misiano was curator there. At the time, there was no money in Moscow, and Misiano made this clear to me from the beginning. I organized things myself and had a great time. I was able to produce a show I organized around the study of Basic Russian and my Reading Seminar projects. This exhibition was important for my own workinghistory, and the lack of international reception and funding did not matter.

Nice, 1994

Imported - A Reading Seminar... (Russian Version),

Moscow, 1995 Right:

Imported - A Reading Seminar... (French Version),

Currently, I am working on a one-person exhibition for Artist Commune, a nonprofit space in Hong Kong; elaborate work is required. Chi ef curator Shin-Yi Yang invited a guest curator, Mie Iwasuki, who invited me. The show sounds great but, as was made clear to me, there is no funding. I accepted it because several volunteers, including both curators, will tutor me in Chinese on a regular basis as a continuation of my four-year-old Basic Chinese art project. Mie Iwasuki is hard-working and supportive. In addition to teaching me Chinese, she is painting three large canvases for my show. I will pay for my own flight ticket and cover the costs of most of the materials, and I hope to have a nice time in Hong Kong. But, without making it sound like I am complaining, I cannot ignore the fundamental question of why a rich city like Hong Kong cannot afford to cover basic artistic activities. Why do curators work there when there is no financial support for the arts? The answers are complex, MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

51

A Portable, not so ideal, imported library or how to reinvent the coffee table - 25 books for instant use (Japanese version), 1993

but they always fall within the logic of the pre-financial thinking that dominates the art world. In this case, my “I don’t sell anything but I learn something” mantra has been slightly modified. I am also in another situation where there is no funding but it is nevertheless an acceptable and pleasant experience - an intelligent show that does not require any money. Alejandro Cesarco and Gabriela Forcadell are curating the show (if it may be called that) for the Centro Cultural Rojas without any significant funding, but with lots of engagement, ideas, and pleasure. I am one of a number of artists who are being invited, on a monthly basis, to present a list of books for people to read, along with an introduction explaining the selection of texts and suggesting reading strategies. The texts will go into an archive they are setting up in remote and cash-poor Argentina. There still seem to be a lot of people with curiosity and interest in art and artists’ reasoning. For me, participation in this project not only provides a perfect pretext for reading, but it is also a way to regenerate the connection between my fingers and certain parts of my cortex. I love to e xpress myself with old-fashioned media that have dominated me and my artistic expression: reading, writing and discussions have been the centerpieces of many of my exhibitions. These basic cultural practices have become more and more anachronistic in a cultural status quo that works with mice, scrolling bars, clicks, and remote control devices. Seeing these curators - who are mainly artists who do not like to wait around - working respectfully with simple and eco-friendly strategies makes me almost forget about the stress that can define the world of art programming. In addition to money issues, many other conflicts can occur, too, just as in everyday life. I will mention only a few of the tensions between curators and artists that are becoming more and more obvious. Artistic interference by curators. This is the result of the changing roles and the deskilling of many artistic practices. Curators start to interfere and compete with artists in the artistic decision-making process: “Make it bigger, make it smaller, use this material, etc.” Curators also assume roles that involve the kind of demands once made by financial patrons: “We want you to do a bar, a dance floor, a skateboard ramp, wallpaper, furniture, a floating structure, and last but not least, a tomb for the CEO.” The merging of artistic production with the emergence of a small art-

52


based cottage industry of social services reinforces this kind of interference. “Could you do a reading seminar? Will you teach the children of the neighborhood? Will you psychoanalyze the members of our museum board?” Because artists are today often the producers and organizers of their own artworks and do not shy away from spectacle or event-planning, their modes of working and managing affairs have become similar to, if not the same as, those of curators or dealers. The blurring of the line between curator and artist presents temptations everybody sh ould be wary of.

Imported - A Reading Seminar... (French Version),

Nice, 1994

The importance of (“I wanna get mass-”) media attention in the art world is another factor that can push artists and curators onto a collision course. People compete for public attention and narcissistic love. Attention seems to be the lifeblood for our media-driven industry. It is not uncommon for the curators of mega-shows to be more important than the art, which is temporarily left on the wayside by the international jet set. When H arald Szeemann invited me to participate in the Kwangju Biennial in 1997, the Korean press could not stop asking questions about my star curator. “What is it like working with him? How did he find you? Have you worked with him before? What do you think of Szeemann?” And so on. There was almost no substantial question asked about my artistic proposal. Today, many writers succumb to this obsession with curating and curators. Larger group shows seem to fall or stand not with the work of the artists in the show but with the curatorial reasoning behind it. Unfortunately, the selection process is often like betting on horses or picking stocks. People like to see recurring high-profile names mixed with those of unknown young newcomers. Older artists try to rejuvenate themselves by collaborating with young talents. Curators reinvent themselves by inviting younger artists who can more easily change their modes of working and synchronize their perception with the flux of things. It is no surprise that thinking about art in terms of scores and rankings has proliferated, since even investment capital has now become part of the picture. Without knowing many details, I learned that some high profile U.S. curators were not only acting as advisors but were actually the founders of a venture fund for amassing capital to invest in the arts. With auction prizes of contemporary art exceeding even the appreciation of Internet stocks during the frantic years of irrational exuberance, it is MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

53

hardly astonishing that institutionalized investment thinking has become a reality. By the way, lists of best-selling artists have been published in business magazines since the 1980s. I sometimes have the feeling that many museum curators make exhibitions in order to impress other curators and museum directors, especially those advised by blue-chip galleries and art-collecting board members. “Artist-shopping” now defines museum profiles. At the peak of their careers, highly overbooked and overexposed players do nothing but move from one major museum to another. It is not an easy game to guarantee the booking of these high-flying artists. This gives a false impression that there exists something like the NBA of the art world. But there is no such NBA. More often than not, when artists reach a certain critical point of success and exposure, they begin over-producing and under-performing. I am inclined to say that museum shows that fail to challenge artists, curators, the public, and critics are little more than prerecorded visual Muzak. We should all keep in mind the simple truth that most artists have become known for works they did when few people showed an interest in them and when virtually nobody was spending any money on them. In this landscape of illusions, endless diversity, and competitive selecting, decision-making is difficult and soon contextualizes a curator. “Whom do you show? Whom do you collect?” Curators stay and fall with their artists, their galleries, their openings, their dinner invitations, and their press coverage. Working with famous artists brings fame to curators (and vice versa). I would now like to mention people who offered me opportunities for one-person shows at times when there was a huge discrepancy between my recognition as an artist and the importance of the inviting institutions they represented. When they invited me to do a show, these curators held positions of power and could easily have shown artists who enjoyed far higher social-approval ratings than I did. At the risk of disappointing other important curators who supported me and whom, for merely technical reasons, I cannot mention, I would like to thank the following four people, who all gave me solo museum shows: Annegreth Nill, Dallas Museum of Art, 1992; Timothy Blum, Person’s Weekend Museum, Tokyo, 1993; Sabine Breitwieser, Generali Foundation, Vienna, 1997; and Edelbert Köb, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 1998. Each of these curators and directors had endless programming 54


choices but decided on me solely on the basis of my artistic work. None of these decisions were influenced by social dynamics or networking power games. There was no dealer or any other kind of matchmaker involved. My status as a relatively unknown artist led me to take each of these s hows very seriously. For each of these museums, I was able to make shows that became crucial for my own art-making. Each show in some way altered my artistic direction and became a cornerstone in the development of my artwork. Interestingly, almost all of these shows were relatively ignored by critics, other institutions, and collectors. I have just received an invitation from Bill Kaizen to make a one-person show at the Wallach Gallery of the Columbia University Museum in 2005. This is a well-funded institution that usually limits itself only to historical presentations. Again, I am amazed that this curator and doctoral student in art history has chosen to show me and so diverged from the regular practice of his respected institution.

Imported - A Reading Seminar... (Japanese Version),

Hiroshima, 1995

I will conclude this essay by stating the banality that no formula exists for teaching either artists or curators. Every success story is different and cannot be replicated or even fully understood. To a certain degree, it is nearly impossible to decide what success means for the people involved - busy schedules? sales? visitors? prestigious institutions? media coverage? artistic consistency? In my view, success stories those that require us to redefine the very notion of success. My heart is with those curators who, sometimes against all odds, dedicate themselves to a certain artist or a certain aesthetic without winning social or critical success. I do not even have to like them very much. In New York, Kenny Schachter has for a long time been the kind of case difficult to define. Along with being a curator, he is also a lawyer, a collector, an artist, a writer, a dealer, a gallery owner and, recently, a real estate developer. Many artists who became meaningful and recognized in the 1990s were first presented at one of Schachter’s rather chaotic events in unconventional spaces. His frequent programming took place at empty non-art spaces throughout downtown Manhattan with shows that were as much visited as they were criticized. Most of his artists really had not shown before. But quite a number of them moved on to desirable and profitable careers, some neglecting to mention Schachter in their biographies. I liked only a handful of artists he worked with over the years. While I could not appreciate most of his aesthetic choices, I very much acknowledge (and, in fact, adore) the MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

55

fact that he has been home for many of the artists he showed and collected early on, anticipating and shaping major visual trends in New York. In my personal understanding, Schachter redefined and extended the social role of the artist-curatorwriter-collector-dealer-entrepreneur in a memorable, if often shocking, way.

Left: Leggere Antonio Gramsci Reading Antonio Gramsci.

Base, Florence, 2002 Right: Imported - A Reading seminar... (California Version),

I end abruptly with the unsatisfying feeling that much has been left out. Being exposed to art and artists is an ongoing school that has no need for teachers or students. Listening to artists should be the most important job of anybody who works, or pretends to work, for the arts. Good artists and good curators find their own way to defy the dull institutionalization and non-stop commercialization of art and its vital channels of communication. They are not satisfied with art schools and curatorial training courses, with dealers and museum directors, with the market and the statesponsored event culture that exists for chauvinistic or mutually narcissistic ends. The same is true of intelligent audiences and outstanding collectors, who appreciate and dedicate themselves to the things they themselves really like. All these participants know they need art in their struggle to live a decent and meaningful life. In today’s world of total marketing, spam also occurs in the form of cultural products we do not want, need, or (wish to) understand. Today, the responsibility of everybody involved in the endless process of cultural and artistic production and mediation is greater then ever before. It is a sublime endgame to be endlessly continued.

Los Angeles, 1995

New York, July 2004 PS: It goes without saying that I am deeply indebted to and appreciative of everybody who has worked with me in whatever role. I feel very sorry that space does not allow me to name every single person; my text would have been twenty or more pages long if I had. But I do want to mention two people in New York who have been and still are tremendously generous and supportive: Devon Dikeou, artist, writer, curator, collector and editor of zingmagazine; and Manfred Baumgartner, who is offering me a third one-person exhibition in New York, where the killing cost structure is so outrageous that the exhibition of an artist with my commercial track record hardly seems justifiable - another example of a curatorial choice against the grain. 56



57

STUDENTS’ REMARKS

Paul Brewer

On the Quasi-Dilemma of Enrolling in a Curatorial Studies Program Paul Brewer

is a curator and writer based in New York. He worked as Director of Exhibitions at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC from 1999 - 2003. He is currently completing a master’s degree program at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

“M.A. required, Ph.D. preferred.” This particular string of syllables now tends to anchor almost every curatorial job description circulated by institutions presenting contemporary visual arts. The incredible expansion of the field over the last fifty years has produced a global marketplace and systems of support for living artists (though still mainly based in Western cultural capitals) that feed an increasing plurality of practices and dialogues defining the present and foreseeable future. The organizational structure of this network has necessarily undergone a hierarchical stratification with a new emphasis on departmentalizing the various administrative activities performed in institutional arenas. While there are, certainly, particularities in relation to geography, a type of industrial standardization inevitably guides the roles of individuals whose ambitions and livelihood become inextricably linked to participating in the evolution of cultural production. Competition always breeds entrepreneurship, but it also spawns professionalization - a term often greeted with skepticism and occasional contempt in the domain of creativity - with primacy placed on the compilation of credentials that very often originate in education. Academic programs with titles such as “Museum Studies,” “Arts Administration,” or “Cultural Management,” which have proliferated over the past twenty years at colleges and universities, are a sure sign that career models based on tasks that can be specifically outlined and taught are now firmly in place. But these programs focus mainly on the practical logistics of navigating operational procedures; they offer students formats of communication and methods of production in tandem with surveys of art history and some critical theory. When I was researching options for an advanced degree that might support my own experience and aspirations as a curator, I found that many of the graduates from such programs had realized their career goals in other territories, such as development, public relations, education, or registration and conservation. I looked into art history programs, but the rigors of scholarly work demanded a tightly focused approach to artists and movements that are to a certain degree already canonized; consequently, such programs would have removed me from a strong relation with artists of my own generation. New academic programs, which originated in the late 1980s under the label “curatorial studies,” seemed to offer a match, but I was still made cautious by the conventionality of their description, which seemed to signify a kind of methodical approach to something I

58


always believed to be an uncategorically hybrid practice that could not be learned outside of direct communication and collaboration with artists. The structure of curatorial studies programs was quite similar to what I knew of most MFA programs. Concentrated studio time, critical discussion, seminars on focused issues and practices, interaction with visiting artists, and the production of a body of work for a final presentation - all had direct parallels in most of the programs I researched. With deadlines looming, curatorial studies appeared to be my best option, but my decision was not made without significant reservations. Besides my horror of any scenario involving a large group of curators discussing contemporary art - a situation I consciously avoided at nearly any cost - I had a list of fears and preconceived notions that made wrestling with application forms something of a personal grudge match. First and foremost was a general uneasiness with the term “curator” and the connotations that have developed around it. A stirring of queasiness is easily prompted in me by exalted characterizations of the contemporary curator as a figure of nobility in the rarefied art world, reinforced by mythic stories of monumental exercises in ego and new depths of micromanagement that are usually delivered in inflated, often unverifiable forms of gossip. This notion of authoritarianism is only exacerbated when I listen to what artists say to curators as opposed to what they sometimes say about them, or when I witness what curators have to say about each other in private when a meeting or project comes to an end. While such dialogue appears to be the exception rather than the rule, the polemics of professional relations can be quite daunting when the degree of personal investment in one’s work is as astronomical as it is in the arts. Some of the controversy that inevitably surrounds contemporary curatorial practice is perhaps an indication of expectations that increasingly require the merging of various roles that have traditionally been separate. Today’s museum curator is not simply a caretaker of artworks and organizer of exhibitions. She or he must often also act as an art historian and theoretician for catalogue essays, a critic writing in journals and magazines, a diplomat for a given institution, an informed buyer cultivating relationships with dealers and collectors, and simultaneously both an active participant in global discourse and an agent for a geographically specific community of artists. Aside from some of the more transparent conflicts of interest MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

59

“Nearly every artist I knew could articulate an extended criticism of the insularity of curatorial discussions. Many decried what they felt to be the growing artistic egos of curators who construct exhibitions as meta-artworks to express their own visionary ideas.”

that arise from such a nexus of relations, I was wary of what seemed to me the kind of dilettantish or even political personality that many curators adopt in order to juggle all these demands. In general, I just was not sure I would be able dispel the stereotype I had formulated for my chosen career. Speaking with artists and others in the arts gave me some necessary advice. Nearly every artist I knew could articulate an extended criticism of the insularity of curatorial discussions. Many decried what they felt to be the growing artistic egos of curators who construct exhibitions as meta-artworks to express their own visionary ideas. Scholars warned that by focusing on exhibition history rather than art history, curatorial studies programs revolve around the privileged role of the curator as a cultural producer in his or her own right. Some curators expressed similar concerns, but many others felt that no other type of program offered the experience necessary to approach the actual working environment. What was made clear by everyone I spoke with was that the field (in the United States at least) is practically closed to those who do not pursue an advanced degree. In the end, this was perhaps the deciding factor. Whether justified or not, I began to see my own paranoia and much of the criticism voiced by others as not necessarily relating to curatorial education or even to individual curators, but rather to the concept of the curator, which is something that will always be subject to intense scrutiny and constant reevaluation. Now, with the first year of a two-year curatorial studies program behind me, while I cannot say that any of my initial reservations have been completely assuaged, I will say that I have no regrets about enrolling.

60



61

POSITIONS

Dominic Willsdon

Curating as a Profession? Dominic Willsdon

is course tutor teaching the philosophy of art for the master’s degree program in curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art in London. He is also curator of public events at Tate Modern (programming talks, discussions and conferences) and a member of the steering group of the London Consortium postgraduate program (including Tate, Birkbeck College, The Architecural Association and the ICA). Literature in the sociology of professions includes, notably, the work of Talcott Parsons. See for example, Parsons’ “The Professions and Social Structure” (1954) in his Essays in Sociological Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). 1

Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 2

(New York: Routledge, 2002).

What is a profession? The term is used to mean many things. We speak of “professional” rather than amateur sports or theater to distinguish between paid and unpaid occupations, and maybe also to say something about training and organization. We speak of “the professional classes” as meaning knowledge-workers who work within relatively settled i nstitutional structures, either public or corporate, as distinct from entrepreneurs. In an archaic British usage, “the professions” refers specifically to medicine, law, and academia (the original late-medieval professions) and perhaps also to the clergy and the military. But more systematically, the sociology of professions, especially in its classic period (1930s-1970s), tends to identify its object of study in terms of social structure.1 Professions are expert occupations in which individual practice takes place within some form of relatively autonomous, more or less organized, collective association. A profession organizes itself so as to control its field of activity, including access to the field and advancement within it. This control is exercised typically through a system of regulations including, possibly a code of ethics and, most importantly, specific education requirements and qualifications. Not all professions are the same. Classic sociology tried to map the many variations on the basic model - for example, between the state-appointed, civil service professions predominant in France and the independent or “free” professions typical of Britain and the United States - with the aim of establishing a comprehensive typology. More recent sociology has been concerned less with typology than with professional power (the mechanisms of control), while recent historical (rather than sociological) studies tend to focus less on structure and more on the process of professionalization. It is often argued, as in Harold Perkin’s major work The Rise of Professional Society , that this process pervades post-industrial society and that society is now better understood in terms of professions than in terms of social classes.2 Professionalization involves the creation of specific training programs. Formal training in schools gradually takes the place of informal training “on the job.” Courses supersede apprenticeships, or, very often, on-the-job training is built into the new school-based training in the form of mandatory internships. A profession establishes specific training as a way of affirming the scope, substance, and value of the expertise it claims to represent. It is a way for professions to control the production

62


of expertise. “Some kinds of expertise may be scarce by their very nature,” Perkin writes, “like that of a Kiri Te Kanawa or a Barbara Hepworth, for which the famous opera singer or sculptor may charge a rent. But most professional expertise does not enjoy a natural scarcity, and its value has to be protected and raised, first by persuading the public of the vital importance of the service and then by controlling the market for it. That is why the organized professional bodies are, as much as trade unions, institutions for educating the public and for closing the market, and operate ‘strategies of closure’ including control of entry, training and qualification, and seek a monopoly of the name and the practice. Even the ‘unqualified’ professions like the Civil Service, journalism and the theater try to make early entry and practical experience stand in for qualification.”3

Perkin, 378.

3

To what extent, if any, do today’s courses in curating contemporary art provide professional qualifications? This is one way of approaching the harder question of whether curating is a profession (and i ts implications for how value is managed in the visual arts). If we stick with a strong sociological definition of professional training, the answer has to be: not much. Unlike training in law or medicine (or engineering or pharmacy), curating courses do not provide necessary qualifications for working in the field. Qualified candidates for jobs compete legitimately with unqualified ones. No professional association of curators exists to validate the different courses, and nobody is anticipating the creation of one. In medicine, in Britain, the number of places on qualifying courses is tied to the number of anticipated professional vacancies, and both are regulated by the state. Even when state-funded and stateassessed, as in Britain, curating courses, like most other higher education courses, operate under market conditions (since funding is tied to student recruitment). Qualifications in curating might be better described as vocational arts degrees with a practical element. Yet without being professional, in the strict sense, curating courses may be subject to a form of quasi-professionalization. Collectively, as the provision of training expands, they can become a strategy of closure, in Perkin’s sense. As the number of courses increases in order to satisfy demand (and in Britain, at least, there are signs that this is happening), and if the new courses are broadly similar in orientation to the existing MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

63

“Resisting professionalization is simply a matter of trying to keep the field open to different skills and values.”

ones (for example, centered on producing exhibition-concepts), we will tend towards a situation where something like professional training, though still unregulated, will have been established de facto, inasmuch as those seeking entry to “the profession” might be expected to have taken this general route. It does not matter that unqualified candidates can compete legitimately with qualified ones if the latter are always successful. The link between courses and jobs, facilitated by student placements, would close the field. This is not a problem (since there is nothing wrong with training), and there is no closure, so long as: access to courses is equitable; and the courses are not all substantially the same (as in the expansion of cultural studies, for example, where the tendency was towards greater homogeneity). Homogeneity is the negative side of professionalization and more equitable access is the positive side. In the cultural sector, again using Britain as an example, professionalism (with its emphasis on selection by merit) supersedes a classbased amateurism. The worst scenario, politically and culturally, would be one in which a new homogeneous quasi-professionalism (based on a core model of what curating is) mixes with an old amateurism, to produce something like class-based professionalism. This is what makes the issue of internships important. If curating courses absorb opportunities for advanced work experience in the form of student placements, if primary work experience continues to be one of the most valuable factors in getting accepted on courses, and if work experience of any sort (being unpaid) continues to be only an option for relatively few people, then access to employment will not be as equitable as it needs to be. This is a problem in Britain. Part of the remedy would be for public art institutions to create funded, targeted, multidisciplinary internships, as a way of offering alternative routes into the field. Programs in the United States, such as the one at the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Getty Multicultural Summer Internships Program, provide models. Resisting professionalization is simply a matter of trying to keep the field open to different skills and values. This involves keeping at bay any sense that there is a substantial, essential training (as opposed to essential commitments) proper to curating or, therefore, any substantial, essential expertise proper to curating (aside from knowledge of art). It is hard to do, maybe impossible. According to the economic and social logics Perkin describes, specialization leads directly to professions, so 64


vocational arts training will readily become professional arts training, and specific functions will become professions. Perhaps the most prevalent model for the professional curator today is described by Natalie Heinich and Michael Pollak in an essay published in 1989, before most or all curating courses were founded.4 They begin with an account of what they see as a crisis in the profession of museum curator. They are concerned specifically with France where, traditionally, curating was highly professionalized on the civil service model. The crisis is attributable, they say, to a number of related factors: increased state funding; a consequent increase in the number of posts; and an opening up of entry routes into the profession (since it became more accessible to graduates from schools other than the École du Louvre and because of the formation of subspecializations within the museum that claim other kinds of expertise). Expansion and diversification of the field means that the profession can no longer control or identify itself with the production of the expertise for which it stands. Heinich and Pollak call this “a form of de-professionalization,” and they welcome it. Maybe curating was never as professionalized elsewhere as it was in France. Nevertheless, Heinich and Pollak’s account of the expansion and liberalization of the field seems to apply to many countries (at least in the post-industrial world) and even to have accelerated over the last fifteen years. Old French professionalism and old British amateurism are both in crisis, and for the same reasons. The difficult thing is knowing what form curatorial expertise ought to take under these conditions. Heinich and Pollack propose an authorial model. Depersonalized professional curating (the subordination of personal judgment to professional rules and consensus) gives way to more individual and creative work: the curator as author of exhibitions. De-professionalization, they write, is marked by “deregulation in access to the job, a deinstitutionalization of the criteria of competence (its not being necessary to hold a specific diploma or position), an expansion in the social milieus or, to be more precise, in the intellectual fields of endeavor concerned, an individualization of product where a ‘signature’ becomes much more apparent and a redefinition of competence in terms of singularization (originality) rather than the implementation of collectively recognized rules.” 5 For them, it is a shift from curator-as-professional to curator-as-auteur , on the model of the auteur filmmaker. The old professional is superseded by the director of artistic MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

Natalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur : Inventing a Singular Position” (1989), in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. R. Greenberg et. al. (New York: Routledge, 1996). 4

Heinich and Pollak, 238. 5

65

“Curating might be understood not in terms of producing exhibition-concepts but, more broadly, as the set of technical and intellectual tasks involved in “making art public.” This would be to shift from a vocational arts education with a practical bias to a liberal arts education with a practical bias.”

Heinich and Pollak, 246. 6

collaborations. This is an idea now familiar to us. However, this is only a form of de-professionalization, according to Heinich and Pollak, since the advent of the curator-as-auteur can be seen as the f ormation of a new kind of professional. They end by calling for the inclusion of the auteur in a future sociology of professions: the professional who performs a function alongside the professional who occupies a post. We may be skeptical about the model of the auteur curator, the curator as Godard. Heinich and Pollak greatly overstate the significance of the author-function in contemporary curating. The effect of the director-producer’s “signature” is many times greater in the reception of film (Hollywood as well as cinéma d’auteur ), theater, even television, than that of art exhibitions. There are very few cases, almost none, in which the identity of the curator counts in the experience of the public (except for other curators). Re-forming (or f orming) a profession of curating centered on the model of the auteur exhibition-maker is appealing, and common, especially where curating is threatened by bureaucracy. But as a model for curating, it presents several problems: it fails to express the general culture of curatorial activity; it needlessly creates an opposition between institutional, post-holding curators and freelance independents (with the former undervalued and the latter overvalued); it fetishizes conceptualizing and creative skills that have an ordinary place in curating, just as they do in professional activities (for instance, medicine and law) and quite a few non-professional activities; and it puts a premium on the exhibition concept as the proper and highest value product of curating. If the field of curating becomes de facto quasi-professionalized, the closure, paradoxically, is likely to organize itself around this mode: the reified auteur ideal.

different from the first ones (and the first might need to be different too). For example: curating might be taught less exclusively in relation to art history, and more to activities such as editing, archiving, scenography, performance, broadcasting, and publishing. This would be effectively to complement art-centered studies with studies centered on publicizing functions. Curating might be understood not in terms of producing exhibition-concepts but, more broadly, as the set of technical and intellectual tasks involved in “making art public.” This would be to shift from a vocational arts education with a practical bias to a liberal arts education with a practical bias. It would make it easier for people to apply skills gained in exhibitionmaking in other areas and to find work across a range of publicizing “professions.” But that is just one possible direction. There should be lots. The issue in all this is the range of expertise available and, by implication, the diversity and vitality of what is done.

It would be paradoxical because, despite Heinich and Pollak’s claim, the auteur is not a model of professionalism but of anti-professionalism (“individual creator of status”6 is as succinct a definition of anti-professionalism as you can have). What is important about what they say about the auteur (though the term is not helpful) is the emphasis on anti-professional status: not having a specific diploma, coming from anywhere in a diverse range of social milieus and intellectual fields. Training can be like this; but the new, s econd generation courses will need to be substantially 66



67


Cloe Piccoli

Playing with Serendipity Cloe Piccoli

is an art critic and freelance curator who teaches in the master’s program in visual arts at the Brera Fines Arts Academy in Milan. She also writes for the daily newspaper La Repubblica and its weekly supplement, D/la Repubblica. She is currently working on Other Rooms, Other Voices, a program of six

exhibitions and one book for the Magazzino d’Arte Moderna in Rome. She lives and works in Milan.

To reflect on this winter’s experience in the classroom of Alberto Garutti at the Brera Fine Arts Academy in Milan implies approaching the topic of teaching curatorship - the theme of this issue of Manifesta Journal - through a particular point of view, one that is, however, central: namely, that of the artist. It means sneaking into an interspace to observe one of the ways in which the figure of the curator acquires structure, an aspect that is difficult to define and, probably, impossible to teach - a particular sensibility, an aptitude for listening and observing that is able to be shared with artists.

After all, what situation could be more public than that of Italy’s largest and most important state art school?

Alberto Garutti, Istanbul Biennal, Istanbul 2001

In his class, he seeks to foster with the students - through what is almost more a form of nurturing than instruction - an attentive and open attitude of observation, a way of getting to know the world in all its various aspects. This is a precise and lucid approach - the orientation of an artist - which moves i n many directions, as many as there are students, developing different thoughts and forms.

Alberto Garutti, Istanbul Biennal, Istanbul 2001

In the second semester of this past academic year, Garutti for the first time invited young curators to meet with the students in his classes at the academy. The aim, of course, was not to engage in any specific curatorial training; this was not meant to be a context in which to discuss theoretical and methodological issues decisive in the education of a curator. Instead, the activity took shape as part of the work of the artist himself, who was attempting to cultivate a readiness to listen, a shared sensibility.

This kind of intense teaching activity becomes a fundamental part of Garutti’s work, a practice of shared growth, a moment of exchange in which, despite evident differences in experience and awareness, teacher and students construct a direction to follow and identify a path.

Garutti sees art as a process that establishes a system of relations with others - with people, students, the public, the inhabitants of the cities, places, and contexts in which he operates. Since the early 1990s, he has created important works of public art in Italy and abroad, generating interesting and vital connections between the world of art and society. “The making of a work for a public space,” he say s, “imposes an attitude of listening to places, the existing urban fabric, and the sensibilities of the citizens who live there.” And he adds, “I like to think about intervention in the city knowing how to give up any kind of showiness, taking ethical responsibility for a methodological approach that pays attention to the needs of the ‘client,’ or namely, the inhabitants who will live with the work.”

“The idea,” the artist says, “is to try to create a type of shared sensibility - an indispensable condition to develop a fertile relationship, though of course without confusion of roles. The artist gives form to the work; the curator gives form to the show.” During Garutti’s work with the young curators, who produced an exhibition with the artists in the class, there emerged different ways of seeing and thinking - a particular attention to multiplicity and variety that was capable of perceiving, at least in part, the complexity of reality. But above all, what appeared was a sharing of the artists’ sensibilities, an ability that is as fundamental for a curator as are systems of thought and languages. Sensibility, to be sure, cannot be taught; neither can serendipity - the recognition of accidental wonders discovered along the way. Artists are born, not made, and perhaps, this is true of curators, as well. But sensibilities can be recognized, refined, and given orientation.

This attitude of listening, of responding to precise needs, forms the foundation for Garutti’s teaching at Brera. His work with student artists, and this year with curators, is based on the same premises as his work in artistic, public, and social contexts. 68



69

NEW PROGRAMS

Zoran EriÊ and Stevan VukoviÊ

Curating the Curators Zoran EriÊ

is an art historian, curator, and Ph.D. candidate at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Together with Stevan VukoviÊ he organized a program of curatorial workshops - Professional Standards in Curatorial Practice in Belgrade

in 2001. His curatorial projects include

Dysfunctional Places / Displaced Functionalities, Belgrade, 2001, Identity,

(video selection) Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg, 2001,

Personal - Public Space, »aËak, 2002, ID Troubles, Lüneburg, 2004.

Stevan VukoviÊ

studied philosophy and art history at the University of Belgrade, art theory at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, and cultural studies at ASCA in Amsterdam. He writes art and culture related criticism from 1992, for which he received the Lazar TrifunoviÊ Award by the Union of Art Historians of Serbia in 1999. Since 1996 he has curated a number contemporary art events, the most recent being Belgrade Art Inc., Secession, Vienna, 2004. For the Last East 70

Fellow Curators, What is to be Done?

Curators work in a realm marked by aporias in the relation between the conservative nature of culture and the unique and singularly destined character of the artwork; for this reason, they are constantly being mobilized to participate in the struggle by imposing discursive modes, demonstrative procedures, and rhetorical and pedagogical techniques that frame whatever is considered to be artistic practice. Curators intervene in the processes of conceiving, perceiving, and interpreting art practice in order to provide it with new contexts that redescribe, and even rearticulate, each work involved as well as the cultural setting in which the works are presented. To do this, they form temporary alliances. For instance, a curator might for strategic reasons insist on the sovere ignty of the artwork in relation to the traditional crafts and design techniques of the cultural industries, even though hardly any curator today would accept such a notion as anything more than a regulative idea. On the other hand, a curator might foster the desublimatory potential of subcultural practices or the leveling features of mass-produced cultural artifacts in order to make the art field less competence-based and more inclusive and to make artwork less fetishized and more relational. When dealing with artworks and art practices, curators must necessarily deal with different traditions and institutional frameworks. Consequently, they must find ways in which the particular set of values and standpoints implied by a specific type of work in the art field interacts productively with the shared experiences of the community of specialists (art critics, art historians, gallerists, artists, and art managers) as well as those of general audiences, so as to ensure that the majority of both groups will be able to decipher the codes and messages of these works and practices. Working mainly in the social context, the curator’s task is to act upon the habitual and preconceptual paradigms of art, as imbedded in processes of perception and interpretation of actual art. Curators must assume the role of enlightener, relying on the promise of a full affirmation of the future, of what is unpredictable, incalculable, and unprogrammable in the artwork, while insisting on those features that have not yet been appropriated, assimilated or acculturated, as well as those that cannot be fully translated, transferred, or transported into history without a kind of uncanny reminder.


European Show he was,

The Basic Guidelines

Curators must both provide contemporary art practices with new contexts and influence existing cultural contexts by introducing new and non-standard artistic practices. In order to do this, they need to develop criteria for selecting artists, as well as formats, for their projects, and this necessarily involves reflection, questioning, and analysis of existing curatorial models. Teaching curatorship does not mean imposing already established and determined models of curating for young curators to reproduce, but rather stimulating prospective curators to materialize, in projects and events, their own standpoints on certain problems through actual artwork or broader societal processes. They should learn to work with artists themselves, and not only with their work, developing, as a starting point, joint projects with an open frame that can be later articulated in a collaborative process that includes a wide range of discursive actions and relations with and towards the contexts in which they take place. Artists today similarly use various methods and media in pursuing the same issues in the analysis, deconstruction, and criticism of societal processes. Therefore, art practice and art theory can work together. Indeed, one of the curator’s roles should be to spot and contextualize certain interesting societal phenomena, providing a conceptual framework for artists playing with similar issues as a pretext for work to be developed in a particular setting. It is important to find the right balance between theoretical assumptions and artistic practice so as not to impose some hermetic theory on artists as an assi gned topic, or to have merely a participatory show with “branded” works that somehow fit into the given frame without fully developing a relationship to the concept or its context. This process must develop simultaneously with curator and artist as “accomplices” in a commitment to the joint “transgressive act,” which goes beyond the standard, normative, or expected. Therefore, the outcome of any developed curatorial strategy of conceptualizing the format of an event and contextualizing actual art practice should be more than just a participatory show for promotional reasons or the production of cultural stereotypes and a contribution to the “cultural industry.” Curatorial strategies should introduce a point of identification for different types of audiences, who need to be involved in the process of articulating the relation of the respective art event to the state of affairs in the local art system, the state of the culture, and the surrounding social networks. Consequently, one of the curator’s major aims should be to create a situation in

together with Zoran EriÊ, awarded the prize for the best contemporary art exhibition in Serbia in 2003.


71

“Our curatorial program is based on non-hierarchical work with participants, who are treated not as students but as young professionals.”

which the critical social questions he or she is posing, together with the artists, might receive a more fertile ground for reception in the public sphere. If artists and curators are dealing with the same issues, though in different media, then the task of the curator might be to link together all the individual acts so as to generate a critical mass of voices that will resonate all the more fully by being orchestrated in a common frame, thus ultimately producing a more powerful effect by exposing certain problems and raising various issues about the society.

Curating in transition,

curatorial workshop, Belgrade, 2002

How to Teach Curatorship?

The first thing one must do in any analysis of curatorial instruction is to reflect fully on the role of the curator of contemporary art. For instance, if we agree that one of the most important points in curatorial practice is selection, we must immediately consider the criteria for selection that the curator adopts in developing his or her strategy. The curriculum for teaching curatorship should take into account all of the three main aspects of curatorial practice: conceptualization of a project, production of an art-related event, and development of the interpretative tools used to inscribe the event in the wider discursive matrix. To be able to conceptualize a project, young curators must first learn how to articulate their standpoint and the criteria they will use in selecting artists before they become so involved in the production of the event that they no longer have sufficient distance to reflect on what they are doing and why they are doing it. As for the production of the event, curators must be aware of existing models of exhibiting and presenting contemporary art and must develop their own skills and abilities to coordinate the process of realizing an event within a given framework and to choose an appropriate and inventive way of presenting and mounting the exhibition. As for the interpretation of the event, the problem one faces in developing a curriculum for teaching curatorship on an academic level is how to acquaint young curators both with theoretical methods and with practical skills and how to open up the possibility for their specialization. The curriculum should focus, in general, not just on the form and history of art-related subjects; it must be open to an allencompassing range of diverse bodies of knowledge that can enable the curator to cope with the existing varieties of artistic practice. And it should focus, in particular, 72



73

not just on local history, but on a whole topography of frameworks in which art practice, including local practice, may be seen in relation to other current forms of art practice and to the contemporary state of culture as a whole.

and its inevitable institutionalization. The main focus is on the role of the curatoras-mediator, processing the permeability of the art system to innovative artistic practices and providing these practices with the appropriate contextual framework and cultural and theoretical interpretation.

Curating in transition,

curatorial workshop, Belgrade, 2002

Developing a Local Model

The program of curatorial workshops we developed in Belgrade is process-oriented; it involves long-term work through a number of successive stages, including theory, research, and realization. The program was created on the basis of an analysis of various existing models of curatorial training and an awareness of the specificities of a local art system in which several important aspects and sectors are either missing or underdeveloped. The aims of the program are to foster abstract theoretical thinking, to develop abilities in relating artistic practice to what is happening globally, to research current practice and recognize potential, and, through concrete and locally specific action, to create the most appropriate format in which to realize a project conceptualized in the workshops. Our curatorial program is based on non-hierarchical work with participants, who are treated not as students but as young professionals. They are given a chance to work on projects on an equal basis with more experienced colleagues, who act as lecturers and tutors. Our role is, in a way, that of moderators and mediators of the process; basically, we are “curating” the curators of a project for which we provide an initial framework. We have never tried to set limits on, or narrowly define, the framework for a curatorial workshop; rather, it takes shape according to the topic of the project (for example, “Curating in Transition” or “Trans-global Art-ground”) and the dynamics of group work. The final product, therefore, has always been the result of a mutual decisionmaking process developed through debates in the workshops. In a conceptual sense, the model we are developing discloses the process of mediation between the various segments of the art world, as well as the constant practice of redefining the role of art in different institutional frameworks, thereby making evident the inner antagonism between the critical potential of artistic action 74



75

NEW PROGRAMS

Pip Day

“Site-specific” Curatorial Studies Pip Day

has founded and currently directs the programs Estudios Curatoriales (Curatorial Studies) and RIM (International Residencies in Mexico) as part of the Mexico City based independent arts organization Teratoma. She obtained her MA in Curatorial Studies at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College in 1996, after which she worked as curator at Artists Space in New York. She has been curating and writing independently since 1998. She has published articles and essays in various catalogues and journals including Art Review (London), Untitled (London), Curare, (México), Photography Quarterly (New York) and is contributing editor to the arts and culture magazine Cabinet (New York). Her curatorial projects include Zero at OPA, Guadalajara (2004) and Art & Idea, México City (2002), Nostalgia at Art in General, New York (2002), Residue, at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna (2000); Faucet at Exit Art, New York (1999); Performing Video at E x-Teresa, México City (1999) and several exhibitions 76

Rather than address curatorial studies programs in general, each of which is generated for specific reasons and with particular methodologies, I would like to outline here a recent initiative for a curatorial studies program and explain why it came about. Estudios Curatoriales (Curatorial Studies), a program based in Mexico City that runs in tandem with the program Residencias Internacionales en México (International Residencies in Mexico, or RIM), was started in 2003 as an initiative of the independent cultural organization Teratoma.1 A part-time, eight-month course designed for practicing curators, critics, and other cultural workers, the program might be referred to as “site-specific” curatorial studies. By this I simply mean that the program takes account of its particular urban context within a specific geopolitical region at a given moment in history. Rather than attempt to replicate other academic programs, Curatorial Studies aims to respond to the specific needs of the cultural community in Mexico City as it positions itself within the larger and rapidly changing geopolitical and cultural circumstances of Latin America within the global cultural context. The local cultural context looks a bit like this: On the one hand, the dysfunctional nature of the official, or governmental, arts system in Mexico allows for a certain amount of strategic freedom (although with grave economic constraints). In other words, the dominant model is so obviously and deeply flawed that it essentially needs to be scrapped, while the playing field for conceptualizing and constructing new models remains completely open. On the other hand, there is a certain urgency with regard to the local and international frameworks that are being established around Mexican cultural production by global market forces. While Mexican artists today enjoy unprecedented international attention, the major works of the most prominent artists are rarely seen within Mexico, with the rules of national representation being increasingly set by foreign curators in foreign venues and then transported back home.


So just what does the RIM/Curatorial Studies project attempt to do? How do we foster the creation of parallel models for cultural and curatorial practice specific to the urban context of Mexico City? The urgency in setting up this program can be seen in some ways as a direct response to a situation that required immediate confrontation (as I have described). The course is intended primarily as a forum for debate and the exchange of resources and information between participants active in the cultural sphere. It is not a degree program and has no formal affiliation with any cultural or academic institution, although the many informal institutional links are integral to the functioning of the program.

while curator at Artists Space, New York (1996 - 1998). She has taught at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and lectured at Parsons College, Institute for Contemporary Photography and Goldsmiths College.

Second, the diversity of the teaching body is reflected in the makeup of the student body. The core of the faculty is drawn from the Teratoma group of Mexico Citybased critics, curators, artists, anthropologists, academics, filmmakers, and other

Teratoma is a multidisciplinary collective composed of art historians, art critics, curators, artists, and anthropologists, who explore, from the position of their various practices, contemporary cultures in radical transformation due to changes in production structures, the shift in intellectual and aesthetic attitudes, the effects of economic globalization, and changes in cultural geopolitics. Teratoma attempts to activate debate between virtual and real producers and audiences, reviewing notions of interpretation and historical representation, recording and provoking critical discourse, and testing new forms of cultural politicization. A civil organization independent from official academic and cultural apparatuses, the group aims to radically influence the debates of cultural policy in Mexico


77

The program’s operations differ from that of other programs in several ways. First, the program is geared towards young professionals who are already working actively in the cultural sphere either in institutions or independently. (Classes are held outside of work hours, and the course lasts only eight months, a reasonable period for intensive study parallel with one’s professional obligations.) Discussion of the students’ professional projects are built into the program and balanced with courses that deal with specific theoretical, historical, and critical concerns relating to these projects. Thus, the theoretical and practical sides of curatorship are directly linked, just as they are linked, too, in the yearly exhibition curated collectively by the students. Through both the students’ individual professional projects and the group’s collective exhibition project, the work generated in the course reaches the public and directly enters the institutional discourse. While student projects are central, course work also includes the intensive study of issues of national representation, both historical and current; a general history of theory, critical writing, and exhibition practice; and a series of modular thematic sections taught by RIM associates. The students are challenged to become aware of, and to articulate, the critical context of their own practice, their place in the history of cultural practice, and the political choices inherent in mounting any exhibition as well as the impact of these choices on social, political, and artistic production.

1

in order to develop more sophisticated institutions and means of production and the circulation of aesthetic issues. Teratoma is a forum for encounters, debates, exhibitions, residencies, education, training, and dialogue - a space for bringing together textual, visual, virtual, and physical information with the goal of furthering the discourse of production and hosting the culture of the near future on our continent.

“The program, then, serves not so much as a tool for understanding how the art system operates, but as a possible forum for developing new strategies and models by which one can operate individually and collectively.”

“While stressing the importance of a clear curatorial voice in the development of the students’ discourse, we always try to bring the discussions back to the artwork and artistic production, in both general and particular terms.”

cultural practitioners. They focus on both his torical and current social, cultural, and political issues relevant to the Latin American cultural context and its relationship to international practice as well as to the increasingly globalized local practice of peripheral countries. Another important focus is on the cultural practices of other developing countries and, in particular, non-Western models that address similar issues. RIM’s invited instructors, then, include a number of practitioners from nonWestern countries - this year they have come from Brazil, Cuba, and Taiwan - as well as Westerners (for example, from England, Germany, Canada, and the United States) who are either interested in the Latin American context or are developing experimental models for their own Western-based practice. The interdisciplinary nature of the group allows for extremely diverse viewpoints, political positions, and curatorial models, with gaps and overlaps providing innovative ways of thinking about the various disciplines and their relation to the public sphere through exhibition practice. Imaginative strategies for dealing with political, economic, and intellectual difficulties are shared not only between the foreign instructors of RIM and the students, but also between RIM residents and the Teratoma group or other local cultural practitioners.

to bypass the curatorial star system, first, by politicizing the role of the curator at the present moment and in the present context, and, second, by underscoring the need to articulate one’s position clearly in relation to historical models, to the institution, to one’s public, and last but not least, to the voice of the artist.

The program, then, serves not so much as a tool for understanding how the art system operates, but as a possible forum for developing new strategies and models by which one can operate individually and collectively. (Not incidentally, the students who completed the first year of the program went on to form the curatorial collective Laboratorio 060; while curating exhibitions and conferences, they also continue to participate in lectures and debates generated around the course and RIM.) While experimental and innovative approaches to curatorial practice are strongly encouraged, the program attempts to ground experimentation in solid theoretical and art-historical research and, most importantly, writing. Students are required to write essays, primarily about particular objects, works, or bodies of works of art, and must complete a research paper on a theoretical or artistic concern. While stressing the importance of a clear curatorial voice in the development of the students’ discourse, we always try to bring the discussions back to the artwork and artistic production, in both general and particular terms. Although it may be overly ambitious, we seek 78



79

NEW PROGRAMS

Saπa Nabergoj

World of Art in the World of Art Saπa Nabergoj

is assistant director of the SCCA Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and director of the World of Art, School for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. More information: www.worldofart.si

Introduction

The World of Art, School for Contemporary Art, was founded in 1997 as a reaction to the dominant state of affairs of contemporary art and art interpretation in Slovenia. In the 1990s, art production in Slovenia underwent a renaissance, while theoretical and curatorial structures lagged behind. Formal education in art history included neither contemporary production nor art theory, so young art professionals, lacking the appropriate knowledge and tools for decoding contemporary trends in art, have largely devoted their energies to earlier periods. To fill the gap, the World of Art program instituted a series of public lectures intended to shed light on contemporary art practice and theory. Also offered was a course for curators of contemporary art - the only program of its kind in Slovenia - that would enable participants to gain the knowledge necessary for this kind of work. In its first year, the World of Art program was organized by the ©kuc Gallery. In 1998, it became a program of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts - Ljubljana and acquired a specific international character thanks to the Center’s extensive international links, especially within the former Eastern Bloc (Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union). This was also the year in which the length of the course - which involved the process of conceptualizing and mounting a contemporary art exhibition - was extended from eight to ten months and the program began to include study trips abroad. These trips have given participants an opportunity to look beyond the borders of the local scene and familiarize themselves with a variety of methods, approaches, and operational techniques in the art systems and art milieus of neighboring countries. With the academic year 2004-2005, the World of Art enters its eighth year of operation. For the past five years, it has been organized as part of the newly established SCCA, Center for Contemporary Arts - Ljubljana (SCCA-Ljubljana), a successor to the Soros Center. While still bearing the label of an “informal” program, the World of Art has continued to develop, change, and evolve. After a number of experimental endeavors in previous years, two new program segments were launched in 2002 to supplement the curating course and lecture series, namely, workshops on the theory and criticism of contemporary art and workshops on the concepts

80


of contemporary visual practice. The first series of workshops was conceived to contribute to theoretical reflection and stimulate writing on contemporary art, while the objective of the second series is to encourage artists to analyze and reflect on artistic concepts, as well as their own practices and positions in the world of art. In 2003-2004, the two workshop series were merged into a writing seminar that seeks to fill the gap in theoretical and critical reflection and encourage writing on contemporary art practice. With its multifaceted structure, the World of Art is a unique program in Slovenia; it has established the mechanisms necessary for operating reflectively in the world of art and has been continuously developing and adapting to the rapid changes of the art world and the surrounding social conditions. The Course for Curators of Contemporary Art

This course offers basic knowledge related to the curator’s work of conceptualizing and mounting exhibitions. The course is limited to a maximum of six or seven participants each year. It lasts ten months (from October to July) and is the only course of its kind offered in Slovenia. The pedagogical process is organized to fit contemporary artistic practices. The course begins with “modules” at which art professionals are invited to present the practical work of the curator through workshops and lectures (topics include the organization of exhibitions, public relations, financial planning, documentation, and catalogue editing and design). The introductory section is followed by weekly sessions with instructors and with the director of the program. The course also includes meetings and discussions with artists and curators, as well as special guided tours of exhibitions. Course participants also engage in practical assignments and research, for example, analyzing contemporary art galleries, examining attitudes of institution directors and curators, and studying exhibition concepts, as well as in guided reading of specialist literature and the conception and presentation of a virtual exhibition project, among other activities. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

81

Marko A. KovaËiË Europe, 1997 Installation From the exhibition This Art is Recycled,

1997

The heart of the course is the preparation, in collaboration with the instructors, of a final exhibition - developing the concept (presenting arguments, adjusting to team work, reaching consensus) and realizing the exhibition and accompanying program (working with artists, preparing texts, planning the budget, handling public relations, marketing, and managing the technical execution of the show). The course includes also two study trips abroad - as a rule, one to Eastern Europe, the other to Western Europe - on which the participants become acquainted with the specifics of the art system and art scene, including the art production, of the chosen city or country. In the past two years, the focus has shifted to research trips within Slovenia, since it turned out that participants generally have a very poor knowledge of the local art scenes in the country. Because study trips are also meant to help establish connections for future collaboration, “discovering” Slovenia (and thus creating a foundation for content-based collaboration) seemed the most sensible way to handle this situation. The course presents the organizers with challenges on s everal levels. First, participants must obtain the knowledge and tools needed for working independently in the art world. The concrete knowledge and skills acquired by participants from tutorial work, theoretical lectures, and workshops are applied in practice when setting up the exhibition. Their knowledge and skills usually exceed what is expected from the average curator working in a gallery, but they are absolutely necessary if one is to operate efficiently outside the framework of an institution.

The study trips abroad and direct contacts with foreign art specialists familiarize participants with the art scenes and art production beyond local borders, as well as with the general workings of a foreign art system, and offer opportunities for future cooperation and research. At the same time, the trips help participants place themselves in the broader context and develop a perspective on their own position.

Duπan Trπar Light objects, 1973-1977 From the exhibition Camera Lucida, 2002

A third challenge is to stimulate well-reasoned discussions on contemporary artistic practices and concepts, which begin with defining the exhibition concept and continue through all subsequent phases. We seek to go beyond the typical university setting that trains students in the memorization of information instead of creating the kind of discussion environment that is so important in developing teamwork. The instructors and visiting lecturers (artists and curators) share with participants their knowledge of curatorial work, including such as pects as conducting research, keeping abreast of art production, and communicating with artists. What is most important, however, is that the knowledge participants acquire in the classroom is then tested in practice when they set up their own exhibition. Over the seven years of its existence, the course has been completed by forty-eight people from Slovenia and Croatia. The Lecture Series

A second challenge involves getting participants involved at the very heart of the Slovene art scene, which much too often seems to be closed to newcomers, at least at first glance, and thus discourages self-initiative on the part of prospective curators. The work positions occupied by our graduates serve to confirm that we have been successful at this challenge. During the ten months of the program, participants become acquainted with the national art scene, meet many of its leading figures, and develop a sense of where they themselves might best fit in. They get to know the art system and the mechanisms behind it. They also acquire a good picture of contemporary visual production and its infrastructure. 82


Every year we organize a series of public lectures on a specific theme. In 1997, six speakers, from both Slovenia and abroad, gave talks on “The Conceptual Art of 1960s and 1970s”; in 1998, seven lecturers shared their thoughts on “Theories of Display”; in 1999, seven lecturers looked at “Geopolitics and Art”; and in 20002001, eleven lecturers discussed “Strategies of Presentation.” This last theme was extended over the next two years, with nine lecturers featured in “Strategies of Presentation, Part 2” (2001-2002), and seven in “Strategies of Presentation, Part 3” (2002-2003). MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

83

Borut HlupiË - Holland The Quantum Angelic Art, 2004

A series of paintings of angels and the manuscript of the

Theology of Architecture and Astronomy

From the exhibition Between Fire and Art,

2004

For the first three years of the series, the themes focused on art practices and movements important for understanding the development of modern and contemporary art. With the “Strategies of Presentation” series, we have presented art professionals who, through various approaches and methods, critically question the mechanisms of the art world, their own position within art, and the role and power of art itself. Artists, critics, theoreticians, curators, and activists have discussed their dilemmas and doubts regarding the art system in which we operate and have presented ways it can become a socially engaged form of activism capable of selfcriticism and self-reflection.

with the first year devoted to acquainting participants with contemporary and modern art as well as introducing them to an understanding of contexts. A second option is to transform the course into a more ambitious program with international validation, and so on. Whatever we decide, one thing is certain: we need to develop better coordination between the separate school segments (the course, the seminar, and the lecture series) and, at the same time, create a platform for deeper collaborations between the increasing number of people who have assumed responsible positions in the art world thanks in some measure to the World of Art program. Nor should we forget the established network of our international colleagues, who are linked ever more closely as the years go by.

Video works of Sarajevo artists Zoja BajbutoviÊ, Nedæad BegoviÊ, Miroslav BenkoviÊ, Dejan CoriÊ, Zlatan FilipoviÊ, Vuk JanjiÊ, Smail KapetanoviÊ, Zlatko LavaniÊ, Lejla PorobiÊ, Alma SuljeviÊ, Nebojπa ©eriÊ ©oba, Muhidin Tvico, Dejan VekiÊ, Sran VuletiÊ, Pjer and Nino Zalica, Enes Zlatar, Jasmila ÆbaniÊ. From the exhibition Visitors, 1999


85

Seminar in Writing on Contemporary Art

The seminar is composed of a nine-month series of workshops and lectures under the mentorship of Miπko ©uv akoviÊ and Igor Zabel. Mentorship takes place through regular biweekly meetings (reading and analyzing texts and writing individual essays ) as well as through electronic correspondence. There are seven monthly workshops that cover a variety of writing genres (catalogue text, exhibition review, etc.) and forms of media presentation, as well as their practical application. The Anthology

Each year the program concludes with an anthology of texts in which we publish the lectures, document the achievements of the course and final exhibition, and present conversations with our invited speakers. The Future

Since its beginnings in 1997, the World of Art program has come a long way. Thanks to the work we have done over the years, our fervent discussions and enriching collaborations, the program has grown into what is now a school for contemporary art. Our eighth year, which is just about to s tart, will, in addition to the normal operations of the school, be focused on in-depth thinking about our future development. We have a number of options. We could expand the curating course into a two-year program, 84


EXPERIENCES

Mercedes Vicente

The Central Place of Discourse in Curatorial Studies Mercedes Vicente

is an independent art critic and curator living in New York City. A regular contributor to Exit , Lápiz and La Vanguardia, she has reported art news, written extensive essays on such artists such as Andrea Fraser and Martha Rosler, as well as interviewed such figures as Harold Bloom, Robert Storr and Rosalind Krauss. She was 2001-2002 Helena Rubinstein Whitney Curatorial Fellow and has organized exhibitions on American conceptual drawing and around issues of temporality. Her exhibition Slowness has traveled to the Gowett Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand in October. She is coeditor, together with Anna María Guash, of the upcoming anthology of writings by art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh entitled Formalismo e historicidad, modelos y métodos en el arte del XX to be published by

Akal Publicaciones.

Renée Green, quoted in Howard Singerman, “A History of the Whitney Independent Study Program,” Artfo rum , February 2004, 115. 1

86

On my first day in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, each of us was asked to provide a list of critics, art historians, and theoreticians whose writings we would like to read or whom we would like to have as visiting lecturers. This was a sign not only of the Whitney program’s non-hierarchical pedagogical approach, but also of its respect for the participants’ intellectual proficiencies. Both when I was doing a master’s degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College (1998-2000) and even more, later, when I was in the Whitney program (2001-2002), I liked to think of myself not so much as a student but as a “participant.” As Renée Green remarked in a recent Artforum article on the Whitney program, “The people that come to the Whitney program are considered to be participants, implying an active role of contributors rather than passive absorption of transferred knowledge.”1 It is not only that some of us were not so young and had already come a long way before joining these programs, but, more importantly, I had never perceived my postgraduate education along traditional lines; rather, I saw myself as a participant in a discursive environment, one that would shape the course of my intellectual development. I have always strongly believed in this model, regardless of one’s professional and intellectual expertise: each individual should actively pursue his or her own education, guided by some sort of mentorship and always humbly recognizing that there is a long way to go on the road of learning. A curatorial program should provide resources and the transfer of information, to be sure, but most importantly, it should be open to dialogue. When I was asked, during my application interview for Bard, why was I interested in becoming a curator, my response may have puzzled the committee (made up of the curatorial center’s director, Norton Batkin, and Lynne Cooke and Thelma Golden). My ultimate aim was not so much to be a curator, I replied, as to find a structured environment in which to continue my study of contemporary art and culture so I could apply this knowledge to my writing - though I did not discount the possibility that, ultimately, I might combine both activities. Having worked for four years as the New York cultural correspondent for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and as a contributor to the Spanish art journals Lápiz, the now-defunct Rekarte, and others,


I had the desire to take some time off from the demands of professional writing to achieve further specialization and explore more comprehensively my core interests. In my letter of application to Bard, and in even clearer terms to the Whitney, I stated that my aim was to find in these programs venues in which to examine and test new ideas, to engage in dialogue with my peers in a structured environment, and to find guidance for the development of new projects, both in writing and curating. What I sought, as a participant who was actively trying to chart her own intellectual path, was a program that would offer me an open and flexible structure able to accommodate my needs. The Bard and Whitney programs presented very different experiences. While Bard offers a standard two-year master’s degree program with a structured curriculum based on a combined model of art history and theory and hands-on curatorial practice, the Whitney program, being devoted to “independent study,” maintains the seminar model of reading discussions led by its director, Ron Clark, and specially invited artists, critics and curators (mostly former fe llows of the program). These radically different pedagogical models were not the only distinction between the two programs; they also had different missions and philosophies. The Whitney Program, founded in 1968, is, as Thomas Crow has stated, a crossover between the new social art history and the theoretical approach associated with the journal October. Indeed, many of the journal’s editors and contributors have been both alumni and faculty of the program (Hal Foster once headed the Whitney program’s art history division, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh was one of its most prominent faculty members). The educational reforms that characterized the period in which the program was founded may have been a factor in shaping its ideologically leftist approach, including the focus on discourse and the insistent questioning of a consciously theorized practice, for which the program is known. The program’s continuing alliance with the Whitney Museum of American Art provides the curatorial fellows with the chance to meet some of the museum’s curators and even to collaborate with them (on an optional basis) on museum projects, as well as with the opportunity to borrow works from the museum collection for the final year exhibition and to produce the exhibition catalogue with the help of the museum’s publications MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

87

“I had never perceived my postgraduate education along traditional lines; rather, I saw myself as a participant in a discursive environment, one that would shape the course of my intellectual development.”

“A curatorial program should provide resources and the transfer of information, to be sure, but most importantly, it should be open to dialogue.”

department. As a curatorial fellow organizing an exhibition under the auspices of the Whitney Museum, one has the privilege of experiencing the program’s intricate relationship with the museum, as it strives strategically to maintain its ideological independence while bearing the Whitney name responsibly, with all the related constraints one might expect.

course, assure professional success, they can provide the first stepping-stone. The downside of such programs is, as Robert Storr once observed, that they create high expectations that are not always fulfilled once the student enters the professional world.2

Robert Storr, quoted in my “Entrevista con Robert Storr,” Rekarte, March 1996, 10-11. 2

In contrast, the Bard program was established in 1994 around a private contemporary art collection with the double aim of providing a home for the collection (the CCS museum houses the Marieluise Hessel collection on permanent loan) and using it for educational purposes (first-year students curate exhibitions based on the collection). Moreover, unlike other university curatorial programs, CCS stands on its own feet within the context of a liberal arts college; it is not under the wing of an art history department, such as are the master’s programs at Columbia University and New York University. Existing as it does in a kind of “no man’s land,” CCS has been able to define and develop its program freely, based on the needs of, and catering to, the new discipline of curatorial practice, rather than being academically subordinate to an art history department. While graduate students from different institutions might all eventually mingle together in the professional world, different forms of schooling result in different profiles. While CCS’s focus on contemporary art and direct contact with artworks, rather than on the study of the contemporary through the weight of art history and theory, would make it most attractive to those with a penchant for institutions representing the art of the present, like alternative spaces and Kunsthallen, other prospective curatorial students might be drawn to the curatorial departments at museums. But in fact, CCS alumni hold jobs across the spectrum, working in museums, alternative spaces, university art galleries, and commercial galleries, or as independent curators. As to whether or not curatorship can be taught, I believe that such programs as those offered by Bard, De Appel, or Le Magasin, to name a few, can provide practical training on the logistical aspects of curatorship and the organization of exhibitions, but they should also provide room for individual study, the critical discussion of texts, and for the search and development of new ideas. Added values of these programs include the fact that one meets and makes alliances with future colleagues and that they offer a certain cachet to the emerging curator. While they cannot, of 88



89


Karina Ericsson Wärn

Okwui Who? Karina Ericsson Wärn

is a writer and critic in the field of fashion and Course Manager at the CuratorLab at Konstfack, University College of Art, Craft and Design, in Stockholm. She was the founder of and curator at Galleri Gauss (1981-1986) and the Director of Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation (1991 - 2001) and Acting Director at IASPIS (20022003) in Stockholm. She is based in Paris and Stockholm.

When I first heard about the curatorial program at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Craft and Design, in Stockholm, I was quite skeptical. I believed that the core of self-generated energy every curator must have is not something you can acquire by spending time at school, no matter how experimental or theoretically interesting that time at school might be. But in retrospect, I have to admit that maybe my feelings were based on jealousy. Like many others of my generation (I presented my first exhibition in 1981), I have had to put together my curatorial e ducation on my own. It was an education obtained through practice and more practice, and by reading texts that seemed to me to be appropriate, relevant and necessary. It was learning by doing - everything. But then, suddenly, everything was being offered in a single package! In any case, five years ago I accepted, largely out of curiosity, an invitation from Konstfack to teach wanna-be curators. Today, the program is now called “CuratorLab,” a name that seeks to underscore its structure and educational approach. While a theoretical section is, of course, included in the package, there also workshops that in their structure almost resemble a Luna Park. Take, for instance, the workshop “Who’s Who?” where every week I assign each student a different name from the field of curating. The following week, they have to present a fifteen-minute talk on the name they were given. These are not always curators; they may be important exhibitions, critics, cities, books, or institutions. So, in a rather relaxed way, this workshop combines research, essential knowledge about the field, and public presentation. In addition to doing various kinds of re search, program participants also travel, make studio visits, put together budgets, write press releases and essays, develop funding strategies, and learn about electrical wiring and PAL video systems. Construct walls (literally); get to know everything about insurance and transportation; learn to say no; always be honest; no hidden agendas; and always, always, stand behind your show and its participants. Spend sleepless nights worrying about j ustice. Is it fair to pay an artist who needs only a pencil to do her wall drawing in two days the same amount you pay her colleague, who needs three video projectors, one assistant, and

90


a newly constructed room? Is it OK to pay for a catalogue essay but not be able to afford airplane tickets so your artists can attend the opening? Curatorial practice is filled with such complex ethical decisions. This list of “things you have to think of” is, as every curator and artist knows, more or less endless. For CuratorLab, this list is not about some hypothetical scenario. It is not a list of tasks we merely play with in the classroom. We engage in actual intense situations, and I think this is the most valuable part of the program. We do not pretend to do shows; we do them, in real life. Responsibility and moral questions are always on the agenda. And students have also worked with me during my years as a curator and director at Index and IASPIS in Stockholm; they were my co-curators for ReShape! at the Venice Biennial in 2003, and were responsible for a public art project in Stockholm funded by Fondation de France. When, after all the studio visits, meetings, document-filing, and worry about finances, a student asks me (as someone does every year), “When do we start to curate?” my answer is, “You already have.” From time to time, I am asked whether curatorial programs might not put too much emphasis on curatorial strategy to the detriment of content. Honestly, I have no answer to this since I am not all that familiar with what goes on in other classrooms around the world. But for me as a teacher, the most important point is selecting applicants to the program. I am always looking for people who show a strong interest, not in curating itself, but in some particular topic (or even several) that needs to be formulated and expressed - and the curatorial method might provide a way for such a person to realize his or her story. Applicants whose primary desire seems to be to have the title “curator” printed on their business cards do not really i nterest me. They go straight into my “No” file. You have to have some groceries to be able to make dinner. You will not be able to do it with kitchen utensils alone. Recently, when we were interviewing applicants for the CuratorLab, one would-be student was asked what she thought of Okwui Enwezor’s latest big show. The jury member who asked this - Ronald Jones, a professor at Konstfack - was, of course, referring to Documenta 11. The applicant, a young woman who had already spent MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

91

The last day of Konstfack at Valhallavägen, June 2004. The school moved to a new address, and the curatorial program changed its name to CuratorLab.

a year at another curating program (I will not mention the name) sank into silence. After a while, she replied, “Okwui who?”

Standing, from left to right: Luca Frei (artist), Amanda Cardell (artist) Robert Stasinski (student), Gunilla Klingberg (artist), FransJosef Petersson (student). Sitting, from left to right: Ikko Yokoyama (student), Marianna Garin (student), Johan Thurfjell (artist), Lars Siltberg (artist), Kajsa Dahlberg (artist), Felix Gmelin (artist).

So there we were, interviewing an applicant who had already gone through one curating program, and she had no clue as to who was who. She was, as it were, quite lost in the field. But even while she was desperately trying to orient herself and straighten things out, she was also carrying some rather heavy luggage - luggage filled with dreams and ideas, including a postgraduate knowledge of chemistry, all of which she hoped to visualize in three-dimensional projects. We came to the conclusion that we had to give her the tools to do this. She was very well-supplied in the “groceries” department. Another recurrent question is whether curating programs do not overemphasize the curator as dictator to the detriment of the artist. This question, of course, relates to various power structures. Who gets the microphone? At the CuratorLab, situated in an art school, where we have students with very different backgrounds (architects, designers, and artists - though so far no poets), this potential “power struggle” is eliminated. Or at least it is not about one kind of professionalism at the expense of another. But frankly, I am not so interested in putting labels on people, and I have to admit that, in my eyes, Harald Szeeman is - a great artist! Finally, do I believe in curatorial programs? Yes, as long as they do not raise any false expectations about a future life of luxury and fame, and as long as they combine the knowledge of different strategies with content. For me, strategy and content do not need to be ranked in any specific order. The most important thing is: the day you get the microphone in your hands, you must have something to say, and you must be able to express it.

92



93

EXPERIENCES

Måns Wrange

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Curator? Måns Wrange

is an artist based in Stockholm. He is professor at the Fine Arts Department and director of CuratorLab at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. In 1999 he founded, together with architect Igor Isaksson, OMBUD - The Institute for Improving Society (www.ombud.org), a network of people from research, the arts, and opinion forming. His works have been widely shown internationally, including Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; We Are All Sinners, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Tele[vision], Kunsthalle Wien; Swedish Hearts, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Incidental Alterations, P.S. 1 Museum, New York, Transpositions, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 100 Artists See God, touring show in the USA, and Hypnosis, Art Moscow.

94

In your opinion, is curatorial instruction focused too much on the figure of the curator rather than on that of the artist?

It depends on which curatorial course you are talking about. But I can definitely see that danger when you have courses where no artists are involved as teachers. I can only answer from my own perspective as an artist who founded CuratorLab in the fine arts department at Konstfack in Stockholm. The aim of this course has been, from the very beginning, to counteract that development where, in many situations, the curator has become the leading star and artists have been degraded to a kind of supporting actors or extras. CuratorLab is as much geared towards artists and even, for example, designers and architects, as towards curators and those with a background in art history. Each year around 20 to 25 percent of our students are artists, and the course is also directly linked with the fine arts program, where curatorial students collaborate with art students on various projects as well as sharing lectures and discussions. A great deal of emphasis is placed, too, on creating a mutually interesting collaboration between artists and curators. Other types of collaboration are also explored, such as with writers, designers, and architects, or with people MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

from other fields, such as science or politics. Is curatorial instruction focused too much on curatorial strategy at the expense of content?

It depends on whether you think that strategy and content can be fully separated. I think that strategy is an important aspect of curatorial practice that, of course, will have an effect on the content, and vice versa. In order to work with a particular idea, you might need to develop the appropriate strategy. Sometimes, the strategy itself is the content. Do curatorial courses celebrate and communicate only certain kinds of curatorial practice while ignoring others - for example, those that are quieter and more discreet, or those that are more experimental, innovative, and less conventional?

My impression of the curatorial courses I know of is that they often relate to the practice of the specific institution that organizes the course. If, for example, an art history department offers a course, there is a big chance that the course will have a more theoretical direction than if it is organized by a art institution, where the exhibition program of that institution

is probably reflected in the content of the course. CuratorLab is organized by a fine arts department that has a very experimental direction, and the people who teach in the course are a mixture of artists and professionals from the independent curatorial scene and art criticism. This will naturally be reflected in our course. CuratorLab is structured in the same way as the fine arts program, which is project-based and largely adapte d to the individual student’s interests and focus. This means that the content of the course will, to a large extent, change depending on who the students are. The intention with CuratorLab is not to produce new curators for institutions but, rather, to function as a kind of a testing ground for new curatorial approaches and a critical investigation of curatorial practices. In our case, we have been more criticized for placing too little emphasis on the more traditional curatorial practice and arts management that are more directed towards art institutions and work with collections. But on the other hand, what is experimental and what is conventional? Many so-called experimental art practices, such as site-specific projects, interventions, and web projects, have today, in many instances, become just as much a part of institutional practice as the “white cube” aesthetic. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

95

EXPERIENCES

Richard Flood

Questions Re: Internships Richard Flood

is the Chief Curator & Deputy Director of the Walker Art Center. He curated Sigmar Polke: Illumination, Brilliant! New Art from London , no place (like home), Robert Gober: Sculpture + Drawing, Matthew Barney, Cremaster 2: The Drones’ Exposition

and, with Frances Morris of Tate Modern, London he has co-curated Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972. He is

currently working on America is Waiting: The Art of Cultural Inquiry, 1979-1989 ,

scheduled for exhibition in summer 2006. He has written extensively on contemporary art and film for Artforum, Frieze and Parkett and has taught at The Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts, New York City.

My responses to the questions posed by the magazine are contextualized by the Walker Art Center’s fellowship program, which has been in continuous operation since 1965 and involves young scholars in every aspect of the Walker’s curatorial practice. Because the Walker is multidisciplinary (with departments in film and video, performing arts, design, new media, and visual arts), the fellows, too, are involved every aspect of the creative process. Over the years, the program has trained more than sixty curators and education professionals who have gone on to positions at a range of institutions, such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Serpentine in London. 1) The ideal mission for programs dedicated to training young scholars for curatorial practice is to provide them with all the necessary tools for pursuing an aggressive, professional, and highly motivated career. Implicit in that construct is the encouragement of intellectual independence that hopefully enables scholars to enter the world knowing that their differences count. They will also hopefully emerge with the confidence to explore new models for the support of liberated ideas about art and the way it is exhibited and understood. Finally, it is essential that these nascent curators understand that art, artists, and ideas are the center of the equation, and not they themselves. 2) I am assuming that curators-in-training arrive at their institutions with the arthistorical course work completed and with an intellectual readiness to begin their life in a real world dedicated to the public presentation of art, artists, and ideas. If the real world is one dedicated to artistic and civic ideals, the course is set for the immediate involvement of students in every aspect of curating - from conceptualizing an exhibition to its realization and, along the way, taking into account budgeting, education, publications, audience development, and marketing. This curriculum is all about doing and emphasizes a team approach where interdependencies are liberating.

others require Franciscan modesty. One curator can project any number of personae in the course of a career and, hopefully, these personae represent an appropriate understanding of the curatorial assignment. Nonetheless, whether the exhibition is an extravaganza of globalism or a quiet monograph (reverse the modifiers for a new paradigm), respect for the artist and the artwork should, above all else, be the essence of the contract. Without that respect, the curator simply becomes an interpreter of a language without meaning. 4) It is difficult to generalize regarding cumulative effects in curatorial programs. My suspicion is that the practical often takes a backseat to the conceptual, and that self-reflexivity tends to trump the institutional/programmatic mission. The notion of a degree-bearing curator is often at odds with the ideal of a collective creativity where a democracy of differing talents is essential to the highest realization of a project. There is also the danger that a solipsistic curatorial vision puts the audience and the educational goals in jeopardy. The best curatorial endeavors depend on teamwork; to create and maintain a team requires energy, respect for others, and an atmosphere that rewards innovation. When that compact is breached - when artists and collaborators become secondary to the pursuit - the always-persistent possibility of a post-curatorial era is nearby. The study of curatorial history is of enormous importance because, at its best, it is a record of incredible humanistic achievement. And, at its worst, it is a tale of dangerous venality (personal, professional, and political). The worst of the new is frequently the result of ignoring the past, while the best of the new benefits from an understanding of what has preceded it. History is a goal always awaiting completion; it needs participants and activation to summon up a pulse. Curators contribute to history by reflecting the world in their practice, by looking at history through various lenses, and by creating situations where understanding dominates presentation.

3) The biggest dangers faced by curators are hubris and intellectual bankruptcy. Every exhibition calls for a different response; some need entrepreneurship, while 96



97

NEW PROGRAMS

Kate Fowle

Curating as a Process Kate Fowle

is co-chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and an independent curator. Her recent exhibitions include Tonite! at Spanganga Gallery and 17 Reasons at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. Her book on recent architecture in San Francisco is forthcoming.

With the recent proliferation of curating courses, it will come as no surprise that in 2003 a two-year program in curatorial practice was established at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. What may be somewhat of a revelation, however, is that this is the first program to be offered on the U.S. West Coast. In fact, it is currently the United States’ only dedicated master’s degree program in curating outside New York, which goes to show that, in this country at least, the formal training of contemporary-art curators is still re latively uncharted territory. The question of how useful or necessary it is to “study” curating has been met with skepticism on both sides of the Atlantic, not least because of the fear of overpopulating an already competitive profession. At the same time, i t is increasingly recognized that as contemporary art has evolved, the role of the curator has followed suit. Practitioners are now as much mediators and producers of culture as they are keepers of institutional mandates or purveyors of taste. Working relationships with artists are becoming more complex as the scope and ambitions of projects grow and challenge established exhibition norms. Concurrently, ideas on the relationship between art, site, and audience have expanded, and the ways organizations are structured and administered have become more diverse. It could be said that curating is now a “field” rather than a job, and so it makes it harder to rely on the traditional career strategy of apprenticeship (after completion of an art history degree) as a way of gaining needed skills and an understanding of the curatorial debates that have emerged over the last sixty years. A curating program provides time for people to build on their knowledge, to experiment, and to challenge their assumptions of the field. But in some respects, the notion of “study” in relation to curating remains problematic, as it implies a certain distance from the subject, which is counterintuitive to the process of exhibition-making. Just as an artist develops an art practice, perfecting both conceptual and practical methods, so a curator similarly needs to develop a curatorial practice: continuously engaging with artists’ production, exercising discursive skills, and refining her or his practical experience.

98


Differentiating between “studies” and “practice” might be seen as a matter of semantics, but for the California College of the Arts the distinction was an important one in devising the new program, first, because of its art-school context and, second, because of the course’s West Coast location, where there is a s trong legacy of artistled initiatives and movements, such as Land Art, which have extended curatorial concerns beyond so-called institutional models and traditional gallery spaces. Of equal importance are the social, cultural, and political influences on the region from Asia and Latin America, which affect the understanding of the art scene on an international level. These influences and curatorial models are often sparsely documented or rely on a knowledge of the context for their understanding; consequently, textbooks and other secondary sources can provide only little of the information needed to appreciate the unique sets of physical and social parameters that go into the realization of an exhibition or event. Students must visit sites if they are to know the reality of interactions with colleagues, artists, audiences, and benefactors; they need to meet with practitioners who can give them first-hand accounts about the considerations that influence professional decision-making from all perspectives. They also need to develop projects, in groups and independently, in order to test out ideas and learn from their mistakes and achievements. So, while the CCA program has been designed to encompass training around institutional curatorial strategies, including collecting, displaying, interpreting, and conserving art - with classes during the first year of the program held at the CCA’s Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as in-class presentations by curators working at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others - the program places as much emphasis on, for example, artists’ expanded approaches to curating.

In the program’s first year, Fred Wilson worked with the students to develop a project that explored his practice of institutional critique. In the fall of 2004, Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser are each working separately with incoming students around MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

99

“The question of how useful or necessary it is to “study” curating has been met with skepticism on both sides of the Atlantic, not least because of the fear of overpopulating an already competitive profession.”

the same issue. In recognizing one aspect of the West Coast’s specific character, artists such as Jeffrey Vallance and Dave Muller, both of whom have blurred the boundaries between art and curatorial practice, also share their experiences and perspectives. These discussions introduce a performative, or project-oriented, method of exhibition-making, and also shift the emphasis from the figure of the curator back to the artist. Offering another viewpoint, Sandra Percival, director of the Public Art Development Trust in London, examines the topic of commissioning in her class, exploring the curator’s role in the production of an exhibition or new work. By posing such questions as, “What does an artist require of a curator in site-related or socially oriented projects?” and “How does a curator engage with an artist to determine the best work for a specific moment or place?” Percival has encouraged students to see the possibilities of a curatorial approach that is process-oriented, rather like that of a producer or facilitator. On other occasions, students have held in-class conversations with such artists as Alfredo Jaar or Wang Jian Wei, asking logistical questions and sharing different outlooks on the expectations and responsibilities of re alizing largescale non-gallery projects. Research trips provide instances of diverse curatorial models “in action.” By establishing ongoing relationships with some of the unique projects and organizations in the region, the program has been able simultaneously to offer students an opportunity to conduct primary research on site as well as to take classroom discussions to another level. Through collaboration with the organizers of inSITE, for example, the students have had the opportunity to explore the entire process of the project’s most recent incarnation, which opens to the public in the summer of 2005. The inSITE project was established in 1992 as a binational event across the U.S.-Mexican border. Featuring a different theme with each installment, the project is process-oriented, involving artists’ commissions and residencies, which offer participants the chance to respond to physical and cultural issues in the neighboring cities of San Diego and Tijuana, culminating in a public presentation where events and installations can 100


last anywhere from an afternoon to six weeks. In the classroom, students have met with artists who were past participants in the project and examined inSITE in the context of public art developments in Latin and North America. In November 2004, students will spend four days in San Diego and Tijuana, participating in tours of both cities similar to those commissioned artists receive when they are introduced to the ambitions of the project. In this way, students can consider the specifics of the commissioning process from the perspective of the artists. They will then meet with some of the current participants, curators, and organizers to learn of the problems and questions that have arisen as new works developed. This will allow students the opportunity to witness the reality of how a process is affected by the specifics of location and public interaction. The curator’s role is thereby posited as one that goes beyond working with spatial concerns in relation to art practice; it is seen as also encompassing the idea of creating mental, social, and political spaces in which issues and ideas relevant to contemporary society may be discussed. This concept is taken a step further in a class developed by Matthew Coolidge, director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a quasi-institutional organization that grew out of Coolidge’s interest in the eclectic uses of land in the vast American West. The students spend a week at the Center’s interpretive compound in Wendover, Utah, on the edge of the Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake Desert. Coolidge regards the area as “an underappreciated region of national significance, that is often considered to be the emptiest place in the Lower Forty-eight States.” Home to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels, as well as casinos, a U.S. Air Force base, and a toxic waste disposal site, students look at how places in the region are perceived, through both conversations with local representatives as well as presentations from CLUI staff. During the trip, students focus on considerations of place, or space, as a “curatable” medium and on the process of curating as the construction of a point of view. They are expected to collect data and, when they return to the classroom, to devise a tour individually that represents their own “curatorial statement” on the area, constructing an experience that is composed of sites and dialogues from the region. This project can then be developed further in the student’s own time, leading to the production of exhibitions and presentations for CLUI’s Wendover site. MJ - Manifesta Journal no. 4

101

“It could be said that curating is now a “field” rather than a job, and so it makes it harder to rely on the traditional career strategy of apprenticeship (after completion of an art history degree) as a way of gaining needed skills and an understanding of the curatorial debates that have emerged over the last sixty years.”

In a similar vein, there are, over the two years of the program, other opportunities for gaining practical experience that depend on the students’ particular interests. Students may choose to carry out an internship with a local organization alongside their studies or wait until the summer interval between their first and second year to undertake a work placement for an intensive period. They might submit a proposal to curate an exhibition for the ongoing program at the college’s student-run gallery or participate in a semester-long event, such as the exhibition project that curatorin-residence Manray Hsu developed to elucidate issues of cultural globalization and apply some of his Eastern-influenced philosophies towards curatorial practice. The one practical project that is mandatory is the thesis exhibition, which requires students to work collaboratively to conceive and organize an exhibition and catalogue (following the model established by the Royal College of Art’s Curating Contemporary Art program) as a way of learning about working and negotiating with colleagues, pooling resources and expertise, as well as other practical aspects of seeing an exhibition through from beginning to end.

Many of the research trips and projects with international visiting faculty would not be possible without the support of trusts and foundations interested in the pedagogical development of the field. Since the program started a year ago, CCA has received substantial funding from the Getty Grant Program to help realize the course’s aim of developing a network of visiting faculty and initiating site-based projects. Support from the Christensen Fund has helped in hosting visiting faculty from Asia and Latin America to the program, while an informal collaboration with the Asian Cultural Council in New York has enabled the college to bring art professionals from Asia to San Francisco. These partnerships, together with the willingness of artists, critics, and curators to dedicate time and energy to working with students, are testimony to a desire on the part of the industry to encourage emerging generations of curators to excel in a constantly evolving field. In return, courses such as CCA’s Curatorial Practice program can support these developments by documenting the different models and perspectives for an interested public and providing an ongoing commitment to education that builds on the knowledge and expertise of faculty and participating organizations. August 2004 Further information on CCA’s Curatorial Practice program may be found at www. cca.edu and www.cca.edu/curatingarchive.

102



103

Manifesta Journal 4

Recommend Documents