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Issue 23. Time and Photography / La Photographie et le temps

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

Author: Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans
Published: November 2008

Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance
Edited by Judith Rugg & Michèle Sedgwick
Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007
ISBN 9781841501628

The most pertinent question in the growing discussion on curating seems to concern the criteria in choosing to exhibit some artworks at the expense of others. Exhibiting is crucial for an artwork, because it means making it known to the public. How and why do some artists and their work become visible and why do other disappear? This is also the question of the power of institutions, which establish chosen artworks as a norm or a canon. Institutions claim the authority to consecrate some artifacts as works of art and relegate others to the dustbin of history. Since recently, this nearly magical power has shifted significantly towards another agent in the art world – the curator. Yet it is difficult to say what exactly this shift changes in our perception of art. Although seemingly all-present in the cultural field since more than a decade, the curator has still an ambiguous position. Distrusted by many, especially artists themselves, the curator seems to have attracted a lot of attention of the broad public, in some cases arising more interest than artists that are shown in exhibitions.

The texts collected in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance contribute significantly to this growing debate on the role and importance of curating. One of the editors, Judith Rugg, states firmly in her introduction that the aim of the book is to initiate new paradigms and critical thinking about this increasingly expanding field (7). This ambitious aim is concomitant with an unambiguously confident concept of curating, which editors approach as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture. It therefore sets out from a very high estimation of curating as a form of critical involvement with contemporary culture at large and attempts to confirm and consolidate this conviction in most of the individual contributions. In that sense the book is written by and for curators, which is probably its biggest constraint. This limitation, however, is partly compensated by the fact that some authors try to undermine this all-too-optimistic vision on curating by both questioning such conception of the role of the curator as well as investigating possible meanings of a critical intervention.

The collection sets off with an erudite summary of issues and developments in the history of curating. Its author Paul o’Neill proposes to talk about ‘the curatorial turn’, analogously to the linguistic turn in philosophy or the pictorial turn in cultural studies. He locates the rise of the importance of the curator – what he calls the ascendancy of the curatorial gesture – in the 1990s, with such prominent figures as Harald Szeeman and Jan Hoet coming to the fore. Yet the difficulty of this new term is that it easily obscures the fact of the existence and the role of curators before the purported turn. The shift might be less dramatic than o’Neill suggests if we think of some groundbreaking curators from before the 1990s (such as Edward Steichen or John Szarkowski, who introduced photography into the art museum).  
The following chapters of the book address curating through typically neglected or newly rediscovered subjects related to art history, such as feminist art (Catherine Elwes), the art from the peripheries (Liz Wells, Sophia Phoca); Black art (Richard Hylton); software art (Geoff Cox); dance (Kate Lawrence) or even plants (Chris Dorsett). The various texts in Issues in Curating are therefore refreshingly diverse, ranging from detailed accounts of particular curatorial experiences or even descriptions of exhibited works to theoretical considerations and academic summaries. The book thus offers different perspectives and variety of information of interest to diverse reader, yet it also disappoints some of its promises set out in the introduction. Above all, this publication makes it clear how important it is to understand what ‘being critical’ might mean for the practice of curating art exhibitions and what are the unavoidable limits of critical attitudes in cultural discourse.

One of the most relevant questions raised in the volume addresses the influence exhibiting can have on conceptions of art. In her very interesting contribution Susanne Buchan traces the shifting meanings of an artwork in relation to the so-called low art of animation film. The fact of being exhibited in an art gallery can radically change the perception of these works, which heretofore functioned within a relatively little known circuit of animation film festivals. In that context it is relevant to ask about the role of a curator in showing any type of creative work as an art object in a gallery. It is remarkable how an artifact which was so far neglected by art museums changes its meaning after being chosen by a curator to feature in an art exhibition. Such ways of elevating ‘low’ arts to the status of an art work are perceived by the authors of this volume as a form of subverting the power of the museum. But is it really the curator’s role to act against the institutions, subverting the canons and undermining the patterns of exhibition and acquisition policies? How doubtful this (romantic) plea is, can be shown clearly in the otherwise very interesting essay by Sophia Phoca, who remains very inconclusive about the role of the hosting institution - the Tate - in her curatorial decisions. Phoca begins with raising the question of the constraints imposed by the exhibition venue in the decisions she made as curator of ‘Place and placelessness’ exhibition. Surprisingly, after having posed the question in the beginning of the article she avoids answering or even approaching the issue at the conclusion of her text.

For this reason I think that the most interesting contributions in the book are those which confront the unavoidable ambiguity of a ‘critical’ curating. Both JJ Charlesworth and Richard Hylton doubt about a possibility of being truly critical, and of subverting the power of the museum from the position of a curator, who always has to function within the constraints of an institution. Hylton states that as a curator who works within the public sector and is therefore supported by public money, the notion of being critical or autonomous is arguably as fantastical as it is implausible (122). Having these restraints in mind while making a ‘critical’ curatorial statement might help avoid some intrinsic difficulties that are linked to critical activism. In the closing essay, Alun Rowlands reminds about some contradictions of the so-called institutional critique. As a characteristic attitude within the contemporary liberal society, it always is inscribed in the all-encompassing and subjugating power of the institution; and therefore, loses much of its ‘critical’ qualities.
Interestingly however, what this collection of essays on curating does not address is the quite pertinent question of the relationship between curatorship and art. If we consider that it is art which used to be called ‘critical’ and ‘subversive’ then the curator seems – in the perspective drawn in Issues... – to have usurped the art’s role. And if it indeed is so, it might mean, as Boris Groys remarked, that the growing importance of curating inevitably implies art is permanently ill and in need of the curator to heal it by granting artworks visibility they helplessly desire (see Boris Groys, “On the Curatorship”, in: Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, 43-52). The import of such approach is, from the art’s point of view, highly contentious and hence worth considering within the debate on curating.

Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans is fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO)
E-mail: katarzyna.ruchel@arts.kuleuven.be

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