Chance and Indeterminacy as Curatorial Strategies

SC13 (2010), installation view, January 16−22. Photo: Chris Fitzpatrick, courtesy SC13.

JCS 1.1_Markpolous_6-24.indd 6 2/3/12 4:39:07 PM

Journal of Curatorial Studies Volume 1 Number 1

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.1.7_1

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JCS 1 (1) pp. 7–24 Intellect Limited 2012

Keywords

curatorial methodology curatorial critique chance proceduresmutable exhibitions

Leigh MarkopouLos

The Accidental Exhibition: Chance as Curatorial Critique and Opportunity

Abstract

This article elucidates the possibilities offered by an increased interest in chance and indeterminacy as curatorial strategies. Whether informed by artistic or scientific practice, the processes informing these exhibitions are intended not only to attenuate the curatorial role, but also to critique temporary, circumscribed and static exhibition formats in pursuit of more vital structures for the production of knowledge through display. Examining Elena Filipovic’s Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010−11) and Jens Hoffmann’s Passengers (2007–08), among other shows, demonstrates how chance compositional tropes involving repetition and gradual transformation emphasize the exhibition medium as an unstable form with matrices of possibilities.

Artists have consistently courted contingency and accident in their work, often with productive results. Ranging from Tristan Tzara’s decoupage of newspaper articles and their reassembling into Dadaist poems, and the Surrealists’ pursuit of serendipitous meaning through collage and the exquisite corpse, to John Cage’s use of the organizing principles of the eastern philosophical system of I Ching to dis-order the conventions of western music and the indeterminacy promoted by Fluxus exponents in their scores, these strategies have been co-opted by curators, too, in manipulating the exhibition medium. This article centres upon exhibitions that are to some degree determined by an interest in chance and in so doing explores the seeming paradox of curatorial decisions being relegated to quasi-mathematical or other applied formulae. As


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http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jcs.1.1.7_1

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the following examples make clear, the displacement of subjective preference and aesthetic judgment can prove rewarding in fostering more vital (in the sense of immediately responsive, whether to a particular set of logistical challenges, the artistic content of the show, or critical intent, or a combination of all three) structures for a more fluid (in the sense of contingent and multivalent) production of knowledge through display. Whether inspired by artistic or scientific practice, the processes informing these exhibitions are intended both to call into question the curatorial role, which since gaining independence (initially through the activities of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann in the late 1960s) has been critiqued for exerting undue authorial dominance over the exhibition

Zarouhie Abdalian, Certain Spanning Trees (2010), aluminum foil tape on concrete floor, installation in SC13. Photo: Chris Fitzpatrick, courtesy SC13.


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format, and also to challenge norms of display and classification. In seeking to create productive disorder out of the organizing principles of exhibitions, through structural devices such as repetition, partial or total formal change, and multi-authorial interventions, the curators under discussion have expanded the possibilities for encountering works for audiences and, not least, for themselves.

If building upon a foundation by first undermining it does not seem like the most practical approach, it is one that can work, as Cage demonstrated often throughout his career. An artist in his own right, the composer was also both the subject and the organizer of exhibitions during his lifetime and at the time of his death was engaged in concep-tualizing a survey of his work with Julie Lazar, a founding curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Travelling to numerous US venues, Rolywholyover A Circus (1994–95)1 subjected Cage’s visual art to chance operations that mirrored those he employed in his compo-sitions. Critic Brian Dillon explained the continual mutability of the installation:

Not only were the precise content and arrangement of the show to be decided by chance so that it became less an exhibition than a kind of ‘composition for museum’, but periodically (as Cage put it) ‘the exhibition would change so much that if you came back a second time you wouldn’t recognize it’.

(Dillon 2010)

The show was re-hung daily during the hours it was open to the public and each new hang was determined by pulling numbers out of two hats (one number to select the object, another to determine its placement).2

Recently, Cage’s strategies resurfaced in Baltic Centre of Contem-porary Art curator Jeremy Millar’s travelling retrospective of the composer’s prints and drawings. Entitled Every Day Is a Good Day (2010), the exhibition was curated collaboratively by Millar (who devised a series of questions relating to the number of works required by the venues, the focus of the works, etc.) and staff at the participating venues (who compiled answers with the assistance of an online program for random number generation). The parameters for the answers were also devised by the venues, so that if, for example, the number of desired works was estimated to be between fifty and seventy, the program would allocate a precise number. Once the list of works was established, by a similar procedure, the works were also positioned by the program using a virtual grid of the gallery walls. To further encourage the vagaries of chance, venues were encouraged to reconfigure the layout of the works selected, using their resources (e.g. staffing, space) as parameters. As Millar emphasized in his catalogue essay, the computer program was intended to replace rather than augment the curatorial decision-making process:

In all, at each point where a question might ordinarily be asked of a curator – How many? Which one? Where? – it must be asked of the score instead, and the score must be able to provide an answer. This

1. To quote art critic Thomas McEvilley on the subject of the exhibition’s title: ‘Cage’s revolutionary spirit is reflected in the show’s main title, taken from Finnegans Wake, with its implication of a revalaution of all values; the subtitle “a circus” holds out the promise of high jinks in a usually solemn place’ (1994: 106).

2. This process borrowed from the selection technique used by Marcel Duchamp in the creation of his first musical work, Erratum musical (1913). Conceived for three voices, Erratum was composed by pulling a set of 25 cards, each bearing a single note, out of a hat. The process was repeated for each singer using a different set of the cards.


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might be considered less a curated exhibition, than an a-curated exhibition.

(Millar 2010: 18)

Using the word ‘score’ brings Millar back to Cage, emphasizing the use of minimalist strategies to create a composition for galleries. Contemplating what the position of the curator might be in relation to this form of exhi-bition, Millar mused about the increased objectivity that results from removing personal bias from the exhibition organizing process:

Perhaps it is somewhat similar to that of Cage in relation to his own works: that of an interested participant-observer. […] While he may have determined the process at work, he could scarcely determine its outcome. Chance operations allowed Cage to be free (or more free, at least) from his prejudices and here, largely, [they have] liber-ated me from mine.

(Millar 2010: 18)

While the notion of an ‘a-curated exhibition’ is oxymoronic, because some level of decision-making regarding selection and placement remains at play, it is clear that Millar is reacting to critiques of the curator as subjective arbiter of taste and value. His plea against personal bias would seem to show him to a certain extent even subscribing to this point of view, but his remedial strategy, although suited to the spirit and work of Cage, cannot be uniformly applied. To do so would be to substitute one form of prejudice for another and again subject artists and audiences to standardized processes albeit of a different nature. However, the anxiety of self-definition that informs his impulse is char-acteristic of today’s self-reflexive approach to curating and to a greater or lesser extent informs also the curatorial endeavours to be discussed subsequently. Isidore Isou, the cofounder of the Lettriste Movement in postwar Paris, expounded his views on the development of the poetic and musical forms in his 1947 manifesto, ‘Introduction á une nouvelle poèsie et á une nouvelle musique’, published by Gallimard. A 400-page tome, the manifesto traced two discrete phases – the amplic (amplique) and chiseling (ciselante). Isou posited the former as a period of expansion, and the latter as one of contraction, during which the achievements of the amplic are refined to the point of extinction. Applying his rationale to the field of curating, we are now witnessing the chiseling era of curatorial practice. During the heady days of burgeoning globalism and the rise of large international, group/thematic exhibitions, the auteur curator was, for example, acclaimed as a crucial mediator and ‘central player in the broader stage of global cultural politics’ (Ramírez, cited in Brenson 1998: 17). A few years later, the view of curators as ‘jet set flâneur[s]’ (Rugoff 1999: 47) marked a shift in emphasis. This continuing shift finds its expression here in Millar’s courting of a new, more impersonal, form of exhibition making informed by an artistic practice itself predicated on indeterminate strategies.

Marcia Tucker’s somewhat notorious Richard Tuttle show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975 is an earlier example of



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fruitfully integrating an artist’s working methods, or intentions, in the conceptualization of an exhibition’s organizing principles. In her refreshingly candid foreword to the catalogue, the publication of which was delayed in order to include installation photography, Tucker explained those aspects of Tuttle’s practice that had been most influential and how they were used to determine the trajectory of the exhibition:

Tuttle has often said that, given a specific space, there may only be one work, which seems ‘right’ for it. Because his work is so depend-ent upon the space in which it is installed or executed, many pieces will only be borrowed at the last minute, as the space requires them. Only a very few works have been requested in advance, and this is because they seem unequivocally essential to an understanding of the body of his work in general. […]

Other deviations from the normal exhibition procedure have also been made. Generally work is installed and remains unchanged for the duration of the exhibition. In the present instance, […] because so little is known of Tuttle’s work, the works within each of several groups (i.e. paper octagons, wire pieces, slat pieces) will be changed at two-week intervals throughout the duration of the show. Thus those interested in seeing more pieces than could be installed without disrupting their individuality can return to the Museum after each installation.

(Tucker 1975: 21)

In the event, two installation changes occurred during the show’s two-month run. The rationale could not have been clearer or more logical. Yet the exhibition’s innovations were almost universally dismissed. Writing for the New York Times, critic Hilton Kramer raged that, ‘The present arrangement will be altered on October 7 and altered yet again on November 4. (How many aficionados, I wonder, will dutifully pay up their three admission fees in order to savor the full subtlety of this farce?)’ (1975: 21). While Kramer does usefully introduce the notion of audience, he confuses innovation with novelty. In taking her cue from the post-studio migration of process to the gallery, Tucker sought not to increase attendance, but rather to offer an expanded framework for viewing Tuttle’s art. In the same way that an artist’s book relates more closely to his or her practice than a catalogue or monograph, the show was intended to privi-lege the artist’s working methods, rather than a curatorial or institutional position. Tuttle’s challenges to line, space, frame, colour and surface were written into the exhibition itself. The show thereby became an outlet for his artistic process allowing meaning to accrue to the body of work on display a posteriori, rather purveying a fixed a priori interpretation.

Many exhibitions, previously as well as subsequently, have sought to prolong an engagement with audiences for varying reasons, in some cases exaggerating or frustrating the confinement of shows to gener-ally accepted time periods and fixed constellations of objects to make their point. Harald Szeemann’s documenta v (1972) advertised itself as a 100-day event extravaganza, while Raimundas Malasauskas’ Hypnotic


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Show (2008) was a one-day event that has been subsequently repeated in cities from San Francisco to Paris. Cities on the Move, rapidly moved and mutated across institutions in Europe and the Far East for three years from 1997 to 2000, ostensibly reflecting the pace of growth and change in Asia. Co-curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has explained that the exhibition’s form itself was the ideal vehicle through which to emulate motion and a kind of real-time process of evolution:

Hou Hanru and I […] use[d] the travelling show, which is usually a homogenizing force. We tried to [make it] the opposite and [to] produce a local and global research system for each venue. It was a continuous process of dialogue, of emerging collaborations, feed-back loops and notions of circularity; also of mise en abîme and recy-cling of previous exhibition design.

(O’Neill 2005)

Exploiting the logic of travel, the show gained and shed loans, acted on and was acted upon by the local, thus adapting, mutating and taking full advantage of each new context to reiterate, diversify and complicate its own argumentation.

Using temporal extension as a conceit to encourage in-depth looking, as well as to critique conventions around exhibition-making, lay at the heart of Maria Lind’s retrospective of French artist Christine Borland, which took place at the Munich Kunstverein (KM) in 2002–03. Instead of showing Borland’s eight projects at once, the individual installations were staged over fourteen months in various parts of the KM’s building, and further integrated into a series of programs intended to foreground time and cast a critically self-reflexive eye at the institution’s remit. Also during this period of experimentation, for example, Lind telescoped Rirkrit Tiravanija’s retrospective into a week-long multi-participant work-shop (20–26 September 2004). The extent to which the KM’s curatorial team theorized its remit and activities, as evinced for example by the body of writing constituting its ambitious bi-annual journal Drucksache, distin-guished the Kunstverein from other institutions that were exploring similar territory. However as Lind, Søren Grammel and Tessa Praun admitted in their editorial: ‘It does take some time for this type of programming to be discernible. Only after a while does a picture appear’ (Grammel et al. 2004: 103). And indeed this type of ‘picture’ could only be formed through the chance differences and commonalities that evolved out of the succes-sive juxtapositions of Borland’s work with other programming.

An equally subtle weaving of exhibition programming and instal-lation to challenge limited space and explore the potential of duration can be seen in the recent exhibition curated by Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers in San Francisco, California. The show was sited in, and titled after, SC13 (2010–11), one of the many glass showcases lining the walls of the city’s Antique & Design Mall (SFADM). Making use of the Mall’s display mechanisms and the modus operandi of its 200 or so dealers in their aesthetic and conceptual decisions, the curators created a continually evolving hybrid display that productively rubbed up against the premises’ eclectic contents. SC13 sought to frustrate not



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only certain exhibition conventions but also the market operations of the venue (nothing was for sale). Taking place over five months, the exhibition purported to be about sculpture at its most basic level, and an analysis of ‘objects on display and their means of containment’ at its most complex (Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers 2010). While the vitrine was regularly rearranged, some works remained in situ to be reani-mated by a subsequent set of bedfellows, sparking dialogues with neighbouring display cases. Of the works contributed by 24 artists, many were specially commissioned and took the show’s context and concerns as their focus. Almost all touched on the theme of the ready-made, represented by SFADM’s wares. Danish artist Nina Beier’s work, Facing Figure (2010), comprised a darkly patinated bust found at the mall, its face vertically amputated, and the remaining cross-section positioned so as to align the exposed hollow interior with the vitrine window, where it was animated by the reflections of viewers’ faces. Intrigued by the surrounding jumble of objects and eras, the curators of SC13 also included performative works that played with the idea of time. Artist Zarouhie Abdalian’s contribution consisted of incrementally filling in a large crack in the section of concrete flooring that led up to the showcase. This almost imperceptible development underscored the relatively minor visual impact of the exhibition on its surroundings at

Nina Beier, Facing Figure (2010), installation in SC13. Photo: Chris Fitzpatrick, courtesy SC13.


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the same time as drawing attention to how the site informed curatorial and artistic decisions.

Less directly determined by its context, Jens Hoffmann’s Passengers at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, also in San Francisco, began as an exercise in rethinking the notion of exhibitions as static presentations of limited duration. Featured were emerging international artists, none of whom had previously had a solo presentation in an American public art institution. In its very first incarnation, the exhibition comprised works by twelve artists, from countries as diverse as Portugal, Slovakia, the United Kingdom and Brazil. Sited in a large, single gallery, the works were installed in a circuit of sorts around a walled-off area acting as a self-contained space. This mini gallery-within-the-gallery was used to feature the work of one artist who, at the end of his/her month-long solo show, passed out of the exhibition, giving way to another artist. A new artist was concurrently introduced to the group to maintain the number of participants, and the installation was adjusted accordingly. Over the first year the exhibition highlighted each of the original twelve participants, and renewed itself completely (or ‘roly[ed]wholyover’). Although this progression was initially intended to extend over five years, unforeseen institutional constraints prevailed and so in the second year the exhibition’s progress was reconfigured, and wryly acknowledged as such in the revamped title, The Exhibition Formerly

Passengers: 1.9 Gareth Moore (6−24 May 2007), installation view. Photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.



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Known as Passengers (2008–09). Making a virtue of necessity, Hoffmann altered the criteria so that the solo artist was not replaced after his/her presentation. The cube’s walls were progressively expanded and integrated into a diminishing group show, which taken to its logical conclusion ended with a full-gallery solo show of French artist Aurélien Froment’s work. Constituting a conscious attempt to evaluate the ideas of time and transformation with respect to exhibition practice, Passengers could also be seen as a critique of the seeming randomness with which artists are accorded recognition. Not least it reflected Hoffmann’s interest in the notion that an idea can be expressed in many ways with similar structures or objects. Interestingly, in allowing meaning to accrue through the additional, and to some degree, ineluctable vagaries of budget and institutional priorities (in the same way that Millar sought to incorporate the various institutional constraints of participating tour venues to good effect), Hoffmann willingly derailed his initial vision, allowing the aleatory to inflect his process.

A similar logic applied to Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010–11), the Felix Gonzalez-Torres retrospective curated by Elena Filipovic and advertised as one exhibition with six versions. After selecting and installing the 46 works that made up three of these permu-tations, Filipovic invited artists Danh Vo, Carol Bove and Tino Sehgal

The Exhibition Formerly Known as Passengers: 2.2 Kris Martin (7 October−1 November 2008), installation view. Photo: Johnna Arnold, courtesy of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.


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respectively to re-curate the show halfway through its run at WIELS Contemporary Art Center and two subsequent venues – the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (MMK). Undoubtedly galvanized by the nature of Gonzalez-Torres’s work – its challenges to the authority of the artwork, the institution and the artist as the ultimate form-giver – Filipovic’s strategy suggested that it was undesirable and even impossible to present a singular interpreta-tion of an artist’s oeuvre. It also proposed loosening the curatorial grip on the production of meaning, through collaboration. For his interven-tion at WIELS, Danh Vo removed and added works, drastically recon-figuring the exhibition around a total of seventeen works. Indeed only one of the initially selected works remained in its original place – a self-portrait of the artist that appeared at the end of the exhibition. Vo’s installation related, in Filipovic’s view, more to the gallery’s architecture and visitors (whereas hers dwelt on the formal qualities of the work). In

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Loverboy) (1989), blue sheer fabric and hanging device, dimensions vary with installation; Untitled (Placebo), candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane, endless supply, overall dimensions vary with installation, ideal weight: 1,000–1,200 lbs; and Untitled (For Stockholm) (1992), light bulbs, porcelain light sockets and extension cords, overall dimensions vary with installation, twelve parts: 42 ft. in length with 20 ft. of extra cord each. Installation view of Tino Sehgal’s curated version of Specific Objects without Specific Form at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany, 2011. Photo: Axel Schneider, © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.



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the Fondation Beyeler, the works were installed throughout the perma-nent collection of modern masterpieces creating an additional discourse via their juxtapositions. Carol Bove’s intervention there sought to restage dealer Andrea Rosen’s Gonzalez-Torres show of 1991, adjusting the list of works accordingly, and seeking to recreate the same relationships between works where possible. While Tino Sehgal, as the MMK’s press release announced, took his cue from the exhibition title putting the works themselves through their paces:

Sehgal not only made an entirely new selection of works from Gonzalez-Torres’s oeuvre but also developed a choreography according to which many objects in the exhibition change form and location every hour until, by the end of each day, roughly six very different constellations of objects will have been visible. Depending on the length of his or her visit, the visitor can witness the various stages of these changes. Sehgal’s interventions take the exhibition title Specific Objects without Specific Form very literally into account.

(Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main 2011)

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (For Stockholm) (1992), light bulbs, porcelain light sockets and extension cords, overall dimensions vary with installation, twelve parts: 42 ft. in length with 20 ft. of extra cord each; and Untitled (Passport) (1991), paper, endless supply, 10 cm at ideal height × 60 × 60 cm (original paper size). Installation view of Danh Vo’s curated version of Specific Objects without Specific Form at Wiels Contemporary Arts Center, Brussels, 2010. Photo: Sven Laurent, © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.


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Thus a candy pile became alternatively a floor piece or corner stack of varying dimensions and migrated through the spaces. While these adjustments are, of course, inherent in the instructions that constitute the ground rules for Gonzalez-Torres’s work, they had not previously been played out within the confines of a single exhibition. Sehgal’s interest in choreography (he studied dance) is here clearly articulated and perhaps most clearly manifests the performative aspects of the various exhibition formats under discussion.

The co-opting of the random can also operate as a strategy to animate collections and explode the museological disciplines of order that more commonly dictate storage and/or display. Working with the 1,700 objects of Concordia University’s Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, cura-tors Rebecca Duclos and David K. Ross (2009) claimed in their (online) statement to be in pursuit of a ‘non-narrative curatorial approach’ that would allow ‘unbiased selections’ and promote ‘a surprisingly rich array of chance juxtapositions, comparative examples, and associative read-ings to arise’. The title of the resulting exhibition as much as possible given the time and space allotted (11 March–17 April 2009) was at once a directive and organizing principle.3 In order to facilitate the display of ‘as much as possible’ within the ‘allotted’ six week time period, cura-tors and gallery staff devised a system of random sequential display that took into account all sections of the Gallery’s storage area by system-atically removing works in a spiral trajectory of sorts. Another device employed was the close, salon-style hang, which made use of every available surface in the gallery (whether walls for paintings or floors for sculptures).

As one work was hung, another was brought out of storage and installed, and so on. During the period of continuous installation the galleries were open to the public, underscoring transparency about the exhibition-making process and fostering complicity between visi-tors and the more usually unseen constituencies, such as installers and registrars. Once the spaces had been ‘saturated’ the show ‘rested’ for two days and the works were then sequentially returned to storage. Rather than rationalizing their process through museological prec-edent, the curators attributed their antecedents to conceptual artistic strategies:

as much as possible gestures not only to a previous history of concep-tualism but also to a legacy of performance-based practices which construct a set of ‘actions’ to be enacted as the primary activity of art-making […] creating a critique of curating that emphasizes the significance of artistic rather than museological models, operations of chance over the decisiveness of selection, the dynamic of duration over stasis, the power of juxtaposition as a form of interpretation, and the privileging of process over pedigree.

(Duclos and Ross 2009)

Constituting an almost meditative logistical and conceptual mecha-nism, the measured procession of works to and from the exhibition spaces thus allowed for an extended consideration of the collection

3. My thanks to Reesa Greenberg for bringing this project to my attention.



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As much as possible given the time and space allotted (2009), installation views. Photos: David K. Ross, courtesy Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, Montreal.


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and potential mechanisms for its display and categorization. At another level the use of an algorithm of sorts to determine form and content functioned here, as in Passengers, to subvert traditional exhibition and museological practices. Paradoxically, in destabilizing and questioning their dominance, this strategy simultaneously allowed institution, curators and audience to capitalize on random opportunity. In evolu-tionary terms, this could ultimately result in new paradigms informed partly by the successes of this kind of curatorial experimentation (e.g. different selection and installation criteria) and partly by recognition of what is unfeasible (continuously evolving exhibitions with randomly generated content).

Primarily motivated by an impulse toward accessibility, Brazilian curator Ana Paula Cohen worked with students on the CCS Bard curatorial studies program to interpret the Marieluise Hessel Collection (20 February–23 May 2010). As much of the extensive Hessel Collection usually remains in storage, Living Under the Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies proposed making the collection database available to lecturers and their classes and visi-tors so that they could designate works that they would like to see exhibited. A roster of the resulting selections was installed briefly in a viewing area to allow more intimate access before being displayed for week-long periods in the Hessel Museum’s galleries. There they were not hung, but rather perched on specially commissioned exhibition furniture (designed by Bogota-based artist Gabriel Sierra) that riffed on the improvisatory solutions used by technicians to stow works during installations. The evolving display was thus lent further poignancy through underscoring a sense of impermanence and expediency. By the end of the show more than 2,000 artworks, artists’ books, videos and films had been brought out of storage – an amount that would have otherwise been exceedingly difficult to show at any one time. Of course, the participation of an informed and/or interested audience was crucial to the success of these strategies. Operating collaboratively, but not necessarily through consensus, the exhibition was activated by and simultaneously satisfied a number of visitors not only through its constant transformation but also through affording them curatorial participation.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, The More Things Change, attempted similarly to highlight recent acquisitions through an (otherwise traditional) evolving display curated by the partici-pating departments. Featuring approximately fifty works in its initial presentation, the exhibition was periodically adjusted to accommodate new works and on view for a year (20 November 2010–6 November 2011). But rather than aspiring to accessibility or a framework for the chance accrual of meaning, the intent was stated as revealing the museum’s collection ‘as a seismograph of shifts in contemporary culture’ and ‘sketch[ing] the mood of the last ten years, in effect creating a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade’ (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2010). In the same way that Cities on the Move sought to mirror a certain frenetic energy in its form, here the museum sought to map its development against a broader context. Whether the rather grandiose thematicization



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Living Under the Same Roof: The Marieluise Hessel Collection and the Center for Curatorial Studies (2010), installation views. Photos: Chris Kendall, courtesy Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.


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meaningfully legitimized a decade of eclectic, cross-departmental acqui-sitions was, however, dubious.

These exhibitions all function as examples of how questions can be asked within the parameters of exhibition making, or history, and of an institution, or site. To return to Cage for a moment – I would like to suggest that he was perhaps less concerned with challenging exhi-bition formats and more with remaining faithful to the systems that informed his compositions. Cage’s chance procedures were a way of side-stepping artistic intervention (or intention) and while he may have thus been the purist par excellence, he did not conceive of himself as a curator. The curators of the preceding examples evince a conscious-ness about the role and history of the curator that is to varying degrees unavoidably self-reflexive. Acknowledging some of the constraints of institutionalized formats or conditions for display, and/or the limits of curatorial power, they have without exception privileged an extended engagement with audiences to allow meaning to accrue over a period of time. Through the purposeful and controlled use of chance to desta-bilize order they have sought to challenge the determinism of exhibi-tion paradigms, without dispensing with an underlying logic. Although motivated by an interest in chance, the new, evolving structures they have instituted are not to be understood as mere formal conceits, nor institutionalized as patterns to be applied ad infinitum. Rather, they are new orders specific to a peculiar situation, particularly as each func-tions on two levels – as critique and as proposal, or exhibition, in its own right. SC13’s often minimal interventions in the fabric of SFADM fed on, and drew attention to, the randomness of their surroundings, while providing a convincing platform for a number of highly enigmatic conceptual works. The 24 different versions of Passengers maintained their dynamism over two years, drawing out the shared concerns of the participating artists through inhabiting the gallery spaces in different ways. Specific Objects without Specific Forms produced six distinct inter-pretations of a fixed set of objects (and more if we consider Sehgal’s contribution, as outlined above), promoting a greater understanding of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work and advocating against the retrospective as definitive. Living Under the Same Roof pointed out the irony of a study collection that remains inert and inaccessible.

However, even when an exhibition is not required to offer a conclu-sion, but rather only to propose a matrix of possibilities, ambiguity adheres to the role of (1) the curator, (2) the artist, and (3) the audi-ence. For it would be disingenuous to suggest that the curators under discussion have completely effaced their preferences and prejudices or that they have made a case for dispensing with their services alto-gether. Or, indeed, that this has been their main intent. Despite prob-lematizing curatorial motivation and decision-making, they have not relinquished hold of its ultimate expression. The exhibition remains the curator’s medium, in the same way that classical music resides firmly in the purview of the composer. As chance would have it, it is once again the artists, and their work, that despite the best curatorial intentions run the greater risk of being manipulated through being subjected to different, albeit arguably more objective, preferences and orders. And



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although invited to longer engagement and encouraged to in many cases co-elicit meaning out of the works and their juxtapositions, that other vulnerable constituency, the audience, remains for the most part recipient rather than co-author of the mechanisms for generating change and difference.

It remains to acknowledge that chance, while assiduously courted, has never been given free reign in any of the above examples, and order, while challenged, has never been dismissed. Even in the more stringent examples of the abdication of curatorial control (Every Day is a Good Day, as much as possible…), true randomness was precluded by set criteria that delineated display, the range of works, etc. Indeed, the relative success or failure of these exhibitions relies on the recognition of accepted curatorial modes of behaviour, of paradigmatic exhibition forms, and to a certain extent of the developing history of exhibitions. Rather than propositions for a new orthodoxy, these exhibitions remain alternative approaches. Their success, therefore, resides also in their anomaly.

References

Brenson, Michael (1998), ‘The Curator’s Moment’, Art Journal, 57: 4, p. 17.Dillon, Brian (2010), ‘The Visual Art of John Cage’, The Guardian,

10 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/10/john- cage-composer-drawings-exhibition. Accessed 12 February 2011.

Duclos, Rebecca and Ross, David K. (2009), ‘As much as possible given the time and space allotted’, http://ellengallery.concordia.ca/en/reflexion_asmuchaspossible.php. Accessed 26 April 2011.

Fitzpatrick, Chris and Post Brothers (2010), ‘SC13’, http://www.showcase13. com/. Accessed 18 January 2011.

Grammel, Søren et al. (2004), Gesammelte Drucksachen/Collected Newsletters, Spring/Fall 02/04, Munich: Kunstverein München.

Kramer, Hilton (1975), ‘Tuttle’s Art on Display at Whitney’, New York Times, 12 September, p. 21.

McEvilley, Thomas (1994), ‘Rolywholyover, A Circus’, Artforum, May, p. 106.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jul/10/john-

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Leigh Markopoulos

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Contributor Details

Leigh Markopoulos is Associate Professor and Chair of the Curatorial Practice MA Program at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Formerly Director of Rena Bransten Gallery, Markopoulos held positions at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Serpentine Gallery, London. She has curated over fifty exhibitions, including most recently Love is a Stranger (2010) at Creative Growth, Oakland, and Complicity: Contemporary Photography and the Matter of Sculpture (2009) at Rena Bransten Gallery. She is a regular reviewer for Art Practical and has contributed texts for many artists’ publica-tions, including most recently for Johan Grimonprez (2011).

E-mail: [email protected]



Documents

Chance and Indeterminacy as Curatorial Strategies