E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
Mørland / Amundsen / Degot Curating and Politics
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6034-8
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 128 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6034-8
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Discover the Hidden Layers of Exhibition Politics
Since the 1990s, the discourse on curating has often centered around the figure of the professional curator, viewing exhibition politics as a direct result of curatorial intent. However, contemporary shifts in institutional models, funding policies, and collection strategies have unveiled realms of curatorial practice that lie beyond the curator's control.
This groundbreaking volume brings together essays by renowned art theorists and cultural scholars, moving beyond the traditional focus on the curator. It delves into the often-overlooked dimensions of exhibition politics, uncovering uncharted territories of influence and decision-making.
Perfect for professionals, students, and anyone interested in the evolving landscape of art exhibitions, this book challenges conventional perspectives and offers invaluable insights into the complex interplay of curation, institutions, and external forces shaping the art world today.
Key Features:
- In-depth essays from leading experts in art theory and cultural studies
- A fresh perspective on curatorial practices and exhibition politics
- A must-read for anyone exploring the dynamics of art institutions and curation
Autoren/Hrsg.
Fachgebiete
Weitere Infos & Material
Cover
Title Page
Preface
Contents
Request for a Radical Redefinition: Curatorial Politics after Institutional Critique
Art and the Colonization of Value
Activist-Patron-Curators and North American Museums
Curating Against the Apocalypse: Documenta 13, 2012
Beyond the Era of the Object: Towards an Aesthetics of Anti-Commodification
Critical Afterword: Curating as Hand-Sorting and Other Recent Developments
Copyright Page
Heidi Bale Amundsen and Gerd Elise Mørland Request for a Radical Redefinition Curatorial Politics after Institutional Critique
curatorial politics is usually discussed as a product of the curator’s intentions and active choices. But what about the politics that transcend the figure of the individual curator, that are a product of contextual factors over which the curator has little or no control? The plurality, scale, and broad spectrum of politics—which can involve anything from community tensions to economic conditions to donor involvement—highlight a gap in today’s critical curatorial discourse that urgently needs addressing, particularly since the meaning of contemporary exhibitions has expanded well beyond any one single figure or frame.
Jacques Rancière’s ongoing research highlights the correlation between the art world and politics as it appears at different moments in time. For him, politics is not the exercise of power; rather, it is constituted by what occurs when the dominant social order is ruptured or revealed as a contingent structure and reconfigured for the better.1 That is, when it is reshaped to accommodate a more equal and democratic system. In the light of this definition, contemporary curatorial practice seems to be characterized by increasingly political ambitions, by a desire to get involved with society and to produce change by reconfiguring established social or art world structures.
A long list of examples bears witness to this type of political ambition—the Göteborg Biennial PLAY! Recapturing the Radical Imagination of 2013 perhaps most explicitly. According to the press release, the intention of the curatorial team was to “us[e] the agency of play to deconstruct established systems of meaning.”2 Through the artworks selected for exhibition, the curators sought to constitute an alternative space for creative playfulness and activism, and for experiments with alternative approaches to the world we live in. That intention corresponds closely to Rancière’s definition of politics as a space for reimagining established truths.
Another example that reveals similar political intentions is the 11th Istanbul biennial, What Keeps Mankind Alive? (2009). The curators, the WHW Collective (Zagreb), aimed at being transparent with regard to the process and realization of the show by making available statistics and data usually off-limits to press or public, such as information concerning the income and expenses of the event, the distribution of artists according to their current location, age, and gender, and the connections of exhibiting artists to commercial galleries. In short: information on the total distribution of wealth related to the biennial at the economic, social, and artistic level was presented as part of the exhibition. The intention behind this gesture of transparency was “to address questions of the contemporary world amidst the current economic crisis,”3 and their means of doing so was to play with art-world conventions of secrecy. It was a highly political move, since visibility made possible the reconfiguration of established structures.
Another example illustrating the current politicization of the exhibition is the Potosí Principle: How Can We Sing the Song of the Lord in an Alien Land?, presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2010. The exhibition consisted of two parts: the first comprised a selection of Baroque paintings produced in Potosí, Bolivia, during colonial times, when Potosí was one of the wealthiest cities in the world, with a strong economy based on transnational trade and the violent exploitation of local citizens. The second consisted of artworks made in response to the Baroque paintings by contemporary artists and artist collectives like the Culture and Arts Museum of Migrant Workers, Harun Farocki, and Chto Delat. In the words of the curators, the purpose of the juxtaposition was to highlight certain “parallels between the ideological function of colonial-era painting and the modern-day function assumed by art—that of legitimizing the elite of globalization.”4 In short, by letting artworks from different time periods comment on each other, the curatorial team hoped to open up a field of exchange for highlighting, questioning, and perhaps even reconfiguring certain established structures that influence our conception of the world: here again, the curators’ intentions approach Rancière’s notion of politics.
Several other examples could have been added, and the frequency of this kind of political exhibition, which aims to question dominant truths, calls for broader discussions of curatorial politics. But this has not been the case. When politics has been discussed, it has usually been within the extremely limited framework of individual curators’ intentions and active choices. But curators are not the only agents that produce meaning within the context of exhibition production, and the politics of an exhibition are obviously not limited to the curator’s active choices, selections, and gestures. Other factors may include the relationship between the selected artworks and the funders and benefactors of the institution or exhibition, the contextual relationship between the institution and the reality of the city in which the project is carried out, or the relationship between the exhibition and its constructors, officials, and ticket vendors. These relationships are also encompassed by Rancière’s definition of politics, yet they rarely form part of curatorial discussions. The question we want to ask is why this should be so: our working hypothesis is that this lacuna is driven by the dominant perspective of contemporary curatorial discourse, which is almost entirely centered on the notion of institutional critique.
The Dual Identity Quest of the Professional Curator
The nineteen-nineties was a time of transition within the art world, involving a rapidly expanding market for contemporary art, an upsurge of biennials, art fairs, and large group exhibitions as well as the construction of numerous new museums for contemporary art. Within this new construct a new kind of curator took to the stage as the exhibition came to be regarded as a medium of expression in its own right. While the term “curator” used to refer to a marginal character who worked as conservator and administrator within the confines of a museum, today’s freelance curator—often referred to as the “professional curator”—is thought to inhabit a freer, more creative, more central position within the art world at large, and, more significantly, to have staked an authorial claim to the exhibition as such.5
Curatorial discourse as we know it developed in conjunction with the emergence of this new breed of curator and was—and still is—dominated by that same figure, rather than by art historians. These curator-writers, such as Ute Meta Bauer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Maria Lind, developed theoretical discourse as a means of self-reflexion—as a testing ground for curatorial ideas—and as a critical tool for identifying the curator as a subject that produces meaning.6 Through writing, curators attempted to establish an identity for themselves by posing questions in which the role of the curator and the myriad nature of curating occupied pride of place.
The curatorial profession’s attempt to establish a new identity is mirrored in numerous first-person narratives on curating written by curators and published throughout the two-thousands. That is, in curatorial literature in which the writers take their own practice as exhibition-makers as a point of departure for discussions of what curating is and what a curator does. Some important examples are Hans Ulrich Obrist’s A Brief History of Curating (2008), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating (2011), and Ways of Curating (2014); Selected Maria Lind Writings (2010); and Jens Hoffmann’s Should the Next Documenta be Curated by an Artist? (2008), and Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating (2013).7 This highly self-reflexive practice is also mirrored in several seminars and debates organized throughout the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, such as the seminars Curating Degree Zero, first organized in Bremen by Dorothee Richter and Barnaby Drabble in 1998, and The Curators at Witte de With in Rotterdam in 2008.8
The first-person perspective of curatorial discourse involved a particularly close connection between theory and practice as the quest for curatorial identity was carried out in parallel, through writing and experimental exhibition production. Reaching back to the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, the professional curators of the nineteen-nineties adapted the strategies and programs associated with artists such as Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, and Marcel Broodthaers: artists now associated with the foundations of institutional critique, who questioned established ideas of the artwork as autonomous and somehow independent of time and context. The professional curator was also inspired by conceptual exhibition-makers who were active before the institutionalization of the curator but contemporary to the conceptual artists referred to above. Examples include Harald Szeemann and Seth Siegelaub, who took questions of aesthetic neutrality and autonomy to new levels of interrogation by pointing to the entire art institution as deeply entrenched in a political, ideological field of which the exhibition is a far from neutral expression.
One...
