questions are these: How have the currents I identified in 2000 unfolded since? How have they changed relative to each other? What other kinds of art and art-like practices have emerged, and how do they impact on these currents or suggest the growth of others? I present my ideas in my teaching, in public talks, and in essays and books. Critical thought about these phenomena demonstrated by inventive curators (those already mentioned, as well as Dan Cameron, Catherine David, Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist and many others) builds on their insights into the current state of art in order, above all, to present them in the format of an extended, expanded exhibition of some type. Exhibiting might range from rehanging part of a permanent collection through various kinds of temporary exhibition to the staging of an event, the creation of a sequence of sites, or the orchestration of a discursive interaction, such as a public dialogue. The exhibition—in this expanded, extended sense—works, above all, to shape its spectator’s experience and take its visitor through a journey of understanding that unfolds as a guided yet open-weave pattern of affective insights, each triggered by looking, that accumulates until the viewer has understood the curator’s insight and, hopefully, arrived at insights previously unthought by both.
If we can say that a historian, critic, or theorist searches for a conceptualization (usually a mental image) that encapsulates the apparently disparate elements of his or her analysis into a definable “shape,” a discursive figure that holds up when explicated (thought through, written out, contested in dialogue, measured against the works) in detail, then the equivalent kind of curatorial insight might be one that gathers all of the elements under consideration into a previsualized exhibition or, more explicitly, into a projective imagining of the viewer’s journey through such an exhibition, or of the participant’s likely accumulative experience if it is an event. While many curators still envisage one (ideal?) viewer’s pathway, others prioritize a number of possible routes for that viewer, or the passaging of numbers of viewers, moving in parallel or in concert. And of course these projective imaginings are modified in the planning, in the mounting, in response to the exigencies of available elements, to the limits, but also the potentialities, of the time, space, and persons involved. The how of selecting the artworks and other materials and of mounting the exhibition as an arena of experience is as crucial as what it is for and why it is consequential.
To many curators, it is precisely the necessity of having to forge an exhibition in the crucible of practical contingencies that distinguishes what they do from the empathetic insight required of the critic, the speculative bent of the theorist, and the historian’s commitment to arm’s-length research into art that is becoming consequential. (Let us leave aside for the moment that critics, theorists, and historians have their different, but equally demanding, pragmatic crucibles; thus this distinction is poorly conceived.) In What Makes a Great Exhibition? Paula Marincola argues that:
Questions of Practice places its emphasis on and asserts the value of how concepts surrounding curating are filtered through lessons derived from repeated performance, from thinking and doing, or, perhaps more accurately, thinking based on doing. It is in practice that a priori theories and closely argued theories meet with the resistance of the empirical and the contingent. Various factors, many beyond the curator’s control—insufficient budgets, recalcitrant lenders, space constraints, competing institutional imperatives and priorities, ancillary resources or the lack of them, to name a few—defy the most carefully cherished ideas and ideals. Curatorial intelligence, invention, improvisation, and inspiration are developed and refined by effectively engaging and reconciling these constraints as the inevitable limitations that accompany most exhibition making.7
Every point made here is absolutely true. As an ensemble of statements, however, this implicitly identifies curatorial thought with the conditions in which it is exercised. It is as if to “think and do” within such constraints is unique to curators. Yet the metaphorical comparisons for which Marincola and others reach suggest that the same holds for many other kinds of cultural producer and interpreter. She cites Walter Hopps as saying, “The closest analogy to installing a museum exhibition is conducting a symphony orchestra.”8 For his best analogy to exhibition making, Robert Storr cites the film director when it comes to ultimate responsibility (he or she who controls “the final cut”), while the process, for him, is closest to that of “the literary editor who negotiates with publishers and writers on behalf of the ‘best’ version of the work that can be obtained.”9 While these are suggestive analogies they do not, in themselves, isolate the unique features of curatorial thought. They are, however, helpful in pointing to one of its essential (necessary, but not sufficient) qualities: whatever else curatorial thinking is, it is always deeply embedded in the practice of actually mounting the exhibition. On analogy to the thinking within a medium that artists must do in order to create a work, it is praxiological.
ART CRITICAL, CURATORIAL, AND
HISTORICAL THINKING COMPARED
In her review of Performa 11, “So Big, Performa Now Misses the Point,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith chastises RoseLee Goldberg for not pushing hard enough at programming events that, in contrast to those that blur the boundaries between theater and the visual arts in some vague or haphazard manner, fully exemplify and at the same time push at the boundaries of “visual art performance.” This is an art critic holding a curator to account, demanding explicitly that her exhibition be “a kind of argument about what is and what is not performance art or, more specifically, what constitutes a particular kind of performance art that is implied by the term ‘visual art performance.’”10 Is this a fair comment on a real shortfall within an enterprise that is essentially shared by both curator and critic or an example of an art critic missing a curatorial point?
Perhaps, if we take a historical perspective on the Performa project, we will find it to be an interesting disagreement about what counts as “visual art performance.” Since 2005 these biennials have consistently pursued and expanded Goldberg’s conviction about the centrality of performance art to the history of modernist avant-gardism and have sought to revivify the flagging energies of this tradition. She has done this through deliberate commissions, thus infusing performance art as a category of practice with the visual intelligence, production values, plentitude, and embracing affect so evident in the works of certain installation artists, such as Shirin Neshat and Isaac Julien, who have absorbed cinematic poesis. Each iteration of Performa has sought to advance this quest by testing it against one or more of the other arts adjacent to performance and by reviving a relevant historical connection: contemporary dance and Happenings in 2007, architecture and Futurism in 2009, and theater itself in 2011. As with any experimental event, especially those that are festive in character, there is overreach, confusion, and failure. However, the interesting outcome, still emergent, is a compelling hybrid form, a kind of performative installation, the shifting shapes of which we can glimpse in William Kentridge’s I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine, Mike Kelley and Mark Beasley’s A Fantastic World Superimposed on Reality, both from 2009, or Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss from 2011, the 12-hour-long performance of repeats of the last act, two minutes in duration, of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Is Smith sensing a project that, however successful at its best, is hitting up against the limits of its initial conception? Or must art-critical priorities always undervalue the instinct within performance to exceed its own terms, an achievement of theatricality only possible if performance contrives to court failure? Has this instinct, so fundamental to theatrical performance, but questioned in favor of the neutral or the natural in late modern experimental performance art, returned to color contemporary performative installations?
What do examples such as these suggest for our quest to distinguish the qualities that are distinctive about curatorial thought? Provisionally and schematically, we might posit that art-historical thinking typically seeks to identify the concerns, techniques, and meanings that shape works of art made during the time and in the place under consideration and that connect these works to the social character of their time and place (how they come from it, what they return to it). Taking an art-historical perspective also means constantly assessing the significance of each work or grouping
