Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith

      Bruce Nauman, 100 Live and Die, 1984. Neon, 299.7 x 335.6 x 53.3. Collection Benesse Holdings, Inc, Japan

I do not write as a curator by profession, having been involved in making just a few exhibitions.⁷ I am, rather, an art historian, critic, theorist, and teacher who is a professional visitor to exhibitions and an amateur enthusiast about them. I have, over many years, learned an enormous amount from the efforts of curators—from the most collection oriented to those who would never think of setting foot in a museum. These reflections are a respectful attempt to offer something in return. I owe my first glimpse of art to a curator. Coming from a family for whom original art was out of the question, and going to primary schools where it existed, unremarked, as reproduced decoration, I discovered art by what I thought was an accident. At the age of nine, my father took me to visit the Museum of Natural History, Melbourne, to see the dinosaurs and the effigy of Phar Lap, a great racehorse, when I noticed in a cabinet at the bottom of some stairs what I thought were colored sketches for comic books of the kind I was making at home. Climbing up to the landing, another cabinet housed fine line drawings of extraordinary intensity. When I reached the top of the stairs, looking for more, a wonderful vista opened in both directions: vigorous battle scenes, lustrous figures, and dreamy landscapes. This was the National Gallery of Victoria, then as now stocked with a major collection of art from Europe, courtesy of the Felton Bequest, and from Australia, courtesy of local donors, mainly artists. The images that had attracted me on that stairwell were drawn from the gallery’s unmatched collection of William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy and its set of Blake’s etchings of the Book of Job. Years later, Dr. Ursula Hoff, Curator of Prints and Drawings, told me that she placed them there in the hope that they would do for the youth of the city exactly what they did for me.⁸ This is curating as laying out the lure.

      In these essays, I think alongside the thoughts about curating expressed by a number of curators, looking for traces of the constituents of contemporary curatorial thought, such as those listed a few paragraphs back. These essays are also a set of provocations. They urge curators to complicate thinking about “the contemporary” and to grapple with the challenges of curating contemporaneity.

       1 Steven Rosenbaum, Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), http://curationnation.org/pages/aboutthebook.

       2 A distinction drawn, for example, by Robert Storr in his essay “Show and Tell,” in Paula Marincola, ed., What Makes a Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 14. Museum-based exhibition makers looking for an introductory compendium of sound advice about how to conduct their profession in an honorable fashion will find this an extraordinarily useful essay, as are the contributions by Carlos Basualdo, Lynne Cooke, and others to this anthology.

      3 On-Curating.org 11, no. 11, “Public Issues,” n.d., www.on-curating.org/documents/oncurating_issue_1111.pdf.

       4 Cited in Carolina M. Miranda, “Biting the Hand that Feeds Them,” Art News 10, no. 11 (December 2011): 89.

       5 Avanessian and Skrebowski, “Introduction,” in Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, eds., Aesthetics and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). My grumble about the time-lag remark is occasioned by the fact that some of us have been attempting to theorize contemporaneity critically since the 1990s—in my case, in publications since 2001. It is true, however, that this effort has only been taken up more widely in the past two or three years.

       6 A film by Waterlow’s partner, Julie Darling, entitled A Curator’s Last Will and Testament, was screened in Sydney in April 2012.

       7 My curatorial record is modest and has always been undertaken as part of productive collaborations: The Situation Now: Object or Post-Object Art?, inaugural exhibition, Contemporary Art Society Gallery, Sydney, July 16–August 6, 1971 (with Tony McGillick); Dreams, Fears, and Desires: Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting 1942–62, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, Newcastle Regional Gallery, and Monash University Art Gallery, Fifth Biennale of Sydney and Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1984 (with Christine Dixon and Virginia Spate); consultant curator, along with eight others, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999; and consultant to The Achievement of Albert Kahn, University of Michigan Art Gallery, Ann Arbor, 2001. I have also served on the boards of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1989–2000, the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 1996–2000, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, since 2002.

       8 On Dr. Ursula Hoff, see Sheridan Palmer, Center of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians in Melbourne (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008).