of exhibition are the most visible elements of the infrastructure within which art curating is practiced today. We might set them out as a spectrum, an array, ranging from the traditional (in the minimal sense of having been around the longest) to the most recent, and from those thoroughly invested in landmark and location to those that presume mobility and transience. At one end, there is the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: a mother-ship among megamuseums that—like its few comparators, such as the British Museum, London, and the Louvre, Paris—has recently included contemporary art within its treasure troves, appointed a specialist curator of twentieth and twenty-first century art (Sheena Wagstaff, who arrived from the Tate Modern), oriented its collection rooms toward making vivid the contemporary circumstances surrounding the creation of at least some of the items, and heralded, where appropriate, the continuing vitality of cultures that had previously been regarded as having reached their aesthetic highpoints at some time in the past. We could place at the other end of the spectrum venues that focus on the work of one artist or even, as is the case with The Artist Institute, New York, a slowly changing program of exhibitions of just one work of art at a time. Yet the real other is not concentrated versions of the same thing but the proliferation of open-ended curated projects, short and longer term, that seek to work from within the creativity already present in the everyday life of small, but constrained, communities. Between 2000 and 2005 Oda Projesi (Room Project), a collective formed by three women artists, staged thirty community arts projects in their apartment and the courtyard of a building in the Galata section of Istanbul, continuing their work since then in more mobile and virtual formats, as well as pursuing projects in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Since 2003 in Yangon, Myanmar, Networking and Initiatives in Culture and the Arts (NICA), founded by two artists, Jay Koh and Chu Yuan, has nurtured a variety of local possibilities and international connections for Burmese artists and spun off other independent arts spaces. Meanwhile, in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, the Waffle Shop is a community building, consciousness raising location, performance space, TV studio, and blog site, conceived and run by artists associated with Carnegie Mellon University, that also offers a full menu of edible waffles. A related project, the take-out restaurant, Conflict Kitchen, only sells food from nations with which the United States is in conflict.1
Façade with banners, detail of main entrance and steps, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2006
What are the exhibitionary venues that fill out the infrastructural spectrum between these two ends? Having begun with the universal history of the art museum that holds pride of cultural place in most metropolitan centers, we soon shift our gaze to the huge variety of more specialized collections—the period museum, the national collection, the geopolitical area or civilization museum, the city museum, the university gallery, the art school gallery, the private collection museum, the museum of modern art, the single artist museum, the museum of contemporary art, the one-medium museum, and spaces dedicated to large-scale commissioned installations. Continuous with these, in well served cities, are various venues that do not have collections as their basis but are devoted above all to changing exhibitions: Kunsthalles, alternative spaces, artist-operated initiatives, satellite spaces, and the exhibition venues of art foundations (some of which have collections). Finally, we visit institutes of various kinds that include exhibitions as one part of their research, publication, and educational activities, and check out temporary and online sites. With these last, and with many emergent quasi-institutions, the focus shifts from physical location and on-site continuity as the literal grounding to situations in which the event and the image prevail over place and duration. Each of these venues or operations has distinct features and purposes, and they often spring up in response to perceived shortcomings of already existing institutions. At the same time, traffic in ideas, objects, and people has always flowed between them. These days it is becoming very dense indeed.
Oda Projesi (Room Project) collective (Gunes Savas, Secil Yersel, and Erden Kosova), October 2005
To this long—and, it must be said, impressive list (how many other arts spin off new infrastructure so often, and so variously?)—we should add the growing interest of many commercial galleries, collector museums, and art fairs in certain kinds of public-oriented, “art historical” exhibitions. This has not displaced their basic commercial orientation, nor is it likely to, given the seemingly endless boom (at least at the top of the market), especially for contemporary art. With a narrower set of costs and far greater financial resources than most public museums, Gagosian Galleries has taken to presenting “museum-quality” shows of artists such as Piero Manzoni, Yayoi Kasuma, Pablo Picasso, and Lucio Fontana. Staged by in-house curators, these shows sometimes include among the works for sale a number of not-for-sale works borrowed, or loaned for a fee, from museums. In their Miami location, Mera and Don Rubell regularly present theme shows drawn from their collection: their focus, since 2000, on young artists from Los Angeles helped propel that city to its current return to prominence as an art center. Certain private collectors have always known that they can influence the development of art itself, not just the direction of the market, simply by the weight of their attention: Charles Saatchi is merely the most notorious recent example of the collector become museum director. There are many precedents, going back to the first large-scale private collections made available to select circles of invited viewers that were assembled during the seventeenth century by certain Italian cardinals and German princes. Closer to our times, and still very influential, are public museums oriented around the values of the original collector, such as the Menil Collection and the associated Rothko Chapel, Houston, which are constantly curated to promote relationships between “Art, Spirituality, Human Rights,” so dear to the founders, John and Dominique de Menil.
Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Conflict Kitchen, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2010–present
Some collectors are beginning to see that they can become not only museum directors and de facto curators but artists as well. Toronto foundation director Ydessa Hendeles curates exhibitions aimed at creating “an experience that precludes words” by establishing “new metaphorical connections” between artworks that she collects for this purpose.2 Since 2001 she has worked on Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), a vast accumulation of found photographs that include teddy bears, usually from family albums compiled between 1900 and 1940. In the versions shown at the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2003), and the Gwangju Biennale (2010), the multilevel central rooms were filled with thousands of these images. Installation style, they were preceded by smaller rooms that displayed a range of vernacular artifacts including a 1950s Minnie Mouse doll and artworks such as a small Diane Arbus self-portrait taken in 1945, and were followed by a room that included one item that the viewer approached from behind: Maurizio Cattelan’s Him (2001), a child-sized figure, on its knees praying, with the unmistakable features of the adult Adolf Hitler. In this installation, one of Cattelan’s typical visual one-liners suddenly resonated with multiple, darkly explicit meaning.3
In 2011 Hendeles was invited to curate an exhibition in the Chelsea space of the dealer Andrea Rosen. The only stipulation was that she include at least one of the Polaroid images that Walker Evans shot in the last year of his life (1973–74), which the gallery was licensed to sell. The result was The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project), shown between December 2011 and February 2012. Subtitled A curatorial composition by Ydessa Hendeles, she used certain items from her own collection and borrowed others from museums and dealers: the final installation included eighty-three Evans Polaroids, including some from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Rosen Gallery consists of a narrow entrance area that opens on to a large central space topped by an impressive skylight mounted on a wooden frame and supported by steel beams. Hendeles cleverly negotiated the affective distance between this imposing environment and the modest Polaroids through selections that laid out a set of affinities.
