Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith

disappointing that there is so scant a record of audience responses to art exhibitions. Curators talk about it all the time as the holy grail of their profession, but do very little beyond filing press responses and taking record photographs to actually examine it in depth and detail. This is left to the education and press people. Spectatorship seems a notional, not an actual, repository of value. The real thrill seems to have remained with conceiving and installing an exhibition. Is there a parallel to architects’ taste for photographs of their buildings made just after the moment of completion and before their intended users, who are, at least ostensibly, the primary motivators of the design, occupy them? The equivalent for curators is the folio of generalized shots of room installations, the major information value of which is to record which artwork hung where. It is telling that no practice of photography has evolved to capture the actual experience of walking through an exhibition. The closest thing to that ideal might be the virtual tours offered by various galleries and by services in some cities (which tend to be short-lived). The Google Art Project, and Vernissage TV, are interesting attempts to offer online access to quite different aspects of the exhibitionary complex, but remain rather limited relative to actual experience. My text editor suggests that e-publishing might eventually create a space that could address this issue. Perhaps so, when the time comes that most relationships have become e-relations, including exhibiting visual art (at that point mostly a matter of image-exchange, with objects remembered as holographic specters).

       13 Storr, “Show and Tell,” 23.

       14 “The Grammar of the Exhibition,” Manifesta Journal, no. 7 (2009/10).

       15 Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum 68, no. 2 (October 2009): 103. Reprinted in Brian Kuan Wood, ed., Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 63.

       16 See Carol Kino, “Puppies, Paintings, and Philosophers,” New York Times, March 4, 2012, AR23.

       17 Lind, “The Curatorial,” 65.

      18 Lind, in Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011), http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=759#top

      19 Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en. This is very close to her description of turning, and of contemporaneity. See “Turning,” e-flux journal 0 (November 2008), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/.

       20 João Ribas, “What to Do With the Contemporary?,” 3/10, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Contrappunto S.R.L., 2011). Elena Filipovic’s excellent contribution is full of exact formulations that share much with the approach taken in these notes. See “What is an Exhibition?,” 6/10, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Contrappunto S.R.L., 2011).

       21 Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?,” in “What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54.

       22 Tim Griffin, “Out of Time,” Artforum 50, no. 1 (September 2011): 288–89.

       23 Ibid., 289.

       24 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics,” in Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 109.

       25 Ribas, “What to Do With the Contemporary?,” 90.

       26 Ibid., 91.

      2.

       Shifting the

       Exhibitionary

       Complex

      Can we ever get beyond the essential conservatism

       of displaying works of art in conventional,

       dedicated spaces?

      —Paula Marincola, What Makes a Great

       Exhibition?, 2006

      Sites of exhibition are the most visible elements of the infrastructure within which art curating is practiced today. We might set them out as a spectrum, an array, ranging from the traditional (in the minimal sense of having been around the longest) to the most recent, and from those thoroughly invested in landmark and location to those that presume mobility and transience. At one end, there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: a mother-ship among megamuseums that—like its few comparators, such as the British Museum, London, and the Louvre, Paris—has recently included contemporary art within its treasure troves, appointed a specialist curator of twentieth and twenty-first century art (Sheena Wagstaff, who arrived from the Tate Modern), oriented its collection rooms toward making vivid the contemporary circumstances surrounding the creation of at least some of the items, and heralded, where appropriate, the continuing vitality of cultures that had previously been regarded as having reached their aesthetic highpoints at some time in the past. We could place at the other end of the spectrum venues that focus on the work of one artist or even, as is the case with The Artist Institute, New York, a slowly changing program of exhibitions of just one work of art at a time. Yet the real other is not concentrated versions of the same thing but the proliferation of open-ended curated projects, short and longer term, that seek to work from within the creativity already present in the everyday life of small, but constrained, communities. Between 2000 and 2005 Oda Projesi (Room Project), a collective formed by three women artists, staged thirty community arts projects in their apartment and the courtyard of a building in the Galata section of Istanbul, continuing their work since then in more mobile and virtual formats, as well as pursuing projects in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Since 2003 in Yangon, Myanmar, Networking and Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (NICA), founded by two artists, Jay Koh and Chu Yuan, has nurtured a variety of local possibilities and international connections for Burmese artists and spun off other independent arts spaces. Meanwhile, in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, the Waffle Shop is a community building, consciousness raising location, performance space, TV studio, and blog site, conceived and run by artists associated with Carnegie Mellon University, that also offers a full menu of edible waffles. A related project, the take-out restaurant, Conflict Kitchen, only sells food from nations with which the United States is in conflict.¹

      Façade with banners, detail of main entrance and steps, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006

      What are the exhibitionary venues that fill out the infrastructural spectrum between these two ends? Having begun with the universal history of the art museum that holds pride of cultural place in most metropolitan centers, we soon shift our gaze to the huge variety of more specialized collections—the period museum, the national collection, the geopolitical area or civilization museum, the city museum, the university gallery, the art school gallery, the private collection museum,