of the curationist moment, Obrist may be its natural harbinger. To quote artist Philippe Parreno, ‘I think [Hans Ulrich Obrist]’s one of the only great curators today – or the last one.’
Part 1
Value
We can’t know who organized the first art exhibition. It is even more difficult to propose a teleology of curating, as it has become popularly known: any arrangement or editing of things, usually cultural. Arranging and editing, like sex and appetite, are common yet variously expressed. They are part of who we are and always have been. Mid-twentieth-century generalists spoke of this frequently. The great British art writer Kenneth Clark called collecting ‘a biological function, not unrelated to our physical appetites’ (think natural selection).
Sociologists, anthropologists and ethnologists contemporaneous with Clark, who looked for structural patterns across cultures, argued something similar. In his 1962 study La Pensée sauvage, French ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss advanced a complex view of culture creation stressing the fine-art term bricolage, a concept not unlike what we currently understand as curating. (A present-day florist in Austin, Texas, is named Bricolage Curated Florals.) Patrick Wilcken, in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, elucidates Lévi-Strauss’s theory of bricolage: ‘Rummaging around their environment, [pre-literate societies] observed, experimented, categorised and theorised, using a kind of free-form science. They combined and recombined natural materials into cultural artefacts – myths, rituals, social systems – like artists improvising with the odds and ends lying around their studio.’ The Lévi-Straussian bricoleur is, in Wilcken’s estimation, ‘a tinkerer, an improviser working with what was to hand, cobbling together solutions to both practical and aesthetic problems. La pensée sauvage – free-flowing thought – was a kind of cognitive bricolage that strived for both intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction.’ The bricoleur is anyone attempting to plan, solve or create.
In his essay ‘The Bias of the World,’ art writer David Levi Strauss (no relation to Claude), formerly professor at one of the world’s pre-eminent curatorial-studies programs at Bard College in Hudson, New York, also acknowledges the curator as bricoleur. But he begins his examination of the curator by looking at the titular origin of the word, a revealing exercise illuminating the contemporary curator’s conflicted, paradoxical role. The use of curator can be traced back to the Roman Empire, in which curatores were bureaucrats made responsible for various departments pertaining to public works. (Curatores viarum, for instance, were responsible for overseeing roads.) The root of the word is the Latin cura, meaning care; curatore means, essentially, caretaker. The title of curator was used not just for bureaucrats, but for types of guardians or tutors under Roman law, who were either appointed to minors or to those with whom they were entering into contracts, in order to secure both parties from subsequent litigation due to the minor’s inexperience. Curators could also be named as caretakers-cum-advisors for those classified as prodigus, or prodigal (i.e., proven to be squandering their estate or inheritance), and as lunatics. One should also not neglect the Roman procurator, most often a member of the equestrian class, and appointed to supervise outlying provinces. Pontius Pilate, the man who sentenced Christ to die on the cross, is referred to in the Bible as a procurator, although in other literature he is given the title of prefect.
By the Middle Ages, the Christian Church had appropriated the term. Writer Erin Kissane notes that The Oxford English Dictionary dates the term via William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman: ‘curatoures’ are parish priests, ‘called to knowe [know] and to hele [heal]’ their ‘parisshiens [parishioners].’ David Levi Strauss rightly deduces that the early roles of curators thus constitute this Roman-medieval double duty, a ‘curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest,’ a split between ‘law’ and ‘faith’ – not unlike the contemporary curator within major art institutions, who, we assume, wants to make the public believe in art and artists, and also to function successfully within the political machinery of the museum or gallery, liaising with directors, donors and trustees, and sometimes securing works for loan or purchase.
There are pejorative suggestions to add to Levi Strauss’s interpretation. The Roman curator, and especially procurator, was an agent – some might argue a tool – of the state. A person of rank, the curator was nonetheless at the mercy of those above him. Pontius Pilate is the obvious example of the toadying Roman procurator, sent to a far-flung colony (in his case, Judea) to enforce the power of his superiors. In the Gospels, Pilate is reluctant to condemn Christ. Depending on which source you consult, Pilate’s decision to crucify Christ was due either to pressure from the Jewish Sanhedrin, who claimed Christ was controverting Jewish law, or, as the Sanhedrin themselves argued to strengthen their case, to Christ’s flouting of Roman tax laws. In this latter sense, the Roman procurator Pilate is little more than a glorified tax collector. One could gather that the procurator is superfluous, only a nominal ‘caretaker.’ In The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Roman historian Suetonius refers to procurators a few times, always with the implication that their titles are politic stepping stones. Of the Emperor Vespasian’s greed, Suetonius writes, ‘he advanced all the most rapacious amongst the procurators to higher offices, with the view of squeezing them after they had acquired great wealth. He was commonly said “to have used them as sponges,” because it was his practice, as we may say, to wet them when dry, and squeeze them when wet.’
The medieval curate is a position that endures in the Church in varied form to this day. The curate’s title is not as tokenist or honorific as the Roman curator’s or procurator’s could be; the curate has important duties within the hierarchy of the clergy – he is what we commonly know as the parish priest. Said figure is responsible for the ‘cure of souls,’ a concept rooted in Pope Gregory I’s sixth-century treatise Liber Regulae Pastoralis, commonly translated in English as Pastoral Care, which outlines the role of the clergy and defines ‘cure of souls’ as the exercising of the priest’s duty within his assigned district. Contemporary curators, whose roles and responsibilities can often be murky or splintered, may find it amusing that the curate or parish priest was also expected to do a host of tasks, from delivering sermons to tending to the sick. The etymology of the term, and the meaning of the Latin cura, can be brought to bear here. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, cura had three main senses, ‘care, concern, and responsibility’; ‘cure of souls’ is deceptive, then, because the curate or parish priest does not actually cure souls, per se, but care for them. The Oxford notes that it was only in late Middle English that cure develops its medical sense of healing. To care is not necessarily to cure, the former suggesting tending, the latter a more powerful ability to transform.
The stereotype of the curate or parish priest has long been one of a humble, hard-working, impecunious and at times obsequious man. The saying ‘curate’s egg’ comes from an 1895 cartoon by George du Maurier entitled ‘True Humility’ in the satirical British magazine Punch. A curate, young, thin and hunched, sits in a restaurant with a bishop, his superior, who tells him he has been served a bad egg. The curate responds, ‘Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!’ Du Maurier’s anxious-to-please curate may tickle disgruntled contemporary curators who feel pressure to answer to directors, trustees and artists, and to assure them that risky or contentious collections and exhibitions are indeed excellent. The curator is someone who insists on value, and who makes it, whether or not it actually exists.
And so it is that the two early understandings of curator that David Levi Strauss identifies – the Roman and the medieval-clerical – suggest dependence and responsiveness rather than direct action and agency. This makes a lot of sense when we begin to think about the curator within the context of the museum or collection, an identity that starts to take shape around the sixteenth century. The curator cares for objects, and the objects, not the curator, are the focus. The history of the curator can, in fact, be seen as one of successive subservience: to institutions, objects, artists, audiences, markets. The phenomenon of the autonomous curator, which
