Curating Now 01

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C U R A T I N G N O W

c c a c

w h a ta r e t h em o s tp r e s s i n g q u e s t i o n sf o rc o n t e m p o r a r y c u r a t o r s t o d a y ?


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C U R A T I N G N O W

What are the mostpressing questionsfor

contemporarycurators today?On November 13, 2002, FIVE panelists gave their perspectives on the issues and debates that areinfluencing the future of exhibition making. The transcripts of their contributions are reproduced inthis publication.

panelists

Michelle Grabner, artist/independent curator/critic and director of the Suburban Gallery in Chicago

Matthew Higgs, artist/writer and curator at CCAC Wattis Institute, San Francisco

Lars Bang Larsen, independent curator/writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Glasgow, Scotland

Renny Pritikin, chief curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

Fred Wilson, artist based in New York

Curating NowOrganized by the new MA Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in collaboration with Yerba BuenaCenter for the Arts, to coincide with Bay Area Now 3, a triennial survey that presents recent developments in Northern Californias art scene.

cover photo: Eric Wesley, Kicking Ass, 1999 (China Art Objects, Los Angeles)photo: Kate Fowle


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introduction

Kate FowleThere were two reasons to instigate this panel discussion, the first being thedevelopment of the graduate program in curatorial practice at CCAC. Thiskind of event is one of the ways in which we hope to open up discussionsthat start to unravel contemporary issues of curating and their relationshipto current art practice and thought.

The second reason, and the motivation behind the collaboration with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, was that it

made sense to have this event in the context of the Bay Area Now 3 show. In his introductory essay for the exhibitioncatalog, Ren de Guzman, Yerba Buenas visual arts curator, suggests that the artists selected for the show share aninterest in creating subtle and idiosyncratic ways to visualize perceptions that evolve out of their immediate surroundingsand experiences. Drawing on the language of film, politics, the media, and musicand with a strong emphasis onutilizing common materials or mundane actionseach artist works to challenge, or perhaps question, the conditioningthat naturally develops through routine. At the same time they are linked by an obvious awareness of the broadercontext within which their work is now presented. The show can be seen as a spotlightnot just on the individualworks, but also on the many discussions around current art practice and sociopolitical trends in the Bay Area.

In a similar spirit, each panelist is going to outline his or her thoughts about curating in the context of his or her ownwork, as a starting point for further discussion. Each has been invited because of the contribution he or she hasmade to different approaches to, and perspectives on, current curatorial practice, helping to create a more open anddiscursive arena through which to think about and experience contemporary ideas and art.

Curating today is a kind of renaissance endeavor, with practitioners positioning themselves perhaps more asmediators or cultural producers than the upholders of an institutional mandate or purveyors of taste. Looking at theapproaches taken by the panelists alone, we can start to see diverse strategies at play. They work as artists, writers,facilitators, performers, educators, and collaborators, commissioning new work from artists, re-presenting culturaland historical artifacts and data, initiating discussion, and creating exhibitions that highlight the fluidity ofcontemporary art practice.

Each of the panelists has initiated projects that reveal different ways of understanding and interpreting the traditionalmuseum display; of pushing the permeability of the white cube gallery space; or of developing the language ofpresentation in domestic settings and shops, in civic and corporate spaces, and on the street, as well as throughpublications. In effect you could say that this panel is a partial representation of ways that curators are going beyondworking with spatial concerns in relation to art, creating mental, social, and political spaces through which issuesand ideas that are relevant to us today can be explored.


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biographiesKate Fowle is the associate director of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice and an adjunct lecturer in the MFA Program inFine Arts at CCAC in San Francisco. Fowle is also codirector of smith + fowle, an independent partnership based

in London and San Francisco that specializes in commissioning and curating contemporary art. Recent exhibitionsinclude Shelf Life for Gasworks Gallery, London and touring (2001); three: art projects for social exchange forKent Institute of Art and Design, U.K. (2000); and to be continued for The New Art Gallery, Walsall, U.K. (1999).A regular contributor to publications such as Contemporary, Artists Newsletter, and Graphics International, Fowleis writing a book on recent architecture in San Francisco, forthcoming in 2003 from Chrysalis Books.

Miche l l e Grab ne r is an artist, writer, and curator based in Chicago. She is codirector of The Suburban, a nonprofitspace that she initiated in 1998 together with the artist Brad Killam, which hosts international artists and projects,including Dave Muller and Joseph Grigely. Currently Grabner is developing projects with the London-basedcollaborative Bank and with Luc Tuymans. Grabner also develops independent curatorial projects, includingInheriting Matisse: The Decorative Contour in Contemporary Art in 2002 for the Rocket Gallery in the U.K. In1998 she collaborated with Lars Bang Larsen and Jacob Fabricius on Bicycle Thieves, which took place at multiplesites across Chicago.

A regular contributor to Frieze, Tema Celeste, and New Art Examiner, Grabner is an associate professor ofpainting at the University of Wisconsin and a graduate advisor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since1996 Grabner has exhibited her paintings regularly with the Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica; Ten in OneGallery, New York; and the Rocket Gallery in the U.K.; as well as participating in numerous group shows across theU.S. and in Europe.

Mat t he w Higg s is curator at the CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and associate director of exhibitions at theInstitute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is also a faculty member of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice atCCAC. Since 1992 Higgs has organized more than forty exhibition projects, including Program & Survive at theWhitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 2000, and The British Art Show 5, which toured the U.K. in 1999. Sincearriving at the Wattis, he has organized To Whom It May Concern and Reality Check: Painting in the ExplodedField, both in 2002. A regular contributor toArtforum, Higgs has written for many catalogs and other publicationson artists such as Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Rodney Graham, and Susan Hiller, among others.

Higgs also publishes Imprint 93, a series of artists editions and multiples, which to date has presented more thanseventy projects with artists including Elizabeth Peyton, Chris Ofili, and Paul Noble. As an artist, he is representedby Murray Guy, New York, and by Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.

As an independent curator and critic, La r s Bang La r s en has established a reputation as one of the leading protagonists forcontemporary Nordic art. In 1998 he was a curator for the Nordic Biennial that took place in Norway, and from 1997 to1999 he was a curator at the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bang also hasdeveloped exhibitions across Europe, including Pyramids of Mars in 2000 at Londons Barbican Art Gallery andSomething Rotten in 1998 at the Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, Germany.

Now working between Copenhagen and Glasgow, Bang is the author of many critical essays and interviews withartists who have emerged on the international scene over the last ten years, particularly those who engage in socialand critical practice such as N55, Aleksandra Mir, Jens Haaning, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen.Currently he is an associate editor for Art/Text, Nu, and Springerin, as well as a contributor toArtforum and Frieze.

Bang is also the art critic for the Copenhagen-based newspaper Politiken.

Just before his trip to the West Coast, Bang mounted his most recent show, Fundamentalisms of the New Order,at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. His book about Sture Johannessons psychedelic art of the 1960s was publishedby Lukas and Sternberg in 2003.


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Re nny P r i t i k in was named director of the Visual Arts Program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 1992 and subsequently chiefcurator for all artistic programsvisual art, f ilm, performing arts, and educationin 1997. He initiated the Bay Area Nowtriennial six years ago as a centerwide festival to celebrate regional practice. From 1988 to 1992 Pritikin served asexecutive director of New Langton Arts after joining the gallery as codirector in 1979. A founder of the NationalAssociation of Artists Organizations, Pritikin is a frequent consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts andother agencies in California and nationally. In 2001 he was selected to organize the U.S. participation at the Cuenca(Ecuador) Biennial, and in 2003 he traveled to Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington, New Zealand, on a Fulbrightfellowship.

As a writer, Pritikin received the 1989 McCarron Fellowship for art criticism and has had two small press chapbooksof his poetry published. In 1995 he received a United States Information Agency fellowship to tour and lecture atfour museums in Japan and the Koret Israel Prize, a fellowship to visit Israel. In 2003 Pritikin also will be a facultymember of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at CCAC.

Fre d Wi l s o n is an artist who has become known for his pioneering interventions in the museum environment. For over twodecades his projects, including the landmark Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, haveexposed underlying cultural and racial issues in many institutions across the world. In 2001 his exhibition FredWilson: Objects and Installations, 19792000 was presented at the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Maryland,Baltimore, and it has subsequently toured the country. It was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum in January2003, together with a new project that he has developed through his research at the universitys HearstAnthropological Museum.

Wilson has participated in many group shows internationally, including Museum as Subject at the National Museumof Art, Osaka, Japan, in 2001, and Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the

Netherlands, in the same year. His work also was included in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity inContemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994, as well as in The Museum as Musein 1999 at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art.

Wilson has served on the boards of directors for many visual arts organizations, including Artists Space in New Yorkand the National Association of Artists Organizations. He was a curator for the Bronx Council of the Arts from 1988to 1992 and a member of the exhibition committee for Independent Curators Inc. in 1998. In 2003 Wilson willrepresent the United States at the Venice Biennale. He will also be a faculty member of the MA Program inCuratorial Practice at CCAC.


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remarks on

mediation andproduction

Sr enAndrea sen

andLa r s BangLa r s en

We use the term middleman as an overall denominator for productivesubjectivity, including the nominal roles of artist, critic, curator. Take the two ofus, for example, artist/writer and critic/curator, respectively, we are at the sametime producers, distributors, and consumers of art. Middlemen between ourselves.

1


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In 1970, the critic Harold Rosenberg stated: At the present timeand this explains the interest shown in [thecurators] workonly the middleman has the power to fulfill the dream of union between the creative individual andsociety.2 Rosenbergs nearly thirty-year-old concept of the middleman resonates with the many functions of todaysflourishing culture of middlemen and -women: curators, consultants, producers, DJs, facilitators, spin doctors, etc.People whose profession it is to mediate or to prevent the occurrence of problems. It seems like the middleman is aprivileged agent of subjectivity in late capitalist-bureaucratic society. However, the concept of the middleman is morethan a mere job description and more than a critique of certain functions; our claim is that middlemanship is today ageneral condition of authorship and behavior. The existence of middlemen indicates that exchange itself is central tohow value is estimated. It means being acutely implicated, it is a portrait of the desire for complicity. There is, so tospeak, no outside middleman: everyone is a middleman. Which isnt to say we dont do different things in differentways; it is subjectivity as it is predicated by the marketplace of a globalized economy.

In 1993 Pierre Bourdieu wrote about the field of cultural production: the subject of the production of theartworkof its value but also of its meaningis not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality,but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field. Among these are the producers of works, classified asartists, critics of all persuasions, collectors, middlemen, curators, etc.; in short, all those who have ties withart, who live for art and, to varying degrees, from it, and who confront each other in struggles where the impositionof not only a world view but also a vision of the art world is at stake, and who through these struggles, participate inthe production of the value of the artist and of art.3 Bourdieus analysis seems apt, if it werent for the productiveidentity he assigns to the artist as a maker of material objects. In the era of immaterial work this comes across assomewhat outdated. In other words, Bourdieu sees the site of artistic creativity as a primal scene of sorts; we wouldlike to argue that there is no such primal scene of production. That is a modernist idea. Instead, the style ofproductivity today is a patchwork of mediated sign-materials.

Let us take a look at the mechanisms of authorization that underpin the role of the cultural producer. What we aretalking about might be called an evaluation of power, a dissection of the complex web of signification that themediating subjectivity is entangled in. As Michel Foucault told us, having power or being empowered is not aproblem in itself. The question is how power is used and represented. We need to find positive ways to evaluatepower from within the role of the middleman, from the position of networking and being networked.

The classical problem with the middlemanwhich is at the same time the perennial prejudice against themiddlemanis that as soon as he interferes, the situation is no longer one to one. Middlemen are seen as the oneswho quietly follow and are subservient agents of market trends. In opposition to the traditional notions of the maker,the worker, and the author, the middleman is only involved in a process part of the time, but in that time his agencysignificantly affects the further course of this process. Typically, his involvement raises the value of the goods thatare circulated. He is seen as having shifting loyalties and being somewhat immune, comfortably placed as he isbetween producer and marketplace. You cant reduce him and you cant add anything to him. At the same time ashe has power, he isnt really the guy in charge, which is why it is difficult to address the question of authority in

relation to the middleman.

But on the other handand this is the other aspect of the middlemanwe must bear in mind the colonizedinfrastructures of the past and the present. The middleman is not just somebody who quietly follows, but also onewho can be a part of basic infrastructures. In This Sex Which Is Not One the feminist thinker Luce Irigaray talksabout woman as a go-between, as having functioned as an infrastructure, unrecognized as such by our society andculture ... everything depends on their complicity: Women are the very possibility of mediation, transaction,

transition, transferencebetween man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself.4 It looks like themiddleman can be more than one who, like capitalism, arrives when everything is ready. And infrastructures, ofcourse, can convey many different desires, depending on their composition. The flows we put in orbit can be mereornaments, but they can also be big waves or columns of rising air, staged to go somewhere in order to see whatthey collide with.

In a lecture he gave at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, England, almost exactly two years ago,

Hans Ulrich Obrist stated his curatorial priorities: [what is important is] how within curatorial practice and alsowithin institutions one can bring back, against the background of an obvious acceleration, new forms of slowness.

How can we re-inject slowness into velocity?5 Wed like to deconstruct this statement, because even though it is acriticism of the speed of productivitycertainly a relevant pointit still assumes that it is up to curatorial authority toslow things down, that it is up to the middlemen to perform the operation of re-injecting slowness. The curator, orthe middleman, can speed things up and slow them down again. Now, which subjectivity injects slowness? From theabove statement, the curator appears to be a kind of harmonizer. Can he also be a radicalizer, and if so, how? Inany case it seems like the curator is free to choose different producer identities and different sets of operations forhimself. Moreover, curators can decide what institutional format, or metaphorarchive, laboratory, platform, etc.towork with.


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But we shouldnt isolate the curators professional identity in its pragmatic subjectivity. Let us try for a moment andthink beyond this specialized role and have a discussion about the cultural location of mediation.

The subjectivity of mediationthe middlemanis the subjectivity that brings us modernity. We are the ones throughwhom information travels. Often, you hear us curators urge pushing the envelope, urge new strategies to engagewith new audiences, art practices, and ways of using the institution. The curator is professionally curious, looking fornew ways and tools to implement these new strategies with. We want to question this notion of the curator assomeone always waiting to be filled with new knowledge, new qualificationsin other words, the middleman as areceptacle. The figure or the concept of the receptacle is something recurring in discourse about avant-gardecuratorship: The curator is one who is learning from art and artists, and a pedestrian bridge between artist andaudience, to quote Maria Lind and Alexander Dorner. A migratory subject who is filled up by new meetings, newcities, new information. The curatorial mind is like a palimpsest, like Freuds magical pad, the metaphor that he usesto describe the unconscious: it is covered, only to be erased, but something discernible always remains underneath.The curatorial mind is accumulativeand erasing. How do the intentions of curatorial subjectivity translate to thismanifest-and-erased knowledge?

Today, production gets organized in shorter and shorter sequences through the discontinuous reinvention ofinstitutions. In the networked society, every nodal point in the network is a go-between for flows, for material inmovement. The cultural critic Blent Diken has written that network power is about the capacity to escape; itsinstruments are fluidity, liquidity, and speed. In liquid modernity power lies in the ability to travel light.6 With thisin mind we would like to quote the curator Francesco Bonami from his catalog text for the recent Manifesta 4: Tocall Manifesta an exhibition is misleading [...] Because of its fluid structure when conceived and its mobilewhereabouts it is impossible to identify Manifesta with a particular place or identity. Presumably without wanting to,Bonami has here given us a very precise definition of authority as it today exists in its pure and amorphous form: it

simply cant be pinned down. We dont know what form authority has or where it resides; it refuses to be identified.In the networked society, traditional parameters of evaluation have disappeared. What do we put in their place?

When we use the term mediated sign-material, we want to talk about what exists under certain conditions: sign-material that exists due to economical, ideological, or psychological interests and therefore always exists somewhereelse too, namely in the context of these interests. Obviously, sign-material is always already produced. We ought tofocus on how to understand the significance and potential of mediated sign-material as a matter of fact. As arepresentative figure for this we want to propose the sign-materiality of the echothe echo itself with no referenceto the source, because a reverberation process produces a version of the source that is also a division: you end upwith two different structures.

A production of an echo that is deliberately promoted exposes a desire to produce something else by producingthe divisions of versions. The production of an echo is a way to escape the authority of the source and thereforemakes an implicit promise of change and difference. As we take it that this style of mediation-production is very

much the raison dtre of the middlemanbecause sign-material is brought into a state of flow that enables atakeover of controlwe again arrive at the question of how to relate to these gestures of promise and desireproduced by the operations of the middleman. In other words: how do we trust the middleman? How do we trustourselves as middlemen?

The middleman, this agent of mediation-production, probably entered western civilization in the early eighteenthcentury, in the era when capitalism became articulated between global markets. However, here we would like toask this question in a different way: how and when did civilization start to trust the workings of middlemen ascultural agents? How and when did a middleman gain power on his/her own terms? We would like to suggest thatthe work of Phil Spector in the early 1960s is such a turning point, in cultural/aesthetic mediation-production,which is the frame of this discussion. Interestingly, Spectors rise coincided with what has been described asrocks lost weekend (that is, 195964; from the decline of Elvis to the global breakthrough of the Beatles). 7

Spector was onto something different from the mythologies of the Bard. He didnt perform, he rarely composed (hemerely forced his autograph onto compositions), and still he became a star name in popular music. What he did do

was to produce music in a very all-embracing meaning of the word. Born in the Bronx, New York, and partly raisedin Los Angeles, Phil Spector established himself as a successful freelance producer by the age of nineteen,producing hit records for the Top 10 world of popular music. He formed his own record company (Phillies) by theage of twenty-one and took absolute control of all aspects of the music he produced and released. Composers andmusicians were hired on a freelance basisperformers were constructed and renamed over and over, whether assolo or as group artistsand recording techniques and studios were developed to suit Spectors sound productionstyle: the Wall of Sound.


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So, Phil Spector produced a sounda style of music production. It has to be noted that the pop music of Spectorwas at the time regarded as highly disturbing as the songs were about teenage trouble and the sound was likeplasticnot realmusic, but a symptom of the times. He was very much aware of this and defined himself as arebel, both in the sense that he gave teenage sensibility a cultural form and also because he transgressed theworkings of the music industry. This double gesture combined the ambition to take over the means of production andto generate a public flow of adolescent desires, that were at the time very much excluded from the public sphere.What is of great importance here is that Spector didnt operate by the means of dialectics; he didnt establish anantithesis (a counter-cultural/subversive form) but aimed to gain impact on the Top 10 world of popular culture.What he did was to establish a new synthesis of the means of production and we suggest that only a middlemancould take on such an operation, as the ability to deal with all aspects of production is needed to gain authority. Theauthorship of the middleman is the control of the flow of production. There is no claim for autonomy in Spectors Waof Soundit is merely a staged flow of desires that echoes a certain cultural sensibility. Accordingly, when thissensibility changed and Spectors production style was adapted throughout the music industry, his powers declined.That is the sad fate of the middleman: as soon as you lose control of the flow, youre replaced.

The question of style in production might be the thing to take us further in this discussion of the middleman. The arhistorian Ina Blom has made some interesting remarks on style in contemporary art in her essay Dealing with/inStyle (2001). She finds that discourses of style have vanished due to the influence of the terminologies ofconceptual art and institutional critique, which regard discussions of style to be a simple question of reference andformalism. What she points out is that there is a productive ambiguity of style in much recent art, which cannot berepresented in the before mentioned discourses. In [...] these discourses [...] style functions as a marker or asymptomatic formation, which seems to pulsate around oppositional figures such as singular/general, subject/systemart/the everyday. It would perhaps be just as relevant, then, to focus less on what style is, it performs a kind ofdouble gesture that both produces these divisions and renders them uncertain.8 The point made here is that a

contemporary discussion of style should focus away from the postmodern notion of diversities of style in favor of anattention to the diversityor the multiple operationsof the object of style itself. This is a production of differenceand ambivalence that has much to do with the present postmedia situation of art production, where formal mediacategories are no longer relevant and where productivity defines itself in terms of project, situation, or event.

To take Ina Bloms remarks a bit further, we find that her analysis of style applies very well to the overall look of manyrecent group shows. Curatorial work as well should be regarded as an agency of style that performs a kind ofdouble gesture that both produces [...] divisions and renders them uncertain. A patchwork of mediated sign-material, staged to produce differences. In this way, Obrists ambition to re-inject slowness would represent a desireto stage differences of velocity, and Bonamis description of Manifesta exposes a desire to authorize ambiguity.

Now, the most empathetic way of striking up a relationship with the multiple operations of the object of styleorshould we say the multiple operations of the flow of stylewould be one of interpretation rather than one ofmapping. With a desire for interpretation, one has the chance to comprehend and maintain difference, whereas

mappinginherent to the concept of the postmodern style paletteis a gesture of archiving that is potentiallyinimical to invention. The mapping subject controls flows by making them irreversible in isolated domains, while notconsidering him/herself as part of that domain.

Therefore, to us, parameters of trust hinge on the historicity and materiality of the way a flow is styled. How else doyou evaluate the composite flows and your own role in the flow when you are part of it? Domains have to be openedup, roles switched around, and levels of experience synchronized in order to establish relationships and cede contro

In conclusion, we are not suggesting that the middleman is to be reduced to a producer of symptomatic formations(something that has been a point in the critique of curatorial work), but rather that the middleman establishes anauthority in the control of the flow of productivity. In other words, the middleman is an authorand the author is amiddlemanwho exposes a desire to stage mediated sign-material, thereby producing a certain subjectivity.

1 Parts of this essay were presented at the conference Polyphony of Voices in Krakow, Poland, in October 2002. Andreasen and Bang have beencollaborating on critical essays on practices and discourses surrounding contemporary visual art since 2000. As curators they are currentlypreparing The Echo Show, which will take place at the Tramway, Glasgow, in autumn 2003.

2 Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (1972), quoted in Claudia Bttner,Art Goes Public (Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1996), 221.3 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 261.4 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, quoted in Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 36.5 The Producers (Newcastle: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2000), 23.6 Blent Diken, The Aesthetic Critique of Capitalism and Transpolitics of Immigration. Conference paper, Under Construction (Helsinki, 2001).7 At press time (May 2003) this discussion takes on a certain tragic resonance due to Spectors arrest in February.8 Ina Blom, Dealing with/in Style, Critics News (Helsinki, 2001).


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from left to right:Lars Bang Larsen, Matthew Higgs, Michelle Grabner, Renny Pritikin, and Fred Wilson at Curating Now, November 13, 2002photo: Shane Aslan Selzer


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i work for

historyDav id Robb in sMichelle Grabner read from a screenplay-in-progress by artist and writerDavid Robbins. These excerpts offered the responses of Lycra Duvall,curator at the Center for Contemporary Acquisitions, in attendance at anart opening.

Look how they keep their distance. Thats fine. Let them fear me. They know that Lycra Duvall has drawn a line.They know that History and she have an arrangementthe sort of arrangement which licenses her to sit in adarkened conference room at the Center for Contemporary Acquisitions gazing at the projected slides of analtogether minor artist who stands nearby promoting his creations, her impatience with his presentation mounting,her attention quite understandably wandering from his babbling to the genuinely important meeting to be heldlater that day with a group of collectors, licenses her to turn to him and ask him, point blank, whether he actuallyconsiders what hes doing to be a career. Sure it was a hard question to ask, but those of us who are historysdeputies are fully authorized to ask hard questions. Authorized and obligated.

Just last week, that feisty Michael Applicatta character had the cheek to assertto my facethat art history is afiction, invented in order to justify and reinforce the transactions of the art marketplace ... How tiresome. Yes,Michael, a curator does work with just a part of the big picture, but thats hardly the same thing as equaling anoutright fiction. A person can only work with what has become known. The evidence. Which is always and only aportion of what has been produced during a given historical period. God! A Lycra Duvall grows so weary ofexplaining that art history is always a partial history, that we do have the evidence and the evidence is real, as realas this strand of pearls circled about this beguiling throat. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographsnot only isthe evidence real, the evidence is in fact all anyone has to go on. How can that possibly be characterized as afiction? Something that is known is never a fiction.

A Lycra Duvall is a successful curator because she understands that her power as a curator is predicated on herskill in advancing your sense of the power of the evidence while suppressing your sense of the fiction. This is not askill possessed by all.

I cant seem to get used to how unfamiliar with beauty so many artists seem. So many artists mistake the merely

weird for the beautiful. So many settle for the weird ... the transgressive ... the subversive .... That, or they settle forpersonal adventure! As though personal adventure were sufficient excuse for creating something that has forgottenbeauty is its goal!

Whos Martha? Really, you dont know? Dont tell me history has already forgotten Martha McCoy! Headcheerleader for post-professionalism? Author of Strategic Shrugging, andAssert the Power of Caprice? Well,then Ill tell you. Artists were to abandon New York, LAabandon the centers. The real action was now in theprovinces, supposedly. Why an artist should want to go from being an insider to an outsider artist, when the normal


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progression is completely in the other direction, this is beyond me, but be our guest, Ms. McCoy, move out of NewYork. Move to Omaha. Move to Shreveport. Whats that? You detect a shade of anger? How astute. My showStyle, Structure, Identity, Politics, Gender, Context, Issues: A Reconsiderationwas only the most importantshow that year. And Martha? Not in the mood, was little Marthas reply to my invitationafter which she turnsaround and shows the piece Id requested in some gallery in a suburban Youngstown strip mall! Why, Martha?Liked the organizers phone manner. Well, that one was always on the nasty side anyway. Curators are art dealerswho lack the guts to open galleries, I remember she asserted once, publicly, when we were empanelled together.

Why is it people are always advising other people to relax? Not if you keep instructing me to, I cant! Anyway, thatsall in the past. Marthas hopelessly 90s. Professionally, were under no obligation to consider her contribution foranother twenty years. In the meantime therell be plenty of opportunities to conspicuously overlook Ms. MarthaMcCoy. Unfortunately, an artist has all the time in the world. They either have a date with history or they havent. Ifthey do, they can wait us out. They have forever. Not a privilege thats extended to the curator, may I point out. Wedont have the luxury of forestalling an intimacy with history. A curator has to make the most of a proximity to historyright now, while shes still drawing breath. During her lifetime.

Why do I put up with the pressure? If I had a Raymond Pettibon for every time Ive asked myself that veryquestion.... It certainly isnt the money, I can tell you that. Fame? Please: I can hang a retrospective in the time itdtake the layman to name a famous curator. Whereas everyone remembers the artist. No, the reason is quite simple.Simple and beyond reproach. Lycra Duvall has a responsibility to beauty. She has always felt an obligation toidentify, to protect, to advance beauty. All her life she has felt close, personally close, to quality things. Lycra Duvallworks for history.

Demanding? History? Between the egos of the trustees, the museum director, ones competitors, the artists ...

honey, a diamond would feel the pressure.

David Robbins has had more than thirty solo exhibitions of his work in the United States and Europe, and he is the author of numerous essays andsatires. Since 1997 he has frequently collaborated with Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam on video projects. In May 2003, their video, One MothersLove, was exhibited at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, Chicago.


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between the

audience andthe stage

Mat thew Higg sI recently turned thirty-eight. Before moving to California at the end of last year, Ilived and worked in London for almost fifteen years. Before that I studied as anartist in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three years. And before that I lived in a smallmarket town in the Northwest of England called Chorley.

Chorley made me. It defined who I am. In the late 1970smy youthChorley was down on its heels. Chorleyhadand probably continues to havea lack of self-confidence. A predominantly working-class community, Chorleyhad grown up around the textile mills established in the late-Victorian era. By the time Margaret Thatcher came to

power in 1979, Chorleys once-proud manufacturing heritage (with its accordant legacy of trade unionism) wasalready long gone. My youth was dominated by the specter of unemployment, by the specter of Thatcherism.Beyond a handful of pubs there was little or nothing to do. I had four close friends, brought together by a sharedpassion for the then-developing independent music scene that had emerged in the aftermath of punk. I f Chorley didhave one thing going for it, it was its proximity to Manchester and Liverpool. Manchester and Liverpool wouldprovide memore than any schooling ever wouldwith my primary education. For those not from the northwest ofEngland it is hard to describe the importance of these places during the years between 1978 and 1981. Thereexisted a skeptical pragmatism, nurtured through years of economic neglect that was as palpable as the gray skiesthat hung over our heads. From the estranged perspective of Chorley, the London of the Sex Pistols and The Clash,the London of 1976 and 1977, was a foreign land. (At that time I didnt actually know anyone who had even been toLondon.) Manchester in the late 1970s was home to Joy Division, The Fall, and Factory Records; Liverpool home toEcho and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, and Erics nightclub. I ultimately became interested in art throughan interest in music. Obscure references on record sleeves induced my curiosity for the Situationist Internationale,the Dadaist milieu of the Cabaret Voltaire, the twisted literature of William Burroughs and other avant-gardes. In

1979, aged fourteen, I started a fanzine. Inspired by the proliferation of independent publishing and fueled solely byteenage enthusiasm, my fanzine was to provide me with a line of communication that went beyond Chorleysclaustrophobic limitations. Despite its modest circulation I soon found myself implicated in an informal network oflike-minded correspondents from across Britain, Europe, and eventually the United States and beyond. It was acommunity of sorts. Certainly the first I had encountered outside of my immediate circle. Aged fourteen, the worldsuddenly got larger.

Today, when I am asked to talk about my practice as a curator, writer, publisher, and (sometimes) artist, I alwaysrefer back to this time. For me it is important to publicly acknowledge how and why I became involved in workingwith artists. There is no consensus as to the role of the curator, just as there is no definition as to what constitutes


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art. In struggling toward rationalizing my own practice, the closest I have come is in the possibility and potentiality ofworking between the audience and the stage. The reference to a live context is as intentional as it is explicit. Allexhibitionswhatever form they might takeare events, ultimately dependent on their relationship with anaudience, with a lived experience. My own experience as a teenager, in fact the reason why I started to write,publish, and distribute my fanzine, was born out of a frustration with the traditionally passive role consigned to theaudience while simultaneously acknowledging no personal desire to perform on the stage. Between the audienceand the stage, between the spectacle and its reception, there exists, I believe, a space, a tangible if indefinablespace in which to operate. It is in this space that I am interested, and it is this space that I continue to negotiate.I have always enjoyed organizing things. While publishing my fanzine I would simultaneously organize gigs in myhometownbringing the mountain to Mohammed, if you like. Later, while studying art in the mid-1980s, I started anightclub in Newcastle with a friend from art school. Each of these endeavors was born out of a necessity. Born outof a desire to make something happen. To fill a void. To alleviate boredom. To make life more interesting. Myinvolvement with art, and with developing projects with artists, emerges from exactly these same desires.

Im interested in gaps, in the spaces, situationsand sometimes individualsthat are neglected or overlooked forone reason or another. The monolithic institutions with their accordant bureaucracies hold no fascination. If nothingelse they are too unyielding, seemingly unable to act responsively. In 1993, after a six-year, self-reflexively inactiveperiod, I initiated a publishing project called Imprint 93. Indebted as much to the do-it-yourself aesthetics andstrategies of fanzine culture as it was to the earlier methodologies of, say, fluxus or the mail art movement of the1970s, Imprint 93 was a vehicle, an agency, through which I could both commission and distribute artists projects.Despite me being the sole proprietor, my project was essentially a collaborative actan accumulative project: thesum of its parts. Its motto: Imprint 93 celebrates other peoples ideas. Realistic in its ambition, Imprint 93 operatedon a minuscule budget, supported for many years by my income from a part-time administrative job in an advertisingagency. Imprint 93 was an attempt to rationalize my ongoing interest in contemporary art while negotiating the

everyday practicalities of living and working within a specific context: namely, London in the early 1990s.

The local is often depicted pejoratively, invariably aligned with suspect nationalistic tendencies. I dont subscribe tothis view of the local. A sense of locality and an acknowledgment of the responsibilities (and limitations) that go withworking within a particular community are at the center of my practice. An acknowledgment of the specificity of aparticular context and how its particular (and peculiar) nuance impacts upon individuals and cultural productioncontinues to motivate me. Much has been written about the London art scene of the 1990s. Mythologized throughthe acronym yBa (young British art/artists), the real story of British arts passage through the 1990s has yet to bewritten. Contrary to its received history, there existed a spirit of adventure and exchange. Despite, or in spite of,often conflicting interests, a genuine sense of dialogue existed. Artist-run spaces, artist-led initiatives, artistscollectives, collaborative projects, and individualistic gestures were proliferating. Each in their own distinct waystruggling toward a redefinition, a reexamination, a reconsideration of what constituted a public threshold for thepresentation and dissemination of art. It was, in the best sense of the word, amateurish, run largely by enthusiasts.Improvisatory and ad hoc, it survived and thrived outside of any commercial imperatives. These determinants

impacted upon my publishing project. Distributed by mail and free of charge, Imprint 93 published some sixtyprojects. Its hybrid form allowed it to represent my, often catholic, tastes in art: from, at one extreme, the brutal andoften maudlin poetry of punk musician Billy Childish, to the tragicomic conceptualism of Martin Creed at the other.Imprint 93 operated in the manner of both a parasite and a virus. Parasitical inasmuch as it was realistically aware ofits dependency on the context of the art world for its legitimacy; viral inasmuch as it arrived unannounced,unsolicited from an ostensibly anonymous source. In the early 1990s few, if any, people in London were publishingand distributing new work by artists in this way. Imprint 93, by default, had the territory to itself. It distinguished itselfthrough a lack of alternatives. Imprint 93 afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with a generation of artists, ofroughly a similar age, at an early stage in their practices, establishing mutual working relationships that persist tothis day. This sense of continuum, the necessity for an ongoing dialogue that goes beyond the momentary status of aparticular project or event is critical to my practice as a curator.

Over the last ten years I have realized some one hundred projects with artists, either independently or through theagencies of public or private organizations. From their outset each project is determined by the specifics of its

context. Curating remains a largely intuitive act. My jobif it is a jobis to establish an appropriate response toeach given situation. Consequently each project is differentdeterminedly sodemanding an entirely distinctrationale. Of course this might sound like stating the obvious, but the reality is that most exhibitions are stillinstigated, administered, realized, and received according to models established decades agomodels increasinglyinappropriate to current artistic production. This consensus or status quo has increasingly led to thehomogenization of exhibition culture. A culture that aspires to a kind of visual Esperanto, the results of which areinvariably empty spectacles drained of any specific nuance, inflection, or dialect. In 2000, the British artistscollective Bank imagined a scenario in which all of the publicly funded galleries in London would be forcibly closeddownin turn, taking all the money from those curators & status-mongers & bureaucrats & moneymen &managers. According to Banks vision, those monies would then be redistributed to ARTISTS, who would set


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up loads of temporary, more exciting spaces for lots of artists to show in. Thered be much more art around becausethe money would go so much further than it does now as it wouldnt be spent fuelling the careers of all those whopretend to be the friends of artists but are really their lazy, powerful enemies JUST IMAGINE ALL THAT ART! Itwould make London a phoenix reborn from the ashes of bureaucracy!! LETS DO IT!!! This might seem a littledramatic, but I can sympathize with Banks position. (Indeed, why restrict it to London?) The contemporary art worldis too professional. The increasingly bureaucratized role of the curator shouldas Bank identifiedbe the cause ofsome concern. Curators do not initiate shifts in cultureat best they can merely respond to the new directivesinitiated by artists. The artist should be privileged at all costs.

Artists are among the last great amateurs. My dictionary locates the origin of the word amateur in the Latin forlover. Nowadays the amateur is a maligned figureoften little more than a byword for contemptible ineptitude. Butin our increasingly professional and bureaucratic art world we should learn to cherish the amateur, learn to celebratethose rare individuals motivated by enthusiasm and love. From the inspired Victorian philanthropist Sir John Soane,whose incredible museum in central London remains unburdened by the typical hierarchical notions of value andtaste, to the recent projects of the British artist Jeremy Deller, the spirit of the amateur is alive and well. I oncecontributed a list of ten exhibitions that I wish I had curated to a fanzine (The Poor Pony, issue 1113: The Liaison).A significant number of them are exhibitions curated by artists, and I would like to speak briefly about one of them byway of a conclusion. Jeremy Deller recently completed a yearlong residency in the Bay Area with the publication ofhis Capp Street projectAfter the Gold Rush, an idiosyncratic guidebook to California. Deller operates loosely withinthe relatively recent trajectory of the artist-curator: a slippery coalition, whose numbers would surely include suchseminal figures as Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, and Claes Oldenburg. Dellers ongoing project proposesa radical reappraisal of conventional assumptions about both artistic and curatorial practice. Unconvention(19992000)while not typicalis illustrative of Dellers approach. Essentially a group showfor which I wrote theintroductory catalog textUnconvention was devised specifically for the short-lived Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff,

South Wales. Unconvention emerged from an earlier Deller project, The Uses of Literacy(1997). The Uses ofLiteracywas a display of artifactsdrawings, paintings, poetry, and proseproduced by fans in response to thehistorical and cultural interests and obsessions of the Welsh rock group the Manic Street Preachers. Described byone of its participants as a poetic recordseen through often extraordinary imagesof the screams, sighs, andwhispers of some remarkable young people, The Uses of Literacyencapsulated and prioritized the latentcreativity of its teenage authors. The Manic Street Preachers, more so than any other British band, have continuallysought to contextualize their intentions through references to other artists and writers. For their fans, the band has,in turn, become a kind of parallel education: providing them with access to images and literature denied orsuppressed by conventional schooling. Rejecting conventional curatorial wisdom, Deller assembled an exhibitionfrom the viewpoint of a rock band, rather than from an art historical, theoretical, or thematic perspective. Theresulting exhibition provoked visual juxtapositions as unlikely as they were profound: key works by Lawrence Weiner,Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Martin Kippenberger, Pablo Picasso, and Jenny Saville were displayedalongside documentary war photographs by Robert Capa, Kevin Carter, and Don McCullin. Archival sectionsdevoted to the Welsh miners fraternal involvement in the Spanish Civil War sat alongside the complete literature of

the Situationist Internationale. For its opening weekend, Deller invited numerous local organizationsfrom AmnestyInternational and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, to fanzines produced by fans of the bandto set up stallsamid the artworks. Reminiscent of a radicalized village fete, the opening weekends events concluded with animpassioned speech by Arthur Scargillpresident of the National Union of Mineworkersand a stirring performanceby the Pendyrus Male Choir, singing songs of passion and resistance, songs originally sung in the miningcommunities of South Wales. Each artwork, each organization, each document, each individual was accorded anemotional and intellectual equanimity. The usual distinctions between high and low cultural artifacts wereabolished. Unconvention was one of the most context-specific artworks/exhibitions I have encountered. It engagedexplicitly and unashamedly with the social, cultural, and political legacies of its constituentsthe people of SouthWalesmediated through the agency of a local contemporary rock band, which since its inception has sought toaddress the discrepancies and injustices that exist in society. That some four thousand people attended its openingweekend made it all the more remarkable, not only validating Dellers enterprise but vindicating his persistent beliefthat art does not and cannot exist in isolation. Jeremy Deller operates as a catalyst. Working literally between theaudience and the stage, Dellers art is an art of democratization: one that demystifies and liberates the construction

of meaning, empowering both its audience and participants alike. Ultimately Unconvention consolidated my ownpersistent belief that art does have the potential both to illuminate and to transform our experience and expectationsof life, without patronizing its audience. It reinforced the necessity for self-determination that I had encountered as ateenager in the independent music scene of the late 1970s. In amplifying and privileging mutuality, Deller served toremind us that only together can we confront and challenge orthodoxy and that together we must acceptresponsibility for our own destiny. Or as the Bristol band The Pop Group once said, Where there is a will, there hasgot to be a way.

Between the Audience and the Stage is a revised version of a text originally commissioned by Catherine Thomas for her anthology of contemporarycurators writings, The Edge of Everything (Banff, Canada: Banff Centre Press, 2002).


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Peter Fillingham, Installation of Window and Untitledphoto: Kate Fowle


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notes toward

a curatorialportrait of

ybca 2002Renny P r i t i k in

When SFMOMA was rehoused in 1995, the architect of its new building,Mario Botta, frequently stated that he saw the museum as the new cathedral.This set the curatorial team at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts pondering aboutthe architectural metaphor for our ambition for this institution. We aspire to bea different kind of public site, perhaps a really comfortable bus station or a reallycool mall. That is, a place where you can hook up with the means to get you

where you need or want to go inexpensively or get turned on to the newest stuffwithout having to buy it. If you go to a baseball game you will always see at leastone thing youve never seen before. Were seeking to design a museum experiencethats equivalent; a place where it is safe and fun to hang out and meet or watchor learn from a wider-than-usual variety of people for a few hours. In those kindsof places we feel unselfconscious, interested, comfortable, relaxed, ready to spendsome time, never sure exactly what might happen, open to possibility. The sitehas a context and meaning, but it is open-ended, rife with potential. Were talkingabout the life of the mind being understood as a good scary choice, an escapade.


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Its a given that most curating in contemporary art is of artists, not art; perhaps the next step is curating of not justartists, but projects and institutional alignment. We can identify in a rough way four areas of activity at YBCA thatput that evolution in thinking to practical use. These include:

1. the lively mix of community-based pop culture and contemporary art

2. multidisciplinary approaches, including Centerfest theme projects

3. remodeling the museum for the new century with the whole of visual culture in the mix. For example, in ourbicycle culture show (or boxing, or surf culture, or hip-hop, or comics, or tattoo, or halls of fame, et al.) wewere able to achieve diversity and a wonderful variety of materials: Latino teens low-rider bikes, artist bikes,designer abstract bikes, prison-made bikes, and state-of-the-art commercial mountain bikes andprogenitor cruisers from the 40s.

4. repositioning the institution as a catalyst, a shape-shifter, a resource, a good partner, solving more problemsthan we create

Okwui Enwezor, the curator of the most recent Documenta in Germany (2002), said, I want to make a distinctionbetween curating within the canon and curating within culture. ... That is, to curate within culture is to see art in atotality that is not simply bounded by art history. It is there that we begin to make room for new forms of knowledge,new possibilities for articulating different types of intelligence that are unruly and cannot be disciplined by theacademic world. He is arguing for expanding the universe of the kinds of art we look at beyond the academy andoutside art history. I have found in my practice that if we open up the gates that far it just doesnt make sense tothen continue to exclude the greatest percentage of our societys visual production, which is generally referred to as

visual culture. Things we make that are beautiful, interesting, emblematic, informative, worthy of scrutiny, that are notart or considered art generally. We are not equating this material with art; were saying that the question of whetherit is art or not is not the driving force for us, all the time. It is this insight that has led Yerba Buena to produceexhibitions that are one consistent thread in our programming, that are manifestations of what people are actuallydoing and making and getting excited about in our communities.

The number one rule youre taught in curator school is not to go over the line to thinking youre an artist. I think inmost cases, and certainly within traditional practice, that is true and important. However, in order to take on thesekinds of projects it is necessary for the curator to take a more active stance. I dont know if it is an artistic practice,but it is more of an artistic practice than merely exercising connoisseurship. It probably is close to being an old-fashioned impresario, crossed with the newer notion of a facilitator. In our experience, putting on such projectsinvolves responding to and/or assembling teams of community aficionados/experts as consulting curators. This cantbe overemphasized because they often are the ones who push us to think of different approachesbeyond artabout bikes or by bikers, why not show bikes themselves or keep pushing the idea and show bike-related ephemera

like patches and zines and outfits? Also it is vital to engage partners such as fringe commercial supporters (comicsstores, bike stores), relevant political groups (San Francisco Bicycle Coalition), new audiences (subscribers tobike newsletters, Critical Mass enthusiasts), non-art institutions (environmental groups), academics (UC Berkeleyprofessor Iain A. Boals Bicycle Roots), including also other arts groups, media sponsors, et al., ad infinitum.So the idea that has been radical for us is working with cultural participants to create an opportunity to celebratetheir achievements. We can guide their enthusiasm and expertise with our ability as outsiders to edit and bring tobear our knowledge of display, organization, marketing, etc., as well as access to our facility and whateverfinancial resources we can muster.

The image is of an institution that is no longer monolithic and stable, but rather involved in a constantly shiftingnetwork of alliances, projects, communities, supporters, and partners. Our goal is to have an institutional identitythat is as contingent, in flux, fugitive, self-renewing, complex, and evolving as any individuals identity.


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Fred Wi l so nAlthough an ever-changing phenomenon, museums move imperceptibly, almost

glacially. And as they move, they absorb new ideas along the way, freezing themand fusing them with their own established ways of doing things.

In my own practice Im interested in mixing genres, communities, popular culture, art and artifacts, etc., in a morefluid way, and Ive been doing this for quite a while. At the time I created Mining the Museum, 1992, at the MarylandHistorical Society, major art museums rarely made exhibitions that challenged the master narrative of the great whitemale artist as genius, or group exhibitions of treasures and masterpieces. When they had previously tried organizingunusual exhibitions, such as Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art, 1984, organized by William Rubin at the Museumof Modern Art, New York, or Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, organized by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center,Paris, they were roundly attacked from all sides, sending many into retreat. Though I agree with the critiques of theseexhibitions I do not agree that this was an indication that museums should give up trying to break out of the staleenvironment they had become and maintain their status quo, as some would have liked.

Im interested in how mainstream museums take in new curatorial ideas and then regurgitate them for the public.Although my egos not so big as to allow me to take complete credit for all new ideas, I do feel like the work Ivedone over the last fifteen years has had some impact on museums. Curating internationally is going through awelcome change, but the road is a bumpy one. Curators in major museums are trying to diversify their exhibitions anddo things in ways that were unheard-of only fifteen years ago. I think whats going on in international exhibitions,organized mainly by independent curators in alternative museums and spaces, seems to display an understanding ofwhats at stake socially and culturally. Many national museums, however, have recently been engaging the public withexhibition schedules that try to both organize exhibitions in a traditional way and create shows that mix things up a bit,with, in my opinion, varying degrees of success. For the most part what Im seeing makes me nervous. I would like tomention a few exhibitions that stand out in my mind as ones whose problems are very emblematic of the state ofcontemporary exhibition making in major American museums, and in this way instructive. Some of the curators are, Ithink, fantastic and I always believe that we can grow by making problematic exhibitions. So this critique is notintended to slap hands, but rather to encourage learning about things by doing them. The first exhibition I want tomention is Black Romantic, 2002, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, organized by Thelma Golden, a really gifted

curator. Golden presented black artists engaging in the art world and those who work outside the mainstream butoften have a great deal of success within a black art market. All representational, a great deal of the art wasillustration or design based, focusing on popular themes relating to African-American culture. This work was shownalongside artworks of subtle and complex African-American subject matter and visual invention, and I believe that thecurator acknowledged the distinction between the two in her essay, albeit in an oblique way. Due to that and the waythe exhibition was set up, it seemed to be an uneasy mix of an ethnographic study and the usual type of art museumdisplay based on aesthetic quality. It is confusing to create an exhibition in an art museum partially around a culturalphenomenon and partially around the artworks aesthetic value, rather than combining the two. Forefronting culturalphenomena over visual interest is reminiscent of an anthropologistsrather than an art curatorsapproach toexhibition making.

Actually, Ive been seeing these anthropological/art exhibitions a lot latelythey have become something of a culturalphenomenon in themselves! Of course I am interested in an anthropological way of curating, but it might be best tobe clear about what constitutes examples of cultural phenomena that are instructive but lack vivid visual excitement,

and what is worth a second look as particularly interesting art and visual culture. Without clarity of intention thisapproach can miseducate the public. An example of a successful visual art presentation that really struck me can befound at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. This museum is very clear about including currentindigenous artists works in its contemporary art galleries. While they might not be working within the international art-making that we are more usually presented with, the museum sees these artists as contemporary and therefore partof the dialogue about contemporary art, and it exhibits them alongside their European-descended Australian artisticpeers. That a similar dialogue has not taken place in recent years in American museums is to me a huge oversight, toput it mildly. This is not only a problem of curating interesting exhibitions and the need to invigorate them, but also aclear indication that there are artists who are being systematically overlooked.


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And race is not the only area of oversight. Although you do see one or two so-called outsider artists occasionallyincluded in exhibitionssuch as the mind-blowing carnival costumes in Beau Monde, 2001, at SITE Santa Fe and thegorgeous African-American quilts in the last Whitney Biennial, 2002these are the exception to the rule due tofearless curators. Outsider artists relationships to current art practicethe fact that they are working in contemporarytimesis somehow not enough for them to have a dialogue within exhibitions of contemporary artists working in whatI call the international style. In fact, Ive had ongoing conversations with outsider artists in Georgia and NorthCarolina, who over the years have told me how they have to act dumb around collectors, who dont want to knowthat these artists actually communicate and compare notes. So they have to act like they are really alone, working in awilderness of their own minds.

The other exhibition that reminds me of Black Romantic is the Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Guggenheim, NewYork, 20012. The museum used the hackneyed artist-as-genius mold to present an artist eternally popular withAmericans, but ignored the obvious questions that might surround Norman Rockwells work. To me this is anappropriation of what has been going on in alternative art exhibitions to insincere ends. Choosing a subject ignored bythe high art community, but one of mass appeal, and recasting an insider American illustrator as an outsider artistcould have been brilliant, if the museum confronted the complexity of the choice and educated its audience, ratherthan just count the cash at the door. I think probably where the curators of the Rockwell show went astray was in notreally saying what they were trying to do, whereas Thelma Golden did.

Part of the problem is that (unfortunately) the public doesnt expect a dialogue about society, fame, multiple artmarkets, and parallel art worlds when they go to museums. Ironically, they dont even expect to have to grapple withaesthetics. The public expects one truth, the highest quality, and one way of thinking about an artist. This expectationwas created by the art market and is supported by the major museums themselves. They create masterpieces andtreasures exhibitions, which decide for the viewer what great art is, without explaining why (visually), and they

organize shows touting the artist-as-genius, as if he (quotation marks intended) were just born that way. This dumbsdown the public to believe they do not have to actively engage their own critical instincts, flex their own connoisseurshipmuscles. They are not given the tools to understand that they have a role in their own aesthetic and culturaldevelopment. In an art museum, ignorance is not blissand should not be. A museum could honestly explain who thecurators are, and how the environment within and without acted as the catalyst for its choice of exhibition. It coulddiscuss the philosophical concerns that determined its decisions. Simply opening up the process of exhibition makingfor the public to understand might go a long way toward diffusing any frustration.

Occasionally major museums do flip into exhibition-as-dialogue mode in an effort to remain current with contemporaryexhibition-making trends, leaving the public to wonder, Well, are we supposed to think this is great art? Is this whatthe museum thinks? Who should we trust? and causing further confusion. For example, the Museum of Modern Art,New York, organized an exhibition for the millennium called MOMA 2000, which combined the art and design ofvarious departments of the museum, again with mixed results. The one problematic gallery I particularly remember isthe one where they combined works from the Painting and Sculpture Department with the Design Department, pairing

a Joseph Beuys felt suit with a designer suit. The meaning of the felt suit, even though explained on the label, wasevacuated from it because of the visual relationships being built up around the room. The visual almost always cancelsout attempts to modify the meaning with label text, if there is an inherent strength in what you see, especially if thetext and image are at odds. In contrast, a similar type of exhibition they did that really worked well was Ensor/Posadapart of Modern Starts: People 19992000. Here a seemingly simplistic visual connectionbetween the use ofcadavers and skeletons in the work of the Belgian expressionist James Ensor, and that of his contemporary, theMexican folk artist Jose Guadalupe Posadawas supplemented by a very complex case for the relationship betweenthe artists and their work, which was extremely satisfying.

The first exhibition at the new MOMA QNS, for me, presented a similar problem albeit on a smaller scale. It wascalled Tempo and each room had a theme. One room entitled Time Elapsed was a show about artists use of timein their work. It used the visual to a fault, presenting works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cildo Mereiles, MatthewMcCaslin, Andrea Zittel, and several other artists, all of them using clocks, so that it really felt like a clock store inthere. The meaning of these works was, again, completely lost, because in the desire to have a theme and maintain

visual cohesion, the conceptual underpinning behind these objects that made them more than clock studies justdisappeared. Beau Monde, the SITE Santa Fe exhibition organized by Dave Hickey, was hands-down the mostbeautiful exhibition I have ever seen. It had art, it had so-called crafts, it had folk/popular culture, and the exhibitionarchitecture itself was designed to inform your reception of the art. However, the beauty of the installation and thebeauty of the art rendered meaning subservient, nothing had to be culturally important or intellectually stimulating;though outside of this context, they were. Everything was beautiful and colorful in the extreme, so visually dazzling ithad a numbing effect, subverting at least a good part of the artists intention. This to me was the most problematicand reactionary use of what weve been doing with contemporary exhibition making in the last twenty years. Theexhibition included Ellsworth Kelly paintings paired with Ken Price ceramics, New Orleans carnival costumes next toa Jessica Stockholder sculpture, Bridget Riley paintings, a Josiah McElheny glass installation, etc. It included worksthat had some inferences of pornography, some inferences about the dark side of childhood, but you didnt thinkabout any of that. It was like eating colorful cotton candy: you whomped it down and then wondered, what did I eat?


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California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) MA Program in Curatorial Practice1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107www.ccac-art.edu

Editor: Leigh MarkopoulosProduction Manager: Erin LampeDesign: Richard Chang

Printing: Valencia PrintingEvent Conception: Kate Fowle

Thanks to: Sren Andreasen, Nancy Crowley, Peter Fillingham, Michelle Grabner,Matthew Higgs, Lars Bang Larsen, Erica Olsen, Renny Pritikin, David Robbins,Shane Aslan Selzer, Eric Wesley, Fred Wilson, and Jonathan Yorba.

2003 CCAC MA Program in Curatorial Practice and the authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, orutilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, includingphotocopying and recording, or any information or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publisher.


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Curating Now 01