Ways of Curating Read online

  That said, the role of exhibition-maker is one sometimes played by creative artists themselves. In 2006, Jean-Luc Godard curated a show for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which turned out to be one of the most radical experiments the Centre had mounted since Jean-François Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux exhibition in 1985. The museum had played a role in Godard’s work since his film Bande à Part (1964), with its famous sequence of the lead characters running through the Louvre. His exhibition was a non-retrospective retrospective, in which he planned to look at the history of cinema, the hegemony of American popular culture and the hegemony of images.

  I visited the exhibition many times, a bit like Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk some twenty years earlier. Godard’s show revealed that it was still possible to change the rules of the game and unsettle most conventions of the format. The exhibition started with a series of disclaimers that it was not suitable for all audiences and warnings not to take kids into the last room. Godard’s partially hand-corrected wall text made clear that the original idea of the show he had wanted to curate remained unrealized – the initial title was Collage(s) de France: Archeology of Cinema. The exhibition wasn’t put on due to the technical and financial difficulties it presented, so Godard replaced it with Travel(s) in Utopia JLG 1946–2006: In Search of Lost Theorem.

  About six months before the opening, Godard declared that he had fired the curator working with him on the show. From this moment onwards, he refused all other dialogue with the Pompidou Centre other than handwritten faxes. Godard later refused to allow a press release. The final show was never final as it kept changing throughout its duration: there were cables lying around and other installation elements of the process so that the show looked forever unfinished. Visitors entered by parting heavy plastic curtains. It was chaosmotic, to use Felix Guattari’s word for an experience of osmosis in an environment of constant change – and the history of cinema is nothing if not that.

  Godard included original paintings from the museum’s collection, from Henri Matisse to Nicolas de Staël, situations like a bed with pillows, models of the unrealized show and the realized show, waste and posters, many film posters, and a number of flat plasma screens with fragments from his films and other films. Godard included a room, labelled AVANT-HIER (‘before yesterday’), with abandoned maquettes of the original, unrealized exhibition, Collage(s) de France. In the room HIER (‘yesterday’) he showed many filmic fragments from his own and other films. And in the room entitled AUJOURD’HUI (‘today’) he included plasma screens showing sports, pornography and found situations such as the bed. The show was an imaginary space of past and present coming together, as an exhibition should be.

  Courbet, Manet and Whistler

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists themselves played the most important role in the transformation of the exhibition format. In 1855, Gustave Courbet submitted nine paintings to the Academy for inclusion in that year’s Salon. The Salon exhibitions had become the most important venue for French painters to exhibit their works, and it inspired the development of what we now know as art criticism. Between 1759 and 1781, Denis Diderot had published a set of newsletters reviewing each of the Salon exhibitions. These writings marked the beginning of the understanding of exhibitions as publicly received events whose contents could be assessed in terms of newness, originality and vitality. By the nineteenth century, figures such as Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola were emphasizing the Salon’s importance by writing about the painters they saw there.

  Courbet was frustrated by his lack of recognition from the Academy, which was the only way for an artist to earn credibility in nineteenth-century France. The style favoured by the Academy involved the use of large canvases for ‘important’ subject matter, such as historic, mythical scenes. Courbet did not abide by this hierarchy of values; his large-scale painting Burial at Ornans had shocked audiences in 1851 by showing the humble residents of his home town in a manner normally reserved for the social elite. In 1855 he submitted a similarly radical canvas, an allegorical portrait of himself entitled The Artist’s Studio.

  The Artist’s Studio was rejected by the Academy. In response, Courbet decided to take matters into his own hands. He erected a temporary structure near the Salon and installed forty-four of his paintings in it, calling his exhibition the Pavilion of Realism. Courbet’s self-mounted exhibition inaugurated the modern period in painting, in which the artist, rather than his patron, became the protagonist of art. Equally importantly, he helped to free public exhibitions from the sole authority of the state.

  Within ten years further revolts against the hegemony of the Academy occurred. Protests by artists led Napoleon III to mandate that rejected artists be allowed to show at the other end of the official exhibition hall. This led to the 1863 Salon des Refusés, which showed the works of artists including Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet, who had been refused from that year’s official exhibition. The exhibition featured some of the century’s most celebrated works, including Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1862–3).

  ‘To exhibit is to find allies for the struggle,’ Manet remarked. Whereas in the Salon’s traditional format paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, covering an entire wall, Manet believed that paintings should be hung in at most one or two rows, with space left between them to allow viewers to concentrate on a single work, rather than a jumbled assemblage. Courbet’s and Manet’s self-organized shows intervened directly in the discourse surrounding what counts as art, rather than leaving it up to ‘authorities’. Courbet and Manet had begun to act as curators. They are the predecessors of today’s many artist-run spaces.

  A third artist who expanded the terrain of art in the nineteenth century was James McNeill Whistler. When a wealthy shipowner named Frederick Leyland and his interior architect, Thomas Jeckyll, consulted Whistler for help decorating the London dining room where Leyland displayed his collection of Chinese porcelain, they also commissioned a Whistler painting called La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–4).

  Whistler went much further: he repainted the walls with yellow, then decorated the room with a wave pattern. After Leyland left on a trip to Liverpool, Whistler installed an imitation gold-leaf ceiling, then painted it in a pattern of peacock feathers. Leyland returned to find Whistler treating the entire room as an artwork – a kind of early Gesamtkunstwerk – and so began a predictable dispute over payment. Whistler went right ahead and incorporated this too, by painting a mural showing a pair of warring peacocks representing himself and Leyland, which he titled Art and Money; or, The Story of the Room. Whistler’s overstepping of his boundaries created one of his famous artistic efforts, The Peacock Room. It prefigured installation art, in which an artist works on the entire environment of a space, rather than simply decorating a part of it with a painting or sculpture.

  Courbet, Manet and Whistler each played an important role in the emerging field of exhibitions and installation, laying the groundwork for the artist-run space, the modern concept of hanging works of art, and the idea of the room as a total unit under the control of the artist. In so doing, they brought the display of artworks into the realm of individual agency, making it possible to conceptualize a role which became distinct from that of the artist, a role with responsibility for the overall arrangement and presentation of groups of artworks within an aesthetically unified space. The twentieth century’s rethinking of art and display was deeply influenced by their modernizing efforts.

  Collecting Knowledge

  To make a collection is to find, acquire, organize and store items, whether in a room, a house, a library, a museum or a warehouse. It is also, inevitably, a way of thinking about the world – the connections and principles that produce a collection contain assumptions, juxtapositions, findings, experimental possibilities and associations. Collection-making, you could say, is a method of producing knowledge.

  During the Renaissance, private citizens collected items of note
in their own homes, often in a specially designated room known as a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders. Aristocrats, monks, scholars, academicians, natural scientists and wealthy private citizens: the slightly motley group who made up the early modern public sphere were the initial protagonists. The compulsive interest of such people in collecting expressed itself as a drive to collate and understand significant objects: the fossils, minerals, specimens, tools and artisanal products that provided evidence for our knowledge of and theories about the world. And without modern national institutions – there was no British Library or Natural History Museum in London, or Library of Congress in Washington – it fell to interested parties to take up this job themselves.

  Though the aim of amassing evidence may sound like a rather scientific way to think about collecting, it is necessary to remember that the hard distinction between science and art which marks more recent centuries was not evident as late as the sixteenth century. The separation of art and the humanities on the one hand, and science on the other, is a fundamental feature of modern life, but it also constitutes a loss.

  Looking back in time can be an invaluable tool for this: pre-modern scholars had a more holistic and comprehensive picture of human life than we do today. The hard division between the rational and irrational that marks modernity has rendered unclear how science and art might relate to one other – how each is, perhaps secretly, part of the other. The history of the Wunderkammer – in which artefacts, paintings, specimens, sculptures and geological samples were collected in one place – is also the history of the period in which explanations, facts and the scientific method were first being elaborated. To study the Renaissance is to gain a model for reconnecting art and science, sundered by history.

  The Wunderkammer presented, in a room or suite of rooms, miscellanies of curiosities, those objects that were mysterious or strange. A recent exhibition text described their typical contents: ‘animal, vegetable, and mineral specimens; anatomical oddities; medical diagrams; pictures and manuscripts describing far-off landscapes, strange figures and animals, or beasts from fable and myth; plans for impossible buildings and machines’.

  These early collections of all forms of knowledge appear remarkably omnivorous to our modern, specialized selves. The Renaissance scholar, scientist and Wunderkammer-maker Athanasius Kircher is a striking example of this type of omnivore. I first came across Kircher’s work in my childhood, in the monastery library in St. Gallen, and his knowledge of many different fields of activity fascinated me. Born in 1602, Kircher studied and contributed to the understanding of geology, optics, astronomy, perpetual motion machines, Chinese culture and history, clock design, medicine, mathematics, the civilization of ancient Egypt, and an amazing array of other subjects. Among other things, he produced diagrams proving that the Tower of Babel could not reach the moon, and had himself lowered into the crater of a rumbling, soon-to-erupt Mount Vesuvius to gain a better understanding of volcanic activity.

  Kircher assembled a large collection of curiosities outside Rome, known as the Museum Kircherianum. There he installed a speaking tube, which connected his private bedroom with the exhibition rooms. When visitors came, he could be informed and attend to them. In the period before the connection between museum-going and the public sphere, Kircher’s system was a kind of early hybrid between private and public, and between the roles of private host and public museum official. He was probably the most famous intellectual investigator of his time, and his interests, unimaginably diverse to us today, would have appeared to his contemporaries as the impulses of a natural philosopher. His books, and the many beautiful drawings he produced, are now seen as part of both the history of science and the history of art.

  Today, such important collections are stored in public institutions: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of a collection that belonged, as a kind of inheritance, to the citizens of a democratic state came into being. The British Museum, for instance, originated from the massive collection of Hans Sloane, a capitalist, physician and botanist. Sloane personally collected plant and animal specimens from Jamaica, and to this core he added other collections. He amassed hundreds of volumes of plants, as well as precious stones and animals, all of which he left to England at his death in 1753. From such collections, the first public museums inherited their aspiration to contain everything, to bring representations of all the world’s diversity under one roof. Their descendants are museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its Polynesian canoes, Impressionist paintings, Japanese suits of armour and Egyptian Temple of Dendur. The aspiration to completeness was also the principle behind the Victoria and Albert Museum’s room full of plaster casts of monuments, including a ‘life-size’ cast of Trajan’s column so large it had to be cut in two.

  The effort to organize and explain the world’s copious and strange complexity is the desire underlying the Wunderkammer – but equally evident is the desire to luxuriate in what cannot be understood. Even if we have, today, split apart the scientific from the artistic, the Wunderkammer reminds us that the two are both essentially forms of taking pleasure in the task of understanding the world, provoked by a stimulating object or idea. As the artist Paul Chan told me, ‘curiosity is the pleasure principle of thought’. Both art and science require and call into being an archive of such objects and ideas, which is what Kircher, Sloane and others like them produced. This archive, in a typical Wunderkammer, is heterogeneous, unedited, and contains artworks embedded with non-artworks, artificilia with naturalia – any and all objects whose curiousness incited a quest for understanding.

  Public state museums are a phenomenon of the late eighteenth century – the first major public art museum being the Louvre – but museums also existed in antiquity; the original meaning of the term is a place consecrated to the muses. The famed library of Alexandria is the oldest known museum; the connection between museums and libraries, then, is an ancient and intimate one. By the Renaissance, Kircher and other scholars were using ‘museum’ to refer to any place or object – a study, a library, a garden, an encyclopedia – where items were collected for learned study. Museums were supposed to be an objective archive of the past. By the late nineteenth century, walking through a series of interconnected rooms in a museum was understood as a journey through time, through stages of development that tell the story of history. But this does not mean the museum is simply a resting place – in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the institution has recovered this multiplicity of roots.

  Of Libraries and Archives

  I grew up in the eastern part of Switzerland, near Lake Constance, and was first exposed to the idea of a collection by libraries. Before I discovered museums, my parents often took me to the Stiftsbibliothek, a monastery library about 40 kilometres away in St. Gallen. The monastery library, a large baroque hall from the seventeenth century, contains books that date back to the ninth century. My child’s mind was very deeply attracted to and marvelled at this library, its collection of medieval books, the white gloves worn by its staff, the readers forced to walk silently wearing felt slippers. These are indelible images for me. In its completeness, the monastery’s collection represented the dream articulated by Athanasius Kircher: that we could have all the world’s knowledge united in one place – and in one person. The monastic collection inspired me, and I was soon collecting books myself. By high school you could hardly get into my room – from the beginning my interests in literature, visual display and collection were intermingled.

  One of the monastery library’s most famous holdings is a ninth-century map known as The Plan of St. Gall, which is the design of a monastic cloister. It contains plans for the monks’ kitchen, their library, their living spaces and so on. Human beings have a prodigious ability to memorize spaces. The plan is very much about archives – for the medieval mind, space was also a way to store memories.

  A second library that fascinated me as a child was an important bridge between the literature and t
he visual arts. This was the Erker-Galerie, a gallery and bookshop in St. Gallen. Its director, Franz Larese, had been a book dealer and took special pleasure in bringing together artists and writers. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, made a record with the sculptor Eduardo Chillida. One of the most famous occurrences at the Erker-Galerie was a speech in 1961 by the leading playwright of the theatre of the absurd, Eugène Ionesco, who at an exhibition of his friend the painter Gérard Schneider denounced openings and speeches. In short, it was a place of great creative ferment which brought together the artistic worlds of the twentieth century, all near my home town.

  One evening, on the street in front of the gallery, I happened to begin speaking to a man who turned out to be Ionesco himself. Remarkably, he had stopped writing. In his seventies, he was now drawing, painting and producing lithographs. I was struck again by the permeability of creative worlds, and Ionesco-the-real-person’s lack of regard for the supposed calling of Ionesco the world-famous playwright. During our conversation that night he told me that one of his plays, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Prima Donna), had been performed every night in a small theatre in Paris since 1957. It continues to this day, and is widely considered the longest continuously running play in one theatre in history. As a teenager on the street, to meet Ionesco and hear this story made a deep impression – plays and exhibitions, which I assumed always ended after a few months or travelled for a couple of years, could be structured in such a way as to last for time spans more akin to those of sculptures in a museum. Entirely different temporalities were possible.

  * * *

  In a long published conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, during which they discuss archives, the writers say that everything they’ve thought about such collections started with their childhood, and they also discuss the biggest problem with archives: where to put them. Eco’s own archival dilemma became so bad that he actually needed to buy an apartment just to store his books in. As Eco describes the problem in This Is Not the End of the Book: