Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).
For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).
Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).
Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.
Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.
Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.
Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.
In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.
Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)
From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.
In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”
Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)
Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.
“Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”
Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.
A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.
Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.
Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.
Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.
Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress
Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.
“For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.
During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.
Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)
An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.
Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.
Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”
Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)
You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”
Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.
2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.
Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?
Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?
The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”
Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.
Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.
Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.
Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.
Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.
Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”
If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:
The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.
His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.
Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”
Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.
Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3
Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.
Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.
Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.
Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.
Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.
The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.
Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.
An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?
A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.
In Terms Of count: 6.
1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?
2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.
3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.
4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.
Read
Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).
This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fourth texts.
Discussion and Response
Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Dieter Roelstraete on the left and David Joselit on his left (photograph by Christopher Howard)
To conclude the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” two speakers—a curator and an art historian—offered their thoughts on the day’s events. Dieter Roelstraete, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, spoke polemically about the conference theme, wanting his remarks to be “a case and a plea” for a curatorial attitude that “shouldn’t be ashamed of its aesthetic ambitions and its aesthetic aspirations.” Roelstraete first declared that conversations regarding antagonistic tensions between artists and curators, and regarding questions of power, fatigue him. “For me,” he boldly stated, “the practice of exhibition making is really an artistic endeavor.” As a curator coming to the profession through writing (after being trained as a philosopher), Roelstraete thinks of exhibitions as essays, and he considers group exhibitions as “spatial writing—not with ink, not with computers—but with objects.” It is easy for artists to be curators, he said, but it’s still taboo for curators to be artists. He wants to challenge this taboo.
Thankfully he stopped short of calling himself an artist. While I agree that curatorial work is highly creative labor and that the essay format for it is a productive conceit, organizing exhibitions is not art. Curatorial work and artistic labor share many aesthetic elements, such as rhythm and symmetry, as Roelstraete pointed out. Further, he said, curatorial work involves building “an aesthetically compelling argument,” which curators “attempt to master by trial and error.” His observation that “curating is the art of hanging pictures,” however, earned a hiss from an audience member. In fact, this same person—I think it was a he—kept hissing at comments throughout the conference’s final session. Maybe this hiss was intended to be a laugh.
In contrast to Roelstraete’s passionate approach, his session colleague, David Joselit, professor of art history at the Graduate Center, commented briefly on several points raised during the conference. Like many in the art world, he has noticed that curating is everywhere, from the interiors of co-op buildings to products in upscale grocery stores. He defined curatorial work as “adding value through the assembly of a group of things” and “the convergence of production and display.” Joselit offered a notion of “curating in the expanded field,” which consisted of “aggregating, assembling, curating.” Selection, he continued, has become an aesthetic skill, which creates what he called a condition—not a turn. Joselit also observed that embedded curatorial activities with artists—such as Lynne Cooke’s rapport with Rosemarie Trockel and how Josh Kline includes his friends in his shows—may combat the scale of an overwhelmingly expansive art world. The practice, he noted, is not without ethical dilemmas and intellectual contradictions.
Dieter Roelstraete with a two-finger muse; David Joselit with palms-down authority
Though Joselit felt that “the idea of an artist’s career as an object is very interesting,” he approved of Carol Bove’s objection to the attitude that everything an artist does is the work. Suggesting that the impresario curator is a European cultural model, Joselit posited that American curators are caught between the goals of museum public relations (to draw audiences) and the needs of an institution’s funders, trustees, and, to a lesser extent, corporations and public funding. Like several other conference speakers, Joselit rubber-stamped the idea that artists are delegated to do what regular curators cannot or will not do.
Roelstraete felt it is routine for the “curatoriate” (his term for the professional class) to renovate, reinterpret, reinvigorate, and rejuvenate their institutions’ permanent collection. He agreed with the conference’s keynote speaker, Boris Groys, that everyone—artists, dealers, collectors, museum directors, and even installers—instrumentalizes art in some fashion.
Throughout the duration of the 7th Berlin Biennale, representatives from Occupy and M15 practiced their forms of protest and strategies of involvement on the ground floor of KW
As an example Roelstraete discussed the seventh Berlin Biennial (2012). Even though it was the first one organized by an artist (Artur Żmijewski), the show was reviled and panned, especially by Berlin-based artists. A chief complaint, Roelstraete recalled, was that Żmijewski instrumentalized the art. Reflecting on his own practice, Roelstraete said that he doesn’t conceal his intentions when approaching artists, directly asking them if he can instrumentalize their work. “Maybe they like the idea,” he wondered aloud, “or the museum.” Or maybe artists are desperate for a high-profile exhibition to help boost their careers.
Noting that of the thirty exhibitions listed in the September previews in Artforum, only two were group shows, Roelstraete wondered if the group show is an endangered species.1 Even though he specializes in the thematic exhibition with multiple artists, such as the recently closed The Way of the Shovel (2013–14) at his home institution, the curator acknowledged that his preferred genre presents fundraising and communications troubles; group shows, he added, are also hard to travel. Such anecdotal claims cannot be easily proven, of course, but decisions in the curatorial world are often based on personal experiences. That said, Roelstraete relayed that his first attempt at organizing a solo exhibition (for Chantel Ackerman) was tough and his most difficult project. Later on he offered a tantalizing idea of having six curators organize a solo exhibition.
Toward the end of the session the conversation bounced from topic to topic, with each speaker making brief declarations on this and that. After proclaiming that “writing is the bedrock of curatorial thinking,” Roelstraete asked Joselit for an opinion. “Some arguments can only be made with objects,” the historian replied, which he misses from his academic life. (He was a curator in the 1980s.) Joselit was thankful that academia has provided him with time to write but then tried to explain something called the “counterexhibition,” using Philip Parreno, Rirkirt Tiravanija, and Maurizio Cattelan as examples His concept was not clear.
“I don’t think you can curate a menu,” exclaimed Roelstraete twice, urging that the term only applies to exhibition making. Joselit felt that curators should not withdraw into a defensive “I’m an expert” model. Action and dialogue in contemporary art, he noted, has moved from three-dimensional space but also virtual—and that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot assume that bloggers are amateurs, Joselit let slip.
From the audience Chelsea Haines, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center and a conference organizer, reminded the panelists how curators need only posses a generalized knowledge of art, which lessens the dependence on a doctorate or a curatorial-studies degree. People in the art world are nimble, she said, and can learn stuff in bits and pieces. If a curator, Haines continued, wants to bring an outside interest into the museum—here thinking of Roelstraete’s The Way of the Shovel—he or she does not need a PhD in archaeology. Joselit agreed and disagreed with this suggestion: the curatorial rhetoric of constructing an argument in space and with objects, he said, can be learned and developed—it’s not always intuitive.
In his opening remarks Roelstraete observed that no conference speaker had discussed curatorial roles at art fairs, a gap that I also noticed and wished was addressed. In the previous session Kline talked about organizing do-it-yourself exhibitions in unconventional spaces, but the conference largely addressed curatorial roles in traditional art institutions. Haines’s comments about education struck me as particularly interesting: while I agree with her that formal training isn’t always needed, my unscientific observations of employment classifieds for open curatorial positions tell another story—museums and university galleries “prefer” an applicant with a PhD, which is to say that those without one may be unduly overlooked. Even a master’s degree in curatorial studies at Bard College will only get you so far. If a doctorate becomes the baseline standard, the curatorial profession may become out of reach for “outsiders” (such as Robert Nickas or Joshua Decter, to name two from an older generation) seeking institutional positions. To break from convention, a museum can always call on artists to provide an unconventional approach to exhibition making. To have only these two options—academic and artist—precludes a wide realm of curatorial viewpoints.
In Terms Of count: 1½.
1 Discounting the introductory section that lists seven biennials, the seasonal preview in the September 2013 issue of Artforum listed nine group shows among the forty-four selected for the section.
This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fifth texts.
The Artist-Curator Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Installation view of Kazimir Malevich’s work in 0.10 (1915)
What happens when artists act as curators, organizing exhibitions for museums, commercial galleries, and other venues? Well, they become curators, if for one show only. Is this new? Is it a trend? What advantages and complications result when an artist takes on a different professional role? The third session for the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” simply titled “The Artist-Curator,” explored these ideas and more.
In some ways, the artist as curator is as old as the curatorial professional itself, which developed in tandem with the rise of the modern public museum. Or so I imagine, since someone had to work in the Louvre and at the British Museum two hundred years ago. As the previous session demonstrated, artists organized exhibitions—usually of their own work—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it seems little research has been conducted on curators from that time.
The current session’s moderator, Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, named a handful of significant artist-curated exhibitions from the last one hundred years: 0.10 in Russia, which featured works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Lyubov Popova (1915–16); an exhibition of Surrealist objects in the Parisian gallery of Charles Ratton, a dealer of so-called primitive art (1936); Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox, held in several museums across the United States (1969–70); Richard Hamilton’s TheArtist’s Eye in London (1978); the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, whose inaugural event was a curatorial contribution from Scott Burton (1989); Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum (1990); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which features an artist, Michelle Grabner, among the three curators.
Installation view of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox at the RISD Museum in 1970
A talk by the curator Florence Ostende titled “Exhibitions by Artists: Another Occupation?” added another exhibition to Musteata’s list, the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1938. Ostende then explained how a demand by the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 for a committee of artists with curatorial responsibilities at MoMA was realized (in part) twenty years later through Artist’s Choice; she also noted two exhibitions by the artist Philippe Parreno, Snow Dancing (1995) and Alien Seasons (2002) as being projects that combined aesthetic and curatorial practices. For an important group show called The Uncanny (1993), the artist Mike Kelley rigorously researched his subject and used art-historical methodology, she said. Ostende also cited Jean-Luc Godard’s self-directed installation of Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem (2006) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and its abandoned predecessor, Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema, as well as the Museum of American Art in Berlin, as examples of curatorial projects by creative types.
Acting as curators, Ostende told us, artists can subvert rules, turn things upside down, and present a “carnival that mocks the king.” While that may be generally true, and artists having a voice in an institution as powerful as MoMA is certainly important, it’s wrong to assume an artist curator would by nature resist conservative and safe approaches to exhibitions and challenge established categories and histories. After all, think about how often artists, when invited to give a lecture, follow a standard chronological method of presenting their work. It’s not that artists are inherently more imaginative and have more freedom than professional curators. I would expect an art exhibition organized by a lawyer, a plumber, or a biologist to be just as unconventional, even radically so. (Or not, considering the professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal’s Size DOES Matter in 2010.) Rather, I would argue, institutional conventions, constraints, and inflexibility are factors that inhibit the organizer of an exhibition.
Ostende dated what she called the “decay of the empowerment of the curator” to the 1990s, which is, oddly enough, the decade in which the art world witnessed the rise of empowered curator, if we are to believe the traditional narrative. Perhaps Ostende referred to scholarly minded, museum-based curators in dusty institutions, not to roving agents such as Harald Szeeman and Walter Hopps or globetrotting stars like Okwui Enwezor and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
In a talk titled “Gossip and Ridicule,” the sculptor Carol Bove positioned the artist’s career as a game to be played but wholeheartedly objected to the growing myth of a career as a single project, most crassly realized through the idea that everything an artist does is an artwork, based on the fact that he or she is an artist. In this situation, Bove said, the artist’s life is colonized by the career. “When the going gets professional,” she remarked, “the weird go away.” Her thoughts were especially provocative considering the erosion taking place between Americans’ work and personal lives, many are increasingly expected to be reachable after hours, in addition to the daily nine-to-five schedule.
Bove also said that “lying”—which I interpreted as withholding the truth rather than deliberate deception—is something that artists are allowed to do. Curators, on the other hand, with their budgets, boards, scholarship, and facts, lack this luxury. Nevertheless, she continued, curators lust after the looseness, personality, and potential for abuse that an artist can give to an artwork. Like Ostende, Bove articulated certain qualities that an artist curator can bring to an exhibition, but I reiterate that if a professional curator wants to organize more interesting exhibitions, he or she should closely examine his or her institutional situation and precipitate ways in which that situation can be changed, in both the short and long term.
Installation view of Carol Bove’s restaging of a 1993 gallery exhibition of work by Felix González-Torres
Bove’s sculpture, comprising wall-mounted shelves with decades-old books and small objects (stones, feathers) or composed of subdued, elegant juxtapositions of sizable pieces of wood, steel, and concrete, could be described as having a curatorial nature. Her intent with these works, however, is making art, but she was recently involved with selections for Felix González-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010–11), a retrospective of work by the late Cuban American artist held at museums in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. The lead curator Elena Filipovic had organized the show at all three venues but, halfway through its duration, invited three artists—Bove, Danh Vo, and Tino Sehgal—to reinstall the works according to their own ideas. At Bove’s venue, the Fondation Beyeler, she restaged González-Torres’s 1991 show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Every Week There Is Something Different, in which he switched out the works once a week. González-Torres was not the first to produce a solo show that resembled a group outing, Bove acknowledged, but he provided a template for it. And the result? “It looks exactly like curating,” she said.
Installation view of The Jewel Thief at the Tang Museum in 2010
For his talk, Ian Berry, curator of Skidmore College’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, declared that authorial roles shift even within a single project. A few years ago he worked with the artist Jessica Stockholder—an artist whose sculpture and installation are as much curated as they are constructed and painted—on The Jewel Thief (2010–11). This group exhibition of abstract painting, half of which came from the museum’s permanent collection and most of which was contemporary, was built from their in-the-studio conversations about the genre; it also emphasized the intersection of art with architecture and decoration. Berry said that he and Stockholder had fun choosing “hot and cold” artists, and works were grouped, hung, and installed in unconventional and playful ways. For her contribution, Stockholder created a multipurpose plywood platform that was used as an event space, a viewing space, and seating. You could say that she literalized the metaphoric “platform” fetishized by so many curators.
Josh Kline said he was asked to discuss ProBio (2013), a group exhibition on art, biology, and technology that he organized for MoMA PS1 last summer, but he hijacked his own talk to sort through the challenges emerging artists face, in particular those who curate. Artists today, he said, must become artist curators—which he explained through his own experiences. Working a day job at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)—where he was director of public programs—Kline perceived himself as a curator who secretly made art. At one point he wondered if he would leave EAI for an institutional job or to open his own space, but was discouraged after the Great Recession began in 2008, when many galleries had either closed or become less experimental.
Installation view of Josh Kline’s work in ProBio (2013) at MoMA PS1
Kline was also suspicious of trajectory of emerging artists in the twenty-first century: gaining visibility at MFA degree shows, getting discovered, participating in group shows, getting a two-person show, and earning that coveted solo show in a gallery before moving onto art fairs and the “biennial circuit.” Prior models of career building didn’t cross his mind as a viable option. “Artist-run spaces,” Kline commented, “were something that happened in the seventies,” and he didn’t identify similar activities in New York—including Apartment Show, Real Fine Arts, Soloway, and Cleopatra’s—with that history. In 2009 he curated the inaugural exhibition (Nobodies New York) at 179 Canal, a space run by the artist, curator, and dealer Margaret Lee, whose initial idea was to throw art parties as an effort to help the landlord find tenants for the building in a bad real-estate market. (Lee’s studio was in the building.) During 179 Canal’s year programming, a scene developed, and other shows, such as Skin So Soft (2011) at Gresham’s Ghost, followed. Several of these artists, including Kline, now show at Lee’s critically acclaimed commercial gallery, 47 Canal.
The young artist-curators that Kline knows have worked as arts administrators, artist’s assistants, and art handlers or on gallery staffs—they have experience that comes from the real world, not expensive MFA programs. Those in his group include their own work in their curated shows, a common practice that some still find controversial or unethical. For ProBio, Kline gathered work by like-minded artists—including his own—exploring the dismembered, distributed, posthuman body through ergonomics, bacteria, depictions of the insides of the body, and use of nonarchival materials. (He also noted that this work differs from art about the body from the 1970s, which he described as dematerialized and antimarket.) Concluding his remarks, Kline finally explained that the title of his presentation, “Conservative Curation,” came from a traditional view of organizing exhibitions based on visits to artist’s studios, the interests of artists, and the “discovery of works that speak to our times.” He also believes that curation is a “tool to be used by artists” to present their work “on their own terms.”
DIS, Emerging Artist, 2013, video with color and sound, 1:04
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about a difference between an artist-curated exhibition and an artist’s installation work? The Kabakovs make a distinction, Ostende replied, but the lines are blurry elsewhere. The answer can be found, I think, not with a silver-bullet answer—which so many seem to want—but rather on a case-by-case basis. Kline does not consider his curatorial work to be art but acknowledges that Lee absorbs works of art by others into her exhibitions. Regarding The Jewel Thief, Berry affirmed that Stockholder was clear about what was and wasn’t her art.
The panelists discussed the curator as the primary creative force in an exhibition, eclipsing the roles of artists. Kline faulted graduates from curatorial-studies programs (like Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies) as those coming up with curator-centered exhibitions. He and his peers, he reemphasized, work in a different way, generating ideas from conversations in the studio. Berry said we learn interesting things from auteur curators, just like we find value in chronologically oriented shows. From the audience João Ribas suggested another curatorial genealogy—the collecting strategies of Alfred Barnes and Isabella Stewart Gardner—which derive from the nineteenth-century model of the connoisseur. This notion was off topic—Barnes and Gardner are not artists.
The panelists, from left: Natalie Musteata, Josh Kline, Ian Berry, Carol Bove, and Florence Ostende
A man in the audience said that he knows an artist who works as an institutional curator, and his dealers are telling him to stop. Another man suggested that artists become curators if they can’t find jobs. Someone asked a question about power, transparency, cronyism, and the decisions that lead to the work on the walls. The level of transparency, Berry replied, depends on the institution. Thankfully someone asked a positive question, about the pleasures of curating, to which Bove happily responded: “I feel like my entire MO is ‘look what I found!’”
As the session concluded, I thought about the anxiety many people have over what is and isn’t art, or what’s art and what’s curatorial work. It’s the intent of the artists, the panelists would probably agree. And it’s not too strenuous to make a distinction between roles. Reading and hearing about the debates covered in this session (and the overall conference) for many years has made me realized that scholars—not artists—are typically the ones who fret about creating categories, which is understandable considering their role as arbiters of history. What is strange is that these same scholars consistently often avoid challenging received wisdom regarding the authorial role of curators. When you break things down with case studies, as this and the other sessions did, you realize that generalizations many hold to be true are proved false again and again.
