The Curator as Iconoclast

The work of the curator consists of placing artworks in the exhibition space. This is what differentiates the curator from the artist, as the artist  has the privilege to exhibit objects which have not already been elevated to the status of artworks. In fact they gain this status precisely through their placing in the exhibition space. Duchamp exhibiting the urinal is not a curator but an artist, because as a result of his decision to present the urinal in the framework of an exhibition, this urinal has become a work of art. This opportunity is denied to the curator. He can of course exhibit a urinal, but only if it is Duchamp’s urinal—that is, a urinal which has already obtained its art status. The curator can easily exhibit an unsigned urinal, one without art status, but it will merely be regarded as an example of a certain period of European design, serve as “contextualisation” for exhibited artworks, or fulfil some other subordinate function. In no way can this urinal obtain art status—and after the end of the exhibition it will return not to the museum, but back where it came from. The curator may exhibit, but he doesn’t have the magical ability to transform non-art into art through the act of display. That power, according to current cultural conventions, belongs to the artist alone.

It hasn’t been always so. Originally, art became art through decisions of curators rather than artists. The first art museums came into existence at the turn of the 19th century, and became established in the course of the 19th century as a consequence of revolutions, wars, imperial conquest and pillage of non-European cultures. All kinds of “beautiful” functional objects, which had previously been employed for various religious rituals, dressing the rooms of power, or manifesting private wealth were collected and put on display as works of art—that is, as defunctionalized, autonomous objects of pure contemplation. The curators administering these museums ‘created’ art through iconoclastic acts directed against traditional icons of religion or power, by reducing these icons to mere artworks. Art was originally “just” art. This perception of it as such is situated within the tradition of the European Enlightenment, which conceived of all religious icons as “simple things”— and art solely as beautiful objects, as mere artworks. The question then is, why have curators lost the power to create art through the act of its exhibition, and why has this power passed over to artists?

The answer is obvious: In exhibiting a urinal, Duchamp does not devalue a sacred icon, as the museum curators had done; he rather upgrades a mass produced object to an artwork. In this way the exhibition’s role in the symbolic economy changes. Sacred objects were once devalued to produce art; today, in contrast, profane objects are valorised to become art. What was originally iconoclasm has turned into iconophilia. But this shift in the symbolic economy had already been put in motion by the curators and art critics of the 19th century.

Over the years modern artists began to assert their art’s total autonomy—and not just from its sacred prehistory, but from art history as well. Because every integration of an image into a story, every appropriation of it as illustration for a particular narrative, is iconoclastic—even if the story is that of a triumph of this image, its transfiguration, or its glorification. According to tradition of modern art, an image must speak for itself; must immediately convince the spectator, standing in silent contemplation, of its own value. So, modern artists began to hate and condemn curators, because the curator never could completely rid himself of his iconoclastic heritage. He can’t but place, contextualize, and narrativize works of art—which necessarily leads to their relativization. Curating’s ineradicable and inevitable iconoclasm has never made artists happy; museums were compared to graveyards, and curators to undertakers. The curator’s every mediation became to be suspect: the curator was seen as someone standing between the artwork and its viewer, insidiously manipulating the viewer’s perception with the intent of disempowering the public. That’s why, for the general public, the art market is more enjoyable than any museum. Artworks circulating on the market are singled out, decontextualized, uncurated—so that they get the apparently unadulterated chance to demonstrate their inherent value. Consequently the art market is an extreme example of what Marx termed commodity fetishism, meaning a belief in the inherent value of an object, in value being its intrinsic quality.

Even today we can hear from many curators that they are working towards a single objective, that of making individual artworks appear in the most favorable light. Or to put it differently, the best curating is nil-curating, non-curating. From this perspective, the solution seems to be to let the artwork alone, enabling the viewer to confront it directly. However, not even the renowned white cube is always good enough for this purpose. The viewer is often advised to completely abstract himself from the work’s spatial surroundings, and to immerse herself fully in self- and world-denying contemplation. Under these conditions alone—beyond any kind of curating, that is—can the encounter with an artwork be regarded as authentic and genuinely successful. That such contemplation cannot go ahead without the artwork’s being exhibited, however, remains an indisputable fact. Giorgio Agamben writes that .... “the image is a being, that in its essence is appearance, visibility, or semblance” (1). But this definition of artwork’s essence does not suffice to guarantee the visibility of a concrete artwork, however. A work of art can’t in fact present itself by virtue of its own definition and force the viewer into contemplation—artworks lack vitality, energy and health. They seem to be genuinely sick and helpless—a spectator has to be led to the artwork, as hospital workers might take a visitor to see a bedridden patient. It is no coincidence that the word “curator” is etymologically related to “cure”. Curating is curing. The process of curating cures the image’s powerlessness, its incapacity to present itself. The artwork needs external help, it needs an exhibition and a curator to become visible. The medicine which makes the sick image appear healthy—makes the image literally appear, and in the best light—is the exhibition. In this respect, since iconophilia is dependent upon the image appearing healthy and strong, the curatorial practice is, to a certain degree, the servant of iconophilia.

But at the same time, curatorial practice undermines iconophilia, for its medical artifice cannot remain entirely concealed from the viewer. In this respect, curating remains unintentionally iconoclastic even as it is programmatically iconophile. Indeed, curating acts as a supplement or a pharmacon (in Derrida’s usage) (2), in that it cures the image even as it makes it unwell. The work of a curator is an act of presentation – the act of presentation that presents itself. And that is the central difference between the art museum or, generally, art exhibitions on one side and globalized media and art market on the other side. The art exhibition makes the act of showing, exhibiting, curating images visible – the art market and also the media market conceal it creating the illusion of the autonomy of the image. Especially by the media images are presented as, so to say, super-images endowed by super-natural strength and dynamics – and precisely the same super-images are treated by the media as true images, as icons of our time. But the curating remains unintentionally iconoclastic even as it is programmatically iconophile.

Yet this statement opens the question: Which is the right kind of curatorial practice? Since curatorial practice can never totally conceal itself successfully, the main objective of curating must be to visualize itself, by making its practice explicitly visible. The will to visualization is in fact what constitutes and drives art. Since it takes place within the context of art, curatorial practice cannot elude the logic of visibility.

The visualization of curating demands a simultaneous mobilization of its iconoclastic potential. Of course contemporary iconoclasm can and should be aimed primarily not at religious icons but at art itself. By placing an artwork in a controlled environment, in the context of other carefully-chosen objects, and above all involving it in a specific story, in a narrative, the curator is making an iconoclastic gesture. If this gesture is made explicit enough, curating returns to its secular beginnings, withstanding the transformation of art into art-as-religion, and becomes an expression of art-atheism. The curating of an artwork signifies its return to history, the transformation of the autonomous artwork back into an illustration, an illustration whose value is not contained within itself but is extrinsic, attached to an historical narrative.

Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red features a group of artists searching for a place for art within an iconoclastic culture, namely that of 16th century Islamic Turkey. The group are illustrators commissioned by the powerful to ornament their books with exquisite miniatures; subsequently these books are placed in governmental or private collections. Not only are these artists increasingly persecuted by radical Islamic [iconoclastic] adversaries who want to ban all images; they are also in competition with the Occidental painters of the Renaissance, primarily Venetians, who openly affirm their own iconophilia. Yet the novel’s heroes can’t share this iconophilia, because they don’t believe in the autonomy of images. And so they try to find a way to take a consistently honest iconoclastic stance, without abandoning the terrain of art. A Turkish sultan, whose theory of art would actually serve as good advice for contemporary curatorial practice, shows them the way.

The sultan says the following, “an illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in the absent story, we will naturally begin to believing in the picture itself. This would be no different than the worship of the idols in the Kaaba that went on before Our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, had destroyed them.... If I believed, heaven forbid, the way these infidels do, that the Prophet Jesus was also the Lord God himself, ...only then might I accept the depiction of mankind in full detail and exhibit such images. You do understand that, eventually, we would then unthinkingly begin worshipping any picture that is hung on the wall, don’t you?” (3).

Strong iconoclastic tendencies and currents were naturally to be found in the Christian Occident as well - 20th century modern art in particular -  indeed most modern art was created through iconoclasm. As a matter of fact, the avant-garde staged a martyrdom of the image, which replaced the Christian image of martyrdom. The avant-garde put traditional painting through all sorts of tortures, which recall first and foremost the tortures to which the saints were subjected as depicted in paintings from the Middle Ages. Thus the image is—symbolically and/or literally—sawed, cut, fragmented, drilled, pierced, dragged through the dirt, and left to the mercy of ridicule. No coincidence, then, that the historical avant-garde consistently employed the language of iconoclasm: avant-garde artists speak of demolishing traditions, breaking with conventions, destroying their artistic heritage, and  annihilating old values. But this is definitely not a matter of sadistic lust for the abuse of innocent images; nor is there any guarantee that new images or new values might emerge as a consequence of all this demolition and annihilation. Quite the contrary: images of demolition of old icons become new icons for the new values. The iconoclastic gesture is instituted here as an artistic method, less for the annihilation of old icons than for the production of new images—or, if you want, new icons and new idols.

Already Christianity appropriated and neutralized the iconoclastic gesture, because in the Christian tradition the image of destruction and destitution—Christ on the cross,  is transformed quasi-automatically into an image of the triumph of that which has been destroyed. Our iconographic imagination, which has long been trained by the Christian tradition, does not hesitate to recognize victory in the image of defeat. In fact, here the defeat is a victory from the start. Modern art has benefited significantly from the adoption of iconoclasm as a mode of production.

Also in the context of Modern art iconoclasm has become subordinate to iconophilia: the image’s symbolic martyrdom only strengthened belief in it.

The subtler iconoclastic strategy proposed by sultan—turning the image back into an illustration—is actually much more effective. We have known at least since Magritte that when we look at an image of a pipe, we are not regarding a real pipe but one that has been painted. The pipe as such isn’t there, isn’t present; instead, it is being depicted as absent. In spite of this knowledge we are still inclined to believe that when we look at an artwork, we directly and instantaneously confront “art”. We see artworks as incarnating art. The famous distinction between art and non-art is generally understood as a distinction between objects inhabited and animated by art, and those from which art is absent. This is how works of art become art’s idols, that is, as analogous to religious images, which are also believed to be inhabited or animated by gods.

On the other hand, to practice art-atheism would mean understanding artworks not as incarnations, but as mere documents, illustrations, or signifiers of art. While they may refer to it, these are nevertheless not art. To a greater or lesser extent this strategy has been pursued by many artists since the ‘60s. Artistic projects, performances, and actions have regularly been documented, and by means of this documentation represented in exhibition spaces and museums. However, such documentation simply refers to art without itself being art. This type of documentation is often presented in the framework of an art-installation for the purpose of narrating a certain project or action. Traditionally executed paintings, art objects, photographs or videos can also be utilized in the framework of such installations. In this case, admittedly, artworks lose their usual status as art. Instead they become documents, illustrations of the story told by the installation. One could say that today’s art audience increasingly encounters art documentation, which provides information about the artwork itself, be it art project or art action, but in doing so confirms the absence of the artwork.

But even if illustrativity and narrativity have managed to find their way into the halls of art, by no means does this entry signify the automatic triumph of art-atheism. Even if the artist becomes faithless, he or she doesn’t lose the magical ability to transform the simplest thing into art, just as a Catholic priest’s loss of faith doesn’t render the rituals he performs ineffective. Meanwhile the installation itself has been blessed with art status: installation has become accepted as an art form, and increasingly assumes a leading role in contemporary art. Even though the individual images and objects lose their autonomous status, the entire installation gains it back. When Marcel Broodthaers presented his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles at the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf  in 1973, he placed the label “This is not a work of art” next to each of the presented objects in the installation. The entire installation, though, is legitimately considered to be an artwork.

Here the figure of the curator, especially, of the independent curator, increasingly central to contemporary art, comes into play. When it comes down to it, the independent curator does everything the contemporary artist does. The independent curator travels the world and organizes exhibitions which are comparable to artistic installations, because they are the results of  individual curatorial projects, decisions, and actions. Artworks presented in these exhibitions/installations take on the role of documentation of a curatorial project. Yet such curatorial projects are in no way iconophilic; they don’t aim to glorify art’s autonomous value.

The independent curator is a radically secularized artist. He is an artist because he does everything artists do. But the independent curator is an artist who has lost the artist’s aura, one who no longer has magical powers at his disposal, who cannot endow objects with art’s status. The curator doesn’t use objects—art objects included—for art’s sake, but rather abuses them, makes them profane. Yet it is precisely this which makes the figure of the independent curator so attractive and so essential to the art of today. The contemporary curator is heir apparent to the modern artist, although he or she doesn’t suffer under their predecessor’s magical abnormalities. The curator is an agent of art’s profanation, its secularization, its profane abuse. It can of course be stated that the independent curator, as the museum curator before him, cannot but depend on the art market—even do the groundwork for it. An artwork’s value increases when it is presented in a museum, or through its frequent appearance in the diverse temporary exhibitions organized by independent curators—and so, as before, the dominant iconophilia prevails. This can be held to be self-evident—or not.

The market value of an artwork doesn’t correspond exactly to its narrative or its historical value. The traditional “museum value” of an artwork is never the same as its value on the art market. A work of art can please, impress, excite the desire to possess it—all this without having a specific historical relevance and, therefore, remaining irrelevant to the museum’s narrative. And turning this around: many artworks that may seem incomprehensible, boring, and depressing to the general public, find their place in the art museum, because they are “historically new” or at the very least “relevant” to a particular period, and therefore can be put to the task of illustrating a certain kind of art history. The widespread opinion that an artwork in a museum is “dead” can be understood as meaning that it loses its status as an idol there; pagan idols were venerated for being “alive.” The museum’s iconoclastic gesture consists precisely of transforming ‘living’ idols into ‘dead’ illustrations for the art history. It can therefore be said that the traditional museum curator has always subjected images to the same double abuse as the independent curator. On the one hand, images in the museum are aesthetisized and transformed into art, on the other, they are downgraded to illustrations of art history and thereby dispossessed of their art status.

The space of a museum exhibition or of an artistic installation is often disliked in our days because it is a closed space – contrary to the open space of the contemporary media. But the closure that is effectuated by a museum should not be interpreted as an opposition to the ”openness”. By closure the museum creates its outside and opens itself to this outside. The closure is here not an opposition to the openness but its precondition. The media space, on the contrary, is not open because it has no outside  - media want to be not open but total, all-inclusive. The art practice that is conceived as a machine of infinite expansion and inclusion is also not an open artwork but an artistic counterpart of an imperial hybris of the contemporary media. The museum exhibition can be made into a place of openness, of disclosure, of unconcealment precisely because it situates inside its finite space, contextualize, curate images and objects that also circulate in the outside space – and in this way it opens itself to its outside. Images don’t emerge into the clearing of Being on their own accord, in order for their original visibility to be abused by the “exhibition business,” as Heidegger describes it in his The Origin of the Work of Art. It is far more that this very abuse makes them visible.