alt="10_TCC_Hendeles.jpg"/>
Ydessa Hendeles, The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn. Installation view, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, December 10, 2011–February 4, 2012
In the first room visitors were greeted by a model of a cooper’s workshop crafted in France in the nineteenth century set on a child’s table manufactured by Gustav Stickley around 1904. The center of the main space was dominated by a monumental birdhouse made in England in 1875 from mahogany and wire, around which were arrayed, pew-like, wooden child’s settles based on a design by Stickley. The Polaroids lined each wall of the main space, their subdued grays, blues, and greens offering mute witness to the existence elsewhere of the buildings or architectural details that Evans recorded. Imitation architecture squared off against reproductions of absent architecture, leaving an emotional gulf between them.
The gap was filled by imagery of movement, of living things, albeit elusive ones. The cardinal points of the main room were marked by four pairs of images from Roni Horn’s Bird series shot between 1998 and 2007 that show close-ups of birds seen from behind, their folded wings betraying no signs of their identity, except as singular, and singularly beautiful, creatures. We now understand why the first room contained two photographs: Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 record of the running flight of the adjutant bird and Eugène Atget’s photograph, taken around 1900, of a shop front, an old boutique on the Quai Bourbon, Paris. In the doorway of the latter we glimpse the blurred shadow of a young girl. Is it she who has imagined these spaces? Is it her house of memory, her dream world, into which we have been invited?
In the explanatory booklet (designed somewhat like a child’s notebook), Hendeles is quite explicit about her process:
In my practice, my approach is to develop a site-specific work, conceiving and executing each show as an artistic embodiment of the particular exhibition space. I start with the context and search for ways to develop a relationship with it that is expressed through layered metaphorical connections. I use an artistic process to create a site-specific curatorial composition that interweaves narratives from disparate discourses using disparate elements. These elements are in no way aligned art historically, and I regard each as a fundamental component of the composition that bears no substitution, not even from the same body of work.4
Ydessa Hendeles, The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn. Installation view, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, December 10, 2011-February 4, 2012
A clearer statement of the contemporary convergence of artistic and curatorial impulses and constraints is difficult to imagine. Every key artistic idea since conceptualism and minimalism is amalgamated into a seamless, pure, J. K. Rowling-kind of “curatorial composition.” That this statement comes from a collector who sees no boundaries between any place on the spectrum is typical of our times. Nor is it a surprise that Hendeles’s projects excite the interest of young curators more than most other models out there.
THE EXHIBITIONARY COMPLEX
How does this Houdini-like identity-swapping of roles across the spectrum relate to the idea of “the exhibitionary complex”—as described by Bennett, historicized by Lorente, and theorized by Duncan and Wallach, among many others—that undergirded the growth of modern art, linked it to the modernizing city, provoked the avant-garde into existence, and subsequently sustained modernism for many decades?5 These authors identified the system that was initiated most influentially for Europe and its cultural colonies by the addition, in 1818, of an annual showing of new works to ongoing displays of works from the permanent collection at the Luxembourg Palace, Paris. Entrants to the Museum of Living Artists were chosen by members of the Academy, a professional organization led by artists that operated under the patronage of the Emperor and later the state. Works deemed worthy of entering the national collection were passed on to the Louvre Museum ten years after the artist’s death, while others went to provincial museums, to storage, or were returned to the artist’s estate. Artists sold works from these annual exhibitions or direct from their studios. By the mid-eighteenth century in England a number of independent auction houses had been established and commercial galleries began appearing throughout Europe in the 1890s. This apparently competitive, but mostly cooperative system is the core of the multimuseum and gallery spectrum that we have inherited. Role swapping has been endemic since the beginning, especially as the system was adopted in city after city throughout the modern world. This is still occurring, as new art distribution centers are created; China during the 2000s is a striking example, with the Arab states in the Middle East the most recent.
Yet the framework is changing, leading us to ask why, and what would change for the better look like? If French artists in the early nineteenth century faced the problem of how to effectively distribute their work and solved it by institutionalizing, proliferating, and varying the venues for doing so, artists in the Middle East today are small players in local art worlds that seem primarily dedicated to selling works drawn from all over the world to targeted buyers from their region and to anchoring large-scale real estate projects. In the longer-established art centers, the issue for curators is rather different. If the selecting, collecting, and exhibitionary ensemble, however chameleon-like in its capacity to change, tends, like all institutional structures, to prioritize self-perpetuation, slow down time, and incline toward the securities of repetition, are sets of practices, such as those that Lind labels “the curatorial,” examples of emergent, more inventive, and more critical alternatives? Or are they the latest supplement to a structure quite capable of generating its own transformations—as it has done in the past, is doing now, and will do for the foreseeable future?
A third, pivotal element pushes itself into this mix: the repeated mega-exhibition, or biennial, now so widespread as to have become an institutional form in itself. We may situate it, logically, in between concrete institutions, such as museums, and supplementary ones, such as Kunsthalles and online sites. Indeed, biennials have evolved into internally diverse displays that occasionally, but regularly, spread themselves out across the range of exhibitionary venues of the city that hosts them, occupying each site, making each site different from what it normally is, while also connecting them, at least for the duration. Biennials, therefore, may be considered structural—they have become fundamental to the display of contemporary art. For historical art, the parallel is the blockbuster. Since Treasures of Tutankhamun, which toured England, Europe, Japan, and the U.S. between 1972 and 1979, attracting millions, blockbuster exhibitions have become so regular a part of museum programming that they, too, may be considered structural. The major museums seem to be incorporating the mega-exhibition into themselves: they have become so large, so internally various, so full of attractions, and so crowded that we might regard these institutions themselves as megamuseums.
Our galleria-like infrastructural array might, therefore, be seen as concentrating its energies into three realms: the institutional, the alternative (or the supplement), and the link. These are the forms taken by its urge to territorialize. At the same time, as we have shown, there is an incessant urge on the part of each type of venue and each exhibition format to imitate the vital practices of the others, to absorb some of their enabling energies (in the case of institutions), to counter them with previously unimagined activity (in the case of the alternatives), and to embody projective versions of both (in the case of the biennial). Stasis is always vitiated by change; storms are vital to the regular patterning of the weather. To fully grasp the settings in which curating is done, we need to keep in mind the interplay between the art system’s slow moving yet constant regeneration of structures and its fast moving proliferation of artworks and exhibitionary ideas.
In this section, I will reflect further on this interplay by thinking first about museums, then about biennials. What has been happening to both, and what do the changes mean for curating? We have come to a pass in which the museum seems no longer to be the limit setter, perhaps
