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Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating Edited by Jens Hoffmann Mousse Publishing, Fiorucci Art Trust

Credits Publishing director: Edoardo Bonaspetti Editor: Jens Hoffmann Assistant editor: Chelsea Haines Copy editor: Lindsey Westbrook Editorial coordination: Ilaria Bombelli A project realized in partnership with: FIORUCCI ART TRUST Director: Milovan Farronato Design: Marco Fasolini, Fausto Giliberti, Andrea Novali, Francesco Valtolina Intern: Samuele Anzellotti Publisher: Contrappunto S.R.L. via Arena 23 20123, Milan – Italy Acknowledgements: Darren Bader, Nairy Baghramian, Pierre Bismuth, Jana Blankenship, Giulia Brivio, Matthew Buckingham, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Urs Fischer, Mario Garcia Torres, RoseLee Goldberg, Claudia Gould, Leonilson Estate, Linda Mai Green, Sophia Hoffmann, Luisa Lambri, Marysia Lewandowska, Micki Meng, Marsha Miro, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Christodoulos

Panayiotou, Sturtevant, Valerio and Valerio, Vincent Worms © Mousse Publishing, the authors All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher

Why Does the Hydra Have Ten Heads? by Milovan Farronato, Director, Fiorucci Art Trust Between September 2010 and the summer of 2012, Mousse magazine published—on a bimonthly, sometimes quarterly basis—ten booklets in A5 format, each 32 pages long, which have been brought together here in a well-deserved, appropriate, partially revised version. Ten fundamental questions about curating—akin to Lacan’s fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (albeit only four)—proposed by Jens Hoffmann and sent to ten distinguished curators: Jessica Morgan, Juan A. Gaitán, Chus Martínez, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Elena Filipovic, Maria Lind, João Ribas, Peter Eleey, Adriano Pedrosa, and Dieter Roelstraete.

I say “partially revised” because in the current collection, some changes have been made: the sequence of texts has been altered to create a more rational sequence of subjects, a crescendo or a diminuendo, depending on how you look at it. Definitely not a hierarchy of authors, but a consecutio of the themes that are addressed. Some questions have been reformulated, while leaving the subject the same (though one might reflect on why “What Is the Future of Art?” has become “What Is Art?”, for example). The visuals that accompanied the texts in the previous booklets have vanished (for closer adherence to the literary genre it refers to, I believe, and for legitimate reasons of uniformity). It is worthwhile to point out, however, that in the process of parcelling out the project the first time around, each curator involved had the option of invite an artist to help visually support his or her argument. Elena Filipovic’s text was framed, for instance, within a visual concept by Nairy Baghramian, based on a series of wall drawings by Blinky Palermo; the audience, as the subject of Juan A. Gaitán’s investigation, was presented through photos of spectators comfortably seated in various settings—images selected by Christodoulos Panayiotou from the Municipal Archive of Limassol, Cyprus—while the empty frames of a completedly incomplete work by Mario Garcia Torres alternated with Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy’s animated chronicle. Nor does this version include the back covers, where other visuals showed images of projects that, like the Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, Fiorucci Art Trust produced, sponsored, or sometimes designed: stills from a film by Runa Islam, or the poster of a show by Enrico David, a project by

Yto Barrada, an installation by Sharon Houkema, to cite a few. Among these, we have also lost the image of an unusual climb to the crest of a volcano, photographed by Goshka Macuga (Stromboli, in the Aeolian archipelago), as well as the tapestries she presented at dOCUMENTA (13). Now a ten-headed hydra looms disquietingly on the cover, which has taken on a much more reassuring shade of green. And this is the only visual archetype that is left. Jens Hoffmann, the editor of this volume, has the task of updating his introduction to reflect what is now a complete vision of the project and the individual contributions. I have the same task, from what is an obviously much different angle: the standpoint—though I too am a curator by profession—of the patron. And I’m tempted to ask him and myself whether there might be space and time for an eleventh question (I’ve always found odd numbers more reassuring, moreover, much like the color green): “What About Patronage?” But time is short, space is limited, and from the patron’s standpoint, I prefer to cut things short. In the first issue, dedicated to determining “What Is a Curator?” (Jessica Morgan), which came out as a supplement to Mousse #25, I introduced the entire project as director of the then newly-founded Fiorucci Art Trust— which, along with Mousse Publishing, produced the booklets and the current volume—with a brief text in which I explained why Fiorucci Art Trust had decided to present itself to the public with this specific investigation by Jens Hoffmann. The goal at the time (which at least to this point has been achieved) was to avoid all stiffness and be dynamic and flexible, not to have a set protocol, yet to follow certain guidelines: “to be a non-profit entity capable of adapting to circumstances; of promoting under-recognized artists; of implementing risk-taking projects and often running into experimental ways of thinking”. All characteristics which I was sure could resonate with curatorial practice. I thought that the results of this investigation into curating, or this updated version, would yield a professional profile that was not definitive, but potentially varied, fluid and exceptional. I believed the ten questions could lead to new ones, complicate the story, render the discourse more complex. I can see now that the results of the investigation have lived up to these expectations, but at this point, as a precipitous conclusion, I’d rather highlight a few points where they seem to concur. The recurrence of the word “display” and related mechanisms and techniques in many texts (my mind jumps to Syria, with the fourteen-meter-high pillar of Simeon the Stylite, or its

cinematic interpretation by Buñuel); the frequent reservations expressed in regard to the institutions that systematically train new generations of curators, due to and/or aiming for a unanimously shared defence of the personalization of curatorial practice, its educational foundations and its subjective developments. Many of the authors—almost all of them—set off from personal anecdotes as a way of introducing their answer to the proposed question. Some have almost entirely built their argument around specific biographical information. What is more, I find these—do let me indulge in this unusual role of patron—to be the most fascinating texts, like the long dissertation on the future of art by Chus Martínez, or the more fragmentary but equally heartfelt examination of the curatorial process by Adriano Pedrosa. But nevertheless, at the beginning there’s still that tenheaded hydra as a captatio benevolentiae. And so be it…

Ten Fundamental Answers by Jens Hoffmann It has become almost cliché to introduce a compendium of essays on curating by taking note of the plethora of recent publications on the subject. How, in just a few short years, did we reach this point of self-referential saturation? What do all these publications offer? What questions, exactly, do they address? Several of them profess to offer an overview of the curatorial field as it exists today, or attempt to map its historical trajectory. Others propose a series of case studies under a common curatorial theme. Some compile the collected writings or interviews of a single curator. All are hoping to contribute to this relatively new discipline, and its accompanying canon, through the putting forth of a shared set of values and knowledge base. The aim of Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating is certainly to contribute to this canon building. But at the same time, it aspires to offer a real critique of existing publications and modes of thinking by explicitly asking the questions that others may have missed, ignored, or deemed already answered. By inviting ten international curators to each propose and then address one question, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating takes an almost tongue-in-cheek, back-to-basics approach—a return to a kind of zero-degree state—at a time when a recalibration of what a curator is and does seems both necessary and urgent. The idea for Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating has been with me for a long time, and it stems from my essential desire to understand what is happening in the curatorial field today. Over the course of my career I have repeatedly asked myself questions exactly like the ones addressed in these essays. I believe it is constantly necessary to interrogate the simplest, most basic principles of one’s own profession, precisely because the answers are simultaneously quite complex and almost never given any thought by others. In the case of curating: What is a curator? What is an exhibition? Who do we curate for? These questions seem so straightforward, so fundamental, that most curators bypass them entirely. They take the answers for granted, assuming the relevance of our work in the wider world, thereby

indulging in a dangerous sort of unchecked, assumed self-importance. Another impetus for this publication emerged from my perception of a general confusion, or at least ambiguity, about what this field is, what it has been, where it might go, and where we all are at this specific moment. I wanted to bring to light some of these questions in order to discuss them openly and get a better understanding of the coordinates of curating, so to speak. The essays included here collectively create a blueprint, a basic definition and set of roles and responsibilities, to help us reconsider some of the choices we have made in the development of this profession. Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating began as a series of ten commissioned essays for Mousse magazine written over a period of two years, in 2011 to 2012. Each author examined one key question related to curatorial practice—an issue that he or she viewed as important personally, and also as important to curating, art, and exhibition making today. The questions reflect a broad range of interests indicative of each curator’s practice. It opens with Jessica Morgan grappling with one of the most fundamental and overarching questions of all: What is a curator? Even as she claims a certain discomfort with labeling herself as a curator, she deftly, albeit partially, charts out a genealogy and classification system for the profession. For Morgan, the role of the curator is inextricably bound up in site—be it the museum, the international biennial, or the small nonprofit— and the different typologies of curators correspond to their functions in those sites: the curator of collections, the transnational curator, the directorcurator, and so on. She constructs the possibilities for defining curatorship today by the institutional, locational, disciplinary, and financial restraints placed upon us. If context is the framing device by which we define our practice, then for whom do we curate? Juan A. Gaitán attacks this question head-on by focusing on the presumed social contract that exists between museums and their audiences. He examines the development of the first public exhibitions in the 18th and 19th centuries and the notion of art in the public sphere that subsequently emerged. Arguing that contemporary conversations around the

public and the public sphere reflect outmoded models of a harmonious and homogenized society, Gaitán proposes that we see those who visit our exhibitions as fractured, disharmonious, and constantly in a state of becoming. Chus Martínez asks perhaps the broadest and most intrinsic question in the minds of all curators: What is art? She explores the question of art—its categorizations, meaning, future, and (portended) death—by recounting the story of a philosophy professor’s take on art. In this story, art is already dead; it is a remnant of an earlier, less-developed age. Martínez’s unsettled narrative pricks holes in this Hegelian decree, pointing out its idiosyncrasies and flaws, and indicating her uncertainty regarding the possibility of ever knowing a beginning or an end to art. In a time when the role of art itself is in question, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy asks: What about collecting? In today’s art world, the role of the collection curator is definitely perceived as less glamorous than that of the organizer of temporary blockbuster exhibitions or biennials. Collecting as an aspect of curating is almost completely ignored in curatorial degree courses. Hernández begs to differ with this attitude, asserting that collections remain a core principle upon which the traditional public art institution is based, and that the private-turned-public collection is becoming a more and more prominent institutional model globally. How can a collection originally built on the tastes of a single individual be displayed and contextualized in a relevant way for a broader audience? Elena Filipovic endeavors to answer what for many curators is the core question of the practice: What is an exhibition? She dispenses with any notion of the exhibition space as neutral or inert and argues that the each of the different typologies of exhibitions that exist (or may possibly exist in the future) must be analyzed in their own right, taking into account their entirely different aims and goals. For Filipovic, a discussion of exhibitions is always about seeking to determine “what it does, which is to say, how exhibitions function and matter, and how they participate in the construction and administration of the experience of the items they present.” Diving into the function of the exhibition enables us to examine it as a site for the emergence of dialectical relationships among curator, art,

and audience. Maria Lind asks a question that we can all agree is increasingly relevant: Why mediate art? She presents two dominant tendencies in art mediation in the 20th century. On the one hand there is the traditional, didactic museum model largely developed by the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, and its founding director of education, Victor D’Amico. On the other she offers up the more radical, participatory pedagogical practices developed by figures such as the artist El Lissitzky and the curator Alexander Dorner. Lind argues that the abundance of didactic materials presented in major museums—wall texts and object labels, linear display narratives, and an assortment of art educational activities—is predicated on the notion of an audience fundamentally in need of explanations. She challenges us to resist this dominant model and propose other types of mediations, even at the very moment that curators are increasingly seeming to turn inward, and consider their practices in isolation from the ever-growing publics who visit art exhibitions. How can we explain and make relevant what we are doing for more than the alreadyconverted few, without slipping into bland traditional canon-building or curating only for other curators? What to do with the contemporary? João Ribas tackles perhaps the most frequently used word (second only to “art,” that is) in the field today. What does it mean to call an exhibition, an artwork, an institution, a curator, or an experience “contemporary”? Ribas is not so concerned with a comparison of the contemporary to its modern ontological predecessor, nor with its more plebian synonym, the “now.” He focuses instead on the ways in which curators today consider the work they display within temporal, spatial, and historical frameworks. The evolution from “modern” to “contemporary” is more than a shift in chronological time, more than just the staircase that separates one museum floor from the next. It denotes a shift in how humans see the world, and the art that is created in response to changing conditions. What about responsibility? Peter Eleey brings up the increasingly pertinent question of what constitutes curatorial responsibility. For a number of reasons, which Eleey delineates, curators today are sometimes accused of overstepping their bounds by valuing their own work more

highly than the art they are showing, commissioning, or otherwise facilitating. Eleey questions the limits of curating with regard to placing artworks in conditions or contexts for which they were not made or meant to be displayed. He advises us to proceed with caution in the brave new world of the curator-as-author. Building on the questions around the varying structures of curating, Adriano Pedrosa asks: What is the process? Researching for a contemporary art exhibition is, of course, a different beast than art historical research. While many curatorial degree programs exist, and more will surely pop up in the years to come, Pedrosa argues for a different kind of professional methodology—one that is fundamentally interdisciplinary and grounded in real-life research and experience. Horizontal educational and informational models and a self-reflexive, inquisitive mentality, as well as an ardent desire for travel, particularly to the less-charted areas of the art world, are a productive toolbox for curators today. Finally, in all seriousness, Dieter Roelstraete asks: How about pleasure? Of course curating is a serious endeavor conducted by scholarly, intellectual individuals. As all the previous essays in this compendium attest, the experience of visiting a museum or seeing an exhibition is meant to be rigorous, challenging, and consciousness-raising. But even a show curated with the most aspirational intentions can be a decidedly didactic, antiseptic, even anti-pleasurable viewing experience. Roelstraete muses: “Does the invocation of any form of pleasure, visual or otherwise, necessarily align curatorial practice with the evil forces of entertainment?” How can we as curators achieve in our projects a middle ground between education and entertainment, intellect and sensibility? Curating is a relatively young field with short history. It certainly borrows from the more established disciplines of art history and cultural studies, but it is still in its adolescence, still transitioning from an open, creative, largely undefined practice to a diverse professional arena with many highly specialized branches of knowledge and practice. But these specialized branches, while a necessary part of any established field, are producing mountains of discourse under which I fear many essential thoughts can be buried, and perhaps suffocate.

Even as this book goes to print, I cannot help but wonder if the questions these curators examine will all continue to have relevance in five or ten years. We are still in the early stages of formulating a theory of curating, and there may come a time (although I doubt it) when no one will want to talk about curating and exhibition making any more. The more likely scenario is that a decade from now the role of the curator will be analogous to a many-headed creature, the perfect embodiment of a peripatetic, decentralized, deregulated intellectual worker who fills gaps in cultural meaning through a wide range of products and services to an everbroadening consumer market. Questioning the roles and limits of curating, while certainly a healthy thing for those of us working in the field, should and must have broader implications. “Curating” today can mean everything—or utterly nothing— depending on whom you ask. Clearly and straightforwardly defining this work, as we attempt to do in this book, means staking a claim for the substance and relevance of the field as a whole. There are specific questions —questions that are not specialized—that every curator must ask him- or herself. How and why do we do what we do? I strongly believe that anyone working in any intellectual field should, every few years, review the essential questions of their practice and reflect on how their relationship to them has changed over time. Curatorial innovation, new theories of curating, and diverse new conversations should be welcomed and encouraged. But the new and fashionable should not distract us from engaging, and re-engaging, with what we already think we know. In my own practice, curating is still fundamentally tied to making exhibitions. It is tied to artists and artworks. My role, as I see it, is to display artworks in space in a meaningful way according to a particular concept. Today I sense that such an approach is coming more and more under question and that curating is moving further and further away from the gallery. In the debates concerning curatorial practice, we see an everexpanding array of viewpoints. These range from the traditional museum curator possessing deep knowledge of art history and a particular collection,

to the academically trained contemporary curator working in a larger institution with living artists, to the creative curator or curator-as-author, all the way to the concept of “the curatorial” as a methodology or operational tool that is completely untethered to works, artists, spaces, audiences, or any particular outcome of the encounter between “viewer” and “artwork.” Curating is now a global phenomenon. New art institutions and biennials of all sizes and types are springing up across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Museums in the West are expanding as fast as they can secure real estate and international “starchitects.” The (not-unrelated) continued expansion of curatorial programs and degree courses assures that new generations of curators will continue to develop ever more diverse methods for presenting art and ideas. The once-sharp line between what curating is and what it is not has become vague and open-ended. I hope that these essays collectively offer a bit of clarity in a messy world.

Question 1: What Is a Curator? by Jessica Morgan

A Personal Reflection To unpack the baggage of ungainly meaning that the term “curator” has accrued over the last two decades, I feel compelled to try and recall what I thought a curator was before I became one. Assuming, that is, that I am one. Strangely, despite being able to claim this as my job title for going on 16 years—in answer to the question of our age, “What do you do?”—my reply has always felt somewhat illegitimate. Fraudulent, even. Putting aside general (gendered?) insecurities related to professional standing and the occasional lack of confidence that might lead to such a crisis in identification, I come back to the fact that my diffidence about stating that I am a curator stems also from a lack of identification with any of the various options that this title conjures in my mind. Like a row of paper dolls, each kitted out with a particular outfit (more on that later), objective, and attitude, my notional “curators,” most of them justifiably employed and many busy with admirable ambitions, form a complex, multigenerational, interconnecting structure that, more often than not, I cannot place myself within. Perhaps this is true of many—here, again, I struggle to say “of us”— especially those who came to this occupation in a time before curatorial courses, curating master’s degrees, and the tidal wave of curatorial interns. Without any real idea of what the job was when I first came to it, and given the changes and drastic expansions of the field that have taken place during the time that I have occupied this position, perhaps this lack of identification is only to be expected. The term “curator” is now a vast, allencompassing category embracing many workers in the field of visual arts, including education and the many disciplines that are (finally) incorporated into the panoply of an exhibition-making arsenal. But it is also a term that has in the last decade been commandeered by those selecting food and wine, designing hotel interiors, and otherwise engaging in various aspects of “lifestyle culture.”

To return to my first impression of what a curator was: My idea was formed prior to my arrival in the U.S., when I was still at school in London in the 1980s. I was only aware of two or three curatorial models, and identifying with any of them was out of the question. Almost indistinguishable in attire from the cliché librarian (tweed skirt, buttoned-up blouse, low heels) was the female curator at Tate who “allowed” me to read her PhD thesis, which she handed over to me in the museum’s rotunda, near the metal gate that leads to the curved staircase at the top of which used to be the library of the museum. I can still hear her shoes on the marble floor, and the fact that I recall it so well reflects my discomfort at having already started to feel like an impostor in that environment. Her position seemed not much different from that of a young academic (the same training), proximity to art objects and even artists not necessarily making a great deal of difference. Aside from her male counterpart (a uniquely British breed of man largely devoid of sexuality, occasionally displaying an incredible breadth of arcane knowledge but no real sense of what to do with it), there was the aristocratic model, brought to curating through ownership and connoisseurship and essentially embodying the continuation of a collecting/curating tradition that arguably brought about the first curatorial enterprise: the Cabinet of Curiosities. Now, however, these aristocratic collector/curators were also employed by museums to use their personal/professional knowledge to create public/private fiefdoms. The two sources of real inspiration for my future career were ones that I did not, in fact, associate with the idea of curating. The verb “to curate” did not even exist in my mind. London’s ICA was a place to hear music, attend talks, see films, and experience art. A vibrant, noisy, challenging place, it was definitely not run by what I thought of as a curator. The only person I knew who worked in a museum, Bryan Robertson (director of the Whitechapel during the 1950s and 1960s and a close family friend and neighbor), was self-educated, surrounded by artists (not academics), and utterly engaging. Significantly, one of the only other truly important UK curators, Lawrence Alloway (founding member of the Independent Group and later a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in the 1960s), also never received higher education. And in both cases (as Alloway in fact explicitly identified), this lack of inculcation into the ordered, class-obsessed, hierarchical British educational system allowed them to develop an open-

minded acceptance and critical acuity.

Historical Precedent: Convention and Exception While on the one hand my (initially limited) familiarity with academic or aristocratic models of curating was the result of the very limited context of the London or UK art scene—which never experienced the rupture of Modernism and continues to suffer from this inadequate legacy—most Western countries with an established museum system no doubt encompassed these curatorial typologies of caretaker and connoisseur. While the latter is a continuation of the manifestation of the private collector and patron, in particular after the 15th-century development of the portable and domestic art object, the former emerged with the establishment of the public museum in 19th-century Europe. The museum’s development in the 19th century is itself closely related to strategies of discipline and enlightenment in the post-Industrial age. The collection and display of certain objects and artifacts according to chosen curatorial techniques represented not only the writing of specific colonial and national histories, but also the circulation of particular values and ideals. A universalizing of bourgeois views and visions took place, and formed the public support of the museum. The curator’s role was (and arguably still is) intimately connected to the notion of education: Visitors were taught not only curated histories, but also curated ways of seeing and behaving in the museum. It is interesting, then, to consider the exceptions to these models and how they came about. Broadly generalizing, one could say that curators who established diverging practices did so as a result of close affiliation with contemporaneous artistic movements and were responding to a shift in production, itself often related to larger contextual issues or politics and economics, and the resulting rethinking of issues of display and public presentation. Or, though often the two are in any case closely related, the independently minded curators may have been concerned with establishing new publics, or what might be termed counter-publics, rethinking the bourgeois model of museum or exhibition as rational enlightenment and establishing different frameworks for exhibition making that generated new publics. In the former typology, one might assemble a list of figures such as Walter Hopps, Henry Geldzahler, and Kynaston McShine. In the latter, curators or directors such as Alexander Dorner, Pontus Hultén, and Marcia

Tucker. Given that most significant artistic movements in the 20th century were intimately concerned with establishing new publics or audiences, clearly these two models were more often than not in fact one and the same, but arguably some curators have demonstrated a consistent desire to rethink the institution, and with that the constitution and creation of its public, in ways that have drawn on experience and ideas outside of any contemporary art practice. Interestingly, from the perspective of the new professionalized curatorial career, those most celebrated for their contributions have often emerged from disciplines other than art history (the logical precursor of the curating course) and instead migrated from a background in theater (Harald Szeemann, Francesco Bonami, Jens Hoffmann), architecture (Jean Leering), film (Chris Dercon), politics and economics (Hans Ulrich Obrist), or poetry (Carlos Basualdo, Okwui Enwezor). Or were entirely self-educated (Alloway, Robertson, Hopps).

Transnational Curator If these two alternative models/approaches can be said to have defined much of the innovative practice of the 20th century, the third radical shift was the development in the 1990s of the transnational curator. Subsequent to the controversy raised by the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (at the Pompidou in 1989), the most troubling and also exciting development in the curatorial field has been the (extraordinarily belated) incorporation of a global realm of artistic production, and, with that, the redefinition of how to articulate this terrain and the related postcolonial debate. The large-scale group exhibition—whether thematic one-off, biennial, or so forth—has undoubtedly been the arena within which this new practice has emerged, and its scale is partly a simple refection of the incorporation of the multifarious forms of engagement now encompassed within this expanded field. While also the subject of critique, it is equally true that such large-scale exhibitions—and in particular globally situated biennials—have provided new ideas of modernism and modernist histories, and have infused a sense of contemporary culture in sites that did not have an institutional legacy to bring this about and helped to open up institutional spaces for artists working on a local level. Moreover, the resulting research into and expansion of artistic practice has exploded the idea that there is a lack of practice in different parts of the world. While this development led to the establishment of a new form of hyper-mobile curator (epitomized by the inimitable Hans Ulrich Obrist), it has also resulted in the increased establishment of locally based expertise, such that curators from certain regions are justifiably valued for their extensive localized knowledge but quite often overlooked for their potential but equally important contributions to the transnational understanding of the contemporary moment and historical past, which, arguably, remains the privileged purview of the West. Clearly one of the important developments that could happen curatorially will be the contribution of these voices to a revisionist understanding of standard Western art history. With such initiatives and exhibitions as Paulo Herkenhoff’s XXIV São Paulo Biennial and The Former West project, we begin to see what promise this might hold.

Curating the Collection Notably absent from most curatorial courses is any real engagement with what is in fact the fundamental cornerstone of the museum: its collection. When students are encouraged to focus in this direction, they inevitably lapse into “exhibition lite,” organizing the available works into tired thematic groupings better suited to the small-scale Kunsthalle (if at all). Given the crisis in funding that most museums now face, it is an opportune time to start to pay attention to the potential of the collection, but also the challenges faced given the vastly expanded field of production now under consideration. Outside of the large-scale exhibition, the collection is the ideal space in which to pose questions of new histories and new modalities of display. Rather than simply producing another roundup of the latest and the youngest, the collection offers the opportunity to entirely rethink how we understand the past. The relatively unfashionable status of the collection-oriented curator is largely (and sadly) attributable to the difference in time-scale involved in the collection display and the corresponding lack of publicity or frequency of PR-related attention. Whereas the large-scale exhibition has a period of anticipatory publicity, the frisson of opening events and postmortem reviews, the collection display is deemed of public interest only in the case of a major museum’s re-hang or the opening of a new building (vis–à–vis the Tate Modern in 2000, MoMA in 2004, or the Walker Art Center in 2005). In reality, the collection is where millions are educated and inculcated into an understanding of what art is, and as such it is surely a highly significant place for a curator to work. Moreover, from the perspective of a sustainable museum, the collection is locally based, and it requires minimal transport and fewer resources for display. For better or worse, however, the collection is also at the heart of the politics of the museum and represents the public display of the increasingly contested relationship between private collection and public institution. Very few, if any, museums are able to collect without private support, and while this has brought invaluable funds as well as in some

cases exceptional collections, it has also led to the loss of control of the collection focus. The combined effect of the disarray caused by the expanded global field and the corruption of independence of thought has left most institutions at an apparent impasse with respect to their collections, and yet this area seems to hold the most promise for future curatorial initiative on a lasting and expansive scale.

The Curator and the Undoing of the Critic Since the 1990s, the curatorial voice has to a large extent merged or surpassed the critical one. No longer can we imagine a time when a critic such as Clement Greenberg might weigh heavily on the development of art. In part a result of curatorial involvement in the critical and theoretical discourse of the 1980s, the critic/curator has merged into one doubleheaded beast, the risk being of course the loss of a critical platform, given the codependence of the curatorial world and the consequent lack of publicly voiced dissent.

The New Professional The massive increase in the number of museums as well as the expanded activities undertaken by these institutions has, presumably, resulted in the need for more curators, and with that an explosion in curatorial courses offered by enterprising institutions of higher education. Sometimes this equation strikes me as a little like the chicken-and-the-egg conundrum, and I am unclear whether, in fact, museums proliferate because of the number of job-seeking curators. This massive increase in a largely pointless profession reminds me of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein the “useless third” of the population (hairdressers, management consultants, insurance salesmen, and the like) are tricked into evacuating the planet on Ark B and, upon arrival at their destination, are unable to do anything but run around trying to cut each other’s hair, sell nonexistent insurance, and the like. MAs in curating would definitely have been sent on Ark B. Of all the things that can be studied, curating seems almost a complete waste of time, and it is alarming to think that the majority of curators now being employed emerge from this limited purview, rather than from the many different disciplines and backgrounds from which some of the great contributors to the field came, not to mention the even more numerous autodidacts and artists who have until the last decade occupied the “profession.” With this narrowing of the field of those considered “qualified” comes the concomitant narrowing of new approaches, nonhierarchical thinking, and attempts to unravel the limited categorizations of art, art history, and exhibition making. Also worrying is the myopic focus of curatorial courses on art and institutions of the years post-1960.

Authorship The question of authorship and the curator has been contested ground in the last few decades, the presumption being that the curatorial role has seeped into the realm of the artist and threatens at times to eclipse the latter’s position and independence (see Anton Vidokle’s recent “Art Without Artists” on e-flux journal). While in fact it is the artist-curator who has probably taken the greatest license with others’ work (think of such legendary interventions as Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum at the Baltimore Art Museum in 1992, Hans Haacke’s Mixed Messgaes in 2001 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Urs Fischer’s Who’s Afraid of Jasper Johns at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 2008), this critique in fact pertains to a small part of the curatorial world, as the vast majority of curators remain unseen and relatively unknown in the apparently-neutral and all-encompassing facade of the institution. The notion that current museological display is an impartial and naturally evolved environment has been resolutely discredited, and yet the transparency of authorship and intervention by the curator/institution remains largely un-investigated. The critique of the author/curator risks hindering much-needed experimentation and exploration of new forms of display within the museum, new approaches that undoubtedly require authorship and a rethinking of the contextualization of art. We eulogize the great achievements of radical exhibition experiments such as Documenta V —for which Harald Szeemann brought together many of what have become the seminal figures of the time in a 100 Day Event—but we forget that they were similarly attacked by the artists in the exhibition (Daniel Buren and Robert Morris for example) for encroaching on their artistic independence. And what would a non-authorial curator look like? I certainly don’t care to know.

Co-Production (Many Authors) The reality is that any exhibition or display is the culmination of a multitude of authors. Whether this is explicitly manifested as it has been in recent large-scale exhibitions—from all the iterations of Manifesta, each of which has involved a curatorial team, to the more than 10 curators of the 2003 Venice Biennale and the team behind Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11—or in the collectives (both curatorial and artistic) that make this collaboration a standard part of their practice, or indeed as it is made manifest by the work that takes place every day in any large-scale museum with its complex structure.

Director/Curator The natural progression for many curators has been toward the role of the museum or institutional director. In recent years there has been much discussion of the lack of appropriate candidates for the job of director, a position that has fundamentally changed over the last two decades. Largely the result of increasing demands for fundraising (itself in part a reflection of the dramatically expanded role of the museum as a provider of entertainment, education, and architectural experience), the perceived need for a more businesslike approach to the running of a quasi-corporation, and the need to operate diplomatically but also politically in the realm of the board of trustees, the end result is a drastic decline in the curatorial duties of the director. Perhaps a cause for further consternation is the desire for specialized training of directors, who are now encouraged to undergo reprogramming in order to fit neatly alongside the captains of industry who support, but also increasingly control, the museum through its funding. While the capacity to manage a staff, budget, and fundraise are all necessary requirements, the desired schism between the curator and the director evidenced in recent years is a worrying trend. Visionary, experimental, art-centered directors are needed more than ever. Given the central role that museums now play in contemporary culture, the desire to mold this position to fit the corporate ideal seems misguided, especially considering the attraction of the museum for those working outside it (whether visitors or trustees) as precisely a site of difference from the realm of the relentlessly commercial.

What Else? I have deliberately avoided discussing the daily activities of the curator, although I am often asked what a typical day consists of, the classic assumption being that curators spend their time actually hanging art (“Up a little, over to the left”). The answer is dependent entirely on the curator: an academically capable researcher who spends the majority of their time in libraries versus a transient, independent curator visiting the studios of a global array of artists? Or an institutionally based, bureaucratically driven curator fulfilling the demands of trustees versus the director of a small nonprofit scrambling for financial support but relatively free to experiment? The possibilities are endless, although, hopefully, especially if we are talking about contemporary curators, the majority of one’s time is spent thinking about art and working with artists. Given the increasingly prominent role of the museum in contemporary culture—arguably the cultural experience of the 21st century—quite possibly the role will continue to evolve in ways we have yet to imagine.

Question 2: What Is the Public? by Juan A. Gaitán

The exhibition has become a more unformed and uncertain phenomenon than one might infer from the passionate criticisms that are being launched against it and its makers. Who, after all, are its makers? One could accept, as one of the most recurrent criticisms has it, that the exhibition has become the curator’s medium, but exhibitions in fact operate uneasily in an encounter among the institutions that host them, the artworks that are contained in them, and their public. The exhibition is the museum’s medium, the biennial’s, and the gallery’s. It is also, even in our time, art’s medium. With increasing force, in what can be seen as a current paraphrasing of its old rhetoric, it is diplomacy’s medium. If we are to follow Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated axiom that art is a rendezvous, it is also the public’s medium—the medium through which the public becomes public. And it is in relation to this last encounter, the encounter of the public with itself and with its own image, that the discourse around the exhibition of art, contemporary or not, begins to unravel most of its utopian formulations and justifications. In 2004 a book called Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust appeared in bookstores and went almost unnoticed. Edited by James Cuno with essays by several museum directors from around the Western world, it was, from the point of view of institutional critique and by the standards of contemporary discourse on museums and exhibitions, an inconsequential contribution. Nevertheless, the book and the writings in it now seem symptomatic of an entrenchment of cultural institutions in “traditional” values—values that, though invented and reminiscent of another era, provide a recognizable foundation for the existence of the museum and of art. In his preface Cuno writes that the book focuses on the museum’s contract with its public, a contract that is founded on the public’s trust. These words, of course, have one meaning among the trustees, another among the wider public. They also have one meaning in the United States, another in Germany or France, yet another in China, and so on. Despite (or

in spite of) these ideological and situational contingencies, Cuno explains that the absence of oppositional voices in his volume has to do with the fact that he doesn’t want to “present a debate, nor a sampling of current opinion.” Instead, he wants the book “to be focused on first principles, on the basis of the contract between art museums and their public.”1 The implication inherent in this distinction between opinions and first principles is that the former are topical, the latter trans-historical, if not timeless. The contract between museum and public he summarizes thus: In the end, this is what our visitors most want from us: to have access to works of art in order to change them, to alter their experience of the world, to sharpen and heighten their sensibilities to it, to make it come alive anew for them, so they can walk away at a different angle to the world. Despite its grammatical shiftiness, this paragraph was approvingly cited by John Walsh at the outset of his own contribution to Cuno’s publication. To such univocality of opinion one might ask: If this is the museum’s contract with its public, then what is the exhibition’s function within it? The history of exhibitions is not so remote that one can afford to forget that its former incarnations were all acts of empire: For instance, the 1851 exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which famously and infamously included displays of living human beings; the world fairs and expositions, which were often conglomerations of imperial lootings; the princely galleries of the 17th and 18th centuries—one of which would later become the Louvre—with their collected iconography of empire. All were acts of self-reference through which a total image of empire was affirmed. Nevertheless, we accept today that exhibitions serve a different function, one that is relative to the public sphere. In fact, exhibitions were one of the first manifestations of the birth of the bourgeois public sphere, the sphere to which the exhibition now belongs. But many things have changed since the doors of the princely gallery were slung open for all. Not least among these changes is what the word “all” has come to represent. The ongoing aim of the notion of the public sphere, as conceived in the West—which is to say, of the bourgeois public sphere, as this is the one that the exhibition belongs to—the project since then has been to make the universe that is signified by the word “all” more inclusive and real, less rhetorical and ideal, encompassing more human beings; more

cultural, political, and social interests; more religious inclinations and beliefs. In modern history this “all” and its margins have had various names: the people, the collectivity or collective, women, black people, indigenous peoples. In more classed analyses: the masses, the proletariat, the lumpenproletariat, the workers, the peasants. There are also newer, more abstract notions such as “the common,” based on the quintessential principle of our times, property. There is also the notion of citizens, which is a more ideologically neutral form of the word “bourgeoisie” (city people). One of the recent favorites in the English-speaking world is the electorate, a concept that, deliberately or otherwise, narrows democratic participation to those whom the State recognizes, and their participation to the rule of choice. The word “public”—on which the classical concept of the republic was erected, and with it the modern notion of democracy, and which in antiquity designated a narrow segment of society considered to be suitable for governing itself and others—has been wholeheartedly embraced in the language of cultural institutions. “The public” means the segment of society that visits museums, libraries, galleries, concert halls, cineplexes, circuses, and theaters; watches television; listens to the radio; and so on. What this means in the context of my question is that the public sphere has a number of forms, and “the public” is the form through which exhibitions of contemporary art can be seen as taking part in it. Most contemporary exhibitions assume as a premise that works can come together and be arranged under a tentative theme, even a category, then dispersed once again. These arrangements are provisional, and also often spontaneous, intuitive. They are therefore of the order of what Cuno catalogues as “opinions”—opinions that are contained within “first principles” but are not as absolute, and which establish nonessential relationships among works of art, between those and the theme, between the institution and its public, all the while relying on the conviction that those provisional arrangements are timely, that they are vital contributions to dialogues that are taking place in the public sphere, that they potentially counterpoise (without pretending to be entirely disentangled from) what is being articulated in the spaces of official politics, religion, the economy. It is this that brings exhibitions closer to the format of the essay (an attempt, a weighing, a submitting to proof). The exhibition thus functions within the space of that contract that Cuno presents as the museum’s first principle, but

as a disruption of the shake-of-hands between the museum and its public. It is therefore a “problem of opinion” that Cuno must bypass in order present the museum itself as an entity whose function, in his formulation, runs contrary to the critical one we ascribe to contemporary art: “We have all heard stories of people going to museums in the days following September 11, just to be there, quietly, safe in the company of things that are beautiful and impossibly fragile, yet that have lasted through centuries of war and tumult.”2 But such palliative reassurances of humanity’s resilience are certainly not what we should aim for when conceiving of an exhibition. Which idea of humanity are we speaking of anyway? And what public are we speaking to? In fact, if anything has characterized exhibition making in the second half of the 20th century, it is the ongoing endeavour to dissociate the exhibition, as well as art itself, from the establishment of grand historical and political narratives and to aim at reality’s discontinuous character rather than at the confirmation of common sense. This we can call the exhibition’s dissociative factor. Schematically, the exhibition is the space within which the order of this unilateral contract between two institutions (the museum, its public) is interpolated. In this respect exhibitions of contemporary art potentially simulate—albeit sometimes uncritically—the way the public sphere is structured today, as a gathering of non-parallel and exponentially individualistic identities and interests. A refusal of the whole, which is to say, an indication that, in the context of contemporary politics and society, the word “all” means that which is not yet whole. This structural non-integrity of the public sphere, as we live it today in the West, is the topic of Artur Zmijewski’s video-based installation Democracies (2009). The work is composed of 16 flat-screen monitors hanging on the wall, evenly spaced and at eye level. Each one plays a video clip of a public manifestation. There are images of the funeral of the ultraright-wing Austrian politician Jörg Haider next to images of anarchists in an anti-NATO rally in Strasbourg destroying storefronts and throwing Molotov cocktails. There is footage of a number of separate protests against the Gaza War, in both Israel and Palestine; celebrations after a football game between Germany and Turkey, with German hooligans waving the German flag at Turks on the streets of Berlin; and the yearly Orangemen’s Day Parade in Belfast (at one point a woman yells at the camera “fuck off back to

Poland”). And several clips shot in Poland, a particularly telling one showing a military reenactment that is now held yearly in Warsaw, instituted by the Kaczyński twins, who in 2006 and 2007 were the country’s president and prime minister. It is a rehearsal of national pride that is intensely entangled with the Polish Catholic Church, commemorating Poland’s 1920 battle known as the Miracle at the Vistula in which the Bolshevik assault on Warsaw was “miraculously” crushed. This coup-d’oeil over the present conceptions and uses of the so-called public sphere makes the sinister point that democracy’s pluralism has reached a point of self-effacement. And the work itself—that is, the deliberate gathering and serialization of heterogeneous and radically incompatible public manifestations—proposes that if there is a public sphere to speak of, it exists merely as an accumulation of inarticulate political activity. By “inarticulate” I don’t mean that those expressing themselves aren’t individually clear about what they want or how they say it, for they are. I mean in a more general sense that the actual structure of political action is contained by the ideal structure of contemporary democracy, which regards all of these manifestations as legitimate.3 They are legitimate because, in all their excessive expressionism, they are ultimately expressions of democracy. They don’t interfere with the democratic process, even if they threaten private property—which, unless one asks the Thatcherites, is not a democratic value. Here, for the purposes of this essay, I will only highlight two aspects of Zmijewski’s work that are critical. The first is that there is an almost absolute identification between democracy and representation, and this mutual identification is consummated in the image. The second is that, because of this mutual identification, and because of this consummation in the image, everything that happens within the image can be immediately consumed by democracy, as an expression of itself. One could regard such a point of view as excessively dystopian, but one can also take it as a warning that the heart of the public sphere is being transmuted by the systematic reduction of politics to a series of minuscule, increasingly incompatible factions that are harmonized by their inclusion in the space of democracy, which is to say, into the liberal-democratic right of self-representation. Thus, to put it in vulgar terms, the exhibition should not function in parallel to the liberal democratic principle, as a harmonizing agent of discontinuous

fragments; it shouldn’t be conceived, either, as speaking to the public or for the public. If it has a function within the context of the contemporary public sphere, it is to use its logic—a logic of fragmentation—in order to present, in the absence of the public, a public that is always to come. Ostensibly “the public” is that for whom the exhibition is made—that into which art’s institutional, social, and historical responsibilities are projected. The values and principles on which contemporary art is predicated aren’t universal. They have historical and social specificity. Today, given the retrenchment of geopolitical differentiations, the invention of new “traditional” values, and the right-wing rhetoric that everywhere calls for breathing space for culture, “the public” is also becoming more geographically specific. Thus, one must pay heed to the exclusions that are performed by the apparent inclusiveness of the public sphere. For the public comes together intermittently, and its rendezvous is not exactly harmonious. Often, it is just not there. Or there only in principle, in numbers, but fundamentally fractured. One of the characteristic traits of contemporary art is that it allows and often incorporates these fractures. Perhaps contemporary art is the space where the fractures of the public are made most visible. Perhaps, against the museum’s contract with the public, and against Cuno’s notion of a first principle—that in the encounter with art the public sees itself reassured as belonging to a humanity that, even if fragile, is also eternal—the exhibition’s role is to dispel the notion of the public and interpolate this unilateral contract between the institution and “the public” (this “first principle”) and to present another principle, one that is closer to the public sphere’s current methods of fragmentation and dispersal, of nonidentification or disidentification. The continuing classification of works of art under the category of Relational Aesthetics is one recent failure to recognize this factor of dissociation—a factor that, incidentally, is already contained within many of the works in question. At least in principle, and in spite of some recalcitrant adherences to high modernist critique, there is no “whole” implied in exhibitions of contemporary art. In fact, it is often the aim of an exhibition to present each work autonomously, albeit in relation to the others. The public is thus, to conclude with a tentative axiom, a radically separated entity that is continuously produced and harmonized so that the production of culture—if not the culture industry—can be said to belong to

the public sphere. It is the culture industry’s phantom limb. 1 James Cuno, Whose Muse? Art Museums and the Public Trust, (New Jersey: Princeton

University Press, 2004): 7–8. My emphasis.

2 Cuno, 49–77.

3 But legitimacy itself is split between a legal and a political condition. In the legal condition,

legitimacy refers almost exclusively to the right of recognition by the father: Am I, by birth or right, a legitimate offspring? Am I, by birth or right, a legitimate citizen? In politics, however, legitimacy is determined in the direction of judgment: Am I, by how I parent, a legitimate parent? Am I, by how I rule, a legitimate ruler? Or, in the third person: Is this or that act legitimate under the law?

Question 3: What Is Art? by Chus Martínez The future of art must be, because it is cynical to state that art has no future. Art having a future means that art has a continuity, which is different from saying that art is the producer of a future, of its idea. As notions, future and utopia are not even friends. The main trait of Utopia is that everything is subordinated to conscious human will. Utopia is the longing for the realization of the perfect time as messianic eschatology: An ideal vision of rightness realized in a perfect space—as Utopia. The future is a completely different question. It does not require a perfect time and space, but the production of the very fabric of time. The future of art is, therefore, related to the question of duration, to the conditions under which art is continuously made, to its history. The future of art is the same as its end, a matter of language.

* * * Hegel and his thesis of the end of art have been extremely popular. It seems obvious because, logically speaking, all that starts may end as well. However, what really appeals to critics and people interested in the future and the end of art is not art, but the future. That is, to be able to anticipate the future, to see beyond the present. The end of art is one of my favorite statements. Every time one gets enthusiastic about art and waxes lyrical about the fact that not only are there great artists, but the real revolution of human sciences is happening now and through art, another voice pipes up that art already ended. But why would one want to collapse the future of art just because it ended? The same logic would suggest that all that ends can start again, and that there is no necessary causality. Art, indeed, needs to end. Certain parts of our logic, our language, and our discourse are unable to deal with art: Truly of a nonsensical nature, art poses active resistance to description and to interpretation. In front of the impossibility of total inadequacy between the language and the things, language kills the matter. To declare the end of art is an exercise in foreseeing. Stating it before it happens—art ends and ends, and yet it continues to be there—is a trick of the mind. This mind trick is always exposed to the dangers of animism, of having to deal with specters, of not having an object before the eyes, of losing its power in front of the material world. The mind is a magician, and even when it dies, art remains part of the show. Art is the world talking back. But not everyone is ready to listen, or even to notice. In certain moments of history, words are unable to follow properly the order of the disciplines to which they are submitted; they also seem unable to properly deal with the exercises in matter, form, experience, and thought that are happening inside the substance of art. This made art invisible for a while—not for all, but for those looking for sameness. And these same people mistook its inevitable mutation for death. On the other

hand, the mutation is death, since certain traits ceased to be there and others appeared. Nothing is more fantastic than imagining the future of art, and nothing seems more necessary in order to avoid the routine attacks on it and the recurrent dangers it is exposed to. In order to work in peace, art needs to move away.

* * * If one would ask: What is the future of art? The answer is a tautology: The future of art is art. The future of art should be art. Ad Reinhardt wrote it clearly: “Art is art and everything else is everything else.” So “what” is clear. “How” is another question. But even more important: Who poses this question? Art does not. Meaning, art is art and is not concerned with its own future. Why should it be? The question of the future is one of continuity, and therefore of systems and structures that make continuity possible. Art is not an apparatus, but it surely is also “there.” The end of art has happened many times, and so has its future.

* * * Hegel was mandatory. Meaning, one could not study philosophy and skip the Hegel course. There were only six of us in that year, so, it made sense to open some seminars to students in other departments. Hegel was the “art guy,” and the two semesters dedicated exclusively to the reading of The Phenomenology of Spirit were also highly recommended for art history students. Only male students decided to be concerned with Hegel and enrolled in the course. And, since there were only two female students in philosophy, the class had a really nice, strange tension. I landed there after an intense year at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Madrid. Also in Madrid I was “reading” Hegel. The Institute was next door to the famous Residencia de Estudiantes, the place of the intelligentsia in the short, epic Spanish Republican years. The Institute of Advanced Studies in philosophy was a place for researchers. They were very serious and concerned about the future of Spain, concerned with the ability of the country to get to “know itself,” so they spent their days also reading Hegel. The three volumes of The Phenomenology of Spirit were yellow and my eternal question before leaving home every morning was if it made sense to carry all three to the Institute. The philosophers at the center were very pleased by my attitude (I was mute for a year) and recommended me to study abroad. Meanwhile I was sent to Barcelona, where I was to “read” Hegel again—this time with a majority of future art historians. I bracket the verb “to read,” since “reading” in this context was synonymous with “holding” the book in a certain style, making sure to follow the indications for which part of the text the tutor wanted us to engage with. He also announced that if we were interested in reading about art, we should get another book: The lectures on aesthetics Hegel gave in Berlin between 1818 and 1826. It is these transcribed lectures that deal essentially with his idea of the “death” of art. The silence in the room was, as always, a constant. Nobody says a word in these contexts; it is very difficult to make a sound that would sound right to articulate a word that would sound right. The tutor rephrased his

comment as a question: Please raise your hands, those who would prefer knowing about his art theory. The “mass” decided for art. And the fun also started there. I noticed in the teacher the same joy that I saw in his Madrid colleagues as he hurried to arrive at the jolly conclusion of the death of art. The professors all belonged to the same generation that spent its youth in an oscillation between total impossibility and complete openness, and all wanted art to be dead. No one had any doubt: Art was dead, like Franco was dead. Even if it had lasted longer than expected, it finally happened, and with it, time for something else, obviously. The conversations in the Madrid seminar were like those among relatives around a corpse. One could sense that the “death” they were talking about was a recent one. Clearly they all thought that art could not be the last thing at the pinnacle of transcendence. True, it seemed important, but also too mundane in its institutions, as Hegel had already pointed out. Art was too explicitly dependent on the structures that socialized it, and too irrational to provide the expression the highest form of the spirit needed. For those professors, it seemed so necessary to be Hegelian, to acknowledge the death of the most important thing, art and culture, to properly renounce the limits and bonds created by tradition. True newness is not possible if one still enjoys painting, literature, poetry, if one perceives the past embedded in these objects carrying all previous identities. The case of the Barcelona seminar was a little different. It was not a mourning for an old and dear aunt. Here the tone was different. The teacher always smiled in announcing—probably years after he had for the first time given the same sparkling, eventful announcement—that art is DEAD! He said this while staring at the art history students, so the rest of us turned our heads toward them. What sense does it makes to study a discipline that has no subject? The first premise of philosophy is that it is purposeless, and, after this, nothing can go wrong. The case of the art historians was different: If Hegel was right, they had been maintaining a discipline with a dead substance. The future art historians did not seem to care about this. They looked back at us, probably thinking that one trait of philosophy is to try and abolish anything that could potentially turn into a subject. Nothing tangible should be the correlate of thinking; thinking could never be about something. If art was just pure speculation, the philosophers would claim it

as philosophy; if it involves matter and form, then it needs to perish. It seemed true. In the eyes of the teacher one could see his happiness in his rigorous avoidance of being distracted by any toy.

* * * But whatever quarrel took place regarding the disciplinary and postdisciplinary thinking of philosophy toward other forms of knowledge, the fact was that the death of art was a political murder. Not in the hands of Hegel (even taking into account that he was a contemporary of Napoleon, a fact that also opens up to a possible reading of his statement). But in the hands of the Spanish philosopher the words of Hegel were rehearsed with a bitter sense of not being part of life anymore, with an acute sense of a new separation between the generations, provided by art. Art must be dead. He could not imagine himself being part of the huge movement of renewal that was taking place in the country after the death of Franco. All these proliferating multiplications of gestures, forms, voices, and, among all, expression. No, Hegel had said so, and that is the way it was. He was an ex-seminarian, like many other philosophers of his generation. Families with no means or from a rural milieu used to send their kids to the seminary to study, to become a priest or eventually to rejoin secular life under another form. In his case, he reentered society as a philosopher. A true Hegelian, he was. Democracy is one thing, another thing is all this passion for art—contemporary art, they called it now. The word “contemporary” was even more irritating to him than “art.” It was contemporary art he really needed to kill. Art was anyhow dead, since nobody but he and some of his old friends and their new wives was interested in doing a tour to see the Old Masters. His colleagues in the Kantian seminar tried to critically address this notion of the “master,” but everyone knows that Kantians sell out quickly to all new trends, even in academia. He was convinced of a huge difference between what art was and what it had become. However, even his summer tours were slightly changing, and the grand tour cities were slowly being replaced by Paris, first, to see the Pompidou, and then New York, a biennial in one of the summers in between, and then London. This became an obsession, and he started to call other “witnesses” in the case of art’s death. He heard I knew somebody in New York who was also a

big defender of this thesis. And he started reading Arthur Danto. In English, even. Danto was also convinced that Hegel was entirely right: Art had come to an end. Art resembles life so well that it is life itself. All these Brillo boxes that the eyes cannot distinguish from the real ones in the supermarket: They all confirm that art is over!

* * * Sitting twice a week in that seminar, witnessing his brave attempts to kill art, was convincing me. All through Europe and especially in Spain, new spaces for contemporary art were created day after day. What was he saying, then? Was it a strange form of post-traumatic denial, this continuous negation of art? What were these spaces containing, if not art? The public arena was taken by what seemed to be a new interest in contemporary art, in how it was capable of producing social interaction, experience, economy, knowledge. It all looked like a sudden transformation, but it was not. The institutional life of art, as well as all the discourses in favor of it or critical of it, were capable of functioning as both signs and organizers of democracy in the face of post-Capitalism. The institutional life of art performed the duties of the system. Values such as transparency, citizenship, and knowledge were working as performers of a system capable of critique, of self-reflection. It all pointed toward the future. The art institutions became the new technology, and art the new science of the social. Unlike in past art institutions, the historical transmission of certain knowledge was not at stake, but rather the very act of instantiating the future, that is, rendering it present, giving it a concrete form. The contemporary art institution was a space for a particular form of rehearsal, a place where the visitor, the “everyone,” could afford these collective rehearsals, and thus to engage in an anticipatory futuring of the self. Seeing the future was not interesting anymore, when one could perform it. The practice of a technology focused on organizing new forms of participation, in the social and in the political, took over as one of the main functions for this particular public space. Art spaces became plazas for an advanced, interactive leisure technology of experience, functioning less as representation spaces than as instruments of self-fashioning for what one was to become. And the same was true of the anti-institutional voices. It was all part of the same dialectical exercise oriented toward a rhetoric of politics where, through the limits of the system, one could play with them

and learn at the same time about the bad features of the system, the double moral of continuous growth. And so emerged a movement against the undifferentiated time/future of corporations, or the flow of capital, claiming the new art institutions as constructions of a more local, differentiated time with which one could be connected. The cities also saw an opportunity of futuring themselves, by both being local and at the same time catapulting themselves ahead of the national time. The cities became the locus to signify the world, the nation, and the local area, and, at the same time, to signify that the “international,” in the form of contemporary art, has arrived. And yet this man was insisting on the death of art. He could have been another reactionary voice asking who needs art if one has economy, but this was not the case. He was not interested in art, nor he was a detractor of it. He was just trying, through the Hegelian mantra, to understand the culture of transformation we were going through. And like in a self-fulfilling prophecy, art started to disappear, as well as the voice of the artists. The whole discourse that was taking place was generated around policies, the different ways art and the artists performed in power, in the market, inside or in the inside/outside relationship with structures. The futuring of the self needed strategies and certain aesthetics, as well as ways to represent these, to make them visible, and the contemporary provided expectations to a sensuous form, a form of the time. Art was dead only insofar as its social, political, and institutional circumstances were part of the discussion, ensnared in a sentimental form of empiricism. Hegel, in fact, never said that art is dead. This is a detail of no importance, but it is true that he did not use a biological metaphor. He claimed something more interesting: That, eventually, it would come to an end. And he needed to come to this conclusion in order to resolve the conflict between the bourgeois subject’s drive for freedom and its desire to express unity with the world. The more autonomous the subject grows, the less it can justify its existence; the more full-bloodedly it realizes its essence, the more alienated and contingent it becomes. And so radical liberty is radical homelessness. Hegel, of course, never thought that art could think, and that its thinking

could actually be the same as he was expressing for the human, for the spirit. One may think of the overcoming of the human and its institutions in order to become radically free, in order to realize its dream of pure productivity without a product.

* * * After some months of listening nonstop to the compulsory attempts to kill art from a growing group of Hegelians, I understood that it was love, and not hate, that drove them. Fearing that he could be mistaken for a resentful, midcareer male philosopher unable to get rid of his old values—or to have a proper affair with a younger student that would revitalize his image—he started to invite friends. He sent a letter to Arthur Danto, who accepted to come to Barcelona to explain his views. Danto’s books were not translated into Spanish, nor were they about to be. His coming to the faculty, a concrete building ugly like ugliness can be in a university context, was anticipated like a “second coming.” In 1953, in the hardest years of Franco’s regime, Luis García Berlanga made the most amazing movie I have ever seen, Welcome Mr. Marshall! In the movie, Villar del Rio is a small town some hours north of Madrid. Somebody working in an office in the big city hears that some American diplomats are about to visit Spain and will pass through Villar del Rio on their way to the capital. They conceive of a plan: They will disguise this Castilian village as an Andalusian one. They will wear Andalusian costumes and hire a prominent flamenco performer to impress the Americans. Flowers in their hair and hopeful of benefiting under the Marshall Plan, they learn to sing a song: “Americans, we receive you with joy! Americans, you come to Spain healthy and good-looking!” (Americanos, os recibimos con alegria! Americanos, vienen a España guapos y sanos!). The appearance of Danto had that Villar del Rio effect on us. The letter was written by one of the students whose mother was from the United Kingdom, because the tutor all of a sudden realized that he did not speak English. He was in a panic and dedicated another class to the allencompassing hegemony of the English language: An imperialist discourse, deaf to the achievements of thought in French and German as well as to the intelligent reflection on the human condition carried out by Spanishspeaking literature. However, true or not, his English remained the same.

He subsequently called on another prominent philosopher, who had spent two semesters at Harvard, to address the Hegel question and determine if any of the mute students were fluent in English. He was a man of the world, this thinker, who actually was better known as a writer because of his incredibly acute sense of humor. He started the class in English right away, imitating an American accent and screaming, “Art is dead, isn’t it?” and “Now, young people, what is going to become of you?” “Think,” he continued, “that the only genre we master is disbelief. We are not good at producing anything, so we must doubt with style what everyone else produced.” And then he tried to continue the class in English. The scene was incredibly funny, but nevertheless useless to provoke any Englishspeaking proficiency on our part. Danto was arriving and the only remaining option was a translator. By then it was not necessary to promote the event. A photocopy was posted at the door of the main aula of the so-called Faculty of Human Sciences, and a couple of telephone calls to the neighboring departments would guarantee the attendance of no less than 400 to 500 students and staff. The most active ones were the “pre-Capitalists,” what in other countries were known as archeologists, who were always attending every lecture to check if it was politically correct. The day arrived and everyone was there, dressed casually. The pundit of “metaphysics,” normally wearing a bow tie, was wearing a turtleneck under his jacket, and the women faculty replaced their flat shoes with salon-style heels. The six philosophy students and the art history students of the same course were the first in line. We were also kind of nervous, as we had been asked to bring “a good example of art” for Professor Danto to analyze after his lecture.

* * * After an introduction by our teacher, Danto started a really lively lecture. Art came to an end with Pop: A nice coincidence that the embodiment of American art was also the end of it. Art merged with the real in such an intelligent way that it was impossible to tell them apart. If the main goal of art was getting to know the nature of reality, then it was suddenly achieved, when can and washpowder packages were declared art. We all felt that even if a soup can was now art, nothing was proved but an interesting twist in realism. The argument was really catchy, made for those who like surprises in the museum galleries and were wondering, if after the over-quoted Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, something of the kind could still happen. And, surely, the boxes and the cans did their part. Art never claimed any ontology to state that it could be more real than the real was, for that matter, otherwise all marble statues could be claimed to dream of being flesh. Accordingly, all these cans were happy being real cans; they were as happy as stone objects being real stone objects, or metal sculptures being metal, or wooden art objects being wood. True, a can representing a can could be taken for a can. But, so what? It could also be a sign of the end of cans, not of art. However, sitting there listening to him was reassuring. Yes, he was so pleasant, smiling at us all with the headphones of the simultaneous translation, reacting to arguments and jokes with a lag of just 30 seconds. We all smiled with our eyes, and we all secretly loved Mr. Marshall for a night. Sure enough, he seemed as reactionary and incapable of thinking outside dialectics and the philosophy of history as our teachers were. But he seemed happier, without shadows, ready to encounter our young souls. We all wished he could take us to New York to tell us more about how the world would talk, think, look—after the end of art. He stopped talking. Big applause. Even the pre-Capitalist students clapped. The head of the art history department said that the lecture was exceptional and that we needed more lectures like it. Questions? Silence. Mr. Danto observed that this was already a sign that we all recognized that

art had come to an end. Laughter. Our teacher said that the class had prepared a question. He made a gesture with his hand, and I moved toward the VHS. The projector was on. The color code appeared, an acute sound, the timer, and then the title on a black background: “Action 1. Orinando (pissing) by Itziar Okariz.” Then the image. A woman in the middle of the pedestrian section of one of the Manhattan-Brooklyn bridges, pissing. A good-looking woman with a black dress and black sneakers, in daylight, in the urban landscape, pissing. Silence.

* * * The students were now all looking at the philosopher. The philosopher was looking at me. I was looking at my teacher. He smiled, our guest. Finally he said that it was indeed very interesting and that his first reaction was to think that this was, indeed, a very good example of art or an “art hangover” after art had died. He asked me why I had chosen this example. I said that it took me a long time to think of an example that would not be an object, that would refer to a different form of being art. But also that I wanted to find something that would be as similar as possible to the can, to the object being both for real and a fiction of art. The translator tried his best. He made a strange face, like when one listens to an unpleasant family surprise over the phone. That kind of a grin was on his face. He said he did not understand what this example had in common with the soup can. What was the similarity? Everybody in the entire room turned their heads, and there was a noise of bodies moving over the wood-furnished aula to be able to see me when I answered. I said, I thought this was not an object but an action identical to another very well known one of a man pissing in the street. I thought—I said—that it was interesting that only the refusal of sitting down made the image so powerful, a young woman standing on the street pissing. All of a sudden, like the can, she recalled an everyday reality, not that of a supermarket but of the bad habits of some people, recalling as well some gender patterns. But she was not claiming that pissing in the streets was coming to an end. Moreover, this gesture—like the can— was not killing art but actually revitalizing it. He started laughing and said he never understood why these things—pointing to the image projected—were so popular nowadays, but that perhaps there was something to it. Yes, this will be my next book, one needs to talk after the end of art. “Thank you,” he said, “to all of you, it was lovely!” I was also relieved. I was not worried at all about the end of art or its

future, since that is art’s concern and not ours. I did, however, need a letter of reference to go abroad to study, and I felt a bit like I was in the Berlanga movie, risking my hope to be rescued by the Marshall plan.

Question 4: What About Collecting? by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy In front of me, stacked over my desk, are more than two dozen publications on or about curating. They are mainly anthologies; some are interview books. There are also a couple of journals and several folders of article clippings on the subject. I’ve read most, re-read a few, skimmed all. I’ve highlighted sections, marked a page here and there. I’ve used these publications throughout the years for inspiration. They’ve helped me think about ways of working with artists, find ways of resolving institutional challenges, and creatively engage existing or new publics. I’ve used these publications for reference to articulate curatorial processes for certain projects, and to think about exhibition formats and their histories. As of late, however, I find myself referring to them less and less often. It is not because they are no longer influential for me or because I now consider them irrelevant. It is because they mostly do not address one of the aspects of curating that I am currently exploring. Let me disclose this up front: After having spent a decade curating in nonprofit arts organizations and public institutions, where commissioning art was my modus operandi, I’ve spent a year curating a collection of contemporary art for a private foundation, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. In this new role, research and art acquisitions are tasks finely intertwined with building a discourse around a body of existing works and a current set of practices. (I have yet to begin interpreting the collection publicly, through exhibitions or other initiatives, but I will come to the topic of activating collections further on.) On a regular basis, colleagues ask me if I still curate. I’ve found the question both surprising and disconcerting, but productive nonetheless. My first response was the obvious, or so I thought: Curating collections includes devising a selection criterion and entails a program, a direction, as well as the caring for and interpretation of artworks and, I will add, the consideration of artistic practices. I keep forgetting that common sense does not exist; dominant discourses do. Contemporary curating is generally associated with exhibition making. Most importantly, I keep

overlooking that collecting is tied to the art market, money, interests, and other touchy subjects that are perceived, perhaps, as somewhat shameful or too real; that these are subjects if not forces that defy the autonomy that artistic and curatorial practices tend to ferociously defend. Eventually, I stopped making such an effort to respond to the question, and instead put my mind to understanding how such a question could arise. This is when I began noticing that most publications on curating elude collecting practices of contemporary art, whether at the institutional or the individual level, the public or the private sector. Sure, there are texts about collecting—institutional histories, collection catalogues, interviews with and profiles of individual collectors, and publications of exhibitions studying artistic tendencies of archiving and collecting. But why is it that in print and in discussions on contemporary curating, the subject of art collecting practices fails to be addressed? What are the paradigms that have formed the dominant discourses of contemporary curating, where temporality, which appears to be entangled in the concept of newness but is not its equivalent, is championed over permanence, which in turn seems associated with collections? How is it that in the foundational contemporary curatorial study programs, courses on collecting are missed? What could be some of the topics on collecting, if it were to be addressed in curatorial discussions? And, ultimately, why would it even be relevant to address collecting practices in the frame of contemporary curating? In the past two decades, the working dynamic between artists and curators, and between curators and institutions, has been the focal subject of many discussions on contemporary curating. The leading questions have been how ideas are manifested spatially, negotiated contextually, and mediated publicly. One reason why collecting practices are largely absent in discussions of contemporary curating is that many of the individuals considered paradigmatic for having expanded curatorial practice were not in charge of building or interpreting collections. And if they were, that work and their curatorial contributions to the subject of collecting practices are as yet unexplored. Another explanation, somewhat connected to the first, is that exhibitions involving context- and site-specific art have been fundamental to expanding contemporary curatorial practice.1 Such exhibitions turn people and places into hosts and guests of an art exhibition. They also turn site into situation, and give preference to subjects over

objects.2 That curatorial shift owes much to exhibitions of “new art” in the 1960s.3 A special emphasis has since been placed on the conversationdriven relationship between the artist and the curator, a collaborative relationship that impacts both the making and the format of exhibitions.4 These generally contextual and intention-weighty discussions began widening curatorial practice,5 and by the 1990s, the role of the contemporary art curator, beyond the old dichotomy of the connoisseur or the auteur-cum–exhibition maker, was starting to be publicly voiced and defined.6 Descriptive terms abounded, some of which are still in currency, such as the curator as catalyst, cultural agent, and producer.7

For better or worse, the articulation of contemporary curatorial practices was assisted by the emergence of formal study programs. Contemporary curating came under both the spotlight and the microscope.8 In 1992 the Royal College of Art in London began a graduate program in curating. De Appel in Amsterdam initiated its Curatorial Programme in 1994. That same year in New York, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), which was founded in 1990, launched its curating master’s degree program. These three programs all started with, and continue to maintain a focus on, curating contemporary art;9 of these, only CCS Bard, where I studied from 1998 to 2000, developed a museum with an art collection alongside its program of study.10 At the time of my studies there, it appeared that the museum was under a certain scrutiny. Publication titles such as On the Museum’s Ruins and Museum Without Walls and the exhibitions “Mining the Museum” and “Museum as Muse” were influential and incessantly cited.11 Institutional Critique was an established art practice and mindset, as were revisionist methodologies, thanks to poststructuralism and postcolonial theories.12 Informal though prevalent discussions at school also focused on networks and contemporary art institutions in Eastern Europe created post-1989, and on the art spaces there that were crumbling, redefining themselves, or starting up on the occasion of the political and socioeconomic reorganization of the region. Political changes were indeed triggering or, in some cases, simply “internationalizing” other kinds of festival-driven organizations, such as the contemporary art biennial exhibition format.13 Curatorial practice was imbued with connotations of political efficacy and a kind of mandate to carry out cultural critique; curators were now expected to produce exhibitions and discourses that were somehow alternatives to shows of celebration, spectacle, and populism.

Somewhat in the background at school, yet at the forefront in the media, were the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao and the market frenzy surrounding the YBAs; their media impact was no doubt a major contributing factor in the unprecedented popularization that contemporary art was enjoying, and has since, on a global scale. In the classroom, however, critiques centered on the meaning of a museum name being franchised, and on questioning, among other things, why the publicly funded Brooklyn Museum was taking on Sensations, an exhibition of contemporary British art from Charles Saatchi’s private collection.14 Not even then—whether in seminars, essays, or informal debates—did discussions of contemporary curating methodically address art collecting practices at either the institutional or individual level.15 At CCS Bard there was a single though well-intentioned practicum with the goal of collectively curating, as a class, an exhibition of artworks from its museum collection. Even then, the collection was a given, and the process lacked any sustained dialogue about its makeup or the museum’s acquisition processes. My recollections of our discussions in graduate school—which were far more animated than this version—drive home how little attention was given to the histories and precedents and case studies surrounding collecting. If art collecting practices were addressed in discussions of contemporary curating, I think that these could be some guiding topics: collaboration, contingencies, and responsiveness to art innovations. To elucidate on these, I will briefly touch upon some cases that I’ve been researching, leaving for a different occasion other ones, such as experimental art dealers in the 1960s, genealogies of video art, the parameters set by time-based work, et cetera. I approach this text as a work in progress and am sharing highlights of current research from firsthand experience. Hopefully this text is the start of a conversation.

In regards to collaboration, two cases come to mind, one being the independent initiative Société Anonyme, which could very well be considered a proto-curatorial office, and the other being the German Kunstverein. The Société Anonyme was founded by Kathryn Dreier, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. The peculiarity of this itinerant organization was that its mission included activities of both programming and collecting. With a pedagogical mission,16 it created dozens of programs and

exhibitions of “progressive art” between 1920 and 1940; it also developed a collection, which began with donations by the artists it exhibited. When it ceased its activities, it donated its collection to a research museum, the Yale University Art Gallery.17 What I find interesting about the German Kunstverein is its foundational membership-based administrative model, which allowed this type of institution to be, for at least a century, financially self-sustaining and culturally edifying.18 In 1836 in Hamburg, the Kunstverein model introduced a culture of art collecting to its community. Acquisitions were made through the investment of membership fees, and artworks were distributed to members through a raffle system. I find two particular things interesting in these examples. First is that the founders of the Société were artist-curators, and those of the Kunstvereine were the burgeoning middle class, not the State or aristocrats—that is, groups of people rather than a single patron.19 Also interesting are the “ends” of the collections. Instead of founding a museum to house its collection, the Société strengthened an existing institution, and also ensured that future audiences would be able to study and experience the collection. The collection is exemplary of the art and material culture of the times as well as the Société’s aspirations and artistic community—a window into its belief in the progressive, the modern, the new. In the case of the Kunstverein, the raffle system (which, to my knowledge, is no longer in place) encouraged art appreciation and an especially horizontal formation of a collector base community. The potential of this latter condition shaped a culture of philanthropy. When I mention the topic of contingencies in collecting practices, I mean to say how certain collecting policies and activities unexpectedly circumscribe art histories. Looking at institutional collecting policies may help inform current explorations of the meaning of the contemporary in art. For example, consider the formative years of the painting and sculpture collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since its origins, MoMA “conceived of a collection that would ‘metabolically’ discard older works as it acquired newer ones, to honor the spirit of ‘modern’ as meaning of the present, and ever-changing.”20 That didn’t exactly happen. What did happen is that “the modern” became a period with a beginning and an end, a territory within the field of art history, a project and ideology that preceded “the contemporary.”

The metabolic principle, originally envisioned to tactically address the constant contemporary, was considered again some decades later in the same city by the New Museum of Contemporary Art. While pronouncing itself a museum from the start, the New Museum didn’t declare outright a mission to form an art collection until 1978, a year after its opening. That was when the museum initiated its “Semi-Permanent Collection, a concept that would allow the Museum to rotate and review its collection by deaccessioning works after ten years. The idea was never fully implemented, however.”21 The driving question giving shape to this policy —“Could a collection of contemporary art remain contemporary?”—was revisited by an exhibition at their venue in 1995, yet not much tackled thereafter.22 In my current research, I’ve also been studying how certain private collections have been made publicly accessible, and the ways in which such shifts have generated new institutional models for the exhibition and conservation of contemporary art. In that investigation, I’ve particularly focused on how contemporary artistic practices shape collecting practices, and how these form new kinds of museums. For instance, consider Philippa de Menil and her husband, Heiner Friedrich, who created Dia Art Foundation in 1974. Their collecting practice was inspired by a particular set of artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Part of Dia’s collection is sited throughout the United States, at the original sites where the artworks were created by the artists. Among other projects, it includes their commission and ongoing care of Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), an earthwork located in New Mexico, and since 1999 the acquisition and care of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Dia Foundation’s commitment to site-specific art, long-term exhibitions, and commissioning work is also characteristic of its acquisition and conservation policy. While Dia’s collection also includes discrete works displayed in galleries, namely at its building in Beacon, New York, its multi-sited version of a museum proposes an alternative model that responds to and respects a new art form. Some of the questions to which I try to respond today center around the collection or conservation of project work emanating from social art practices and similar forms of current art

making endemically sited in particular places. The differences between Earthworks and socially engaged projects are no doubt plenty. One such is centered on communities, yet both require an experience of site, involving a pilgrimage for a public to experience the artwork in person. That social projects also have ends—these mostly begin and end, become something other that is far from a general understanding of art; these do not have intentions of being collectable but of becoming catalysts for change— unlike that of the art object begs the question of whether a collection in the traditional sense, of a museum, is what is needed to house them for future experiences. What the options could be, I don’t know yet with clarity. But the reason for thinking of options is clear: A series of photographs under a vitrine, or books and videos, only tell about these projects, and fail to generate the experiences that they put in motion. I often wonder if a new kind of multi-sited museum must be created to study, conserve, and necessarily reimagine this work as time goes on. So this is where I am at—with questions fueled by curiosity triggered when studying a variety of collections and institutions, and when visiting artists’ studios, seeing exhibitions, traveling to experience projects and art scenes. Without a doubt, I was giving much thought to collections before joining the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. This was particularly while I was directing Museo Tamayo in Mexico City some years ago. But the curatorial challenges there were so different; at that museum, more situations than questions needed response. My focus then was devising ways of “activating” an existing museum collection that had been largely unattended precisely because it failed to cohesively represent a time period, artistic practice, or art scene. A brief introduction to that kind of collecting practice, which I sense is commonly appearing nowadays in different guises: During the 1970s and 1980s, the artist Rufino Tamayo formed a collection of international contemporary art expressly for a museum. His vision for the collection was influenced by his travel experiences (his art was recognized abroad earlier than in Mexico, his native country) as well as his anxiety over a certain sense of nationalism in the arts of Mexico (as denoted by the constant praise of Muralism). Tamayo’s aim was to present visual art, artistic concerns, and philosophical topics being explored abroad to a local audience. In order to form this collection, Tamayo mainly acquired works through exchanges and

purchases carried out with his own gallery, Marlborough. Thus, the collection is largely the product of Tamayo’s and that gallery’s vision of art. The museum opened to the public in 1981 under the auspices of a corporation, Televisa. Then, in 1986, after several disagreements with the museum administration, Tamayo requested that the institution and its collection be nationalized. And so it happened. Museo Tamayo passed from being privately administered to joining the national network of state-run museums. Tamayo and his wife, Olga, who had been pretty much singlehandedly forming the collection, passed away some years later. Since the State lacked a systematic program for acquisitions, the collection was then stalled, like those of most other public art collections in Mexico. Museo Tamayo’s collection was seldom incremented, primarily through donations by foundations or exhibiting artists, and the chronological and discursive gaps widened between its temporary exhibitions and its permanent collection. To add to this, in the last decade, collections of contemporary art in Mexico have been almost exclusively created privately, by individuals; in some cases these collections are made publicly accessible in galleries founded by their owners. (Not that this situation is so disconnected from Museo Tamayo’s own history.) In the back of my mind, I thought about Inés Katzenstein’s prognosis for private collectors opening museums: “Within institutionally weak contexts … such projects tend to mislead audiences in terms of what they should expect of a museum.”23 What may those expectations be? No doubt they are of curatorially articulating how and why things get there—how and why they are collected, displayed, and valued. And no doubt it is a curatorial framework that can provide a sense of rationale… or whim. If the Museo Tamayo collection was not exactly representative of socalled international and contemporary art, there were still ways to work with it meaningfully. Artworks in the collection could shed light on current practices, could be shown to discuss pertinent issues of our times, could be used for curatorial experimentation. To create a program that would ensure this at the museum, I looked at several contemporary curatorial initiatives

that were creatively activating collections. There were several influential initiatives, and I will mention two here. One was a program led by the then– chief curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Marysol Nieves, and the other was a series of exhibitions by Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. At the Bronx Museum, Nieves invited artists to use the collection for creating projects. The most playful was Manicurated (2001) by Judi Werthein. For this part-exhibition, part–participatory project, Werthein displayed a number of artworks in one of the museum galleries and set up a manicure salon at its center, where audiences could have their nails professionally painted according to the artworks of their choice, all the while discussing artistic intent and content. At the Van Abbemuseum, the ongoing project Play Van Abbe uses the collection in different scenarios—exhibitions, performances, lectures, et cetera—responding to the question of an institution’s mission to collect. One recent exhibition in this series, The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flaneur (and the Worker) (2011) paid attention to forms of experiencing culture, and accordingly offered mediation tools to accompany the exhibition. At the Museo Tamayo, the program for activating the collection had different iterations. We launched a magazine, Rufino, and commissioned emerging art curators and historians to write about artworks of their choice in the collection, whether the artworks were in the galleries or in storage. The exhibition program was quite diverse. The curator Raimundas Malašauskas worked with the artists Gintaras Didžiapetris and Rosalind Nashashibi to “shrink” the museum floor plan into a single gallery and display artworks that confused world proportions. The curator Daniela Perez worked with the artist Jorge Méndez Blake in creating an installation taking as its cue the personal library of Rufino Tamayo, which is part of the museum’s holdings. In like manner, the curator Juan Carlos Pereda worked with the artist Alejandro Cesarco to make a work using photographs and 8millimeter films from Rufino Tamayo’s research and travels. The curator Magali Arriola has been working with the artist Ryan Gander to revisit the first installation that entered the museum collection, during the days of Olga and Rufino Tamayo’s acquisitions: an artwork by George Segal. None of these curatorial approaches used the collection to offer grand narratives of what so-called modern or contemporary art was or is. They did do something just as important: research a collection and give it visibility using a curatorial rationale. Whether by experiencing a single exhibition or

the entire series, the proposal offered the public different ways of experiencing a corpus of work as a “current of thought.” 1 Since the late 1980s and throughout the early 1990s, sites to consider in exhibitions ranged from

an entire city or a particular neighborhood to an abandoned or inhabited building, and, to some lesser extent, a collection or storage facility at a museum. Art projects by Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser, among others, are exemplary of this latter idea of reviewing and exposing rationales (and whims) of museum collections.

2 Among the most influential exhibitions of the time that championed this curatorial approach

were Chambres d’amis (1986) in Belgium; Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art (1991) in the United States; and Sonsbeek: Project Unite (1993) in Holland. The Migrateurs project series (started in 1993) of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was also important. Initiated in 2003 by Hans Ulrich Obrist, it was “an attempt to locate the exhibition both inside and outside the museum … to have exhibitions where one least expects them.” See “Can Exhibitions Be Collected: Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed by Noah Horowitz” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating, But Were Afraid to Ask (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011): 149.

3 For example, to the emphasis on site and its relationship to the multidisciplinary and the

participatory in exhibitions such as Dylaby: A Dynamic Labyrinth (1962) at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Hon: She—A Cathedral (1966) at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. By the mid-1960s, however, site slipped away from the confines of gallery spaces. See Pontus Hultén interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist in A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2010): 40– 41. This interview was originally conducted in 1996 and published in 1997. On another note, these abovementioned exhibitions were probably influenced in some way by avant-garde exhibitions such as El Lissitzky’s interactive installations, Fredrick Kiesler’s exhibition displays, and Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist exhibitions. Dalí’s Birth of Venus (1939) especially comes to mind when looking at images of Hon: She—A Cathedral. Anyway, what is palpable is that a certain sensibility, a playful attitude, from those earlier public presentations of art trickled into the exhibitions of the 1960s. In New York, Seth Siegelaub’s intent to find “different ways and possibilities to show art, different contexts and environments” ensued in the creation of a variety of exhibition formats. See Seth Siegelaub in an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist in A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2010): 120–21. This interview was originally conducted in 2000 and published in 2011. Concurrently, the 1969 group exhibitions Op Losse Schroeven, curated by Wim Beeren for the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and When Attitudes Become Form by Harald Szeemann for the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, were literally groundbreaking presentations of “new art.” See Christian Rattemeyer, Exhibiting the New Art, vol. 1 (London: Afterall, 2010). Szeemann’s exhibition was as influential as his ensuing resignation from his directorial position at the Kunsthalle Bern, marking the start of his trajectory as an “independent curator.” Daniel Birnbaum points out that, with his resignation, Szeemann became “something that had never previously existed, assuming a role that would affect the most fundamental operations of the artworld community for decades to come: the independent curator.” See “When Attitude Becomes Form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann” in Artforum (summer 2005): 55.

4 I make this observation based on the curators’ description of their practice and processes

toward exhibition making as noted in A Brief History of Curating. It is important to note that many of the interviews collected in that book were conducted and published between the mid1990s and the early 2000s, for instance the one with Pontus Hulté n in 1996–97; Seth Siegelaub in 2000–2001; Harald Szeemann in 1995–96. This is also telling of their relevance in 1990s exhibition making and expanding notions of curating.

5 These relationships triggered questions such as where and when art was made, of how and when

to make it public, and by who or for whom it was done. With time, that dialogic relationship became more inclusive of other exhibition interlocutors, from specialists to general audiences, provoking, among other things, more event-based work and socially engaged projects.

6 In the mid-1990s, Artforum began consistently publishing interviews with curators discussing

their exhibitions and practices. There were other attempts, including Michael Brenson’s groundbreaking essay (and conference report) “The Curator’s Moment,” published in Art Journal, vol. 57, no. 4 (winter 1998): 16–27. Also see Jens Hoffmann, “A Certain Tendency of Curating” in Paul O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects (London: Open Editions, 2007): 137–42. And take note of the curatorial journal that Hoffmann founded, The Exhibitionist, whose first number was published in January 2010.

7 See Stopping the Process?, a publication that crystallizes then-current explorations on curatorial

tasks. It’s considerably a seed publication on the subject of contemporary curating to the many conferences, books, and articles that followed.

8 I do somewhat apologize that the influences I mention here are, with few exceptions, pretty

much focusing on Western art and exhibitions. This was a reality of the accessible references (I had) and the dominant discourses (I participated in and that were) circulating and being discussed at the time. If anything, the “professionalization” in the field of curating contemporary art—fueled by both art history and curatorial study programs shaped in the 1980s and 1990s, the communities they created, and the exhibitions, art criticism, and scholarship that followed—have significantly diversified the pool of references and discussions. A handful of now-seminal publications dedicated to the history of exhibitions were influential on my decision to apply to school, and have been key references to the field at large: Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition (1994) and the anthology Thinking About Exhibitions (1996) edited by Bruce Ferguson and Reesa Greenberg. Another formative book of the times was The Power of Display (1998), a historical analysis of exhibition design focused on the Museum of Modern Art in New York, by Mary Anne Staniszewski. Paradoxically, in the three foundational curating schools that I list here, few to none of the authors in the abovementioned publications were fully involved in the formation of these programs or in the day-to-day of these schools, nor were key practitioners responsible for making curating as elastic a practice as it was then or even as it is today. As the school year began at CCS Bard, during the fall of 1998, we were handed the publication Stopping the Process?, an anthology of statements by active curators reflecting on their practices.

9 At that point, contemporary art largely referred to postwar art using as its basis a Western art

historical canon, even if Conceptual art of the 1960s and after was the main impulse, or if group exhibitions of art after 1989, which were presented at the time, posited a new historical episteme. On another note, many other institutions worldwide were creating study courses or full-on programs of the kind.

10 See CCS Bard’s statement on its official website (last accessed on November 11, 2011):

http://www.bard.edu/ccs/museum/collection. This is an excerpt: “The foundation of the Center’s permanent collection is the Marieluise Hessel Collection of 1,780 paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper, artists’ books, videos, and video installations from the mid-1960s to the present… The permanent collection also has works that have been given to the Center by Eileen and Michael Cohen, Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz, Asher Edelman, Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Robert Gober, Joan and Gerald Kimmelman, Eileen Harris Norton and Peter Norton, Toni and Martin Sosnoff, Thea Westreich, and Ethan Wagner… The collection also provides the basis for faculty research and teaching.” My summary of recollections of the courses and discussions held during my student years at CCS Bard are written for the sole purpose of this text’s argument on the lack of attention given to art collecting practices in discussions of contemporary curating.

11 I want to thank Niko Vicario for making this observation, and for reminding me how influential

On the Museum’s Ruins was during that time.

12 There are many examples to give on this subject. Let me name a couple of instances that were

influential to me, as they pertained to critiques of curatorial and institutional practices: Brian Wallis was analyzing the impact of neo-liberalism in the scholarship, sponsorship, and media representation of nation-centered exhibitions, and Mari Carmen Ramirez was breaking down discourses “beyond the fantastic” in U.S. exhibitions of Latin American art. See Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Beyond the Fantastic: Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art” in Art Journal, vol. 51, no. 4 (winter 1992): 60–68; Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation” in Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 2006): 22–31; and Brian Wallis, “Selling Nations …” in Museum Culture (London: Routledge, 1994/2011): 265–81.

13 While the itinerant biennial, Manifesta, whose first edition was in 1996, can be symptomatic of

the lure for mobility topical of the times, the intentions of the incipient Johannesburg Biennial for creating an artistic event to consolidate communities in post-Apartheid South Africa signaled a wider political context for cultural work. (The Johannesburg Biennial closed in 1997, with its second edition curated by Okwui Enwezor.) Paulo Herkenhoff’s use of the concept of anthropophagy as a lens to look at art in the 23rd São Paulo Biennial (1996) overturned any prior understanding of influence and hegemony. See Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø, eds., The Biennial Reader (Norway: Bergen Kunsthalle and Hatje Cantz, 2010).

14 Courses were led by the art critic Michael Brenson and the artist Andrea Fraser, among others.

15 There is no question that at school—whether in study programs of art history, curatorial or

museum studies, et cetera—only the basics of “contemporary art” are actually learned. Most of one’s knowledge of “the contemporary” actually takes place in the field, through the experience of working at institutions and with artists. My observations here of “what was taught and discussed” at school are to emphasize how the discursive weight in and of curatorial practice, diminished attention to the histories and future care of the object of art (and anything can be turned into a “work,” as Conceptualism in the 1960s, and performance today, has proved). It is also to advocate that curatorial study programs can, at best, teach forms of thinking curatorially, and at worst champion spaces and forms of exhibition making. It is also to suggest that, as it turns out, with the market pressures, it is ideal to learn some of the histories of art collections and issues on collecting practices.

16 Their mission was to study and introduce so-called progressive art in America, namely, the

“new art” of the times and what is referred to today as Modern art.

17 The Société Anonyme closed its operations once the Museum of Modern Art in New York was

founded. Marcel Duchamp, who executed the will of Kathryn Dreier, herself an artist, art patron, and collector, was responsible for donating to public museums many of the artworks in her private collection. This included Duchamp’s own work in Dreier’s collection, which was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

18 Seeing its possibilities—and the artistic interests and financial possibilities of many young

professionals today—it is surprising how a programming institution such as the Kunstverein, and similar collaborative collecting initiatives, have not been influential to newer contemporary art institutions and collections. Sort of a disclosure: I am a board member of the Kunstverein Amsterdam, founded in 2009 by Krist Gruijthuijsen and Maxine Kopsa. The administrative model and funding strategies of this flexible contemporary art institution reflect and test the membership model, and while it’s been a challenge and, for the time being, mostly subsidized through public and private grants, it is slowly expanding a community of audiences and members. Considering the severe public funding cuts for arts in the Netherlands, which were announced this year, the model of the Kunstverein emerges at a timely moment in Amsterdam.

19 See Barbara Hess, “Kunstverein in Crisis” in Metropolis M no. 5, 2010. She introduces this

pointing out that “The early founders of Kunstvereins were generally neither philanthropists nor rich patrons, but representatives of an aspiring, wealthy bourgeoisie wishing, in the period leading up to the 1848 revolution, to challenge the supremacy of the aristocracy not only in economic terms but also culturally.” In this illuminating article, Hess also describes the ways in which the Kunstverein has evolved both over time—due to wars, changes in the field, et cetera—and in terms of its members, missions, and visions. So has its finances and funding base.

20 Inspired by the relationship that the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris had with the Musée du

Louvre, the MoMA held a more than 20-year discussion with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, so that the latter institution could take on artworks in the MoMA’s collection once these were deemed “classics.” For a detailed essay on this, see Kirk Varnedoe, “The Evolving Torpedo: Changing Ideas of the Collection of Painting and Sculpture of the Museum of Modern Art” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: Continuity and Change (New York: MoMA, 1995): 12–73.

21 See the New Museum’s website: http://www.newmuseum.org/about/history (last accessed on

November 1, 2011).

22 See the New Museum’s website:

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/289/temporarily_possessed_the_semipermanent_collection (last accessed on November 1, 2011).

23 See Inés Katzenstein’s statement in the special museum issue of Artforum (summer 2010):

http://artforum.com/inprint/issue+201006&id+25707 (last accessed on June 29, 2011).

Question 5: What Is an Exhibition? by Elena Filipovic

What is an exhibition? artists have been aware of the implications of the question for a long time. Gustave Courbet’s 1855 rogue pavilion (across the way from the official Salon), featuring a self-financed presentation of his own paintings, was perhaps the first and most dramatic indication of artists’ desires to reimagine the way institutions organized and displayed their work. And from some of the earliest avant-gardes (Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists) to the present, artists have been the most active instigators of critical responses to, and reinventions of, the exhibition as a form.1 Think of Richard Hamilton and Victor Pasmore’s 1957 exhibition, bluntly titled An Exhibit, which had no images and “no subject, no theme other than itself; it was self-referential,”2 thus making the display of display both its content and driving methodology. Or of Graciela Carnevale’s 1968 exhibition in Rosario: At the height of the Argentine military dictatorship, she locked up guests at the opening, who only realized afterward that their sequestration in the empty exhibition space (and the resultant confusion, fear, paranoia, and eventual escape) was the exhibition. Or of Martha Rosler’s 1989 If You Lived Here…, an exhibition series that refused to be the solo show requested by the institution, and instead offered a makeshift, disorderly mix of art and non-art items related to housing injustices in New York that delivered an implicit critique of the host institution. Or of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 Every Week There Is Something Different, set against a backdrop of seismic shifts in recent American history (who could ignore, for instance, that the first Gulf War was at that very moment changing the rules of politics and war weekly, if not daily?), and offering a checklist and arrangement that the artist changed each week, so that the exhibition was not a singular constellation of artworks or a single, consistent message, but instead several constellations, each revealing how one object put next to another could provoke different readings of both. Or even of David Hammons’s unannounced 1994 exhibition at a shop for African objects, in which items “made” by the artist and the regular wares

of the shop were mixed with little indication, through presentation or price, of their differing status. These are just a few examples among many. Each artist’s approach was different. But long before the advent of that professional species—the curator—and not letting up in the face of its spectacular rise, each found a way to lay bare and counter some of the implicit and most stalwart expectations of the exhibition as such. Their example makes it apparent that this seemingly simple question—What is an exhibition?—should be asked, all the better to interrogate the premises that quietly support and perpetuate the most conventional notions of “the exhibition.” The critical consensus today would seem to be that an exhibition—from its 15th-century roots in legal terminology as the displaying of evidence— is, in the most basic terms, an organized presentation of a selection of items to a public.3 Simple enough. And reductive enough, even presuming that the “presentation” can be physical or virtual, real or projected; the “items” either spectacular or discursive, material or immaterial; and the “public” either known or unknown, composed of one or many. But if the roots in legalese suggest that what is held up for view aims to convince and demonstrate like evidence in a court of law, resulting in exhibitions organized to speak conclusively, authoritatively, and absolutely, then the tacit understanding of “the exhibition” seems problematic. What exactly are we viewing, as spectators, or contributing to, as artists, or organizing, as curators? No theater of proofs, the exhibition should be a performance of another sort. Of course it can be many things, but perhaps first and foremost it is not a neutral thing. In its many lives, it has been understood as a scrim on which ideology is projected, a machine for the manufacture of meaning, a theater of bourgeois culture, a site for the disciplining of citizen-subjects, or a mise-en-scène of unquestioned values (linear time, teleological history, master narratives).4 Political powers and the institutions they support may long have been invested in making the exhibition each of those things at different moments in history. But if we adopt instead the model of the exhibition that artists have at times called for —critical, oppositional, irreverent, provisional, questioning—the term might be understood in an altogether different way.

The exhibition? A single category term speaks for what can have such wildly different aims and ambitions, with vast intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological—not to mention geographic, economic, or institutional— differences between its organizing bodies. Retrospective, monographic, survey, group, biennial, triennial: each denotes a variant in the category. To say nothing about the fact that the tenor of the result can be alternately overwrought, spectacular, modest, sensitive, eloquent, transgressive… The list can go on and on. All equally merit the term “exhibition.” Implicit in the question is thus not so much what the meaning of the exhibition is as a category/genre/object, but what it does, which is to say, how exhibitions function and matter, and how they participate in the construction and administration of the experience of the items they present. It goes without saying that, without artists and artworks, the exhibitions of the sort we are discussing would not be possible (and curators would be, quite simply, out of a job). Artworks are the essential fulcrum around which both exhibition and curator turn. Still, an exhibition is more than the series of artworks produced by a list of artists, occupying a given space and hung more or less high on a wall. And no matter how vital ideas may be to its preparation, conception, or thematization, an exhibition is not a merely transparent representation of ideas (or ideology or politics) in space. Organize the very same artworks in the very same space differently, give the exhibition a new title, and you can potentially elicit an entirely different experience or reading of the contents. This suggests that an exhibition isn’t only the sum of its artworks, but also the relationships created between them, the dramaturgy around them, and the discourse that frames them. Can it be argued, then, that what a particular exhibition is lies as much in its contents as in its method and form? And, further, that one cannot actually separate any of those elements as if one were not part of the other in the construction of an exhibition? In other words, that there can be no such thing as contents (artworks) participating in a show which are not concerned, in the very moment of being exhibited and for as long as they are exhibited, by what brings them together and what company they find themselves in? This is not to say that the presentation is the message or context is content. And make no mistake: This is no plea for the status of the curator as an artist or for the curatorial conceit to itself approach the status of quasi-artwork.5 What is at stake is an ethics of curating, a

responsibility toward the very methodology that constitutes the practice.6 That responsibility is also the responsibility to attend to artworks in a way that is adequate to the risks that they take.7 I have seen this done before. The exhibitions (whether organized by an artist or a professional curator) I’ve admired most and have found most engaging and thought provoking seem to have developed their methodology and form from the material intelligence and risk of the artworks brought together. In these, the artwork was generative of the exhibition itself. You might then say that an exhibition is the form of its arguments and the way that its method, in the process of constituting the exhibition, lays bare the premises that underwrite the forming of judgment, the conditioning of perception, and the construction of history. It is the thinking and the debate it incites. It is also the trajectory of intellectual and aesthetic investments that build up to it, for artist and curator alike. But, most importantly, it is the way in which its very premises, classificatory systems, logic, and structure can, in the very moment of becoming an exhibition, be unhinged by the artworks in it. If artworks are simultaneously the elements in an exhibition’s construction of meaning while being, dialectally, subjected to its staging, they can also at moments articulate aesthetic and intellectual positions or define modes of engagement that transcend or even defy their thematic or structural exhibition frames.8 The artwork can, in short, resist the very exhibition that purports to hold it neatly in place. That is the idea of the work of art to which I would like to subscribe. That said, we have all witnessed the scene: an exhibition whose heavyhanded curatorial premise and lack of sensitivity instrumentalizes the artworks it presents. Such an exhibition may leave even a great artwork little possibility to articulate itself against its context—although I’d like to think that the force of the artwork can still unsettle what the curator says he or she is showing or doing in the exhibition. Much better, of course, is when the curator doesn’t seek to illustrate curatorial ideas with artworks (as if exhibition making were like lining up docile ducks in a row), but instead allows the particular recalcitrance of the artwork to be a model for thinking what the exhibition could be. Either way, because the exhibition is a temporary state of affairs, its framing of the work of art—whether done sensitively or badly—is, by definition, fleeting. One might even say that if it can last indefinitely, it is simply not an exhibition. The frozen immobility

of Donald Judd’s Marfa, Texas, compound is not an exhibition, I would argue, but a shrine, a temple, a permanent collection—and that notwithstanding the fact that the contents are displayed for view, that Judd himself conceived their presentation as the ideal and ultimate public presentation of a specific grouping of works, and not notwithstanding whatever other exhibition-like qualities it might be said to have. For there is an immutability and conclusiveness in a presentation conceived with no end in sight that is contrary to what an exhibition is. The ephemerality and lack of absoluteness of an exhibition might be its most important features. Against the model of the exhibition as the display of some indelible proof, one might admit how subjective an enterprise it is, and inevitably so. I can’t help thinking here of Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes’s response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that all texts involve the mutual exchange of responsibility between reader and writer (incidentally, the latter were gathered in a publication titled with the question What Is Literature?). Barthes is in partial agreement with Sartre but he argues that how a text is written—its form—is as important to the politics of its exchange as what the text says. And, he insists, one cannot escape from the fact that there is a form. Even the kind of writing that attempts to achieve the appearance of neutrality, a “zero degree” of style, denying that it even has a form, in fact has one.9 As with writing, so it is with exhibition making, with some curators and art institutions invested in the appearance of a zero degree of the exhibition and the pretense that the artwork selection, organization, dramaturgy, and discursive framework could not have been otherwise, as if their choices represent the unflappable truth of History, instead of one possible reading among many. That is how dominant ideas, positions, and values solidify and get perpetuated.

But what if we thought of the exhibition as the site where deeply entrenched ideas and forms can come undone, where the ground on which we stand is rendered unstable? Instead of the “production of knowledge” so frequently cited in institutional statements of purpose, an exhibition might provoke feelings of irreverence or doubt, or an experience that is at once emotional, sensual, political, and intellectual while being decidedly not predetermined, scripted, or directed by the curator or the institution. In my experience, the artwork can change (and often does change) what I think I know, and an exhibition is at its best when its curator can admit that.

Celebrated here, then, is the exhibition as a place for engagement, impassioned thinking, and visceral experience (and of course even pleasure, as Dieter Roelstraete so vociferously calls for elsewhere in this volume), but not necessarily as the platform for the sort of empirical knowing that we have all too often been led to believe is important to the artwork and the exhibition alike. As Susan Sontag explains: A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world… . [Artworks] present information and evaluations. But their distinctive feature is that they give rise not to conceptual knowledge (which is the distinctive feature of discursive or scientific knowledge—e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.10 The defense of the particular excitation Sontag speaks about could be the intangible contract the exhibition offers both to visitors and artists. It cannot, in that case, attempt to educate and prove the answer, but might instead encourage unconventional ways of looking at and reading the artwork (and then the world). The following may perhaps serve as an example. Collected in the pages of his book Inside the White Cube is Brian O’Doherty’s description of a major Claude Monet exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. In O’Doherty’s telling, the exhibition’s curator, William Seitz, had decided to take the frames off the paintings. He hung the works, frameless, on the gallery walls; sometimes he even inset the canvases to make them flush with the wall itself. In a single gesture, Seitz showed Monet’s paintings to be something other than portable commodities used to elegantly line bourgeois homes, something other than polite renditions of water lilies in dappled light. In their stead, Seitz stressed what he saw as their “implicit flatness and doubts about the limiting edge” (as O’Doherty so keenly observes).11 Seitz advanced a reading of Monet’s particular brand of modernity and presented it so that viewers could confront the artist’s oeuvre as they never had before. It seems

to have riveted the young artists who saw it, not surprisingly, since they were at that moment grappling precisely with questions of illusionism, edge, and the relationship of easel painting to the wall. Reading about that show as a curator just starting out, I recall being in turns impressed and slightly disturbed by the audacity of Seitz’s curating. “What if he had been wrong?” I remember thinking to myself. That was before I had realized that it isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) a question of right or wrong, of proving something to be true or not. To propose a reading of an artwork is different than to claim to know what that artwork ultimately or definitely “means”; the artwork, after all, is not an algebraic exercise with a single given answer, determined by the set of equivalencies between a certain form and a certain meaning. In other words, the exhibition need not be the place for an empirical object lesson, but instead the place for us to take the risk of reading an artwork against the grain of its already accepted historical meanings. In understanding this, I remember also understanding that, somehow, an exhibition is always made (perhaps can only be made) from the vantage point of the moment in which it finds itself (and Seitz’s moment was one of Color Field painting, Clement Greenberg, a young Frank Stella, and, of course, the discourse on flatness). This realization underscored the fact that an exhibition, no matter what else it is, is not abstract or ahistorical, but a concrete situation located in a particular place and time. At their best, exhibitions venture out on a limb, allowing all of the strange and wondrous incommensurability of the artwork to provoke its own terms of engagement. Such an endeavor could only be subjective in the extreme, and, as a result, fallible, inexhaustive, potentially contradictory, and provisional—all things that some of the best exhibitions in my memory have dared to be. The task, I think, is to celebrate exhibition making in which the immediacy and persistent intelligence of an artwork (and, through it, its particular way of responding to the world) might lead to the construction of exhibitions that could offer themselves as a counterproposal, an idyll, an antidote of sorts to everything else (the media, the market, the culture industry, History…) that claims to know what the “right” art and narratives are at any given moment. An exhibition should strive, instead, to operate according to a counter authoritative logic and, in so doing, become a crucible for transformative experience and thinking.

What is to be done, then, with what Documenta artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev recently referred to as “this obsolete 20th-century object, the exhibition”?12 We can, of course, remain mortgaged to the idea that the exhibition cannot be other than what it has already conventionally been or what some so doggedly want it to be, in which case it might indeed be obsolete as a valid enterprise. Or we could lobby for it to be what exceptional examples in the recent and distant past have already pointed to. In that case, there is no reason the question “What is an exhibition?”should ever lose its relevance. It should probably be asked at regular intervals, again and again, lest we forget that the exhibition must not become calcified into an inviolable or unquestionable edifice. 1 Art history has been exceedingly slow to account for the importance of the exhibition as a

cultural form. And if it seems vital that we finally take adequate account of the history of exhibitions, the goal is less about simply creating a new object for art history, and more about undertaking real discussions about the role and repercussions of the exhibition. See Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994) and From Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, vol. 1, 1863–1959 (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2008)

2 “Pop Daddy: An Interview with Richard Hamilton by Hans Ulrich Obrist” in Tate Magazine no.

4 (March-April 2003): http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue4/popdaddy.htm.

3 This definition paraphrases the way Wikipedia and most dictionaries define the term.

4 See Donald Preziosi, The Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of

Modernity (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

5 The understanding of the artwork, artist, and curator on which this essay is founded could not

be further from the idea that the curator is a producer or coproducer of the artwork itself, as argued for in numerous essays by theorists and curators, including Boris Groys, “Multiple Authorship” in The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, eds. Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005): 93–100; or, more recently, John Roberts, “The Curator as Producer: Aesthetic Reason, Nonaesthetic Reason, and Infinite Ideation” in Manifesta Journal no. 10 (2009–10): 51– 59.

6 The conception of the exhibition that this essay pleads for is diametrically opposed to the idea of

the artwork as impotent and in need of being “cured” by the curator. See the following essays by Boris Groys: “Politics of Installation” in e-flux journal no. 2 (January 2009), http://www.eflux.com/journal/view/31; “Curator as Iconoclast” in History and Theory, Bezalel no. 2, www.scribd.com/doc/47605999/Boris-Groys-The-Curator-as-Iconoclast; and “On the Curatorship” in Art Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008): 43–52. All of these contain a variant on the following statement: “In its origin, it seems, the work of art is sick, helpless; in order to see it, viewers must be brought to it as visitors are brought to a bedridden patient by hospital staff. It is in fact no coincidence that the word ‘curator’ is etymologically related to ‘cure.’ Curating is curing. The process of curating cures the image’s powerlessness, its incapacity to present itself. The artwork needs external help, it needs the exhibition and the curator to become visible. The medicine that makes the image appear healthy—that makes the image literally appear, and do so in the best light—is the exhibition.”

7 After struggling for the words to describe this responsibility, I encountered the notion in Briony

Fer’s brilliant Eva Hesse: Studio Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). There she speaks directly to the role of the art historian attending to artworks in ways “appropriate to the risks they take,” but this idea matters just as powerfully for the curator of an exhibition. I have borrowed her beautiful formulation here.

8 This has always seemed the force of exhibitions as cultural objects and what utterly separates

them from, say, illustrated essays, which might on the surface seem like an appropriate comparison. After all, illustrated essays (or even an art historian’s slide lecture) create juxtapositions, comparisons, and relationships between (images of) artworks accompanied by theoretical arguments (maybe even the same ones that might be expressed in an exhibition catalogue or press release), but both lack the material confrontation with the artwork itself, which can refuse the very conventions that purport to hold it in place.

9 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1977).

10 Susan Sontag, “On Style” in Against Interpretation (New York: Picador, 2001): 21.

11 Description detailed in Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space

(Berkeley and Los Angeles: UC Press, 1999): 25: “Impressionist pictures which assert their flatness and their doubts about the limiting edge are still sealed off in Beaux-arts frames that do little more than announce Old Master- and monetary-status. When William C. Seitz took off the frames for his great Monet show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, the undressed canvases looked a bit like reproductions until you saw how they began to hold the wall. Though the hanging had its eccentric moments, it read the pictures’ relation to the wall correctly and, in a rare act of curatorial daring, followed up the implications. Seitz also set some of the Monets flush with the wall. Continuous with

the wall, the pictures took on some of the rigidity of tiny murals. The surfaces turned hard as the picture plane was ‘overliteralized.’ The difference between the easel picture and the mural was clarified.”

12 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Letter to a friend,” an open letter first circulated by email via

the dOCUMENTA (13) newsletter and recently published as the third volume of the series 100 Notes—100 Thoughts (Kassel: Hatje Kantz, 2011).

Question 6: Why Mediate Art? by Maria Lind Vermittlung—“mediation” in german—signifies a transfer from one party to another, the pragmatic transmission of a message. It also stands for attempts at reconciling parties who disagree on something: nations, for instance, or people in conflict. Although there is an abundance, even an overproduction, of traditionally didactic activities within art institutions today, I believe that now is the time to think more and harder about the mediation of contemporary art. About whom we as artists and curators want to communicate with, and the associated questions of how art actually functions in contemporary culture. It is a seeming paradox: an excess of didacticism and simultaneously a renewed need for mediation. The two different conditions to account for here, before the dance with the question of mediation can begin, occupy different positions in discussions about art and curating. The first is generally considered more annoying than useful by the professional community. The second is by contrast littlediscussed, even below the radar of most practitioners. I am referring to the educational and pedagogical approaches that are in place at most art institutions. On the one hand they can be overbearing, and they may even obscure the art. On the other hand there is the increasing bifurcation between experimental, cutting-edge art and curating, and the ambition of institutions to spread art beyond social and economic boundaries. An effect of the latter condition is a growing sense of isolation between spheres of interests and activities in the arts, not to mention an almost total lack of mediation beyond relatively closed circles in the more experimental arenas. The one institution that has played a greater role than any other in setting the standard for mainstream museum education is the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The model that its founding director Alfred Barr instigated in the 1930s did not add pedagogy at the end of the exhibition-making process, as icing on the cake, but rather integrated it into every exhibition. In the brilliant book Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000, the art historian Charlotte Klonk demonstrates that exhibitions at MoMA have always been consciously didactic, promoting Barr’s formalist view of art. His main purpose was to refine the aesthetic sensibility of visitors and to mold a mode of

spectatorship based on what she calls “the educated consumer,” in contrast to the 19th-century ideal of the spectator as a “responsible citizen.” Despite Barr’s famous charts of stylistic developments and well-written, accessible catalogue texts, the educational approach in his exhibitions tended to be more visual and spatial than discursive. The paintings were hung low on the white walls, and numerous partitions created more wall space. The selection of works and the display strategies themselves were of utmost importance. “Points” were made in the exhibitions: for example, in the 1936 exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, the identification of historical and non-Western visual sources for 20thcentury Western geometric abstraction. The fact that MoMA from the outset quite literally situated itself as a mediator between industrial producers and distributors (a powerful interest group with a strong presence on the board of trustees) and a “buying” audience cannot be underestimated. MoMA openly borrowed display techniques from department stores and other commercial settings. And visitors were considered not just consumers, who in conjunction with certain exhibitions could even buy the displayed design objects in the museum shop, but tastemakers who were expected to become responsible members of the emerging society of consumption. Thus market strategies and business interests merged and shaped new ideals of spectatorship. Given MoMA’s influential status, its approach was taken up at innumerable other art institutions in all different parts of the world. The idea of “winning people over,” of persuading them, was central to MoMA’s didactics from the outset, just as it was in the contemporaneous advertising industry, which was itself coming of age and transforming for the new modern era. Within this largely commercial scheme, unconventional and “innovative” art was accepted as long as the innovations remained on a formal level and did not allude to, let alone provoke, any practical overlap between the sphere of art and the sphere of social and political action. This should ring more than one bell for those familiar with contemporary art museums and curating. Another familiar phenomenon is the concept of the education or pedagogical department. Despite the fact that MoMA’s particular brand of curating was based primarily on integrated didacticism, in 1937 a separate education department was started. Under the leadership of Victor E. D’Amico, it deviated from Barr’s ideas about a more or less detached spectator and promoted visitor participation. Instead of emphasizing enjoyment or judgment of the art on the wall, it encouraged visitors to explore their own

creativity. John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and theories about art as an emancipatory activity with great potential to stimulate political participation in democratic societies played a certain role. Nevertheless, in the cases of both Barr’s educated consumer and D’Amico’s participant, a heightened sense of individuality was promoted. This was markedly different from the collectivist approaches to spectatorship, influenced by Constructivism, that around the same time and even before were promoted by artists such as El Lissitzky and curators such as Alexander Dorner, both in Europe. Collective spectatorship was inspired by the Russian Revolution and by Einstein’s theory of relativity. It encouraged a varied and active experience through dynamic exhibition design, where things looked different from different angles, while simultaneously emphasizing the totality of the installation. It also promoted ideas of shared, collective encounters with art. Today, Barr’s didactic model of “educated consumer spectatorship” can easily be identified in the operations of most major museums and other exhibiting institutions, from MoMA in New York to Tate Modern in London to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The idea of “Constructivist spectatorship” has been largely left behind, although it hibernated and survived in the work of Group Material, the group around Shedhalle in Zurich in the late 1990s, and artists such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, and Liam Gillick. At the same time, museum practice in the United States has, since the early 20th century, promoted itself as reaching out to a wider audience. European welfare states have done some of the same in the postwar period and in the name of equality have supported both broader access to high culture and reformulations of what constitutes high culture. Educational concerns are important, maybe even essential, in democratic societies. But this attitude often clashes with high-modernist ideas about art not imposing itself on its viewers— that it is, or at least should be, strong enough to stand on its own feet and speak for itself, removed from “external” contexts. Which leads to decontextualized “What do you see and what do you feel” pedagogy. Again the art in question does not typically challenge the status quo; it is about enjoyment and judging. We can call this method “the establishment of the canon,” relying mostly on developments internal to art and certainly echoing Barr’s ideas. This method aims at producing a genealogy of artists, and to a certain degree also a sequence of accepted themes, whose work can be included in a master narrative of the history of art. Importantly, however, this

maneuver happens at the expense of more investigative approaches where a stated ambition is to contextualize artistic practice and to study and question current phenomena and inherited norms and procedures. In other words, to decode and recode artifacts and activities that pertain to contemporary life, guided more by what is interesting and relevant than by what is “pleasurable,” “good,” and “lasting.” Nowadays this model can itself be contextualized within the widespread call for canons of culture, blueprints of “eternal quality” to be implemented in school and university curricula. So what does this have to do with mediation? All of the above count as forms of mediation, employed more or less consciously: integrated didacticism, supplementary participatory education and pedagogy, and, finally, narrative information deployed both inside and outside the institution. This last was historically generated by educational and pedagogical departments but nowadays it comes more and more from PR and marketing people. Whereas the added participatory education is based on an assumption that there is a deficiency among the visitors—a gap to be bridged, a hole to be filled, or even a conflict to be solved—the other two are concerned more with a perceived lack of contact between parties, a “misunderstanding” or a conflict to be straightened out. The idea that a sort of “dating service” is needed to put the right people and “things” in touch with each other. At the same time, mediation can be much more than this: It is essentially about creating contact surfaces between works of art, curated projects, and people, about various forms and intensities of communicating about and around art. As a term, “mediation” seems to be open enough to allow for a wider variety of modes of approaching exchanges among art, institutions, and the outside world. In short, mediation appears to provide room for less didacticism, less schooling and persuasion, and more active engagement that does not have to be self-expressive or compensatory. Let us return for a moment to the current abundance of didacticism. It is an excess that pertains in equal measures to what is typically considered the very nucleus of the craft of curating (for example Barr’s model of selecting, installing, and in other ways contextualizing work) and what is tagged onto a curated project (gallery tours and workshops, wall texts, labels, audio guides, et cetera). Whereas the latter is frequently deemed over-didactic, the former is not commonly thought of as “didactic” at all but rather as common practice, the normal thing to do. It is almost not-visible, like curating before Harald

Szeemann—invisible hands selecting and arranging. In addition to the type of curating described above (the didactic establishment of the canon, with narrative information added on), among the most common modes of interpellation in art education within exhibiting institutions today remains the participatory format promoted by D’Amico. Experience-based guided tours and workshops where visitors are asked to share what they see and what they think and feel about what they see, to discover “the creator” in themselves, are part and parcel of this. The division of labor in larger art institutions involves the educational and pedagogical departments taking responsibility for educating the audience, in essence for “fixing” what ought to be the responsibility of other social institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities. The collections and temporary exhibitions departments take care of the more persuasive, integrated, and therefore probably more efficient didactics. An interesting feature of D’Amico-style formats within this scheme is that they are easy to avoid—we don’t have to join in unless we really want to—as opposed to Barr’s model, which is baked into the institution or exhibition. This is also the case with the many overly simplified and often promotional wall texts, brochures, and other presumably generous narrative techniques, which tend to render art at the same time more simple and more spectacular. The pure promotion has reached almost obscene levels, particularly in press releases. Marketing and PR departments have gradually taken over responsibilities that used to be shared between curators and educators. In many art institutions, marketing and PR take the lead on any added narrative, and they can for example decide not to provide written information about a specific project, even though it is up and running, because it detracts attention from the blockbusters. It is not unknown for marketing and PR people to interfere with the program itself, even. But do we really need more mediation? Maybe what we should call for is different types of mediation, and in other contexts. As well as a heightened awareness of the specific forms of mediation that are already employed in institutions, not least the persuasive mediation embedded within the traditional craft of curating. We as professionals would certainly benefit from methods that help us reflect upon what we do and how we do it, as a form of consciousnessraising. Furthermore, most of the methods of mediation in use today have been modeled on modern art, which functioned in radically different ways than contemporary practice. Formats derived from one paradigm are being applied to

art from a different paradigm. But most importantly, it is time to consider and take seriously the fact that the art and curated projects at the forefront of experimentation, which formulate new questions and create new stories, are growing increasingly remote from the mainstream. These sidestreams, many of which test various forms of “Constructivist spectatorship,” trickle further and further away from the situations where most people encounter art and curated projects (large institutions in big cities), and here mediation, whatever type it may be, is marginal. This kind of strategic separatism is in many ways a survival strategy in order to guarantee other proportions of self-determination; the mainstream is not particularly welcoming to the sidestreams, and the sidestreams prefer to stick to themselves. And yet the inevitable result is self-marginalization, where only the already-converted are reached. Another reason for asking what is the good of mediation: More and more over the last decade, I have observed in emerging curators and students of curating a relatively limited interest in communicating about art beyond professional circles. This pattern stands in stark contrast to the developments in mainstream institutions discussed above, which suffer from too much (and too much one-sided) didacticism. Together with a number of colleagues I am partly to blame for this development, having supported ideas around all kinds of experimentation, both artistically and curatorially, advocating the necessity to try out the unknown without having to constantly glance at the reception. We have been motivated by the need to create other ways of thinking and acting— a direct reaction to a perceived stasis among mainstream institutions, including their overly didactic modes of address. The experimentation has more or less only been possible in the sidestreams. And I will continue to pursue it, but while trying to keep more of an eye on how what we are doing might be communicated beyond the confirmed believers. On how mediation can create space for exchange with something “other.” This limited interest in communication beyond the select audience of one’s peers manifests itself in two tendencies among younger curators and students. One foregrounds smart curatorial concepts and another privileges collaboration and new production. The first one, let’s call it the “curatorial pirouettes,” focuses on the ideas of the curator. Here art tends to be included based on

illustrative or representational grounds and the outcome is usually a thematic group exhibition. In this category we can also include some of the more selfreflexive curatorial models, which tend to focus on reworking structures and formats. The second one, which we can term the “over-collaboration,” involves close collaboration between the curator/student and an artist with the purpose of creating new work. Although the rhetoric involves “avoiding traditional notions of authorship” and “escaping individuality,” this intense interaction between the two players often ends up being close to a symbiosis. Others are kept outside, and the result is a “super-artistic” subject who has two bodies instead of one and is surprisingly self-expressive. In both situations, a third term—a wedge to trigger a dialectical dynamism— is missing. Instead there is little exteriority, almost no outside and very few “others.” Again, this is the opposite of the theoretical open-arms strategy of mainstream art institutions. The curator/student creates a separate universe for her/himself and her/his ideas or artist buddy. Of course any show involves detailed work that needs to take place behind closed doors, but I believe that the moment has come to insist on experimentation while simultaneously attempting to develop new forms of mediation—to consider earnestly the question of what art does in culture, what its function can be in society, and to be more generous with the material at hand. And to shift the terms of the existing forms of mediation in mainstream institutions in order to make room for other types of exchanges, and possibly also to let art use more of its potential. Given that consumption is one of the most widely known and accepted forms of engagement with the surrounding reality, we should ask whether dismissing MoMA’s model of the “educated consumer” is necessarily a good thing. Is it actually the fastest and most efficient means by which to reach new audiences, or, rather, to develop a different “exteriority”? Most likely this model can be used in other ways, for different purposes. At the same time I wonder if we have not already seen the emergence of yet another model, that of “the entertained consumer,” where visitors arrive at the museum with the expectation that they must be constantly amused and entertained. And yet the collectivist spectatorship advocated by the Constructivists continues to have an allure. The theoretician Irit Rogoff has argued for a related version of spectatorship, or rather “terms of engagement,” in which the physical participation that is part of the 200-year-old art habitus carries the nucleus of a

qualitatively better form of democracy than the separation offered by representative democracy. If we take Rogoff seriously, “reaching new audiences” is less relevant than changing the terms in which we talk about how we together produce a public or semi-public space thanks to, with, and around art, curated projects, institutions, and beyond.

Question 7: What To Do with the Contemporary? by João Ribas In the 16th century, missionaries in the andean highlands encountered a peculiar phenomenon: a people “with the future behind them.”1 The indigenous Aymara maintained a reverse conception of time, in which their speech metaphorized chronology as the exact inverse of Indo-European time.2 For the Aymara, one faces the past with one’s back to the future, so that tomorrow is a day behind. While the known past is laid out before them, an unknowable future lurks where they cannot see it. In contrast, the temporality of the West, centered as it is by a moving ego, faces the future with everything moving past it.3 The present becomes the fading of the future into oblivion, into messianic time and eschatology, and a history to which it turns its back. If anticipating the future is the condition of our present, then what can we make of what is contemporary to us? The only thing self-evident about the contemporary is that nothing concerning the contemporary is self-evident anymore. Within the field of contemporary art, the term itself has become the topic of recent books, academic conferences, and critical discussions in magazines and journals. The present seems adumbrated to the point of becoming entirely obtuse. What lies behind this apparent need to engage in the empiricism of the “now”?4 As a critical assessment of present conditions, an inquiry into “What is contemporary?” is one whose very unanswerability may define the condition of its object: such self-reflexivity may come to reveal, in the end, an untimeliness. Are we perhaps so concerned with the contemporary because we have failed to reconcile with finitude? That is, to conceive of a future beyond ecological disaster, technological singularity, or terror-fueled millenarianism? The recent interest in the contemporary may be an attempt to contextualize the cultural production of the postwar period within a new conception of history, one beyond postmodernity. The past two decades has seen the field of curating, in particular, beginning to historicize itself. This ongoing historiography of curating has at its core a particular attention to the role that exhibitions have played in the history of art. Concerned with its

own putative historical narrative, such historiography displaces the traditional art historical focus on objects, style, periodicity, or “related critical histories.”5 Until recently, art history has maintained a distance from curatorial work as an object of critical relevance. Empirical histories of modern art exhibitions—as cultural forms central to the public presentation of art since the 18th century, including critical assessments of how such forms directly affected modes of artistic production—only began to be written in the early 1980s.6 What such histories continue to show is the role that exhibitions, as sites of knowledge production, have played in the formation and understanding of art throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Curatorial work— meaning the production of exhibitions and related discourses—is being shown through this history to operate in a critical state of “inbetweenness,”7 that is, between the care for the present and the writing of history, between temporalities, geographies, and categories. Yet questions regarding the contemporary within curatorial discourse have been mostly genealogical or methodological, concerned with how to incorporate a divergent and hetereogeneous field of practices. Such questions are a continuation of the reflexive institutionalization of various forms of cultural production within the field of art at large, from Carl Einstein’s study of African sculpture to the ongoing projects of feminist recovery and “decoloniality.” At the same time,even as curatorial historiography began producing its narrative—initially centered on the midcentury emergence of curatorial auteurs—new forms of art challenging the normative assumptions of that narrative were already evident. Part of a “social turn” in exhibition practices in Europe and North America in the 1990s, these new methodologies were being put in place by new generations of artists and curators whose dialogic, social, participatory, and collaborative forms of art were crystallized in exhibitions such as Traffic at the C.A.P.C. (Musée d’Art Contemporain) in Bordeaux in 1996, and eventually historicized in surveys such as the theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008.8 If curatorial practice has been particularly attuned to such critical discourse, it has been much less attentive to the historical and epistemic

conditions of its field, to the temporality it inhabits and its role in the ongoing debate on how the contemporary is symbolized and historicized.9 This despite a central fact the history of curating evinces: how exhibition practices have functioned as the “archive” of the contemporary, as “the system that governs the appearance of statements” in the Foucauldian sense, and as such, how they structure the contemporary as a historical and institutional object.10 The ongoing historiography of curating demonstrates the significant role that display and site have played in producing the interpretative horizon for the practices historicized as contemporary art.11 Yet scant attention has been paid to curating as a historical practice in itself, compared to the self-critical assessment of the role institutions and exhibitions play in a political economy of culture. As Andrew Wilson has argued, though the role of the contemporary art curator has been the topic of much debate, “there has been little discussion about the curator’s relationship with and position concerning history” even though curatorial practice directly reflects “on how the products of a certain activity can take their place within an evolving sense of history” and impact “the ways in which history is itself dealt with, understood, and presented.”12 Fundamental to the ongoing practice of curating is thus a need to articulate the relationship of curatorial work to the conditions of the contemporary—its temporalities and epistemic conditions—beyond dealing with, or caring for, the present. Along with continuing to provide spaces for the production of new artistic models and methodologies, curatorial work must come to articulate its position toward the ongoing formation of the “contemporary” as a historical, epistemic, and institutional object. To do so would mean to stake critical ground in the debate regarding how to revel “in the warping of time by looking past the contemporary,” attending to history while also “trying (even if failing) to see beyond the present.”13 A central question for curatorial practice remains how the field will situate itself within the dialectic between historicity and contemporaneity that in fact defines what is so often, and so self-evidently, called contemporary.

The Belated Owl There are three times: a present of things past; a present of things present; and a present of things future. —Augustine of Hippo14 In 1948 the Institute of Modern Art in Boston issued a statement outlining its decision to replace the word “modern” with “contemporary” in the institution’s name. “Modern art,” the museum explained, “describes a style which is taken for granted; it has had time to run its course and, in the pattern of all historic styles, has become both dated and academic.”15 Under its new name, the museum, which had been established 12 years earlier as a branch of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, could now remain in a state of “permanent contemporaneity.”16 As an early institutional imperative to remain a site for the display of the now, the decision was echoed by an exhibition organized the following year at the Kölnischer Kunstverein on “contemporary art” in the newly formed West Germany, which was to be repeated every four years.17 The Museum of Modern Art in New York maintained a plan of deaccessioning artworks to the Metropolitan Museum, so as to continue to focus on the art of the recent past rather than become a historical museum of modern art.18 Such an imperative is part of a historical process, initiated by the Musée des Artistes Vivants in the Luxembourg Palace, founded by Louis XVIII in 1818, whose policy was to send its art off to the Louvre after an artist’s death.19 What such institutional practices point to is an emergent categorical distinction between “modern” and “contemporary” as both temporal and descriptive terms. The two were largely interchangeable in critical debates about modern art throughout the 1940s and 1950s.20 The received use of the term “contemporary art” today is defined precisely by rejecting any such equivalence; rather, “contemporary” identifies a separate and supposedly distinct historical object.21 The term has seemingly shifted from being synonymous with modern art being made in the present to defining recent art which follows from it historically; its nominal function is employed to denote practices situated as coming after modernism.

“Contemporary” has come to serve as a term largely displacing, and historically superseding, much-benighted terms such as “neo avant-garde” and “postmodernism.”22 Attempting to pinpoint a decisive historical boundary between the modern and the contemporary is of course blurred by their constitutive relation: the modern is that which contemporary art ostensibly takes as its direct lineage, and from which it represents a progression, if not necessarily a rupture.23 As announced by Documenta 12, the contemporary takes modernity as its antiquity.24 If contemporary art no longer simply means modern art of the present time, it is because the term designates a new historicity itself.25 The familiar usage of the term as a temporal signifier—for every present there has ever been—has come to assume a periodizing function that delineates a category of art in the postwar era. “Contemporary” is not simply a temporal description for art being made now, but rather a reflection of a historical shift and corresponding changes in artistic practices, while broadly encompassing an intergenerational field from Joan Jonas to Mariana Castillo Deball.26 What complicates any easy lineage or larger definition is the indeterminacy of the historical and critical paradigm to which it relates. The contemporary seems to resist any imposed historicism, and so lies beyond “historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment,” as Hal Foster has recently suggested.27 Contemporary art, while manifesting an awareness of a history—being, in fact, constituted by it—would seem to differ from the modern, in Baudelaire’s terms, in that it no longer proceeds toward any supposed teleological conclusion derived from it. Such a posthistorical condition would seem to leave contemporary art susceptible to becoming reduced to mannered references, and at worst a form of cryptoamnesia (where a forgotten memory returns as a novel thought). Here lies the source of the distempered claims about contemporary art and the logic of the museum, in which “all art has a rightful place, where there is no a priori criterion as to what art must look like, and where there is no narrative into which the museum’s contents must all fit,” in the words of Arthur Danto.28 Is there more to the term than a temporal distinction or self-evident description?29 Is contemporary art more than a process of positive legitimation by a market short of historical objects, or institutions attempting to subsume the culture of the present into their model of edifying knowledge?30 Much of the current interest in the contemporary can be attributed to the increasing acceptance of recent art within the discipline of art history.31

The numbers of dissertations on living artists and the art of the immediate past, as well as dedicated academic and institutional positions for contemporary art, have expanded significantly in the last two decades.32 Contemporary art as an institutional formation explicitly deals with the very present that modern art tended to overlook or reduce to a “self-effacing moment” between past and future, as Boris Groys suggests.33 As such, the contemporary represents an attempt to engage what Fredric Jameson called the “ontology of the present,” suggesting it is not merely a temporal category but a discourse, a particular relationship to time itself.34 The contemporary is a time experienced as a new temporality, a present that makes demands on the past and future.35 This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in how the developing concern with the contemporary complicates a central discursive formation of the institution: the past. The term “contemporary art” somehow functions to encapsulate the pluralistic and wide-ranging variety of current artistic production while also now describing a specific historical object. The contemporary in the museum performs a double role: already a historical category on the one hand, it delineates an ever-deferred contemporaneity on the other, one for which a narrative is still being produced.36 The contemporary is thus seemingly outside of time, already anachronistic, removed as it is from its grounding in the present while also functioning as the recent past.37 As new forms of art are historicized as contemporary, the very contemporaneity that defines them, their sense of being contemporary with something, is lost in an odd periodicity. As an institutional object, the contemporary opens what James Meyer describes as a “temporal gap between a now and a then, between the present and a past it insists is past despite its recentness.”38 What we call the contemporary is already waiting for the belated owl of Minerva. The paradox is glibly reconciled in Maurizio Nannucci’s neon sign for the facade of the Uffizi: All art has been contemporary (2009), itself a reversal of the injunction of the cultural commissar of the October Revolution, to simply “let everything be temporary.”39 If the care for the past has been the traditional charge of the curator, and itself the topos of the institution, to what historical or epistemic criteria can the care of the present be indexed? How can the contemporary be said to have a history beyond the speculative accumulation of present objects?40 Do exhibitions produce a history for the contemporary? What role is curating to play within this relationship to time that the contemporary in fact represents?41 Curatorial practice might inhabit this odd mix of

historicity and contemporaneity as form of the future anterior, as the whatwill-have-been of the contemporary. As a critical practice of what it means to be with time, curating must implicitly wrestle and contend with “a future coming from all sides into the present,” in the words of Vilém Flusser.42



An Untimely Meditation

The historicity that defines the contemporary is centered on two singular turning points that structure its political and cultural imaginaries: 1968 and 1989. Their curious relationship is made evident in Peter Friedl’s Untitled (Barcelona) (1998), a wall painting of these two revolutionary years in which the numbers have been cleverly flipped upside down (68/89). The latter date is perhaps the most significant political and historical event that defines the condition of the contemporary: The years following the Eastern bloc revolutions of 1989 saw “the emergence of a new historical period,” defined within the fine arts as “the contemporary,” as Alexander Alberro has claimed.43 This new historicity arising out of political revolution has clear antecedents: French historiography has traditionally called histoire contemporaine the epoch after the French revolution of 1789; Russian lines are drawn, instead, at 1917; and German “contemporary history” denotes everything following the era of National Socialism.44 Within this new period of the contemporary, the major ideological pivots of the postwar era no longer structure the political. The West found itself situated in a new post-historical period: the “end of history,” constituted by globalization, computerized knowledge, and consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy.45 Yet the event that best defines the cultural identifications of this same contemporary period in artistic practice is actually “the second event” of 1968, evident in Catherine David’s Documenta X (1997): the historicization of the politics, language, texts, and visual culture of the 1960s.46 It is, in the words of Cuauhtémoc Medina, “the déjà vu of a revolution that never entirely took place.”47 As a result, the aesthetic vocabulary of much politicized art remains the aesthetics of the politics of the 1960s, and the most frequently cited texts and buzzwords in art discourse are those arising from, or associated with, the coterie of soixante-huitards and its attendant discourse: Guy Debord and Situationism, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Antonio Negri, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, et cetera. As the vulgate of cultural politics, such discourse can be linked to the recent institutional interest in the art of that time, particularly in the conceptual

and expanded media practices of the 1960s from Western and Eastern Europe as well as Latin and South America. The cultural imaginary of the 1960s continues to provide the basis for the aesthetic vocabulary of much contemporary art production, not to mention the critical language brought to it—wryly captured in a recent painting by Michael Krebber, titled Das politische Bild and dated 1968/2010. Contemporary art—as the art of a post-historical moment—is thus underscored by a tension between its cultural imaginary, which structures its aesthetic modalities, and its historical and political conditions. As demonstrated by FORMER WEST, an ongoing research, education, publishing, and exhibition project initiated by BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in Utrecht, the so-called West has “failed to recognize the impact of the massive shifts put into motion by the events of [1989].”48 This is not to say that art imbued with the aesthetics of the failed politics of 1968 or the New Left is by default drained of radicalism or politicization, but rather to ask if the politics that define our present condition are being reflected in the aesthetic language of contemporary artistic practice. Or the obverse: What is the relevance of political forms such as collectivity or revolutionary spontaneity today? Have they been reduced to cultural effects by virtue of being without a social or historical project?



Once Upon a Time in the XX Century

Footage of a statue of Lenin in Vilnius being hoisted off its plinth—arm outstretched, as if flying out of history—was shown on CNN throughout the last decade as symbolizing the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc.49 In Once in the XX Century (2004), the Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevičius pairs video drawn from the country’s state television archive with a freelance cameraman’s documentation of this same event. The twocamera perspective allows for the images to be edited as if to seemingly reverse the sequence of historical events, the monument appearing as if being erected rather than removed. The reversal enacted by Narkevičius tersely foregrounds one of the defining aporias of the contemporary: a historicity that does not know what to do with the recent past. One statue of Lenin in Vilnius was pulled down and replaced with a monument to Frank Zappa.50 It is a temporal condition that extends beyond the mere repetition of historical styles, the paroxysm of hybridity, or mere pastiche. Rather, it is evidence of the need to accrue traces, or, in the words of the historian Pierre Nora, “to keep everything.” “Fear of a rapid and final disappearance combines with anxiety about the meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future,” Nora writes, giving “even the most humble testimony, the most modest vestige, the potential dignity of the memorable.”51 Memory becomes the “storehouse”—in the form of museums, libraries, archives, and databases—of what would be impossible to remember. 52 This storage and hoarding of the past is the inverse of the consumption of the past in narrative.53 In the attempt at a complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past, even “Venus becomes a document.”54 The preservation of such a totality of the past—its institutional objectification—is necessitated as much by the status of knowledge in late capitalist globalization as by what Nietzsche in his Untimely Mediations called the “hypertrophy” of historical time in modernity. It is the kind of archival memory that obscures the importance of the unhistorical and untimely, and that obliterates the present into a future past. All of this emphasis on archiving the present demonstrates how

contemporaneity is in fact a repository of time, of myriad temporalities that comprise what we simply call the contemporary, as Terri Smith has aptly analyzed.55 Such an accumulation of time is actually what allows the contemporary to function.56 As Smith writes, contemporaneity is comprised of many “ways of being in and with time, and even in and out of time at the same time.”57 This multiple and laterally expanding “contemporary” is perhaps most importantly defined by what Ernst Bloch called the very “non-contemporaneity” of the present.58 “Not all people exist in the same Now,” Bloch remarked, and so history must be seen as “a polyrhythmic and multi-spatial entity.”59 If the contemporary is governed by such an accumulation of time, with no narrative of linear historical development with which to subsume it, this has also given rise to opposing historiographic impulses within contemporary art. A new historicism is reflected in the recurring interest in temporal knotting, minor histories, restaging, and reenactment—in short, the modalities of the past in the present, as described by Dieter Roelstraete—in the work of artists such as Matthew Buckingham, Joachim Koester, Melvin Moti, Paulina Olowska, and Simon Fujiwara, to name only a few.60 A similar undercurrent can be seen in the recent interest in a revisionist modernism, reflected in exhibitions such as Modernologies at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2009), Modernism as a Ruin at Generali Foundation (2009), and Formalismus at the Hamburger Kunstverein (2004). The recent emphasis on archival practices in contemporary art functions in a similar manner, though in another direction.61 The archive is itself not a question of the past but rather of the future, of a concern with a responsibility for tomorrow.62 “More than a thing of the past,” Jacques Derrida writes, the archive should “call into question the coming of the future.”63 Such practices represent an ongoing process of archiving the contemporary; they are a form of temporal displacement producing a future past. How can such practices inform the present of curatorial discourse? Perhaps it may mean being out of time, as Giorgio Agamben’s “What is the contemporary?” proposes. Defining contemporariness as a relationship with time that adheres to it only through disjunction and anachronism, Agamben writes that those who coincide with their time, “those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect,” are not contemporaries precisely because they do not manage to see their time.64 It is a question not of blindness, but of darkness: “The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light but rather its darknes…

[to] perceive, in the darkness of the present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot—this is what it means to be contemporary.”65 To keep one’s eyes fixed on this obscurity, the darkness of one’s own time, means to return to the present that has never been, to the untimely potentialities of the past and present.66 It is a fundamental necessity of curating to situate itself within those contemporaneities that remain in darkness, untheorized and “unlived.”67 The question that remains is what we will do with these involutions of time—all of this obscurity of the present that lies before us, or is perhaps already behind us. 1 Rafael E. Núñeza and Eve Sweetserb, “With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence

from Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time” in Cognitive Science no. 30 (2006): 1–49.

2 Ibid and Inga Kiderra, “Backs to the Future Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-

Image View of Time,” http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp

3 Kiderra, “Backs to the Future Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of

Time.”

4 Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, “What Is Contemporary Art? Issue Two” in

e-flux Journal no. 12 (2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/12

5 John Rajchman, “Les Immatériaux, or How to Construct the History of Exhibitions” in Tate

Papers no. 12 (2009), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/09autumn/rajchman.shtm

6 Martha Ward, “What’s Important About the History of Modern Art Exhibitions?” in Reesa

Greenberg, et al., ed., Thinking About Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996): 462.

7 I am borrowing the term here from Hans Ulrich Obrist. See Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang

Larsen, “The Middleman: Beginning to talk about mediation,” http://www.itu.dk/~jonfe/boompearls/litteratur/Andereasen_larsen.pdf, p. 27.

8 This “social turn” was the topic of the symposium “Art and the Social Exhibitions of



Contemporary Art in the 1990s” at Tate Britain on April 30, 2010.

9 Alexander Alberro, “Periodizing Contemporary Art” in Jaynie Anderson, ed., Crossing

Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2009): 935

10 Here I am following Hal Foster’s formation of the archive as that which supplies the terms of

art historical discourse. See Hal Foster, “Archives of Modern Art” in October 99 (2002): 81.

11 Jean-Marc Poinsot, “Large Exhibitions: A Sketch of a Typology” in Thinking About

Exhibitions, 39.

12 Andrew Wilson, “Making New” in Paul O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects, ed. (London: Open

Editions, 2007): 194.

13 Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 6.

14 Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. J. G. Pilkington (Edinburgh: T & T

Clark, 1876): 304. Cited in Wolf Schäfer, “Global History and Present Time,” http://www.stonybrook.edu/globalhistory/PDF/GHAndThePresentTime.pdf (accessed September 15, 2010).

15 Nelson W. Aldrich and James S. Plaut, “Modern Art and the American Public” in Dissent: The

Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985). See Serge Guilbault, “The Frightening Freedom of the Brush: The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art and Modern Art” in Marcia R. Pointon, ed., Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994): 231–48.

16 Christoph Grunenberg, “The Modern Art Museum” in Emma Barker, ed., Contemporary

Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 42–43.

17 Walter Grasskamp, “For Example, Documenta, or, How Is Art History Produced” in Thinking

About Exhibitions, 67.

18 Hal Foster, “It’s Modern, but Is It Contemporary?” in London Review of Books (December 16,

2004): 23–25.

19 Ibid. and Jesús-Pedro Lorente, “Galleries of Modern Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris and

London: Their Location and Urban Influence” in Urban History no. 22 (1995): 193–95.

20 The terms are used interchangeably in the pages of the College Art Journal. For example, see

Lester D. Longman, “Contemporary Art in Historical Perspective” in vol. 8 no. 1 (1948): 3–8; and Jesse Garrison, “Historical Art and Contemporary Art” in vol. 9 no. 2 (1949–50): 158–67

21 Hal Foster, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 3.

22 Foster, 3. For a discussion of the terms and their relation to the formation of contemporary art

history, see Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, “What Is Contemporary Art? Issue Two” in e-flux Journal no. 12 (2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/12 and Mark Godfrey, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 30.

23 Kirk Varnedoe, Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980 (New York: Museum of

Modern Art, 2004): 12

24 Georg Schollhammer, “Editorial” in Documenta 12 Magazine, no. 1, Modernity? (Cologne:

Taschen, 2007).

25 See Alberro, “Periodizing Contemporary Art”; Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and

Contemporaneity” in Critical Inquiry no. 32 (2006): 681–707; and James Meyer, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 74.

26 See Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

27 Hal Foster, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 3.

28 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1997): 5.

29 Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, “What Is Contemporary Art? Issue

Two” in e-flux Journal no. 12 (2010), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/12 and Mark Godfrey, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 30.

30 Raymond Guess, Politics and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009):

102–112

31 Joshua Shannon, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 16.

32 See Richard Meyer, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 18; and

Joshua Shannon, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 16.

33 Boris Groys, “Topology of Contemporary Art” in Moscow Art Magazine 2005–7 (English

digest), http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/digest-2005-2007/. Cited in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity, 701.

34 Here I am following Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis that the temporality of modernity, or in this

case, the contemporary, repositions the relationship between the past and the future. See Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). See also the discussions of temporalities of the contemporary in Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art, 6 and Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity, 702–5.

35 In the words of Koselleck, “The more a particular time is experienced as a new temporality…

the more that demands made of the future increase.” Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, 3.

36 Terry Myers, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009).

37 David Carrier, “Art Museums, Old Paintings, and Our Knowledge of the Past” in History and

Theory, vol. 40, no. 2 (2001): 170–89.

38 James Meyer, “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 74.

39 Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharskii, cited in Street Art of the Revolution, 1918–1933, eds.

Vladimir Tolstory et al. (New York: Vendome Press, 1990): 13.

40 As Mihnea Mircan has written, “[In] order for the present to have a history other than the

progressive agglomeration of present objects,” art history “must not adhere to the past as an inexorable condition or to a future as a necessity of confirmation.” For a discussion on some possible artistic models for “curating as a historiographic enterprise,” see Mihnea Mircan, “Art History, Interrupted,” David Roberts Art Foundation, http://www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com/aolpublic/oneoneone/docs/art_history.pdf

41 See Nancy Condee et al., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity,

Contemporaneity (Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

42 Vilém Flusser, Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002): 118.

43 Alexander Alberro, “Periodizing Contemporary Art,” 935; and Alberro, “Questionnaire on the

Contemporary” in October no. 130 (2009): 55.

44 Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al.

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 155.

45 See Francis Fukyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Penguin, 1992).

46 The idea of a “second event” of the 1960s to define this historical process was suggested to the

author by James Meyer in conversation. For a discussion on the relationship between “the event” and historiographic discourse see Michel de Certeau, “History and Mysticism” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories: French Constructions of the Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998): 441.

47 Cuauhtémoc Medina, “Contemp(t) orary: Eleven Theses” in e-flux Journal no. 12 (2010),

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/12

48 http://www.formerwest.org/About (accessed October 15, 2010)

49 Deimantas Narkevicˇius, “Instead of Today,” gb agency, Paris, February 25–April 22, 2006,

exhibition press release (accessed October 15, 2010).

50 Kate Connolly, “They tore down Lenin’s statue - and raised one to Frank Zappa” in The

Guardian Saturday 29 January 2000 12.58 EST, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2000/jan/29/lithuania

51 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories:

French Constructions of the Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998): 636.

52 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History” in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, eds., Histories:

French Constructions of the Past, trans. Arthur Goldhammer et al. (New York: The New Press): 636.

53 Fredric Jameson, foreword of Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984): xii.

54 “Art becomes a matter of education and information; Venus becomes a document.” Theodor

Adorno, “Valery Proust Museum” in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983): 177

55 See Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

56 “[The idea of ] accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to

enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.” See Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” in Diacritics no. 16 (spring 1986): 22–27.

57 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity, 702.

58 The notion of a laterally expanded contemporary, with the opening of the narrative of

modernity to its postcolonial dimensions, is suggested in the writings of Okwui Enwezor and Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, and by Enrique Dussel’s concept of “transmodernity.

59 Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1991): 62. Cited in Wolf Schäfer, “Global History and Present Time,” http://www.stonybrook.edu/globalhistory/PDF/GHAndThePresentTime.pdf (accessed September 8, 2010).

60 See Dieter Roelstraete, “After the Historiographic Turn” in e-flux Journal no. 6 (2009),

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/issue/6.

61 Recent examples include the C.A.P.C. Musee d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux archives and its

Documents exhibition program as well as the recent “Speak, Memory” symposium on archival practices at the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, in 2010. For a discussion of the archive in contemporary art, see Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse” in October no. 110 (2004): 3– 22.

62 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press):

36.

63 Ibid, 34.

64 Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan

Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 41.

65 Ibid, 41–46.

66 See Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 51–52.

67 Ibid.

Question 8: What About Responsibility? by Peter Eleey A few years ago, i was pestering a dealer about an artwork I was planning to propose for acquisition. How should it be shown? What could we do and not do with it? Had the artist made any particular stipulations regarding its care or exhibition to which the museum would need to adhere? At a certain point in the conversation, the dealer told me that once we paid her, we could throw the piece off a cliff. While this anecdote will surely confirm artists’ worst fears about the people they entrust to merchandise their work, it obliquely points to an important fact: the sovereign power of those who possess a work of art. The dealer, of course, was right: As soon as we have the thing itself, we can do whatever we want with it.1 The sovereignty of curators over the objects we show is absolute. As we have deployed that power more aggressively, we have rightfully subjected ourselves (and been subject) to critical exercises in how we define our work and responsibilities. Much as the behavior of doctors is regulated because of the power they wield over their patients, a number of participants in the system of exhibition making seem to want a kind of code of conduct that would prevent, or at least call attention to, bad curatorial behavior. Because artists and audiences have better things to do, we curators have been the ones most interested in articulating ways of considering ethical issues that surround the making of exhibitions. “Curatorial responsibility,” Anthony Huberman recently argued, “involves the invention of ways to appropriately pay tribute to the lives of artworks and artists—not the invention of curatorial methods for their own sake. By always putting the artist first, a good exhibition behaves like a guest who takes care to do whatever is true to the spirit of the work.”2 Huberman’s sensitive emphasis on behavior reminds us of that platitude of curatorial humility—that we should always put the artist first—which, while all too easily forgotten by many of us, is nevertheless a maxim few would dispute. And yet perhaps some cursory digression into irresponsibility might be useful. What counts as bad curatorial behavior? Can it ever be acceptable? And how does curatorial responsibility differ from artistic responsibility?

First, however, we need to distinguish between bad curatorial behavior and plain old bad curating. (Though they may overlap, they are not the same.) Bad behavior of the type I am concerned with here involves the misuse of art to “authorial” ends, done with a degree of self-awareness. Bad curating is an accidental outcome that results from a lack of attention or skill.3 Humans are, it should be noted, equipped with a range of ways to rationalize bad behavior, and any number of motivations for doing so. Regardless, any effort to rationalize the curatorial misuse of art must begin with the explicit acknowledgment of the practical modesty demanded by our position: that whatever power curators have is accorded to us by the people we depend upon to do our work. Continuing in that spirit of self-awareness, it is useful to situate these discussions of ethical “curatorial practice” alongside the broadened application of the “curator” that has arisen in the past decade. Indeed, people speak of “curating” all variety of things—music, travel itineraries, menus, or experiences more generally—to imply a judicial selection or arrangement, rather than the caring or healing aspects of the term’s etymology that undergirds Huberman’s prescription. In this expanded use, “curators” are editors and guides, providing a trusted filter in the new economy, helping to cut through the noise of dramatically increased culture and information production that has marked this same period. Curating salves a larger anxiety about choosing well in an era of overabundance. While this informational excess has been a useful backdrop for the rise of the pop curati, other shifts in the past decade have sparked debates about control and use that have more considerable bearing on the ways we think about curating contemporary art. Significant legal, political, and economic battles have taken shape during this period around (de)regulation and property. The financial crisis, for example, with its roots in home ownership, involved both—as have major litigation, legislative, and business disputes between content producers and distributors, and those surrounding the governmental and commercial collection and exploitation of personal information.4 What can and cannot be owned? Who owns what, and how much control does such ownership afford its owners? And, just as essentially, what should and should not be controlled? The discussions we have among ourselves about curatorial responsibility, I believe, are informed by these larger disputes and reflect them, since curating is, at base, not simply an act of selection or arrangement, but an act of use and control. Furthermore, we might consider the anxieties around curators’

misuse of art as related to more general concerns about the loosening of the tight relationship between art and its makers, which has accelerated over the past decade, as it has across all forms of cultural production. The ability of artists to control the circulation and use of their work—both as “object” and as “image”—has been eroded, from both within and without. Some significant examples of this loss of sovereignty, all of which have roots in earlier periods: • Art has been ruthlessly commodified in its display and in its consumption. The proliferation of fairs has submitted art to the exhibition conditions of trade shows; it circulates with increasing activity on the secondary market and now denominates an increasing number of investment funds. • Art has been subject to re-performance, and performance subject to objectification. The interest in reading production backward out of product has snowballed through the art history and museum practices of the past 10 years as we have labored to historicize and preserve performance art. • Art increasingly locates meaning beyond its object boundaries, with its definitions gradually shifting toward methods and vehicles of distribution. We speak of “dispersion” and characterize painting as being “beside itself,” dependent upon a larger distributed network.5 • Art continues to be appropriated by other artists. While historical appropriation has reappeared during this time in exhibitions of Pictures Generation artists, newer forms have involved the wholesale unattributed use of the work of other artists, as well as the deployment of art by other artists within authored installations that mime curatorial practices. • Art has been aggressively recontextualized by curators in group exhibitions, some of which sublimate the art to various authorial agendas.6 Not surprisingly, many of the artists who have garnered attention in recent years can be seen as responding directly or indirectly to these

conditions, or participating in them. That we celebrate such artists affirms that we place particular value on contemporaneity, on being of one’s time. (The hegemonic position of contemporaneity is similarly evident in the reactions against it—in the turn toward the archaic or the primitive, for example, as well as the more general discussion of the virtues of untimeliness as a resistant position.) The superior valuation of contemporaneity in our appraisal of art poses some difficulties if we dislike aspects of the current cultural context that an artist may be representing in their work, especially if they are making certain conflicted political or economic forces visible by emulating or participating in them. Assessing Jeff Koons’s 2008 survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Peter Schjeldahl summarized the challenges raised by Koons’s acute reflection of the troubling relationships between high wealth and low culture in America: But then there’s Hanging Heart (Blue/Silver) (1994–2006), an immense steel heart in dreamy blue with steel ribbons in glittering silver, which greets visitors to the show. Passing beneath it, you sense its great weight, perhaps with a touch of physical dread like that stirred by Richard Serra sculptures. It looks (and is) incredibly costly—and as sweet as dime-store perfume. It apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste. Noblesse oblige, never mind that noblesse isn’t what it used to be. (Neither is obligation.) We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.7 Writing just months before the financial crisis, Schjeldahl anticipated the political developments that would follow in the United States, in which the wealthy have defended themselves by instrumentalizing the tastes and prejudices of elements of the lower classes who might otherwise be antagonistic to their inequitable consolidation of money and attendant political power. Though this redistribution has lately accelerated, it began at the end of 1970s, ushering in an age that the economist Paul Krugman has termed the Great Divergence. This is, of course, exactly when Koons began his career, quitting his job at MoMA’s membership desk to sell stocks, the profits from which he used to produce his first significant body of work, appropriately titled The New (1980–83). Can we laud Koons’s trenchant embodiment of the Great Divergence while still criticizing the effects it has

had on American society? Or should we hold him and his work accountable for participating in (and profiting from) a cultural development we may consider deleterious? Schjeldahl himself seems to provide an answer in a review of Damien Hirst’s global show of spot paintings (1986–ongoing) that occupied all of Gagosian Gallery’s venues around the world simultaneously in the winter of 2012. Noting Hirst’s debt to Koons, Schjeldahl described the “formulaic concept” of the spot paintings as “intellectual formaldehyde” and bemoaned Hirst’s “deliberate deadness.” But he was more ambiguous in some of his other comments. “Hirst is originally unoriginal,” Schjeldahl noted, asserting that he “will go down in history as a peculiarly cold-blooded pet of millennial excess wealth.” As he did previously with Koons, the critic located Hirst’s transgressions firmly within the era of their making. “Just as no law forbids the sale of bundled credit default swaps… no agreed-upon aesthetic principle invalidates paintings that are churned out by proxy and then bid up at auction as fungible commodities.” Most essentially: “The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone who naively craves more and better for art—upsets a lot of people. I deem their ire misdirected. Don’t shoot the messenger. Hirst honestly vivifies a situation in which the power of money celebrates itself by shedding all pretext of supporting illiquid values.”8 Schjeldahl’s resigned rationalizations deftly defer blame to the cultures that produced Koons and Hirst, but they are most remarkable because they take each artist’s lack of resistance as a demonstration of their particular contemporaneity. If we valorize contemporaneity and demand it of artists, we probably do have to qualify the extent to which we hold them accountable for fulfilling such demands in ways that, lacking criticality or antagonism, might trouble us. Don’t shoot the messenger. Or maybe just shoot them with a rubber bullet. My assessment of curatorial bad behavior, and the manner in which it might be permissible, nevertheless turns on this rationalization of bad artistic behavior by way of its formal topicality. Can curators be considered “messengers” in a similar sense, actors permitted to occupy a place both inside and peripheral to the culture that provides the content and context for their work? Messengers who, in exchange for reflecting back to their recipients essential characteristics of contemporary life, are accorded a comparable degree of indemnity from responsibility for the way we use things, people, institutions, and ideas?

There are, obviously, some crucial differences between artists and curators that inform this discussion. Artists are responsible for everything they make, whereas curators are never totally responsible because we don’t ever make anything by ourselves. The singular self-possession of the artist’s voice is its distinguishing factor in the same way that dependence on other voices is what marks the curator’s work. Expression is an artist’s fundamental act; use is a curator’s. Just as we would defend an artist’s absolute freedom to express themselves, so I would argue on behalf of a curator’s ability to use whatever they want, however they want to use it. This means that we can agree that artists are always right, but also that there may be occasions when we don’t need to listen to them, or might even antagonize them. We ought to be able to ratify a basic position of curatorial humility, but also reserve for ourselves the freedom to reflect and model the times and cultures in which we work in ways that may sometimes be as discomfiting as the conditions we take as subjects—and prepare to be judged accordingly.9 In short, if we are going to defend curatorial (ir)responsibility, we should do so not simply by likening it to artistic license (which is a false equivalence), but by embracing curating’s overarching contemporaneity— the present coincidence, for example, of curating’s “work” with the macrolevel cultural renegotiations occurring around regulation and property. To the extent that we permit ourselves to creatively misuse art within the arena of the exhibition on such grounds, we should likewise admit that this justification necessarily comes with an expiration date. At some point, society will move on to other battles, and curating as such will no longer enjoy a close formal relationship to the larger discourses of the day. In the meantime, we would do well to consider the extent to which the relentless critical appraisals of “curatorial practice” may be but one part of a gradual shift toward greater skepticism and regulation of contemporary art —for now, self-imposed, and the more valuable for it. Various indications of a changing climate abound in the United States and elsewhere in the West. Numerous laws have recently been contemplated and enacted to police secondary sales of art by private collectors and deaccessioning by museums; continued growth in the market will eventually invite more regulatory attention from securities officials. Art criticism is excised from daily newspapers as auction records make the front pages, binding contemporary art ever more closely to its elite social and pecuniary value in the public mind. Against this setting, major collecting museums raise their admission fees while appearing increasingly entangled with the market;

some have recently begun offering their curators as consultants to the private sector. Additionally, art curricula is being squeezed out of primary education, bequeathing to the future a shrinking audience that will be less charitably inclined toward contemporary art. Doing what we can to counter these larger trends that run against expansive models and platforms for both art making and exhibition making, we should remember that in exhibitions, as in art, something always needs to be put at risk. For now, we should feel emboldened to act as badly as we can justify, and grateful if we can find people who still care enough about what we do to complain. 1 A few caveats. “Things,” of course, don’t have to be objects, per se; they can also take the form

of permission to do or show something, which can be similarly abused (with or without the artist’s grant of authority). And at collecting institutions, admittedly, the broad authority I describe isn’t strictly true. Though we think of museums as places where we can encounter history, they are in fact conceived against history’s action, which tends toward dispassionate misuse. Accordingly, there are various rules and covenants that we create or accept which govern how we handle the objects in our care. Such strictures are partly meant to inspire trust in the artists and dealers who choose to sell art to us. Despite being unconstrained by similar codes, a private collector is yet subject to certain market pressures in their behavior; while they could throw a piece they have purchased off a cliff, they might find it hard to buy something else thereafter.

2 Anthony Huberman, “Take Care” in Mai Abu ElDahab, Binna Choi, and Emily Pethick, eds.,

Circular Facts (New York: Sternberg Press, 2011): 13.

3 This self-consciousness comes with its own set of problems. Johanna Burton has reasonably

described “a new formalism of critique whereby certain artistic and curatorial practices are valued precisely for their polite enumerations of awareness, their performances of consciousness.” Johanna Burton, “On Knot Curating” in The Exhibitionist no. 4 (June 2011): 54.

4 Recent examples of the latter include the fight over the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

in the United States, which pitted the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) against a number of technology companies, and the ongoing case in American courts in which Viacom and the English Premier League are asserting massive infringement by YouTube for posting copyrighted video material (Viacom International Inc. et al. v. YouTube Inc. et al., 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 10-3270; and the Football Association Premier League Ltd. et al. v. YouTube Inc. in the same court, No. 10-3342).

5 See Seth Price, Dispersion (2002–ongoing), free download at

http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf; and David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself” in October no. 130 (fall 2009): 125–34

6 See, for example, Hal Foster on my exhibition September 11 (2011) at MoMA PS1, which he

termed “an extreme version of the now-familiar practice of the curator-as-artist” in Artforum no. 50 (January 2012): 211.

7 Peter Schjeldahl, “Funhouse” in The New Yorker (June 9, 2008): 130–31.

8 Peter Schjeldahl, “Spot On” in The New Yorker (January 23, 2012): 84–85.

9 While purposefully avoiding a discussion of the terms that should be used to judge such bad

behavior, I nevertheless think that our evaluation should take into account the degree of acuity and complexity with which the resulting exhibition represents the circumstances it takes as a subject, and not simply the criticality or antagonism it achieves.

Question 9: What Is the Process? by Adriano Pedrosa

Curating in Fragments

Curating is a vast, highly specialized, diverse, idiosyncratic, and fragmented activity—at once a privileged occupation and a poorly paid one. For this very reason, as a professional activity, curating defies categorization. In the field of art alone there are countless ways of curating: in institutions or independently, with private or public collections, with contemporary artists or those of another era, with objects, performances, or other “practices,” with biennials, festivals, conferences, or fairs, in teaching and writing, in editing and publishing. And then there are the curators of dinosaurs, textiles, and other assorted objects, not to mention wines, hotels, and handbags. In recent years, curating has been co-opted into marketing and commercial fields, linking connoisseurship and expertise to exclusivity and privilege, in areas that have a stronger (even if shallower or more fleeting) impact on culture at large than our much smaller (albeit dignified) field of art. A Google search for “curated shopping” in March 2012 returned 1,500,000 results, whereas “curated exhibition” returned a mere 421,000 results. We might have to find a less contaminated denomination for the term “curator.” Here I will restrict myself to the vast field of contemporary art curating, speaking from my standpoint and taking into consideration my experience as an independent curator based in São Paulo, conversing and negotiating with many interlocutors and agents, reaching out to different archives, and navigating through different territories and fields, be they geographic or disciplinary. Yet curating is also, at the end of the day and above all else, inescapably personal. A useful model is Ivo Mesquita’s curator as cartographer, a subject who travels through geographies, networks, and fields of knowledge.1 Curatorial practice is limited on the one hand by one’s travels, books, archives, and memory, and on the other by one’s known networks of colleagues, curators, artists, and intellectuals. Yet the register is not just territorial, but also temporal; one travels in geography and in history. There is no clear, singular, ultimate map, plan, route, or record of this intricate process, which necessarily unravels and unfolds in multiple fragments. It is through an unstable amalgamation of different readings and positions that one constructs one’s own singular, at times

shifting, standpoint.



Truth, Fiction (Favorite Game)

Truth, Fiction (Favorite Game) is the title of a small drawing made by the late Brazilian artist Leonilson in Amsterdam in 1990. In it, a small, naked, male, faceless figure is drawn with a simple, minimal black outline on a mostly untouched paper measuring 21 x 13.5 cm. As it is typical of Leonilson’s drawings of that period, the figure is small and simply composed, positioned off center, slightly closer to the left and upper edges of the paper. Its delicate, precious quality is set up against the blank background, and the diminutive quality of the work is counterposed by the potency of the narrative that stems from it. The figure is sided by two words —“truth” and “fiction”—entities that frame and tear the man’s bare existence. But rather than a victim caught up in an existential dilemma that splits him between truth and fiction, the character takes pleasure in this division; “favorite game,” Leonilson has also written on the drawing. Is this a self-portrait or a fictional one? The answer may be what Roland Barthes wrote epigraphically in his meta-autobiography: “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”2



F[r]icciones

F[r]icciones articulates the notion of Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction with that of friction, with the intention of constructing a complex and incomplete panorama of Latin American art. In his book Ficciones (1935–44), Borges questions the clear distinctions between literary and textual genres, compiling texts that individually blur these boundaries and bringing together fiction, criticism, and history. F[r]icciones, the book and the exhibition that accompanies it, attempt to call attention to frictions that exist between history and fiction, between art and text, between historical and contemporary works, and also between their multiple media, languages, formats, designs, and contents. Some thematic and formal leitmotifs (always in friction) are articulated in this narrative: the grid and the web, cities and maps, fragments and texts, ethnic and cultural composition. F[r]icciones presents itself as an allegory, a procession of images and texts, weaving a web, a net, a labyrinth also inhabited by some of the landscapes, peoples, and histories of Latin America.3

Histórias [Unlike the more limited English term “histories,” the Portuguese histórias, much like the French histories and the Spanish historias, may identify fictional or nonfictional texts, thus marking at once the historical, the anecdotal, and the literary.]

Geography “I am here, in this exhibition, to defend neither a career nor any nationality,” stated Cildo Meireles in the exhibition catalogue for Information, the landmark 1970 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Said Hélio Oiticica in the same publication: “I am not here representing Brazil; or representing anything else: the ideas of representingrepresentation-etc. are over.”4 Boundaries and limits always call for questioning. The principle of nationality is the simplest of curatorial criteria, and frequently has more to do with bureaucratic, political, and diplomatic necessities, or limitations in budget and research, than true curatorial investigation or relevance. In 2009, as the curator of the 31st Panorama da Arte Brasileira, a biennial dedicated to Brazilian contemporary art organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, I included only foreign artists whose work had somehow established connections with Brazilian culture. (A number of the artists were also invited to undertake residencies in the country.) My proposal was to question the notion of “Brazilian art,” pushing it to its limits via the idea that “Brazilian art” is not necessarily solely produced by Brazilians, but can also encompass productions with Brazilian themes, connections, references. A single Brazilian national was invited by me to participate: Tamar Guimarães, a Belo Horizonte native who had lived mostly outside the country and was exhibiting in Brazil for the first time.

When the project was announced in the press, there were many detractors who objected with protectionist and xenophobic arguments. The title of the exhibition, Mamõyguara Opá Mamõ Pupé, was in many ways a response to them. It was an appropriation of the title of a neon text work made especially for the exhibition by Claire Fontaine, the Paris-based collective. The cryptic sentence is a translation of the expression “Foreigners Everywhere” into Old Tupi, one of Brazil’s first and now extinct languages. Ironically, the play on the national, the native, and the foreign made reference to an indigenous language that is more authentically Brazilian than anything else, but has been wiped away from everyday life by the

violence of Portuguese colonization. Claire Fontaine’s sentence is part of a series of neon sculptures that appropriates the name of a group of anarchists from Turin who fight racism. If Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” advocated a position for Brazilian intellectuals in which they would cannibalize European culture through a sort of postcolonial appropriation avant la lettre, digesting it and producing something of their own, now, as the 31st Panorama demonstrated, it was Brazilian culture that was being cannibalized and poached by foreigners.5



Antropofagia: An Incomplete Project

De Andrade’s antropofagia harked back to the cannibalistic practice of the indigenous Tupinambá people, the proto-Brazilian fathers of appropriation who ate the flesh of their enemies to acquire and embody the latter’s strengths and virtues.6 For the Brazilian modern and contemporary intellectual, antropofagia becomes a productive and liberating epistemological tool true to our own mestizo origins. Yet the limits of modernist antropofagia lie precisely in its excessive orientation toward the European matrix. Antropofagia must live up to its mestizo vocation, devouring our African and Amerindian histórias. As we reestablish connections with other matrixes, we rewrite histórias of the past and propose new histórias for the future.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro has considered indigenous Brazilian culture through Amerindian perspectivism, affirming that “Perspectivism is the resumption of Oswaldian antropofagia in new terms.”7 In this sense, antropofagia remains an incomplete project: Learning from the Amerindian and African matrices entails unlearning Eurocentrism. One may think of antropofagia as an “epistemology of the South” (in Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s terms) or as a process of “de-Westernization” (in Walter Mignolo’s terms). In this trajectory, new, productive relationships of knowledge and reflection may be developed, expanding beyond our mestizo origins toward the margins, the Global South. After all, the South-South connections remain largely unexplored, and in them lie the richest paths of intercultural production and reflection for the future. There are several connections among the margins, and the first is precisely that we are at the margins—of Europe, of the West, of European modernity, of the first, rich, and developed world. The marginal position is positively associated to Hélio Oiticica’s 1968 famous poem-flag “Seja marginal, seja herói” (“Be a marginal, be a hero”). There are also commonalities among the margins (however varied these may be) in terms of a colonial past, of mestizo cultures. Such a geographic position has political and poetic implications that inform thinking; as with Walter Mignolo: “I am where I think.” Above all, the creation and stimulation of platforms for conversations and exchanges will encounter, discover, and unveil other connections, relations,

and readings—something that must be found in practice, not merely in theory.



“The Straight Mind”

There is a historical political connection between the gay movement and the women’s liberation movement that still resonates for me today, even at a time when some speak (in Euro-America) of the “end of gay politics” and when one can no longer speak, as Linda Nochlin did in 1970, about the nonexistence of “great women artists.”8 More than three decades later, Monique Wittig’s radical words in her 1978 manifesto “The Straight Mind” remain urgent: “The discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women and homosexual men, are those discourses which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality… The straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time… Straight society is based on the necessity of the different/other at every level. But what is the different other if not the dominated?”9

The strong presence of female artists in my work as a curator also harks back to my own Brazilian background, as many key Brazilian artists have been women, from modernist figures such as Tarsila do Amaral, Maria Martins, and Anita Malfatti to the mid-century luminaries Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape to contemporaries such as Adriana Varejão, Beatriz Milhazes, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Renata Lucas. Working outside of Brazil, one sees how the situation is different elsewhere, and one often encounters exhibitions and projects that are still dominated by men. I am thus frequently led to privilege women in my research. A recent manifestation of this was the 12th Istanbul Biennial in 2011, which I co-curated with Jens Hoffmann. Departing from the work of a gay Cuban–Puerto Rican artist, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the biennial was largely anchored in the work of a group of senior female figures: Claudia Andujar, Dora Maurer, Elizabeth Catlett, Füsun Onur, Geta Bratescu, Letizia Battaglia, Martha Rosler, Teresa Burga, Tina Modotti, Yıldız Moran Arun, Zarina Hashmi. We chose not release an artist list before the opening of the exhibition, yet given the demands of the press office and in thinking strategically about the dissemination of the biennial in the press, we did distribute images of works by these female figures, several of them portraits of women and selfportraits, which went on to have substantial appearances in the art media.



The North Tongue

Curatorial studies programs in the North have been pouring hungry curators into the highly active and overpopulated scenes of London, New York, and Berlin. Yet few of them venture into Lima, Manila, or Ramallah. When I recently visited Kuala Lumpur I asked Zanita Anuar, a key figure in the Malaysian scene and a curator at the National Visual Arts Gallery, if a Brazilian had ever been there. She recalled a visit sometime in the 1980s from a Bienal de São Paulo curator. As I was leaving Kuala Lumpur the next day, the airport immigration officer commented on the rarity of the Brazilian passport and remembered when I’d come in a few days before. An exotic curator.

These personal anecdotes are telling, as the situation today is not so different from what the Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera described 20 years ago: “One of the worst problems of the Southern Hemisphere is its lack of internal integration and horizontal communication, in contrast with its vertical—and subaltern—connection with the North… The cultures of the South urgently need to know and think of each other, to exchange experiences, to embark on common projects.”10 Indeed, the discourses of globalization and postcolonialism are deeply rooted and developed in the North, predicated on that logic. Again with Mosquera: “The lack of South to South communication is a postcolonial legacy that has been insufficiently modified. The globalization we are witnessing is an expansion of a world network linking more diversified power centers and their numerous, highly diversified economic areas following a North to South axis. There has been little progress in South to South globalization, because the process has been developed from and for the North.”11

It is in this spirit that Nochlin’s feminist question was cannibalized by the Filipino curator Patrick Flores, director of the Vargas Museum in Manila, as: “Why have there been no great curators outside Europe and America?”12 The year 1989 was a turning point in the history of global exhibitions, not so much because of the Eurocentric Parisian project

Magiciens de la Terre, but more because of the 3rd Bienal de la Habana; Mosquera was part of the curatorial team, which was led by Lilian Llanes.13 This biennial pioneered the dialogues and juxtapositions of contemporary art productions from the Global South. In the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Jens Hoffmann and I attempted to bring together contemporary art productions from several regions, but with a special focus on Latin America and the Middle East, which share a recent past of authoritarian regimes in the periphery of European modernity. There are countless exhibitions devoted to African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern art that tour Europe and North America, often stopping in Paris, London, and New York, but we still lack exhibition projects and researches that establish dialogues between those regions. The routes are rich, and remain largely unexplored. As the curator Koyo Kouoh recently wrote to me from Dakar: “The axis Rio-Dakar-Luanda is more interesting and important than Rio-London-New York.”



The Mestizo, Anthropophagic Toolbox

In the past two decades we have seen a growing decolonization of the contemporary art scene. The international art world has expanded its territory and grown from Euro-America and the North Atlantic axis to include artists and curators from all over the globe. In this movement, there is no longer a single, Eurocentric, universal master narrative, but several polyphonic, pluriversal histórias. The task now is to decolonize modernism and the 20th century, reaching out to the masters and pioneers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A similar movement may be observed with female masters and pioneers, who are now being reconsidered and brought into the narrative. One may think of rich juxtapositions such as Amrita Sher-Gil, Nena Saguil and Tarsila do Amaral; Lygia Clark, Saloua Choucair and Charlotte Posenenske; Lygia Pape, Gego and Nasreen Mohamedi.

In this process, one must attempt to discover other models and theories beyond the Euro-American toolbox of abstraction, pop, minimalism, conceptualism, the grid. To learn new tools we might need to unlearn old ones. The proposal is not necessarily to throw away all European models and languages, but to intercross them with other ones. The anthropophagic, mestizo toolbox may provide opportunities to cannibalize the biennial, the exhibition, the museum, chronology, and history. In that sense, the notion of mestizaje, the blending of races, languages, and cultures from indigenous African and European roots, is a key one that informed much of the cultural debate in Latin America in the 20th century. The challenge is to expand, develop, and complexify the mestizo, anthropophagic toolbox, not just in terms of thematics and imagery but also in terms of concepts and languages. A reconsideration of indigenism—which rescued indigenous references in 20th-century art and literature not only in Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Mexico, but also in India and the Philippines—is now in order. Indigenism is a modernist preoccupation, linked to cultural and ethnic identity but also to language and power, thus having strong political roots and repercussions.





Education

I have always been suspicious of curatorial programs. Each curator must develop his or her own cartography and standpoint through their own readings, travels, researches, interests. In this sense, curatorial studies programs are prone to produce similar, cookie-cutter outcomes. If a certain theory, topic, or art becomes fashionable or the norm, it is better to stay clear from it. There can only be one common goal among curators: to promote diversity while avoiding the “totalizing interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language, and all the subjective phenomena at the same time,” as Wittig put it. We must multiply the ways we look at the world, read it, interpret it, write it, and represent it.

I myself graduated in law at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, studied economics at the Catholic University in Rio, studied art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Rio de Janeiro, obtained an MFA in art and critical writing at California Institute of the Arts, and dropped out of a PhD program in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. My work as a curator emerges from an artist’s practice and background (although I stopped making art almost a decade ago).

My real training as a curator came on the job as an adjunct curator of the 24th Bienal de São Paulo in 1998, working with chief curator Paulo Herkenhoff, and later as an associate curator with Ivo Mesquita in the project for the unrealized 25th Bienal de São Paulo in 2000. Today, my involvement with education is better understood as an engagement in programs of “interlocution.” At PIESP—Programa Independente da Escola São Paulo, a program I founded in 2010, we bring not students, but artists and curators, to discuss each other’s work in weekly seminars. There are no teachers or instructors but rather interlocutors, of which I am the “directorinterlocutor.” Escola São Paulo is non-degree school and the PIESP does not offer a diploma. I, too, learn from interlocution with the younger artists and curators.





Exhibition Auteur

At least since the 1960s we have been witnessing, in several fields and disciplines, a certain skepticism toward purely objective (as opposed to subjective) approaches in the humanities and elsewhere. In literary criticism, there is Roland Barthes and his critique of criticism and truth. In history you have the École des Annales and microhistory, which reflect a critique of the total, unbiased master narrative. In ethnography, the presence of the ethnographer in his or her territory of research is far from invisible and, in fact, disrupts the daily life of peoples and cultures, jeopardizing the ethnographer’s supposedly scientific and unbiased report. Even in contemporary design and typography, there cannot be truly transparent design. Beatrice Ward’s famous image of the “crystal goblet,” with typography and design understood as a “crystal clear glass,” is now seen as utopian, if not naive. We could go on in the same way with language, with architecture, with art history, certainly with journalism, with the questioning of photography as a reliable truth-revealing machine, and with the documentary film genre.

Psychoanalysis plays a crucial role in these approaches, Sigmund Freud having pointed out the significance of the most seemingly banal slips of language, which in the end reflect the speaker’s subjectivity. In museum studies this comes up as the critique of the neutrality of the white cube. Behind all of this is the notion that the subject of the writer, critic, historian, architect, designer, journalist, ethnographer, and so forth is always revealed through his or her practice—that these activities are always somehow, and unavoidably, contaminated. It’s as if we have been realizing that many layers (some of them yet to be discovered, and others doomed to remain undiscovered) exist between us and the world, and we cannot escape or bypass them. The exhibition auteur is a reflection of these changes: someone who acknowledges the impossibility of detaching his or her cultural and personal context and who does not struggle to do so, but rather takes advantage of it.14





Cartographic Curating, Learning and Unlearning

Moving between many territories, fields, and locales in short and successive intervals, yet maintaining a slow, reflexive, and concentrated focus, at once open, critical, and generous. Curating is learning, researching, discovering, but also unlearning, be it in a political or a personal way, from the young artist in Ramallah or Hanoi to the pioneer in Lima or Bucharest, from textiles to maps, from rituals to dance. We’ve learned from Lisbon, London, Madrid, New York, Paris. We must now learn from Accra, Alexandria, Amman, Asunción, Bangkok, Beirut, Belém, Belo Horizonte, Berlin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Caracas, Cotonou, Delhi, Dubai, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Kochi, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Lima, London, Manila, Mexico City, Mumbai, Paris, Porto Alegre, Quito, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Sharjah, Yogyakarta. It is a long, arduous route. After all, the periphery is greater than the center. 1 Ivo Mesquita, “Cartographies” in Cartographies (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2003).

2 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (Los Angeles: University of California Press,

1994): 3

3 Ivo Mesquita and Adriano Pedrosa, F[r]icciones (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte

Reina Sofia, 2001).

4 Kynaston McShine, ed., Information exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art,

1970)

5 Adriano Pedrosa, Mamõyguara Opá Mamõ Pupé—31º Panorama da Arte Brasileira, 2009

exhibition catalogue (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2009).

6 The XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998), in which I worked as an adjunct curator with chief

curator Paulo Herkenhoff, brought antropofagia to the international debate, proposing it as a tool to look at contemporary art and art history through the exhibition and its publications. See Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa, XXIV Bienal de São Paulo, catalogues, 4 volumes (São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998).

7 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “O perspectivismo é a retomada da Antropofagia Oswaldiana em

novos termos” (2007) in Renato Sztutman, Encontros com Eduardo Vivieiros de Castro (Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2008).

8 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power

and Other Essays (Westview Press, 1989).

9 Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind” in Russell Ferguson et al., ed., Marginalization and

Contemporary Cultures (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990).

10 Gerardo Mosquera, “The Marco Polo Syndrome: Some Problems Around Art and

Eurocentrism” in Theory in Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, eds., Contemporary Art since 1985, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005): 222.

11 Gerardo Mosquera, “Power and Intercultural Curating” in Trans>arts. cultures. media no. 1

(New York, 1995).

12 Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Museum, 2008):

35.

13 See Rachel Weiss et al., Making Art Global (Part 1), The Third Havana Biennial, 1989 (London:

Afterall Books, 2011).

14 “Truth, Fiction (Favorite Game) [Attrib.]”, Catherine Thomas Interviews Adriano Pedrosa” in

Catherine Thomas, ed., The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice (Naming a Practice) (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2002).

Question 10: How About Pleasure? by Dieter Roelstraete Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige’s wall there was this one: “Matters of great concern should be treated lightly.” Master Itei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.” —Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

A couple of years ago, I had the singularly good fortune of being involved in an exhibition-cum-conference-cum-publication project titled Academy—a room with many doors, one of which led into the museum where I continue to work until this day. I have fond memories of it as a great project for an equally great number of reasons, including the opportunity to exchange ideas with a small group of exceptionally intelligent and otherwise gifted individuals, and the good luck of embarking upon (or at least of having the feeling of embarking upon) an odyssey into unmapped territory that shortly thereafter witnessed a gold-rush-like influx of even more intrepid explorers looking at the now-well-publicized tangle of questions relating to art education, knowledge production, and artistic research.

I also have fond memories of it as a partially failed project—a project that was somehow, and certainly as an exhibition, derailed. Retrospectively—and I did not need much time to figure this out—my greatest critique was that Academy as a whole, and certainly as a series of exhibitions, was far too academic. And this, alas, is not meant ironically. (Sometimes, though not so often as we are led to think, “academic” really is a bad word.) An exhibition titled Academy and subtitled Learning From Art, I always thought (and still believe), should try to avoid at all costs the obvious pitfalls of projects endowed with an emphatically discursive nature. First and foremost, it should refrain from burying the image—the crux of all art, after all—under heaps of discourse; it shouldn’t feature too many video works of talking heads pontificating away in their creaking swivel chairs; it should go light on the black and white; it shouldn’t degenerate into an orgy of diagrams,

maps, statistics, or words. In short, it should resist the inevitable academization of its subject. None of this happened, of course—quite the contrary. At times and in parts, the exhibition did end up looking as pedantic, bookish, and drab as both its title and subject gave us reason to fear. (That the project remained thoroughly engaging and interesting throughout speaks for itself, but that is not what is at stake here.) I had long been aware of this danger and very early on started lobbying tirelessly for the inclusion of at least one artwork whose glaring crassness and harsh colors (to put it bluntly, or mildly) would challenge the dour, discursive monoculture of so much of the stuffy, uptight, proselytizing art we were looking at, at the time. I was successful, in the end, in securing the participation of the Viennese mock-actionist group gelitin, whose unfailing talent for something I would like to call “critical infantilization” (or “critical infantilism”), to my mind at least, provided some much-needed relief from the exhibition’s droning one-directional narrative.

Gelitin’s contribution to the exhibition consisted of a giant Plasticine monstrosity, a kindergarten-turned-postapocalyptic wasteland that had been originally produced in actual collaboration with children (at the Freud Museum in Vienna, no less). I still remember taking some of my colleagues in the Academy project on a rushed tour of the exhibition: they nodded approvingly and smiled contentedly as I guided them through room after room of videos featuring only talking heads, wordy diagrams, and blackand-white graphics—until we entered the room with the giant (and ridiculously overilluminated) gelitin sculpture, whereupon a pained grimace of irrepressible disapproval and haughty disappointment contorted their faces. “Oh dear oh dear, what have you done here?” I heard them sigh in unison. And, appropriately, “You will never learn, will you now?” Though it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, this reaction nevertheless still shocked me somewhat. For me, the invitation extended to gelitin in the context of Academy was connected with what I understood to be the foursome’s unique take on pleasure—for that, too, must certainly be regarded as integral to the pedagogic experience—pleasure sufficiently rattling to destabilize the more

cerebral end of curating with one fell, deservedly foul-smelling, swoop. Unnerve, rattle, and destabilize they certainly did—and very successfully too, judging from the visceral response that the work triggered in my colleagues’ usually composed countenances. So, in that sense, the exhibition was a half-triumph after all. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I decided to dwell on this anecdote, which in itself is not terribly meaningful or important, because it speaks so symbolically (to me at least) about one of a handful of pregnant questions that face curatorial practice in today’s posttheoretical, post-ideological world: What about pleasure? (Inter alia: The question of pleasure is, of course, an eminently ideological one.) And, on a related note, what about bodily enjoyment? Does the invocation of any form of pleasure, visual or otherwise, necessarily align curatorial practice with the evil forces of entertainment? Allow me to stick to the path eked out by gelitin for a while longer, for I have long thought of them as my teachers in this regard (that is, in the various attempts aimed at addressing the aforementioned questions, embodied curator that I am). Much of their work ostentatiously relies on a specifically Viennese talent for abjection, and in it obscenity, sex, humor, and the disruptive discomforts triggered by failing bodily functions mingle to produce an explosive, intoxicating cocktail that is certain to destabilize even the sturdiest (and driest) of intellectual curatorial constructs. It is rather fitting, therefore, that, in the aforementioned exhibition, the one work by gelatin should have resembled a lunar landscape upon which infantilist energies gone haywire have laid waste—a minefield, so to speak, riddled with the serious, well-meaning curator’s most vexing questions: What constitutes seriousness in curating? Can a “serious” exhibition—that is to say, one that addresses the pressing political issues of the day without being too overtly or directly political—indulge in the lowly pleasures of anarchic bodily laughter? Is it OK to fart… in art?

It is of course notoriously difficult to make “funny” art, or otherwise to strike the right balance between art’s traditional claims to being sérieux and the centripetal forces of humor. But is it at all possible to curate “funny” exhibitions? I believe it is. Or at least I have tried to make them. Of course, most exhibition projects of the humor-in-art ilk are invariably doomed to end up as singularly dispiriting and depressingly humorless affairs clogged by the type of tiring jokes your balding bachelor uncle used to embarrass

you with during endless family dinners. And the same is mostly true of exhibitions devoted to the messy subjects of sex, erotica, and carnal longing (when these are looked at through the lens of private joy, that is): rarely will unsexier art events ensue. Food, fellatio, flatulence, sports, and other facts of life that actually make life worth living or serve as dependable sources of entertainment in everyday, non-art life only rarely appear worthy of “serious” curatorial consideration. (I know—I am jumping to conclusions here, or deluding myself with crass generalizations: what exactly constitutes “seriousness” in curating?) And only rarely do these basic instincts make for good art, let alone (and this is of course much less noteworthy) for good exhibitions. And so the question remains: What, or (rather) how, about pleasure?



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Writing about pleasure may be notoriously unpleasant on most occasions (mostly because it is written with such little regard for actual reading pleasure), but a handful of authors thankfully provide enough exceptions to this general rule to allow us to retain some measure of trust in the possibility of thinking pleasure pleasantly, or thinking joy (enjoyment?) joyfully—and one of them is a man named Roland Barthes. Here, a lengthy quote from his delightful little Le Plaisir du texte is in order (in which the notion of “text” can easily be replaced with that of art, the exhibition, or the artwork):

An entire minor mythology would have us believe that pleasure (and singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion. On the right, with the same movement, everything abstract, boring, political, is shoved over to the left and pleasure is kept for oneself: welcome to our side, you who are finally coming to the pleasure of literature! And on the left, because of morality (forgetting Marx’s and Brecht’s cigars), one suspects and disdains any “residue of hedonism.” On the right, pleasure is championed against intellectuality, the clerisy: the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) “life” against (cold) “abstraction”: must not the artist, according to Debussy’s sinister precept, “humbly seek to give pleasure”? On the left, knowledge, method, commitment, combat, are drawn up against “mere delectation” (and yet: what if knowledge itself were delicious?). On both sides, this peculiar idea that pleasure is simple, which is why it is championed or disdained. Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial, and it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality, any ideolect. Something neuter? It is obvious that the pleasure of the text is scandalous: not because it is immoral but because it is atopic.

To the left, to the right—and in the middle. Someone once shared a Brechtian quip with me that went something like this (I have never been able to verify whether Brecht really said anything of the kind, so for the sake of

confirmation or negation, Brechtians of all countries come to the fore!): In the end, the capitalists (the “right”) will probably emerge triumphant from the battle of ideologies because they have the best jokes, the best whisky, and the best cigars (though probably not the best sex). Really? Can’t we—to continue the present rhetoric of bodily pleasure—have our cake and eat it too? What, in short, is wrong with pleasure?



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Pleasure, entertainment, enjoyment, fun. Yes, but at what price? The most common and obvious (double) objection to be leveled at exhibitions and curatorial projects that seek to engage, however sensibly, with the fun facts of life—that both seek to entertain, or indulge in entertainment, and address “entertainment” as such—is simply this: that art as an institution of critique is far too important to squander its precious energies over such futilities as “fun,” and that it is quite simply a blasphemous expression of stupidity and insensitivity to look for (or otherwise single out) “fun” in a world as royally fucked up as the one we live in. Indeed, doesn’t the curatorial have anything more important, urgent, and serious to do than to engage in the production and/or distribution of pleasure? Isn’t the production of pleasure already sufficiently taken care of in most (if not all) other quarters of the culture industry? And is it at all morally expedient to produce pleasure, or actively seek out the production of pleasure as such?

One of the problems of this critique, of course, is that it regards pleasure as unimportant—and it probably does so because it is “of the body”—or as something that is only important insofar as it can be instrumentalized for the purposes of ideological affirmation (hence: to the right of the left, and thus also left over to the right). This reminds me of a remark made by Susan Buck-Morss at a lecture in London in 2010, soon after the publication of her Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History and a mere week after the devastating earthquake in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince that left some 230,000 dead: “Ever since the women’s movement, I have had great reservations about trying to do politics without feelings”—feelings of both pleasure and pain. And then, somewhat impatiently answering an incorrigible cynic in the audience who had critical misgivings about the flood of charitable, “humanist” feelings washing over the Western world in the days following the quake: “What does it mean to think without empathy?”

Here, we return to Barthes’s crucial remark about the unique delights of thinking (one highly specialized form of which is called curating, I’d like to

think), for the aforementioned double objection also assumes that pleasure itself cannot think—that it is “unthinking” and therefore does not belong to the world of the intellect—and that thinking, conversely, cannot possibly be a source of real, quasi-erotic pleasure. Strange Cartesian dichotomies. Are we to consume art with our logical faculties alone? Check our bodies, trusted seats of “feeling,” at the reception desk? Automatically distrust every laugh, smile, or smirk that swims to the surface of our countenance as a perfidious symbol of intellectual bondage, every time we walk through a museum?

Yet more fundamental questions: Is it possible to make a genuinely entertaining exhibition, one that does not shy away from entertainment as both a quality and a subject, without aligning oneself with the entertainment industry? Are leisure and pleasure one, in the same way ethics and aesthetics are? Is it obscene and irresponsible to curate a “fun” show? It is indeed, if we silently and sheepishly accept that these brutal times and our cold world make any consideration of even the possibility of pleasure unbearable, that any suggestion of entertainment in our subcultural field must be immediately and irreversibly tainted by the nihilistic charge of “escapism.” According to this classic Adornian argument (in whose shadow much of the art world’s critical establishment continues to dwell, no matter how pampered its actual living conditions), the last thing art should do is provide relief from the constant anguish of being. If life is bare, which it is, then art —as the privileged witness to this bareness—should be just as bare, or barer still. As for at least one of the many questions listed above, the answer probably goes something like this: It is possible to make a genuinely entertaining exhibition, one that does not shy away from entertainment (or pleasure more generally) as both a quality and a subject, without aligning oneself with the entertainment industry—but it is very difficult. In other words, it requires an almost superhuman effort of the intellect. (As Master Itei commented, “Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.”) It certainly is a lot more difficult than making a genuinely repellent (or merely cerebral) exhibition about the repellent facts of life, considered only cerebrally, which embraces the anguish of being and dutifully plunges the abysmal depths of bare life. Those exhibitions are much more easily made, probably because there is so much more suffering to be reported, and because art has become very good at “reporting” exactly—and that is

undoubtedly also the reason why there are so many of them. Which is a good thing, of course. God knows we need such exhibitions if only to remind us, even in the comfortable seclusion of art, of the stark reality of the human condition outside art, in this darkest of all dark ages.



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Let me conclude with a quote culled from a rather improbable source: “If one starts out from the solid position of socialism, then there cannot be, in my view, any taboos in the field of art and literature. That applies to questions of both shaping the content and of style.” These are the words of a certain Erich Honecker—not someone known for his fine taste or overly developed intellect in artistic matters—from his “Hauptaufgabe umfasst auch weitere Erhoehung des kulturellen Niveaus: Schlusswort auf der 4. Tagung des ZK, Dezember 1971,” published in Neues Deutschland. Note the If one starts out from the solid position of socialism… That presumed solidity was, certainly at that point in time, not much more than a mirage, precisely because “socialism,” whatever we may think of Honecker’s conception of it, had long appeared irreversibly paralysed by one taboo too many, one of which—and here we return to the aforementioned Brechtian quip—concerned precisely life’s guilty pleasures. Among which art, to a certain extent, must surely be counted.

It can sometimes seem as if the puritanical culture of taboos that we have come to associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Stalinist and post-Stalinist experiment in actually existing socialism has since migrated into the more enlightened, “intellectual” top tier of the curatoriat—in many ways (insofar as the absence of real capital can only be made up, forgotten, or made tolerable by the acquisition of symbolic capital) also my own natural milieu, as the story of Academy attests. In this oftentimes oppressive and/or repressed environment, where rigor is regularly mistaken for frigor, the Diogenes in me can sometimes be seen wandering around with his lamp, looking not so much for honest men as for honest portrayals of pleasure— and of the desire that, in the end, drives us all in the pursuit of pleasure through art.