Ways of Curating Read online

  The exponential increase in the amount of data created by human societies is a basic fact of our time. There is no type of information – documents, books, images, video – that is declining. But in addition, we also create more material goods each year than the previous one. Today we are awash in cheaply produced objects to a degree that would have been difficult to imagine a century ago. The result, arguably, has been a shift in the ratio of importance between making new objects and choosing from what is already there.

  This contemporary resonance, however, risks producing a kind of bubble in the value attached to the idea of curating, and has to be resisted. Here I will speak of curating as a profession with a specific history, and touch on moments in that history of curating and exhibition-making as a toolbox for the future.

  Dialogues between artists and places, between publics and exhibitions, can be thrillingly catalysed by the forces of globalization. There is an amazing potential for new encounters among today’s fast-proliferating array of art centres. Yet homogenization is a danger too, as the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has pointed out. For her, exhibitions are a way to resist the pressures towards an ever more uniform experience of time and space, by keeping the visitor in the art moment a little longer.

  If that is to happen, it’s important to shape exhibitions as projects of long duration and to consider issues of sustainability and legacy. Fly-in, fly-out curating nearly always produces superficial results; it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion for applying the word ‘curating’ to everything that involves simply making a choice. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition; curating follows art.

  Being a curator is considered to be a fairly new profession. The activities it combines into one role, however, are still well expressed by the meaning of its Latin etymological root, curare: to take care of. In ancient Rome, curatores were civil servants who took care of some rather prosaic, if necessary, functions: they were responsible for overseeing public works, including the empire’s aqueducts, bathhouses and sewers. In the medieval period, the focus shifted to a more metaphysical aspect of human life; the curatus was a priest who took care of the souls of a parish. By the late eighteenth century, curator came to signify the task of looking after a museum’s collection. Different kinds of caretaking have sprung from this root word over the centuries, but the work of the contemporary curator remains surprisingly close to the sense in curare of cultivating, growing, pruning and trying to help people and their shared contexts to thrive.

  In parallel, the professional curator’s role began to coalesce around four functions. The first of these was preservation. Art had come to be understood as a crucial part of a nation’s heritage, a set of artefacts that collectively told the story of a country. Thus safeguarding this heritage became a primary responsibility of the curator. The second task was the selection of new work. As time passes, museum collections must necessarily be added to, and the caretaker of the museum thus becomes the caretaker of the national legacy which the museum represents.

  The third is the task of contributing to art history. Scholarly research into the works already collected allows the curator to pass on knowledge in modern disciplinary fashion in the same way as the university professor. Finally, there is the task of displaying and arranging the art on the wall and in the galleries: the making of exhibitions. This is the task that has most come to define the contemporary practice; one could even argue that a neologism is needed, so completely has the curator-asAustellungsmacher, or exhibition-maker, departed from the traditional role of caretaking.

  For now, however, the idea of curating has become associated more and more closely with the modern cultural ritual we call the exhibition. Exhibitions themselves are a new form, a later addition to the pantheon of classical forms such as drama, poetry and rhetoric. Like novels, they are a practice that became prominent only in the last 250 years. Before 1800, going to look at an exhibition was a very uncommon thing to do; in the twenty-first century, hundreds of millions of people visit them each year.

  The art exhibition, in particular, has its roots in the processions of the late Middle Ages, when the flow of people through a city during annual and seasonal festivals provided an opportunity for artisanal craftsmen to display their creations to the passing crowds. In the medieval guilds, apprentices were required to exhibit their best objects in this way. Those whose creations passed the inspections of the master craftsmen were allowed to ascend to the status of journeymen. So the exhibition began as a ritual of professional certification during a time when well-crafted and useful objects were scarce commodities. Therefore it was deeply rooted in the free circulation of people through a public space, which continues to be perhaps its defining feature.

  Meanwhile, throughout the Middle Ages, what we know as visual art was not commonly exhibited in public. Royalty and nobility displayed paintings and sculpture at courts, castles and manor houses in order to demonstrate their wealth and importance. In the pre-modern period, the state was of course identified with particular lineages or bloodlines: from the marbles commemorating Augustus Caesar and his family to Hans Holbein’s portraits of the English Tudors, sculpture and painting served an important propagandistic function, while the individuals who took care of these pieces, as well as most of those who executed them (later to be known as ‘artists’), worked mostly in semi-obscurity under the patronage of their social superiors.

  The wider public typically only came into contact with visual art at places of worship – in the great temples, cathedrals and mosques of the medieval period. In the sixteenth century, official academies emerged in Florence and Rome, which evaluated and classified the art produced in their regions. In 1648 the French Academy began its Salon exhibitions, named after the Grand Salon of the Louvre, where they were held. The Salons were government-sponsored exhibitions of French art, to be evaluated by the public. With the development of democratic states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, art came to be seen as the patrimony of the people, who were thought to be in need of the improvement in manners that calmly looking at paintings was thought to produce. Paintings and sculpture needed to be brought to the attention of that new, secular abstraction – ‘the public’. And so state-run museums came into being, beginning with the Louvre in 1793.

  The first people to play the role of professional exhibition-makers at a museum were the Louvre’s décorateurs in the eighteenth century. Usually artists themselves, the décorateurs were in charge of organizing and hanging artworks for the annual exhibitions of the Academy. They began to standardize the practice of installing museum collections in order to best display both historical developments and thematic similarities. In the late eighteenth century, however, the idea of displaying artworks in order to represent historical progress was being explored for the first time. With the French Revolution the debate took on nationalist overtones, and a mainstream style emerged: a walk from room to room in a museum took the visitor on a journey through the stages of a nation’s history.

  With the coming of the twentieth century, the style of presentation in museums underwent a major shift, one of the best accounts of which was provided by the artist and writer Brian O’Doherty in a magisterial set of essays in Artforum during the 1970s. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paintings had been hung cheek by jowl in tightly packed formations from floor to ceiling, their gilded frames almost touching, with those placed high on the wall often tilted downwards to meet the eye of the spectator. This was known as the salon style, after the academic salons in which it began, and allowed spectators to see dozens of canvases on each wall, emphasizing taxonomic schools of painting and commonalities of subject matter. In a famous depiction of an 1832 exhibition in the Louvre, Samuel Morse’s Exhibition Gallery at the Louvre, you can see the Mona Lisa juxtaposed with over twenty other canvases on a crowded gallery wall. Each painted image had to have a prominent frame to make clear the boundaries between the pictures o
n the wall.

  The hazy and indistinct paintings of Claude Monet, O’Doherty points out, typify the inauguration of a decisive new epoch in art history in which the horizontal painted surface, rather than the vertical depth of representational images, was primary. Paintings grew larger and larger, taking up more of the wall. According to this new understanding of the unique importance of each artwork, the space in between paintings began to increase. The spectator was to be encouraged to observe the work free from the distraction produced by the proximity of other ones.

  Eventually, many paintings were hung on a wall on their own, or with only a few neighbours, rendering the separating device of the frame unnecessary; by 1960 the curator William C. Seitz removed the frames entirely from Monet’s paintings for a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The gallery itself became the framing mechanism. In this kind of modernist art space, the encounter between the spectator and one work dominated. For this reason, other visual cues in the space were reduced to a minimum, resulting in a clean, spare gallery space that we know today as the white cube. As O’Doherty writes, ‘The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space … An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth-century art … Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics.’

  As the gallery itself began to be understood as the frame for visual art, artists began to innovate and invent display features within this expanded format. Two projects of Marcel Duchamp, in particular, are pivotal here, and each functioned as both an installation and a curatorial project. In 1938 he curated the International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris. For the exhibition he hung 1,200 bags of coal from the ceiling of the hall, darkening the space and dominating the exhibition with a radical display feature. In 1942 he curated another show, First Papers of Surrealism, in which he garlanded the space with spiderweb-like fibres. As his then collaborator, Leonora Carrington, told me, it was a wry joke at the obsolescence of painting and sculpture in any simple form. 1200 Bags of Coal and Mile of String both treated the exhibition itself as the relevant carrier of meaning. They foreshadowed the late twentieth century’s understanding of gallery space and further expanded the meaning of the space so that artists began to treat sets of rooms or even entire museums as the context for a work.

  Duchamp’s masterwork, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), created between 1915 and 1923, was at the centre of an exhibition that particularly struck me, which I would go to see whenever I could escape from school (I was fourteen at the time). The exhibition was Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk – which means ‘a tendency towards the total work of art’. From February through April 1983 this exhibition, curated by Harald Szeemann, took place at the Kunsthaus Zürich, and I ended up visiting it forty-one times. It was an encyclopedic exhibition and a non-didactic attempt to create, as Szeemann said, ‘poems in space’. It was the most important exhibition I saw during my adolescence, and one of the reasons I became a curator.

  The exhibition traced the Gesamtkunstwerk as a utopian idea from around 1800 to the present. It began with the French Revolutionary architecture of Étienne-Louis Boullée and the German Romanticism of Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich. It featured a large variety of all-encompassing artworks and the documentation of works in many media: the composer Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle; the systemic thought of the theosophist Rudolf Steiner; the artist and choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet; Kurt Schwitters’ sculptural city The Cathedral of Erotic Mysery and his vast, architectural Merzbau; the plans of the visionary architect Antoni Gaudí; the ‘Gläserne Kette’, a chain letter between Bruno Taut and fellow architects; the writings of Antonin Artaud; artworks by ‘outsider’ artists like Adolf Wölfli or the Facteur Cheval; and much more.

  In the centre of the exhibition space, Szeemann placed what he described as ‘a small space with some of the primary artistic gestures of our century’: Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, a 1911 painting by Wassily Kandinsky, one by Piet Mondrian and a Kazimir Malevich. This small room was like a chapel, a meditation on masterworks. The exhibition ended with Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture, and with him the perspective opened up to the present. Szeemann called the exhibition ‘a tendency towards the Gesamtkunstwerk’ because the Gesamtkunstwerk per se, as he said, can exist only in imagination: it can never actually be realized. In the catalogue, he wrote, the Gesamtkunstwerk shows a desire to produce a total picture or to realize an entire universe. The exhibition, Szeemann stressed, was meant to be the opposite of this totalitarian desire: it was, he wrote, ‘an invitation to a walk through the valley of styles on the rise; despite the different forms of power, something of an Olympian calm prevails’.

  The exhibition architecture consequently contained a real polyphony of positions that created fascinating associations across the different historic positions. The ‘Gläserne Kette’ could be connected to Runge, Beuys could be connected to Steiner, and so forth. The space presented different ‘worlds inside the world’, like a Russian matryoshka doll. Be it Ferdinand Cheval or Kurt Schwitters, they created worlds inside the world. This is probably the fundamental idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk: to create a self-contained world.

  Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk was built upon other exhibitions that Szeemann had curated earlier. In 1975 he curated Junggesellenmaschinen (Bachelor Machines) at the Kunsthalle Bern. Szeemann remarked that he ‘was inspired by Duchamp’s Large Glass and similar machines or machine-like men, such as those in Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony”, Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions d’Afrique”, and Alfred Jarry‘s “Le Surmâle”, and it had to do with a belief in eternal energy flow as a way to avoid death, as an erotics of life: the bachelor as rebel-model, as anti-procreation’.

  The second forerunner was Monte Verità: Le mamelle della verità (Monte Verità: The Breasts of Truth) in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1978. Around the year 1900 the hill had become an artist’s colony where many of the protagonists of the great utopian efforts in art and society met: the artists of ‘Die Blaue Reiter’ and the Bauhaus, inventors of modern dance like Rudolf Laban, the theosophists around Rudolf Steiner, the members of the ‘life reform’ movement, and anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin. They came from the north and wanted to realize their utopias of the sun in the south. Szeemann said about the later history of the Monte Verità: ‘Ascona is a case study about how fashionable tourist destinations get to be produced: first you have a set of romantic idealists, then social utopias that attract artists, then come the bankers who buy the paintings and want to live where the artists do. When the bankers call for architects the disaster starts.’ The questions of artistic and social utopias posed by Monte Verità were then further explored in Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk.

  An exhibition like Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk was an arrangement of important and disparate works of art, but within it one can also clearly detect a singular and distinctive cultural voice. You could learn from it, agree with it, disagree with it, defend it. Its power comes from the subtle sources of juxtaposition and arrangement. Most of all, it makes no pretence to being capable of producing something of value alone. The very idea of an exhibition is that we live in a world with each other, in which it is possible to make arrangements, associations, connections and wordless gestures, and, through this mise en scène, to speak.

  Yet here we must sound a note of caution. The danger with a large group exhibition is that it can be seen as the exhibition-maker’s own Gesamtkunstwerk. By the 1980s many thematic exhibitions risked being seen this way, the curator as an overriding figure or auteur who uses artwork to illustrate his or her own theory. Artists and their works must not be used to illustrate a curatorial proposal or premise to which they are subordinated. Instead, exhibitions are best generated through conversations and collaborations
with artists, whose input should steer the process from the beginning. Another positive development is the co-curating of exhibitions by multiple figures. Whereas in Szeemann’s generation the curator was often a singular figure, today many exhibitions are marked by a collaboration between multiple curators.2

  Recounting the actual history of curating and exhibitions can help us steer clear of a related confusion: that the curator herself or himself is an artist. It is true that the exhibition format has become more recognizable and popular, and exhibition-makers have come to be identified as individual makers of meaning. As artists themselves have moved beyond the simple production of art objects, and towards assembling or arranging installations that galvanize an entire exhibition space, their activity has in many cases become more consonant with the older idea of the curator as someone who arranges objects into a display.

  These developments have given rise to an impression that curators are competing with artists for primacy in the production of meaning or aesthetic value. Some theorists argue that curators are now secularized artists in all but name, but I think this goes too far. My belief is that curators follow artists, not the other way around. The role of the artist changed greatly over the last century. The artist Tino Sehgal has said that the notion of art generated by sculptors and painters in the early nineteenth century, and fully articulated and established by the 1960s, is detaching itself from its material origins and venturing into other realms in the twenty-first century. The exhibition-maker’s role has expanded in turn. Curating changes with the change in art.