and Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998; Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
5 Searches through www.worldcat.org and other databases conducted around 2000 showed interesting moments of prominence but not priority for “contemporary”: the 1920s in Europe, the 1960s throughout the world. A recent Google ngram search run by João Ribas for the occurrence of the terms “modern art” and “contemporary art” since 1900 across books in Google Books shows the trend in recent decades toward quantitative near convergence in recent years.
6 Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (London: Laurence King; Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011).
7 Paula Marincola, ed., What Makes a Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 10. Another useful anthology is Helen Kouris and Steven Rand, eds., Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (New York: Apexart, 2007).
8 Paula Marincola, “A List of Questions Leading to More Questions and Some Answers,” insert in What Makes a Great Exhibition? See also David Levi-Strauss, “The Bias of the World: Curating After Szeemann and Hopps,” Brooklyn Rail, December 2006–January 2007,
http:/brooklynrail.org/2006/12/art/.
9 Robert Storr, “Show and Tell,” in Marincola, What Makes a Great Exhibition?, 14.
10 Roberta Smith, “So Big, Performa Now Misses the Point,” New York Times, November 26, 2011, C1 and C11.
11 Storr, “Show and Tell,” 20.
12 It is disappointing that there is so scant a record of audience responses to art exhibitions. Curators talk about it all the time as the holy grail of their profession, but do very little beyond filing press responses and taking record photographs to actually examine it in depth and detail. This is left to the education and press people. Spectatorship seems a notional, not an actual, repository of value. The real thrill seems to have remained with conceiving and installing an exhibition. Is there a parallel to architects’ taste for photographs of their buildings made just after the moment of completion and before their intended users, who are, at least ostensibly, the primary motivators of the design, occupy them? The equivalent for curators is the folio of generalized shots of room installations, the major information value of which is to record which artwork hung where. It is telling that no practice of photography has evolved to capture the actual experience of walking through an exhibition. The closest thing to that ideal might be the virtual tours offered by various galleries and by services in some cities (which tend to be short-lived). The Google Art Project, and Vernissage TV, are interesting attempts to offer online access to quite different aspects of the exhibitionary complex, but remain rather limited relative to actual experience. My text editor suggests that e-publishing might eventually create a space that could address this issue. Perhaps so, when the time comes that most relationships have become e-relations, including exhibiting visual art (at that point mostly a matter of image-exchange, with objects remembered as holographic specters).
13 Storr, “Show and Tell,” 23.
14 “The Grammar of the Exhibition,” Manifesta Journal, no. 7 (2009/10).
15 Maria Lind, “The Curatorial,” Artforum 68, no. 2 (October 2009): 103. Reprinted in Brian Kuan Wood, ed., Selected Maria Lind Writing (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 63.
16 See Carol Kino, “Puppies, Paintings, and Philosophers,” New York Times, March 4, 2012, AR23.
17 Lind, “The Curatorial,” 65.
18 Lind, in Jens Hoffmann and Maria Lind, “To Show or Not to Show,” Mousse Magazine, no. 31 (November 2011), http://www.moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=759#top
19 Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling: An Embodied Criticality,” http://eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en. This is very close to her description of turning, and of contemporaneity. See “Turning,” e-flux journal 0 (November 2008), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/.
20 João Ribas, “What to Do With the Contemporary?,” 3/10, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Contrappunto S.R.L., 2011). Elena Filipovic’s excellent contribution is full of exact formulations that share much with the approach taken in these notes. See “What is an Exhibition?,” 6/10, Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating, ed. Jens Hoffmann (Milan: Contrappunto S.R.L., 2011).
21 Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?,” in “What is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 39–54.
22 Tim Griffin, “Out of Time,” Artforum 50, no. 1 (September 2011): 288–89.
23 Ibid., 289.
24 Giorgio Agamben, “Notes on Politics,” in Means Without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 109.
25 Ribas, “What to Do With the Contemporary?,” 90.
26 Ibid., 91.
2.
Shifting the
Exhibitionary
Complex
Can we ever get beyond the essential conservatism
of displaying works of art in conventional,
dedicated spaces?
—Paula Marincola, What Makes a Great
and Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998; Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
