Thinking Contemporary Curating. Terry Smith
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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.
3 On-Curating.org 11, no. 11, “Public Issues,” n.d., www.on-curating.org/documents/oncurating_issue_1111.pdf.
1.
What is Contemporary Curatorial Thought?
In a recent essay, “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art,” I track the usage of the term “contemporary” in art discourse during modernity and propose an art-historical hypothesis about contemporary art. I try to set out a framework in which we might identify the precise shape of the act of thought—the affective insight—that contemporary life requires of its art, of the criticism of that art, and of the history of that art: the (necessary, but never sufficient) kernel from which, via many vicissitudes, art must be made and criticism and history written. All kinds of inherited inspirations, medium constraints and possibilities, and many still-vital artistic trajectories remain relevant to such making and writing. Nevertheless, our experience of contemporaneity—of the multiple, various ways of being in time today, contemporaneously—is disposing art, criticism, and history in different ways, and is requiring fresh concepts, mediums, and languages. This is my conclusion:
Place making, world picturing, and connectivity are the most common concerns of artists these days because they are the substance of contemporary being. Increasingly, they override residual distinctions based on style, mode, medium, and ideology. They are present in all art that is truly contemporary. Distinguishing, precisely, this presence in each artwork is the most important challenge to an art criticism that would be adequate to the demands of contemporaneity. Tracing the currency of each artwork within the larger forces that are shaping this present is the task of contemporary art history.1
Is it possible to be as concise about what contemporaneity—our current condition—is asking of art curatorship? Perhaps it is. If so, the first step is to recognize that the object of contemporary curating is much larger than contemporary art. It must encompass all other art: art from any and every past, current art that is not contemporary, as well as projective, future art. (Some artists, in fact many, envisage art that is not subject to this past-present-future triad. Curators will follow; some are already on this trail.) Like contemporary art, contemporary curating is embroiled in time, but not bound by it; entangled with periodizing urges, but not enslaved to them; committed to space, but of many kinds, actual and virtual; anxious about place, yet thrilled by dispersion’s roller-coaster ride. It does not