Within the art world, the title “curator” has for some time expanded beyond the confines of those who care for collections and stage exhibitions in art museums to include those in museums who curate what are now regarded as core programs, such as education. Museums routinely name guest or adjunct curators who organize exhibitions on invitation. This practice and the myriad activities associated with it has become itself a professional subfield under the title “independent curator.” An increasing number of practitioners seek shelter under its bright-yet-fragile umbrella. These range from the few celebrated international artistic directors of biennials and mega-exhibitions (most of whom have at least one part-time institutional base) to do-anything interns whose actual working conditions make them foot soldiers in globalized capitalism’s outsourced armies of cultural producers in whose ranks the thrill of being seen to be doing something cool stands in for the slim prospect of being paid, sometime, for their labors.
Although museums have not been abandoned, art curating is no longer necessarily tied to them, except by conservative definitions that draw a distinction between the curator devoted above all to the care and conservation of collections and the exhibition maker who does only, or mostly, what the name suggests.2 Instead, curating now encompasses not only exhibition making but also programming at many kinds of alternative venues, and is often adjunct to even the most experimental art space. A recent issue of the online magazine On-Curating.org, for example, focuses on “aspects of the public sphere, public space, and public art in seven different metropolises around the world,” from Zurich through Istanbul to Shanghai and Mexico City, with not even a passing mention of museums.3 The entire schedule of performance art events constituting Performa 11 was, of course, curated by director RoseLee Goldberg, while nearly every event was itself curated by someone other than the performer. There were fifty-five curators in all. Brooklyn-based artist William Powhida, scathing critic of the financial domination of the contemporary art world, described his sensationalizing manipulation of decadent stereotypes to draw attention to his 2010 show at Marlborough Gallery, Chelsea, in these terms: “Part of the goal was to use the press to curate hype.”4 If it is done in a certain way and according to a certain spirit, it seems that even the critical interrogation of curatorship itself can be curated: for example, activist, performance artist, and academic Lissette Olivares was listed as curator of “A Symposium of Curatorial Interventions,” held at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, on November 17, 2011.
Which way and in which spirit? A current and widely shared answer goes along these lines: “Curating is caring for the culture, above all by enabling its artistic or creative transformers to pursue their work. This facilitation is done, preferably, with empathy and insight, effectively, and with some style.” Such an answer might serve as a job description within the Omigod, iwaslike whirl of getting on with the exigencies of this project while looking for the next one, but it does not identify the distinctive elements of contemporary curatorship and it does not qualify as a definition of contemporary curatorial thought.
Some seem to doubt that curators are capable of critical thought.
Given the ageing of postmodernism as a critical category, but also the absence of any plausible replacement for it, the contemporary has become the default cultural periodization for the artistically current. It is, however, notoriously difficult to specify the contemporaneity of contemporary art. Nevertheless, notwithstanding reservations about its suitability, “contemporary art” has been taken on as the generic name for the post-postmodern art that began to emerge in the 1990s, but that is only now receiving the serious and sustained attention that it demands if it is to be taken as a critical, rather than a merely journalistic or curatorial, category.5
Notice the instinctive distinctions drawn in this otherwise quite accurate remark about the use of the term “contemporary” for today’s art and the less accurate remark about the time lag in critical discourse getting around to treating the contemporary critically. Curators reading this passage may find themselves appalled, as I was, by its implication that their thought amounts to something equivalent to journalism and that it cannot by categorical definition ever become critical.
In fact, the elements of contemporary curatorial thinking can be readily identified. Curators regularly speak about them, reflect on them, and share them with others. They amount to a concrete mix of principles, values, ideas, rules of thumb, and ethical necessities. The seven points that English-born Australian curator Nick Waterlow, director of a number of Sydney Biennales, wrote in his notebook shortly before his untimely death in November 2009 are a particularly poignant instance. Entitled, with dreadful prescience, “A Curator’s Last Will and Testament,” they read:
1. Passion; 2. An eye of discernment; 3. An empty vessel; 4. An ability to be uncertain; 5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists; 6. A medium—bringing a passionate and informed understanding of works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question; 7. Making possible the altering of perception.6
Values such as these resonate within more programmatic efforts by curators to reimagine museums; write the history of curating; innovate within exhibition formats; extend curating into educational activity; and, in some cases, commit to activist curating in venues beyond the art world. These impulses are reshaping modern curatorial thinking. They are crucial to its efforts to become contemporary. Less obvious in the discourse as yet, but equally important for the future, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators, and the challenge of curating contemporaneity itself—in its present, past, and future forms.
What follows are five essayistic tracks into this volatile territory—each drawing freely on adventures in the art world during the past year as I responded to ideas, events, and encounters as they occurred to me—leavened with occasional retrospective diversions and with some attention to the burgeoning literature on curating. To get the flavor of what I am attempting, imagine “Thinking Contemporary Curating” as three words in Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die (1984), centerpiece of the Benesse House Museum on Naoshima island, in the Inland Sea of Japan, in which rows of sets of words on either side of “and” flash on and off randomly in brightly colored neon. Think of the terms of my title as three ideas that flash independently, in bold isolation, but then combine into a number of almost sentences, seemingly located at levels below and more basic than those allowed by the surfaces of spoken and written language, through which they often, these days with accelerating insistence, break.
Bruce Nauman, 100 Live and Die, 1984. Neon, 299.7 x 335.6 x 53.3. Collection Benesse Holdings, Inc, Japan
I do not write as a curator by profession, having been involved in making just a few exhibitions.7 I am, rather, an art historian, critic, theorist, and teacher who is a professional visitor to exhibitions and an amateur enthusiast about them. I have, over many years, learned an enormous amount from the efforts of curators—from the most collection oriented to those who would never think of setting foot in a museum. These reflections are a respectful attempt to offer something in return. I owe my first glimpse of art to a curator. Coming from a family for whom original art was out of the question, and going to primary schools where it existed, unremarked, as reproduced decoration, I discovered art by what I thought was an accident. At the age of nine, my father took me to visit the Museum of Natural History, Melbourne, to see the dinosaurs and the effigy of Phar Lap, a great racehorse, when I noticed in a cabinet at the bottom of some stairs what I thought were colored sketches for comic books of the kind I was making at home. Climbing up to the landing, another cabinet housed fine line drawings