absent.
Therefore, this raises a question about the second-person voice used in nearly all introductory texts, an issue that can only be resolved in the circumstances specific to each exhibition. In general, the challenge is to calibrate the information precisely to that needed for each stage of the experience: thus the general introductory text, the room text or those related to a cluster of works, the wall labels beside individual works, and, sometimes, a take-out reflection. Many of these tasks are now migrating to rentable audio devices, where they are supplemented by the voice of the curator (or often the director, but sometimes, regrettably, the collector). They are also appearing, via apps, on the mobile devices that increasing numbers of visitors bring to galleries, which deeply mediate viewers’ reactions to the work on display. Making exhibitions will more and more become an activity conducted at least in part online. Viewers will expect a variety of voices in the exhibition, as they do in most contexts outside of it: there will be fewer divisions––territories, hierarchies––within the consumption of culture. This will diversify the curator’s role and spread laterally his or her voice.
The same will be true for art critics and art historians. So far, I have been writing as if there were basic, core, ongoing tasks for all art world players and that these tasks, however intimately interdependent, are also to an important degree distinctive in each case. I have concentrated on curators, critics, and historians, but similar comments could be made about the roles of artists, gallerists, agents, collectors, auctioneers, museum directors, arts administrators, and so on. Our challenge is to identify what is ongoing and what is contemporary about each of these tasks—that is, what remains and what has changed during the shift from modern to contemporary art. Given the drift of exhibitionary venues toward more and more experimental, open, virtual, and temporary forms, and the constant, even accelerating switching of roles between players from every node, we know that these efforts to identify core concerns and distinct competences for each player are doomed to become outdated as soon as they are identified. Nonetheless, they are actualities, and we must see them straight if we are to find answers when we ask: Is this or that change, however inevitable it might seem, a change for the better?
THE GRAMMAR OF THE EXHIBITION
When Storr wants to specify “the basics” of exhibition making, he is led to this merging of terms:
Now to the basics. The primary means for “explaining” an artist’s work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling. Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and commentary, documentation and interpretation. Galleries are paragraphs, the walls and formal subdivisions of the floors are sentences, clusters of works are the clauses, and individual works, in varying degrees, operate as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and often as more than one of these functions according to their context.13
He does not pursue this metaphor any further. A recent issue of Manifesta Journal attempts to do so by devoting itself to “The Grammar of the Exhibition.”14 It features not only a variety of ideas about what the underlying structures of exhibition making might be but also some quite antithetical perspectives concerning whether anything approximating a grammar is possible. Efforts to define a grammar are attempts to discern whether there is a set of rules (syntax) that works on the raw material (art practice, or some aspect of the world, seen as a generative base) to shape the language of the exhibition (on analogy to written or spoken language). Of course, for curatorship every aspect of these operations is spatial (it presumes a setting—physical, mental, imagined, affective) and then temporal (it presumes reflexive movement through that setting). Thus each particular exhibition would be an array of speech acts; the exhibition is, in this analogy, a conversational setting. A more accurate metaphor would call up the semantics of the exhibition, that is, how it generates meaning by the relationships between its parts. This obviates the elaborations necessary to keep alive the metaphorical connection between languages and exhibitions, one that almost no one pursues anyway. From this perspective, the most useful essay in this issue is Mary Anne Staniszewski’s account of the curatorial thought underlying Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo’s exhibitions at Exit Art since the early 1980s.
Installation view, Reactions, Exit Art, New York, 2002. Curators: Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo
Putting it this way (as philosopher and critic Peter Osborne does in his opposition to the very idea, expressed in the same issue of Manifesta) moves us away from the tendency toward rule-bound formalism that is implicit in most appeals to systematic structures such as grammar, and instead toward a critical curatorial tendency that is closer to the spirit of Maria Lind’s original proposition.
Is there something we can call “the curatorial”? Something that manifests itself in the activities of a curator, whether employed or independent, trained as an artist or an art historian? It is clear that curating is much more than making exhibitions: it involves commissioning new work and working beyond the walls of an institution, as well as what are traditionally called programming and education. But can we speak of “the curatorial” beyond “curating in the expanded field”: as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education, and fundraising?15
The changed conditions within which curators practice is evoked here, but this does little more than name as curating a number of activities that have been to date considered subsidiary, feeder, educational, or publicity—roles that may or may not be carried out by the curator, depending on time, inclination, and the availability of others to take them on. Acknowledging the inspiration of site-specific practices, context-sensitive art, and institutional critique, Lind goes on to evoke the importance of consciously “curating” these activities in order to link “objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourse in physical space like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions.” This description could apply to populist programming, such as the Mixed Taste series at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver,16 but Lind has something more serious in mind:
Rather than being the product of the curator’s labor per se, curating is the result of a network of agents’ labor. The outcome should have the disturbing quality of smooth surfaces being stirred—a specific, multilayered means of answering back in a given context. Rather than representing, “the curatorial” involves presenting—it performs something in the here and now instead of merely mapping it from there and then.17
A distinction between curatorial and art-historical thinking is being suggested here. A closeness to artistic creativity and perhaps to that of engaged public education is sought instead. The critical aspect of her concept comes out more distinctly in a recent formulation:
I mean a practice that goes beyond curating, which I see as the technical modality of making art go public in various ways. “Curating” is “business as usual” in terms of putting together an exhibition, organizing a commission, programming a screening series, etcetera. “The curatorial” goes further, implying a methodology that takes art as its starting point, but then situates it in relation to specific contexts, times, and questions in order to challenge the status quo. And it does so from various positions, such as that of curator, an editor, an educator, a communications person, and so on. This means that the curatorial can be employed, or performed, by people in a number of different capacities in the ecosystem of art. For me, there is a qualitative difference between curating and the curatorial. The latter, like Chantal Mouffe’s notion of the political in relation to politics, carries a potential for change.18
Irit Rogoff offers a more deconstructive version, one that moves the idea more firmly beyond its efforts to first recognize, then “unbound,” the various art world roles:
In a sense “the curatorial” is thought, and critical thought at that, that does not rush to embody itself, does not rush to concrete itself, but allows us to stay with the questions until they point us
