from an emergent set of attitudes. Can we say that the purpose of curating today is something like this: To exhibit (in the broad sense of show, offer, enable the experience of) contemporary presence and the currency that is contemporaneity as these are manifest in art present, past, and multitemporal, even atemporal? It follows that what is understood in the art world as “Contemporary Art,” while it does in fact inspire contemporary curating of all kinds, including exhibitions of art from previous periods, does not bind curators to its time-bound imperatives.
By art, to put it at its minimum, I mean any intentionally created existent that, following processes of searching self-reflection and including consideration of previous and other imaginable art, embodies its being and establishes its relationships with its anticipated viewers, primarily through visual means. To exhibit is—again following such processes—to bring a selection of such existents (along, perhaps, with other relevant kinds), or newly created works of art, into a shared space (which may be a room, a site, a publication, a web portal, or an app) with the aim of demonstrating, primarily through the experiential accumulation of visual connections, a particular constellation of meaning that cannot be made known by any other means. Of course, such meaning may be parsed in terms other than strictly exhibitionary: art critical, art historical; literary, philosophical, cultural; personal or idiosyncratic; ideological or programmatic—the list is long. But exhibitionary meaning is quite specific because it is established and experienced in the space of an exhibition, actual or virtual (virtual includes memory).2 The parsings, therefore, are translations from curatorial into other expository and interpretative languages.
It follows from what I have said thus far that, broadly speaking, contemporary curating aims to display some aspect of the individual and collective experience of what it is, or was, or might be, to be contemporary. Thus there is a spatial and phenomenological horizon for contemporaneity within the exhibition: it is a discursive, epistemological, and dramaturgical space in which various kinds of temporality may be produced or shown to coexist.3 Enabling viewers to experience contemporaneity in an exhibition setting (taking “exhibition” in the broad sense mentioned, and “setting” to mean any appropriate situated context) would, through this reading, be the curatorial equivalent of making contemporaneity visible in the case of art and of capturing it in writing for publication in the case of criticism and history. I am assuming that exhibiting artistic meaning is the main task of the contemporary curator, to which all other roles are subservient.
Yet while this might bring us to the same kernel of meaning that I got to (I hope) for contemporary art criticism and history writing, it does not fully distinguish what is unique to curatorial thinking. To do so would be to identify the kind of act of thought, the sort of affective insight, that contemporary life requires of curating in a way that it asks it of nothing else. What, then, is contemporary curatorial thought?
THINKING CONTEMPORARY ART
In the Art Bulletin article, as well as in What is Contemporary Art?, there is a crucial step in my argument where I set out, under the headings “Curators in Contention” and “Curators Stage the Debate,” the ways in which, in the years around 2000, Kirk Varnedoe, Okwui Enwezor, and Nicolas Bourriaud offered competing perspectives on the prevailing direction of contemporary art.4 Their insistence, respectively, on a continuity of modernist values within contemporary art, the arrival of a worldwide postcolonial constellation, and the small scale yet portentous emergence of a relational aesthetics, are examples of the kind of curatorial insight into contemporary art that I am talking about. Note that these are different kinds of ideas: the continuity of modernism is an idea about the current profile of art’s autonomous evolution (how art develops by persisting through all the non-art forces that act upon it); the postcolonial constellation is an idea about the current overall shape of human history, to which artistic developments are assumed to be subject; while relational aesthetics is an art world tag, a term for an emergent, imperfectly grasped, but nonetheless interesting way of making art, tossed around between artists, which after a while surfaces as one among a plethora of others to become a critical descriptor, and is then adopted by a curator who believes that curating is a practice of working closely with artists to enable them to manifest their intentions in exhibitions in the optimal possible form.
These three curators already knew, or quickly recognized, that each of these tendencies—although vastly different in scale, ambition, and impact—required a distinct kind of exhibition making, respectively understood as: expand the white cube, decolonize the biennial, domesticate the gallery space. Taken together, in their very contention, these tendencies, along with the ongoing evolution from institutional critique to critical institutionality—to which I will return—shaped debate about what was happening in the years around 2000 more than any other set of ideas coming from art criticism, history, or theory at the time, more even than the unthink that sustained the art market then and does so still.
At that time I understood these curatorial ideas as key indicators (among a plethora of others) of a larger art critical—and, I soon realized, art historical—idea: the contemporaneousness of three powerful currents that, I believe, surge through the bewildering, beguiling variety of contemporary art. My reading would have been impossible without the insightfulness of curators such as these. Their thoughts became crucial elements in a broader argument that I will now briefly summarize. It begins from the realization that, during the 1980s and 1990s, art had come to seem markedly different from what it had been during the modern era: it seemed, above all, and before anything else, contemporary. In art contexts, during the past century or so, these two terms were used interchangeably, usually with “contemporary” as the default, secondary reference to “modern.” Recently, however, usage has nearly equalized and the buzz is with “contemporary.”5 I asked myself what kind of change was this: Illusory or actual, singular or multiple? Why did it happen? How deep does it go? Why is it at once so easy yet also strange to itself, so estranged from itself? How come it had, so soon, a history or, already, many histories? In What is Contemporary Art? and Contemporary Art: World Currents I offer an integrated set of arguments in response to these questions, each of them identifying a different kind of contemporaneity within the totality of the world’s art.6
Here are these arguments, in a nutshell. A worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art was prefigured in the major movements in late modern art of the 1950s and 1960s, was unmistakable by the 1980s, and continues to unfold through the present, thus shaping art’s imaginable futures. These changes occurred and continue to unfold in different and distinctive ways in each cultural region and in each art-producing locality around the world, the specific histories of which should be acknowledged, valued, and carefully tracked alongside recognition of their interaction with other local and regional tendencies and with dominant art-producing centers. This diversity has fed into a worldly (not global or world) contemporary art, within which, I suggest, three currents may be discerned. Remodernist, retro-sensationalist, and spectacularist tendencies fuse into one current, which continues to predominate in Euro-American and other modernizing art worlds and markets with widespread effect both inside and outside those constituencies. Against these, art created according to nationalist, identarian, and critical priorities has emerged, especially from previously colonized cultures. It came into prominence on international circuits such as biennials and traveling temporary exhibitions: this is the art of transnational transitionality. The third current cannot be named as a style, a period, or a tendency. It proliferates below the radar of generalization. It results from the great increase in the number of artists worldwide and the opportunities offered by new informational and communicative technologies to millions of users. These changes have led to the viral spread of small-scale, interactive, DIY art (and art-like output) that is concerned less with high art style or confrontational politics and more with tentative explorations of temporality, place, affiliation, and affect—the ever-more-uncertain conditions of living within contemporaneity on a fragile planet.
Continuing modernism, the postcolonial constellation, and relational aesthetics—the signature ideas of the curators mentioned above—are labels for complex and subtle curatorial insights into a cluster of values, practices, and effects that were definitive
