Ways of Curating Read online

  This leads to Boetti’s other obsession, with the twin poles of order and disorder. He conceptualized systems of order and disorder in his works, in which the one always simultaneously implies the other. Boetti once compiled a list of one thousand of the world’s longest rivers, published as a book in 1977. It is a very thick book, a thousand pages long, with many references to river sources on each page. But, due to the meandering, changing course of rivers, their length can never be precisely established. Thus what the book quixotically reveals is that there is no absolutely fixed length of a river, nor a single reliable source, but rather multiple and varying sources. This project involved immense geographic and scientific research, but with a preordained ambiguity in the results. The order that has been created is, at the same time, disorder.

  Soon after I arrived at his door, we were in Boetti’s car, racing through the streets of Rome so he could introduce me to other artists. He mentioned that a young curator could find great value not only in working in a museum, a gallery, or on a biennial, but also in making artists’ dreams come true. I think that was the most important mission he instilled in me. Boetti kept saying, ‘Don’t be a boring curator.’ He told me that one of his main unrealized projects was to do an exhibition for one year in all the planes of an airline, so that they would be flying the exhibition around the world every day and, in some cases, returning each evening. And in this context he wanted to present a serial work that featured aeroplanes, in which you see one plane in the first image, and then you see more and more planes until the sky of the canvas is filled with them.

  At the time, I was too young to help Boetti realize his ambition. But a few years later I told the (always uncapitalized) museum in progress in Vienna about this idea, and we got in contact with Austrian Airlines. The airline allowed us to feature Boetti’s images of aeroplanes on a double-page spread in each issue of their magazine (which was published every two months) for one year, so we had six issues for the project. Then, one week before the first edition was going to be printed, Boetti sent me a telegram from Milan, where he was working on a large bronze sculpture, and said that the images in the magazine were not sufficient. We needed to add something more physical than the mere magazine page, he continued, and his idea was that we should create a jigsaw puzzle. Now, a puzzle featuring many aeroplanes in the sky would be very easy to solve – but a jigsaw of one monochrome blue and only one plane in it would take hours to solve.

  And so we produced various jigsaws of the different aeroplane motifs, with escalating degrees of difficulty. They were exactly the size of the seat-back tables of the aircraft, and they were given away for free for a year on every flight of Austrian Airlines. The airline began with an edition of 40,000 and later reprinted the jigsaws. When they finally received the jigsaw featuring the image of only one plane in an expansive sky, it occurred to them that this might trigger a fear or dislike of flying, because none of the passengers would be able to solve it. The jigsaw couldn’t even be solved on long-distance flights with several passengers working together. But it was already too late, and so the jigsaws were distributed in the planes regardless. After this experiment, Boetti asked me to come up with ideas not only for different kinds of exhibition space but also addressed to a different audience, to insert art into spaces where it normally isn’t found; for example, today you can find the jigsaws we did for Austrian Airlines at flea markets, as well as in art bookstores and on eBay.

  These conversations with Boetti lay behind my first attempts to supplement existing art exhibitions by creating new formats. Of course, those projects lay somewhere in the future, but my first meeting with Boetti had been a revelation because he gave me a sense that there were still many unexplored horizons in working with artists. Through his drive and inspiration, I had glimpsed the ways I might become a curator and still create something new. He instilled in me not only the necessity of urgency but also my first ideas of what might still urgently need doing.

  Mondialité

  Édouard Glissant, who was born on Martinique in 1928 and died in Paris on 3 February 2011, was one of the most important writers and philosophers of our time. He called attention to means of global exchange that do not homogenize culture but produce a difference from which new things can emerge. Andrei Tarkovsky once said that our times were characterized by the loss of rituals, but that it was important to have rituals in order to find our way back to ourselves on a regular basis. I have a ritual of reading in Glissant’s books for fifteen minutes every morning. His poems, novels, plays and theoretical essays are a toolbox I use every day.

  The history and landscape of the Antilles form the point of departure for Glissant’s way of thinking. The first issue that preoccupied him was national identity in view of the colonial past. That is also the theme of his first novel, La Lézarde (1958; English: The Ripening, 1959 and 1985). He considered the blend of languages and cultures a decisive characteristic of Antillean identity. His native Creole was formed from a combination of the languages of the French colonial rulers and the African slaves; it contains elements of both but is itself something independent and unexpectedly new. On the basis of these insights Glissant later observed that there are similar cultural fusions all over the world. In the 1980s, in essay collections such as Le Discours antillais,1 he expanded on the concept of creolization, applying it to the worldwide process of continual fusion. ‘Creolization,’ he writes, is a process that never stops:

  The American archipelagos are extremely important because it was in these islands that the idea of Creolization, that is the blend of cultures, was most brilliantly fulfilled. Continents reject mixings whereas archipelic thought makes it possible to say that neither each person’s identity, nor a collective identity, are fixed and established once and for all. I can change through exchange with the other without losing or deluding my sense of self.

  The geography of the archipelago is important for Glissant’s thought because an island group has no centre, consisting instead of a string of different islands and cultures. ‘Archipelic thought’, which endeavours to do justice to the world’s diversity, forms an antithesis to continental thought, which makes a claim to absoluteness and tries to force its singular world view on others. Against the homogenizing forces of globalization Glissant coined the term mondialité (‘globality’), which refers to forms of worldwide exchange that recognize and preserve diversity and creolization.

  Many of my exhibitions have been based on these ideas. Particularly in the case of productions that toured worldwide, we wanted to create an oscillation between the exhibition and the respective venue. The exhibitions changed places, but each place also changed the exhibition. There were continual ‘feedback effects’ between the local and the global. The question is how we can react to each circumstance in such a way as to produce differences rather than assimilation. My exploration of this issue was inspired by my reading of, and eventual talks with, Glissant. His ideal of ‘change through exchange with the other without losing or deluding my sense of self’ is something I think curating can help us do.

  do it

  At a café in Paris one late morning in the spring of 1993, I was talking to the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. I was twenty-four. We were discussing a particular kind of art, one that had grown remarkably over the last century: art that included not only objects to be displayed, but instructions to be executed. This, we agreed, had challenged traditional understandings of creativity, authorship and interpretation. Boltanski and Lavier had been interested in such practices since the early 1970s; both had made many works that presented directions for action to the viewer, who became the work’s performer as well as its observer. This kind of art, Lavier pointed out, gave the viewer a measure of power in the making of it. He added that the instructions also gave life to his works, in a very real sense: they provoked not silent contemplation, but movement and action, amongst the visitors to museums or galleries in which they were displayed. Boltanski saw the instructions
for installations as analogous to musical scores, which go through countless repetitions as they are interpreted and executed by others.

  Starting with Marcel Duchamp, we began to list instruction-based artworks that came up as we talked – in 1919, Duchamp had sent instructions from Argentina to his sisters in Paris for the creation of Unhappy Readymades, such as ‘buy an encyclopedia and cross out all the words that can be crossed out’. In the 1920s, László Moholy-Nagy made artworks by giving instructions to sign painters. There was John Cage’s ‘Music of Changes’ (1951), musical pieces in the form of instructions that could be interpreted in multiple ways. In the 1960s, Yoko Ono published her groundbreaking book of instructions for art and life, Grapefruit. George Brecht proposed that scores be published in the newspaper and so made available to anyone, while Alison Knowles created works she called ‘event scores’. Then there was Seth Siegelaub’s January Show, a 1969 exhibition in the form of a Xeroxed booklet including statements such as Douglas Huebler’s ‘the world is full of objects. I do not wish to add any more.’ Many literary movements, we remembered, also used instructions, such as the Surrealists’ famous game of exquisite corpse from the 1920s, in which a poem is written by a group as they add sentences one after another. Automatic writing also made use of instructions, as did Frank O’Hara’s ‘things-to-do’ poems in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Situationists, the radical French group led by Guy Debord in the 1960s, used to produce parodic ‘operational instructions’.

  As our recitation continued, an idea coalesced, as so often happens out of repetitive list-making: perhaps, we supposed, one could create an exhibition consisting exclusively of do-it-yourself descriptions and procedural instructions, a global exhibition that would bring in contributors from different backgrounds and disciplines. On our napkins we started to write down the names of artists who we thought could deliver fascinating instructions. We were on the way to making an exhibition that we couldn’t fully control, that would exist only as a score, on paper and in our memories, until a venue could be found in which it could be interpreted and enacted anew each time.

  do it began in 1993 as twelve short texts, which later that year we translated into eight languages and printed in an orange, notebook-like catalogue. In 1994 the first do it exhibition took place, designed by the artist Franz Erhard Walther at the Ritter Kunsthalle in Klagenfurt, Austria. Soon after, it began travelling to other cities: Glasgow, Nantes, Brisbane, Reykjavik, Siena, Bogotá, Helsinki, Geneva, Bangkok, Uppsala, Talinn, Copenhagen, Edmonton, Perth, Ljubljana, Paris, Mexico City, and twenty-five cities in North America. The archive of instructions kept expanding as new contributors were invited to participate. Because the idea and results of do it changed with each destination, it became a complex and dynamic learning system, with many local differences. It nevertheless remained organized around a few ‘rules of the game’ that ensured a certain continuity: for one, each museum had to create at least fifteen of the original thirty potential artworks. Leaving the process of the instructions up to each institution ensured that a new group constellation emerged each time the exhibition was presented.

  Realizing the artworks, in the sense of actually executing the instructions, was left to the public or museum staff. The artists who originated the instructions were not allowed to be involved: there would be no artist-produced ‘original’ that might be considered the ‘correct’ version, and no traditional artist’s signature. To use the punk terminology, it was a DIY (do it yourself) approach to realization: the do it artworks would not assume a static character, but would mutate with each new enactment. Also, the components from which the works were made were, at the end of the exhibition, to be returned to their original context, making do it completely reversible, or, you might say, recyclable. The mundane was transformed into the uncommon and then converted back into the everyday.

  At the end of each do it exhibition, the institution presenting the show was thus obliged to dismantle or otherwise destroy not only the artworks but also the instructions by which they were created, which also removed the possibility of the artworks becoming part of a permanent collection. do it appeared, but only in order to disappear. (Each artist who participated, however, received complete photographic documentation of his or her work.) Our rules of the game were intended to make for an open, exhibition-in-progress model, and each new city in which do it took place necessarily created the artwork context and stamped it with its own individual mark or features. do it was unconcerned with the notion of the ‘signed original’, and its opposite, the reproduction or copy – the idea was to focus on the different interpretations. For this reason, no artwork or material was shipped to the venues, as happens in traditional travelling exhibitions. Instead, everyday actions and materials were the starting point for artworks to be re-created at each site. Every realization of do it was temporary: an arrangement in space and an activity in time.

  Zones of contact was my working phrase for what Boltanski, Lavier and I were trying to create. I took it from the anthropologist James Clifford, who had written about a new model for ethnographic museums, in which the peoples whose culture was being ‘represented’ by the museum proposed their own alternate forms of exhibiting and collecting. They were taking it upon themselves to recollect their own story and create their history from the inside. This changed the whole historical narrative of the ethnographic museum, which has mostly been a place for one culture to tell the story of another. Such museums could be criticized as an exercise in establishment storytelling, of course, so the anti-authoritarian act of including the audience in the production of what was exhibited was of great importance. Similarly, do it tried to develop exhibitions that built a relation to their place, that constantly changed with different local conditions, and created a dynamic, complex system with feedback loops. It changed places and places changed it.

  Accordingly, do it was conceived to defy the rules that generally govern how contemporary art exhibitions circulate. The dominant idea is that an exhibition is mounted in one city, then taken down and remounted in another in a fashion as close as possible to the first. do it was designed to enhance difference and complexity, and propose a different model of thinking about time, in which the goal was no longer to discover the truth and freeze it in amber. No two interpretations of the same set of instructions are ever identical; do it simply made this explicit.

  In How to Do Things with Words, a book based on a 1955 series of lectures, the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin articulated his theory of ‘performative speech acts’, which he defined as utterances that perform an action, as opposed to just describing or reporting it. In much of linguistics and the philosophy of language, the general understanding had been that language was a way of making factual assertions, of describing reality. Austin and his followers, such as John Searle, direct us to pay attention to the kinds of work language does in everyday activities: how it creates reality through the production of meaning, rather than simply reflecting a pre-existing meaning itself. do it was a development of this research. The title itself, with its imperative form, asks the visitor to act, not only to observe. do it was, and is, an attempt to expand the field of curating in ways sensitive to the twentieth century’s expansion of the field of art.

  Curating, Exhibitions and the Gesamtkunstwerk

  A recent article in the food section of New York’s main newspaper contained this passage: ‘A museum: Chinatown feels that way at times, if you are ducking under the lintel of a basement entrance like Wo Hop’s or Hop Kee’s to find Cantonese crab or lobster. Sometimes the museum gets an energetic new curator like Wilson Tang, who has made the dim sum standards like char siu bao and cheong fun noodles at his family’s Nom Wah Tea Parlor dance again.’

  A clothing retailer sells a brightly coloured style of trousers called the ‘curator pant’, while a brand called ‘CURATED’ promises ‘a new experience in retail design’.

  A museum brochure invites members to ‘curate your own membership’; musicians and
DJs are asked to curate music festivals, radio shows and playlists; hotels’ decor schemes and book collections are listed as curated by stylists; a celebrity chef is described as the curator of the food trucks in New York’s High Line park.

  Social media strategists talk of ‘curated and aggregated content’.

  A panel discussion comparing the merits of humans and computer algorithms describes how ‘the war of humans versus machines has hit the battlefield of online video curation’.

  A blog post entitled ‘How to Build Your Community with Content Curation’ advises business owners on ‘curating content for your business’ blog and social media channels’.

  The sociologist Mike Davis criticized Barack Obama by describing him as ‘the chief curator of the Bush legacy’.

  The president of a chain of housewares says ‘we act as a curator, scouring the world for what we refer to as “the best-on-planet products”’.

  Writing about his poker travails, the author Colson Whitehead reports, ‘I wasn’t depressed, I was curating despair.’

  It’s fairly obvious that ‘curating’ is being used in a greater variety of contexts than ever before, in reference to everything from an exhibition of prints by Old Masters to the contents of a boutique wine shop. Even the verb form so commonly used today, to curate, and its variants (curating, curated) are coinages of the twentieth century. This records a shift in understanding from a person (a curator) to an enterprise (curating) which is now understood as an activity unto itself. There is, currently, a certain resonance between the idea of curating and the contemporary idea of the creative self, floating freely through the world making aesthetic choices of where to go and what to eat, wear and do.

  The current vogue for the idea of curating stems from a feature of modern life that is impossible to ignore: the proliferation and reproduction of ideas, raw data, processed information, images, disciplinary knowledge and material products that we are witnessing today. This is hard to overstate. But though the explosive effects of the Internet have now become very obvious, they are only the leading edge of a larger change that has been occurring for about a hundred years.