Reflection

by Jens Hoffmann and Tara McDowell

The Exhibitionist no. 1 was published in January 2010 as the first issue of the first-ever journal devoted to contemporary curatorial practice and exhibition making.1 Our aim was to create a specialized publication for a professional field that has grown vastly over the past two decades and was in need of a recurring, critical platform to discuss its ways and means. Over the past 18 months we have published four issues containing kinds of writing that, for the most part, did not exist before. With this fourth issue we would like to take the opportunity to look back at some of the discussions that have arisen and respond to some of the reactions that the journal has provoked.

The Exhibitionist does not aim to supplant artistic practice with curatorial practice, nor is it meant to consolidate the power of the curator. This is not an either/or proposition. Close readings of exhibitions by those who make exhibitions only makes us more accountable for the work we show and our motivations for showing it. Our proposal also does not represent any consensus of curating. The widely divergent voices within these pages make clear how we conceive of curating: as a discourse with many viewpoints, styles, and commitments. While we do claim a particular editorial position, we are not aiming to establish a single school of exhibition making. Rather, we want to participate in and foster the diversification of exhibition models. There are writers in this issue who explicitly disagree with the journal’s editorial opinion, and who come to conclusions at variance with one another. Looking back over the past issues, the range of writing styles, arguments, and chosen subjects is striking, especially considering the journal’s strict editorial structure. We have purposefully resisted a homogenous, or hegemonic, approach to curating.

This may seem at odds with the journal’s professed belief in exhibition making as a form of authorship—the editorial claim that has, understandably, generated the most debate and disagreement. But the emphasis is mistakenly on a seemingly anachronistic appropriation of authorship, and elides what for us is the central point: that exhibition making is a kind of making.

This issue of The Exhibitionist diverges a bit from previous issues. Gone is the distinctive, bright yellow cover (an appropriation of, and homage to, Cahiers du cinéma). On the cover, rather than a single image (those in past issues were selected for the especially emphatic ways they staged various positions of looking and being looked at) appears a phrase deployed with tongue just slightly in cheek: “La Critique.” This and every subsequent fourth issue of The Exhibitionist offers a forum for response and critique.

In the critique section, we welcome critical commentary about the journal itself: both its editorial commitments and the specific content of earlier articles. We envision this section as permitting the brief, but passionately argued, response that is the “letter to the editor”—a response that segues what was once a closed, final statement into an open dialogue. The opinions offered by Jarrett Gregory, Mia Jankowicz, Tina Kukielski, Miguel A. López, Rodrigo Moura, and Lawrence Rinder do not coalesce into a neat mapping of key themes of the journal, nor any illusory status quo of curating. Rather, they are idiosyncratic and deeply personal.

A topic that has been discussed at length, in both the pages of this journal and the larger art world, is the relationship between the artist and the curator. Some may feel that this issue has been discussed to exhaustion, but we have noticed a strongdesire on the part of many curators to look into it anew and push the conversation further. In these pages, Massimiliano Gioni, Dieter Roelstraete, and Dorothea von Hantelmann offer points of view that recognize the complexity of this relationship and its historical development. Von Hantelmann notes that the increased significance of curating in the past few decades directly correlates with the new cultural and social value placed on acts of selection: “Only with an understanding of this new culture of choosing, I argue, can we recognize the embeddedness of curatorial practice in the present socioeconomic order of Western societies.” For Gioni, the role of the curator is more akin to that of the interpreter. He cautions against a tide of resistance to interpreting artworks in ways other than the artist intended. “There is quite a bit of room inside an artwork, a vast space that accommodates multiple and varied readings,” he writes. Roelstraete prefers to frame the debate not around good artists or good curators, but on “whether this is a good work of art or that a good exhibition.”

The second topic discussed here is the necessary and relevant subject of the history of exhibitions. Teresa Gleadowe, Julian Myers, and Christian Rattemeyer demonstrate that despite the spate of recent and forthcoming texts on the subject, this is a nascent history, still very much in formation with much interesting work to be done. Gleadowe calls for an exhibition history that we actively inhabit and interrogate through the lens of our own commitments and methodologies, as a preventative measure against the “false familiarity” of a “sterile canon of ‘landmark’ exhibitions.” Rattemeyer argues that, in fact, precisely what this emergent discourse needs is a canon of exhibitions comprised of in-depth case studies as well as a “terminology and methodology of scholarly description.”

Myers for his part warns us that “a phobia of artworks seems to be the cost of a fetishization of exhibitions” and stresses the need for a history of exhibitions to turn to artworks—not perfunctorily but with deep, sustained attention. Certainly this point is well taken, but it also makes the task at hand somewhat Herculean. In addition to attending to the organization, installation, and reception of the exhibition, the historical specificity of the moment in which it appeared, its relevance for contemporary practice, and its material relations with market and site, there are, of course (and most importantly) the works that are in it. Moreover, close examination of an exhibition necessarily reveals in all its squirminess what a history of art and artists would—and does—leave out: the forgotten artists, the failed artworks, the minor or transitional efforts. Writing or teaching a history of exhibitions, then, can quickly become not just Herculean, but unruly, as the photographic and historical record demands writing back in the figures so often left out.

Curatorial education, our third topic, has been the subject of much discussion lately, and rightly so given that we are dealing with a new academic discipline that is most likely here to stay. Johanna Burton, recently appointed director of the graduate program at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, names the elephant in the room: “the possibility that considerations of curating . . . are in the process of becoming fully loosened from considerations of art in any previously coherent or stable sense.” For Burton, however, though it may be fashionable for students to eschew art and its institutions in favor of theory engaged with culture, or image circulation more broadly, we would do well not to abandon art’s

institutions so quickly.

Andrew Renton, director of curating at Gold- smiths College for the past eight years, arrives at a somewhat similar conclusion. In recent years, he says, something was lost in the curator’s dogged pursuit of independence from collections and museums. “If today’s generation of curators inherits a legacy of dematerialized, process- and discourse-driven curating,” he writes, “the physical absence that is produced in the wake of such strategies becomes a site of mourning and loss. Something was left behind.” And finally Kate Fowle, who cofounded and led the graduate program in curatorial practice at California College of the Arts from 2002–8, asks us to push beyond stale debates about whether or not such programs should exist. In dialogue with Maria Lind’s polemical assessment of such programs in the third issue of The Exhibitionist, Fowle reframes the debate to consider “how to provide opportunities for growth over, say, a 40-year career” rather than via a two-year graduate program.

As with exhibition histories, there is little consensus about how curatorial education should be positioned in relation to art history. Is it a subfield of art history, or distinct from it? How far into the reaches of the academy should it wander? How much should it replicate art history’s structures and narratives? It is worth noting that such uncertainty about the ways, means, and boundaries of a discipline is part of what keeps it vital. Art history, to this end, would do well to consider how these unwieldy upstarts might productively trouble its own procedures.

Here is another question we have asked ourselves: How much can “the curatorial” annex and still remain nimble without becoming mega-lomaniacal—or, worse, a “half-abstracted meta-discourse” (in the words of Julian Myers) without a subject? This last question is in response to curating’s growing popularity and prestige (while, for example, as others have noted here and elsewhere, the importance of the art critic has declined), and the tendency for an ascendant body to almost magnetically attract and annex whatever lies nearby. We are calling this phenomenon “the paracuratorial.” This practice defines curating not as bound to exhibition making, but rather as encompassing, and making primary, a range of activities that have traditionally been parenthetical or supplementary to the exhibition proper. We especially like Lívia Páldi’s concise, yet performatively accumulative, definition put forth in her essay here: “The term, which encompasses lectures, interviews, educational events, residencies, publications, screenings, readings, and performances, implies an intertwining net of activities as well as diverse modes of operation and conversation based on more occasional, temporary alliances of artists, curators, and the public.” Páldi notes that the paracuratorial is linked to, and takes advantage of, temporary and mobile models of coming-together that are themselves the result of emphasis placed on the distribution of knowledge rather than its production. And yet, “in an age that is literally drowning in events,” the paracuratorial runs the risk of simply adding to that problem.

Vanessa Joan Müller limns the historical trajectory of the paracuratorial and finds its roots in the New Institutionalism that emerged in the 1990s, and also in the institutional critique of the preceding decades. She asks that we retain the exhibition as our central form and collaborate with other arenas, rather than appropriate their activities into our own (art institutions’) theater of operations as a kind of second-wave institutional critique. “We ought not to forget,” she writes, “that other places exist where much of what we increasingly find ourselves doing is also done—places like universities, repertory cinemas, community centers, and so on, and which merely await our willingness to cooperate.” For Emily Pethick, it is precisely the boundaries and “unnecessary dualism” posited by the term “paracuratorial” that require rethinking. The moment a project runs up against boundaries or obstacles may bring about its most productive turn.

We wonder, as all editors and writers do, who our readers are, and where their commitments lie. Even though this is a highly specialized publication directed at a sliver of an already circumscribed art world, it seems that, paradoxically, discussions around curating are becoming more and more splintered and isolated. This atomization, we feel, results from the total success of the contemporary and the demands of that model that our energies be directed at parsing certain curatorial trends: social practice, the educational turn, New Institutionalism, and so on. We do not claim to be immune to such temptations, but we do feel, and wish to stress, that the often isolated and unconnected discussions around curating are in fact parts of a larger evaluation, of clear relevance to all, concerned with reformulating the relationships among art, critical thinking, the public, cultural institutions, and the politics inherent to all of these.

Notes

1. With the recent launch of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, The Exhibitionist is no longer alone in this pursuit. Other periodicals on the subject of curating are apparently in the making.