the work from all of those categories and practices that limit its ability to explore that which we do not yet know or that which is not yet a subject in the world.19
These formulations have achieved some currency among curators—rightly so, because they pick up on major shifts in art practice, in art institutions, and in the constantly changing conditions of those who work within them and in relation to them.
Maria Lind at the panel discussion "Extending Infrastructures, Part 1: Platforms & Networks," March 12, 2011, The Now Museum conference, March 10-13, 2011, presented by the PhD Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International, and the New Museum, New York
What would it be like to stay with the questions, as Rogoff suggests, and to follow them as far as they can go? Perhaps it would enable us to be a little more exact as to how we might define the kind of curatorial insight needed now. This is what I will attempt to do in these essays. I believe that something like this is what João Ribas is seeking in his essay “What to Do With the Contemporary?”20 He is alert to the variety of ways of being in time that constitute contemporaneity as I have described it. He ends up, as many others do, with Agamben’s (and Žižek’s, but first Nietzsche’s) paradox that the most contemporary person is he who is most out of joint with his time.21 Archiving this contemporaneity from a position alert to its darknesses is Ribas’s recommendation. To me, Agamben’s paradox marks both the strength and the limit of the most advanced thinking on these matters.
Here is another recent example of such thinking:
Among the more puzzling preoccupations of dialogues around art during the past five years has been “the contemporary,” a seemingly self-evident description that, to date, has operated largely in reverse—that has been put forward, in other words, as a meaningful denomination and subject of inquiry in advance of any actual, deductive relationship to the surrounding world. The hope, it would seem, is that the term employed by itself and evocatively will help tease out some general understanding of the conditions for art making and its reception today. Yet, unlikely as this might seem, the impulse is easy enough to fathom: artists, art historians, curators, and critics alike wish to find historical trajectories in art today where none immediately announce themselves; a disorienting air of atemporality prevails instead. Indeed, the imperative for historical precedence or distinction becomes only more urgent in light of the speculative obsessions with the “new” in a radically expanded art system whose borders have become so porous as to erode the very ideation of art. If there is a substantive sense of “the contemporary” to be employed here, it is likely to be the “out-of-jointness” that philosopher Giorgio Agamben ascribed to the term: Something is contemporary when it occupies time disjunctively, seeming always at once “too soon” or “too late,” or, more accurately in terms of art now, seeming to contain the seeds of its own anachronism.22
These remarks open Tim Griffin’s review of the 2011 Venice Biennale, from which he goes on to contrast the “quietness” with which Central Pavilion curator Bice Curiger displays this condition to the urgency with which Francesco Bonami presented it in 2003: “The volatile symptoms of Bonami’s exhibition have by now settled into general conditions. Like so much art today, each individual work might reflect the cultural moment, but one asks whether reflection is enough, or whether there is some other job left to do.”23
Asking about “some other job” is, I believe, more challenging than retreating into Agamben’s paradox, which is limited by its being an evocation of the affective experience of an intellectual’s experience of contemporary conditions that, however poetic and accurate, has little to say about many other ways of world making and unmaking that are in play today. The philosopher is, however, absolutely right about the world condition that has thrown down this kind of challenge to (European and U.S.) intellectuals:
Irit Rogoff at the panel discussion “From Discursive Practices to the Pedagogical Turn,” April 29, 2010, Deschooling Society conference, April 29-30, 2010, presented by the Serpentine Gallery and the Hayward Gallery/Southbank Centre, London
The fall of the Soviet Communist Party and the unconcealed rule of the capitalist-democratic state on a planetary scale have cleared the field of the two main ideological obstacles hindering the resumption of a political philosophy worthy of our time… . Thought thus finds itself, for the first time, facing its own task without any illusion and without any possible alibi.24
Griffin’s question is one for artists, certainly. It is also a question for curators, otherwise curating is merely the provision of “reflections”—more acutely, see-through mirrors—of “the times.” This is not what is meant by curating contemporaneity.
Ribas notes the practice of a number of artists who are concerned with tracking the “modalities of the past in the present,” and that some recent exhibitions—Formalismus at the Hamburger Kunstverein (2004), Modernism as a Ruin at the Generali Foundation (2009), and Modernologies at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009)—amount to “an ongoing process of archiving the contemporary.”25 He takes these artists and philosophers, such as Agamben, as raising a challenge to curators: “It is a fundamental necessity of curating to situate itself within those contemporaneities that remain in darkness, untheorized and unlived.”26 This gets us closer to one of the key imperatives driving curatorial thought in contemporary conditions. Its boldness and grit expresses much about the kind of attitude needed now. But Griffin’s comment reminds us that, while the darkness is, necessarily, a component of the deep dwelling of such thought, it is not its only one, nor its end point.
This brief review of some of the key ideas behind current talk about curating indicates the vitality of the discourse, its close engagement with art practice, and its willingness to grapple with changes in contemporary life. It also suggests that the ground of what it is to be a curator in contemporary conditions is shifting, a fact that is glimpsed in the discourse, but remains dimly understood. We need to push a little harder at this darkness and see what light might flash within.
