The Museum as a University: Looking Out - Looking In

 

 

‘It is out of participation in the general system of symbolic forms we call culture that participation in the particular we call art, which is in fact but a sector of it, is possible…’

- (Geertz, 1993[1983], 109)

 

Artists, critics and academics alike have been quoted as saying that today the museum, or more precisely the site of contemporary art, is the new university.[1] Questions of grade inflation aside, this statement is not based upon the idea of the university’s slip from intellectual power, but rather relates to the fact that the contemporary art world has embraced the globalizing forces of the world, using them as tools to take account of social, cultural and political change. According to French plastician Pierre Huyghe, the media dominates the contemporary world, filling our lives with simulacrum and countless fictions interwoven into a false reality; art, thus, is the last bastion of non-fiction – the only sphere free from such external pressures to examine and question the world around us.[2] 

 

Writing from the perspective of sociology, this author seeks not to interrogate the museum as an abstract ‘institution’, but rather to locate the individuals responsible for its transformation.  In particular, this paper will examine a specific generation of curators of contemporary art, those who are now in their mid-30s to late-40s, and whose independent and international work brought about sweeping changes in an art world about to be consumed by its own elitism and narcissism. While these individuals now hold the senior posts at most institutions and centres of contemporary art across Europe, they are also among the most active in exploring new geographic territories of art, and the first to propose new means of interrogating the art world’s structures of knowledge production.  Active in the decades preceding the rampant explosion of curatorial training programs, these curators generally emerged from backgrounds in sociology, economy, politics and philosophy, as well as literature and theatre. 

 

This paper, thus, looks at the position of the curator in a different way, not as an artist (Heinich and Pollack, 1989), critic (Danto, 1987), or manager (Mc Allister, 1985), but rather as a social researcher. Indeed, the social sciences (specifically cultural sociology and anthropology) share a crucial interest with the contemporary art world – both fields of exploration seek to find new means to interrogate the world. While the curator responds to and picks up on sensitive currents in the art world, in order to understand these new artistic advances, he or she must maintain familiarity with current global issues and situate these advances in ongoing public debates.  Above all, this discussion is an examination of the role of the contemporary curatorial act in global knowledge production.

 

Not only do such curators engage in the self-conscious examination of the world around them, but they also seek to make that world, through artistic oeuvres and activities, more visible and open to interrogation by their publics. Indeed, all research is in fact action, in the sense that it necessitates and leads to a performative or reflexive outlook on the world. The exhibition is that performative or reflexive setting – it is the curator’s medium. The subtitle of this paper, ‘looking out and looking in’, refers to the numerous gazes the exhibition of contemporary art establishes on the world. The exhibition ‘looks out’ from its immediate site, investigating pressing sociological issues, such as globalization, post-colonialization and cultural distinction. However, the exhibition also ‘looks in’, maintaining a critical discourse about the art world’s own practices, as well as establishing an individually embodied, reflexive relationship with each and every one of its viewers

 

Through an ethnographic study of ‘star’ curators of contemporary art in London and Paris, I will explore how these individuals draw on and adapt traditionally sociological discourses in their own search for meaning in contemporary artistic representation.[3] This paper will begin by examining the complex and interwoven relationship between sociology and contemporary curatorial practices, distinguishing the particular ways in which the curator uses sociological discourse in new and unique ways through the exhibition. The contemporary curatorial ‘act’ is much more than the final exhibition; thus the process of curatorial ‘research’ is key to understanding the complex relationship that the curator-researcher must hold with the institution. Throughout, I will examine the ways in which the museum as university both “looks outwards”, examining larger social and global issues, as well as “looks inwards”, shedding a reflexive look on contemporary art today. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the visually-oriented research conducted by contemporary curators is a step up in knowledge production. While sociologists have dabbled in curating (Latour & Weibel, 2005) and conversed with artists (Bourdieu & Haacke, 1995), it is now time for sociology to engage the curator of contemporary art, looking for bridges of collaboration towards common goals.

 

Dialogues Between Sociology and Contemporary Art

 

The role of the social researcher is very attractive to many contemporary curators, perhaps in an effort to distance themselves from the narcissism of the art market. In the handbook Words of wisdom: A curator's vade mecum on contemporary art, several of the curator-respondents identify themselves as ‘visual anthropologists’ (Kuoni, 2001).  Here, Francesco Bonami identifies as a ‘cultural analyst’ (ibid., 34), and Steven Deitz curates ‘to learn something, to research’ (ibid., 51). In addition, Jean-Christophe Ammann recounts his inspiration by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, describing his role as ‘sitting at the window and watching, examining all the things that he sees for their relevance with respect to dialogue, emotion, and cognition’ (ibid., 21). What is the impact of this identification for traditional systems of social knowledge production?

 

The sociological study of museums and art world professionals has traditionally been a sociology of suspicion – viewing cultural professionals as maintaining a network of cultural exclusion and symbolic domination (Bourdieu & Darbel).  As Zolberg (1990, 163) points out, ‘sociologists are concerned with the sources of influence external to cultural forms – the forces that promote and impede change -, while humanists are not’.  However, in reality, citations from the social sciences have been introduced into contemporary art over the last decade as a way to articulate changes in the nature of transnational cultural flows, and the turn towards globalism (Boutoux, 2006, 204).  In drawing on sociological discourses to supplement the humanistic foundations of their work, contemporary curator/researchers prove Zolberg’s statement above to be a false dichotomy. According to Bird (1979), sociology actually introduces a ‘vital corrective’ to the art historical view that creativity takes place independently of social or economic forces, by looking at the socio-economic context of artistic creativity. 

 

To say that museums are the new universities requires briefly reflecting on the role of both historically. As the central institution of modernity, the University was the site where knowledge, culture and society connected (Delanty, 2001). Its role was to perform class, gender and social identity, through the production and dissemination of knowledge throughout society. However, in the postmodern environment, where democracy itself is approaching the constitution of knowledge, the University and its resident academics are under pressure to make increasingly ‘rare’ discoveries of knowledge, and link their work more directly to issues in policy, the media and business.

 

Historically, museums have also played a colonial role, displaying objects and cultures from geographic peripheries (Karp and Lavine, 1991). This is clearly a history not lost to contemporary curators, as the politics of display, un-codified in contemporary art, is of central concern to the framing of the artwork and artist. According to curator Jens Hoffmann, curators and sociologists are alike in that they “both like to observe”. But what is of interest to us here is what actors ‘translate’ into their own language and values as they shift knowledge production and performance from one material, symbolic site to the other (Latour, 1996).  How do curators frame social research and debate in the context of the exhibition in ways that stretch beyond the University’s capabilities?

 

As stated by Boutoux (2006), both anthropology and contemporary art have defined themselves as motors for the production of knowledge as well as bridges between individuals and the world in which they live; they both aim to produce knowledge for the public, but in very different ways. However, while sociology was an applied science in the 1970s, used by policymakers in the fields of law, medicine, and education, among others, contemporary art has shifted from being a highly-specialized, remote activity, towards art in partnership with its audience; art must mean something again (Appleyard, 1984).  After decades of engaging in positivistic, demographic research, sociology has recently experienced a ‘cultural turn’, returning to an earlier understanding of sociology as a cultural science engaged in the realities of multiple worlds composed of signs, values, and visual texts.[4]  This cultural turn is inspired by authors such as Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Foucault and Geertz – texts perhaps more often read by those in cultural studies than those in sociology. As Crow (1996) points out, the recent move towards postmodernism in art history has come not from art but from literary theory. Indeed, the ways in which curators of contemporary have drawn on these individuals, Habermas, Fanon, Deleuze, Glissant, indicates that the cultural turn was prefigured in contemporary art.

 

In order to extend the exhibition of contemporary art into time and space, increasing its circulation out of the exhibition space, it is necessary to document the exhibition, often in textual or catalogue form. Thus, in keeping with the avant-gardist program, the exhibition requires a literature review, citing the inspirations and precursors of the participating artists and curators, as well as discursive ways to describe its existence. Yet, as Bartomeu Mari points out, ‘things without names are not easily communicated and it is difficult to demonstrate that they exist’ (in Balkema & Slager (eds.), 2002, 177-183). To resolve this problem, individuals approach new realities and facts they cannot yet identify by constructing neologisms. In particular, visual art aims to ‘borrow’ theoretical issues and concepts from cultural theory and the social sciences. As curator Andrew Renton states, these studies ‘allowed me to develop all of these discourses that can cope with contemporary art’. 

 

As Hans-Ulrich Obrist pointed out in an interview with Jens Hoffmann, ‘every generation or moment in time needs a writer. . .who can function as a toolbox not only to understand their own time. . .but to actually allow us to do things or realize new possibilities using their writings’.[5] For example, in response to the homogenizing forces of globalization which obviously affect the art world very strongly, Obrist cites Edouard Glissant and his concept of ‘mondiality’, a global dialogue that is non-homogenizing and thus urgent to develop this concept in practice. Obrist worked to do so through such exhibitions as The Broken Mirror (with Kasper Koenig, Vienna (1993), in which he and Koenig attempted to break the traditional figurative-abstract hierarchy in painting through decentralized techniques of display, placing works by unknown and famous artists together in an unordered fashion. The very fact that Obrist and Koenig were criticized for nevertheless reinforcing a superior tendency towards abstraction and transforming the carefully planned ‘non-centre’ into a centre of its own, demonstrates that ‘mondiality’ remains an even more urgent approach to addressing such issues in the art world.[6]

 

Installation Shot from The Broken Mirror

For the curator as social researcher, social and cultural theory is a means to understand and frame what you have seen and sensed in artistic practice. As Hoffmann was quick to point out, ‘we don’t do philosophy!’. The curator draws on and explores existing discourses in writing exhibition texts, but modifies and employs them in much more subtle, visual ways.

 

 

 

Unexpeted Curatorship

 

In order to illustrate the contemporary curator’s unique take on knowledge production, it is useful to compare contemporary exhibitions with so-called ‘unexpected curatorship’, individuals dabbling in exhibition-making from their established vantage points in external fields.  After the collapse of socialism in 1990, art was allowed to be less illustrative of a particular ideology, and thus more speculative, opening up the field to be inhabited by knowledge from scientists, social scientists, economists and other varieties of information systems in order to reanalyse or recontextualise them (Hiller and Martin, 2001). Collaborations from such fields are welcomed; as one curator pointed out, every discipline has a unique way to create knowledge, and in working together, it amplifies the paths of knowledge creation that we can explore.

 

When the Department of Graphic Arts at the Louvre recently invited individuals such as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Peter Greenway and others to curate exhibitions, they asked them to choose oeuvres by their ‘argumentative value’ (preface, Derrida, 1990). In keeping with this directive, Kristeva’s exhibition at the Louvre, Visions Capitals (1998), tried to demonstrate how the image was the only lasting link between humans and the sacred. Similarly, Greenway, in Les Bruits des Nuages (1992), sought to illustrate, through artworks, the trajectory of a stone thrown into the air, as well as its descent. 

 

This tendency towards using the exhibition as an illustration of a theme or idea, is equally visible in Lyotard’s exhibition at the Centres Pompidou, Les Immatériaux (1985), which aimed to ‘make manifest – visually and audibly – the opposition between the project of modernity and the emerging interrogations of postmodernity’, notably in how this changed relationships between the public and their representations (Lyotard, 1985). In filling the exhibition space with a number of informational experiments and false boundaries, he created an ‘overexhibition’ rather than an exhibition. However, the risk is clearly that the academic as curator may draw on visual artefacts as tools to illustrate his or her point. 

 

With his two exhibitions Iconoclash (2002) and Making Things Public (2005) at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Bruno Latour argued that the goal of an exhibition is to ‘make an argument visible’.  This composing of an argument in visual form does not function to present an alternative approach to that argument or issue, but rather to ‘step it up’, to propose new debates and means of embodied engagement with the issue. In particular, as regards Iconoclash, Latour proposed an exhibition about iconoclasm, not an iconoclastic exhibition. What is the difference? The former is an academic text in visual form – Latour invited a team of co-curators to exhibit and discuss artworks which questioned the ongoing need for representation in religion, science, and art. The latter is an performative understanding of what it means to be iconoclastic – The Broken Mirror, as described above, attempted not only to question, but to physically break with modernistic representations in art through its unique grouping and display of oeuvres.

Installation Shot from Iconoclash

As Hennion (2005) notes, ‘works make the gaze that beholds them and the gaze makes the works’. The risk of drawing from theory before drawing from artistic practice results in the accusation of an ‘aesthetically uninteresting’ show. In the contemporary curatorial act, the argument is not shaped or developed through the works, but rather the argument itself emerges from them. . This is more than the ‘upgrading’ of an argument. Rather, as Susan Hiller (Hiller and Martin, 2001, 110) hypothesizes, ‘when you’re making an exhibition, although you research and present, surely it’s like an artwork in that it’s ultimate meaning or effect is not determined by the maker’. To allow the artworks and artists to guide the argument means that the exhibition theme or argument themselves can evolve in new and unexpected ways. This curatorial dynamic of allowing the oeuvres to lead requires a certain approach to social research, and results in a unique rapport between the curator/researcher and artist.

 

 

 

The Contemporary Curatorial Act – Research and Praxis[7]

 

Research

 

In the international world of contemporary art, composed of respected institutions, scattered biennales, and prestigious art fairs, the international cultural professional is responsible for the discovery and construction of new peripheries and issues in contemporary art (Zolberg, 2001).  As a sociologist, it is fascinating that contemporary curators are interested in shifts from the industrial to a cultural economy, the meaning of globalism and tensions between the centre/periphery, all current issues in social scientific research (Thea, 2001). Furthermore, the research process in contemporary art has much in common with fieldwork in sociology, politics or anthropology.

 

The research starts long before the exhibition. The curator must be familiar with the artist’s work, what has been done other places, and in particular, what seems ‘urgent’ to do today; an exhibition is always a continuation and a dialogue with other movements in and out of the global and artistic field. Curators therefore visit multiple research ‘sites’, such as art fairs, biennales, gallery shows, museum exhibitions and artist studios. In contrast to social research, curatorial research is a research into images, and data analysis and the subsequent knowledge production requires the collaboration of the oeuvres and the artist.

 

There are crucial moments with any research, and for the curator/researcher these often tend to be the studio visit. According to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, it is at this point, in concertation and conversation with the artist, that the curator’s research begins to be an analysis – a reflection rather than a judgement. In this way, collected information is transformed into knowledge.  Though the curator is an expert figure, it is the artworks themselves which interpret the social conditions affecting certain groups and the human experience, and the artists themselves who are responsible for assimilating changes in social/economic/political conditions into their work (Crane, 1987). Curatorial research is, thus, a longitudinal study, or ‘ongoing conversation’, with the artist – who is both a key informant as well as a knowledgeable critic and researcher in their own right. Curator Gilane Tawadros contrasts this program of research to the usual ‘cultural tourism’ in which curators only ‘import’ the current fad (Hiller and Martin, 2001). Rather, the curator/researcher invests in powerful, collaborative relationships with artists from various local and geographical peripheries.

 

There is no standard to curatorial research; while some curators spend as many as six or seven years in observation before planning an exhibition, others include the research in the exhibition itself. For instance, Obrist notes that he spent seven years conducting research before organizing his first exhibition – The Kitchen Show (Schwalbenstrasse, St. Gallen, 1991). A counterexample is offered by Jens Hoffmann’s A Show That Will Show That a Show Is Not Only a Show (The Project Gallery, Los Angeles, 2002). Reacting to the lack of time available for curatorial research, Hoffmann began his research for the exhibition the day of its opening. Keeping the public abreast of his activities by means of a daily curatorial journal, and adding new works to the exhibition daily, this exhibition looked inward at the curatorial act, emphasizing the importance of process over finished product.

Installation Shot from: A Show That Will Show That a Show Is Not Only a Show

A final example of the curatorial act an active research activity is offered by Cities on the Move (1990s, various sites), co-curated by Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Although conducting research for months and years before the first site of the exhibition, they also integrated the research process into the exhibition format – itself conceived as a travelling show on the basis of their research experience. As Obrist pointed out, as he and Hanru travelled together throughout Southeast Asia, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and many other locations, ‘what became clear was that the city was a turning point of some sort’. Thus, in order to present recent urban artistic activities, ‘the exhibition needed to become a city. . .a . metabolistic, evolotive system’.  As this exhibition ‘looked out’ on the world of architecture and urbanism, in its every instance, it emerged not from curatorial vision, but rather from situated artistic practice, became simultaneously local and global.

Installation Shot from Cities on the Move 1

Above all, the curator is able to act and react within several words at the time, and his capacity for inventiveness and originality is what distinguishes him from other cultural professionals (Jouvenet, 2001). The curator must keep up external contacts, often spending as much time nurturing relationships as organizing exhibitions. While most radical intellectuals are now in the academy, unattached intellectuals are able to provide some of the most groundbreaking ideas, that often spread to policy and wider society, because they are not limited by institutional pressure or affiliation (Coser, 1965). Yet, many independent curators lament the possibility to ‘sustain the theory of the exhibition or its public presence in the city.  On the other hand, the conflict pointed out by many institutionally-linked curators, is that they are too busy with related tasks to keep up with studio visits, and ‘no longer have the same freedom to innovate’.  

 

As a result, the biennale circuit and independent, travelling exhibitions are vital ways in which curators can maintain the flow of energy and ideas in and out of the gallery.  From the curatorial point of view, organizing or visiting a biennale has a great deal to do with its context, specifically its relationship to current social and political events. This is perhaps why, despite their criticism of the proliferation of biennales as hyperbolistic and meaningless, that many curator/researchers will undertake the organization of a biennale at least once every two to three years.

 

In my interviews, when I ask curators to sketch an outline of the art world from their vantage point, the majority locate their own position as halfway between the museum and the independent biennale circuit. Ultimately, the curator must retain this existence as simultaneously an art world insider and outsider, a typically sociological quandary.

 

Praxis

 

This unique approach to research translates into an equally singular approach to exhibition organization. As pointed out by V. Alexander (2001), the evolution of the exhibition has necessitated a gradual shift from a ‘scholarly approach’ to a ‘managerial approach’, focusing on marketing the artwork through creating exhibition design, producing mediating texts, and even proposing a theme and inviting participating artists.  The ultimate mediator, the curator of contemporary art is responsible for navigating local bureaucracies, assumptions, and facilities to assist the artist in realizing their work and presenting it to public comprehension. Indeed, many curators report that their job is to be more of a ‘programmer' then a conservator; their function is to make things happen for the artist, and help the artist to best realize their vision.

 

Yet, the curator does more than accompany the artist. While contemporary curatorial studies tend to emphasize the management role of the curator – hence the journal Museum Management and Curatorship, there is an emphasis on the curator, like a critic, to produce something if they want to live in their own times.  In sum, though the role of the curator is to listen to the artist, nevertheless there is an ‘individualization’ of sorts which makes these figure emerge from the artistic field (Heinich and Pollack, 1989).

 

This ‘product’ takes shape in two ways. First, the curator helps the artist to best work with the identity of the exhibition site, whether it is an institutional setting or an urban milieu.  The first step in producing an exhibition in collaboration with an artist requires the artist coming to see the space, or in some cases, the artist and curator visiting the exhibition space together.  Indeed, it is the visual experience of being in the space that most often excites the artist to do something, but it is the curator who must have the expert, local knowledge to best work in the space.  As Moulin (1995) states the expert in contemporary art is an expert in context, and thus a main part of his or her role is to create the lien between an artistic project and its environment, the territory of the exhibition, and the territory of the world.

 

The curator is the ‘enabling catalyst’ for contemporary art in a second way as well (Oguibe, 2002). The curator has his or ‘finger on the pulse’ of the collective concerns of the moment as well as the individual history of artist (Thea, 2001).  Thus, the curator’s goal is to pose a question of sorts, a trigger which inspires the artist down a route of exploration.  In the words of curator Mary Anne Jacobs, as a curator, ‘you propose questions that concern you and that you care about. . .unanswerable questions that are worth investigating to find new ways of thinking about them. This is different than thinking about something in a new way – or illustrating it again. This implies that the visual is necessary to understand the answer – and even to find it’ (Kuoni, 2001, 86).  The curator is thus less interested in the traditional valorization of the art object as object (that is the role of the market and the gallery), and more interested in the artist and the artwork as singular commentary, advancement, and often transformation of the theme.

 

For example, with his exhibition of kinetic art Force Fields (Hayward Gallery, London, 2000), Guy Brett speaks about his influence by Marxist ideas and resulting desire to ‘explore’ how forms of visual art could be related to forms of human production (Hiller and Martin, 2001). It is only in bringing an assortment of kinetic works into the space that visitors are able to make the physically, embodied connection begun by seeing these works, and continued by looking out through the exhibition, exploring the ways in which science profoundly affects our relationship to the physical world.

 

Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Obrist notes that the origin of Utopia Station began with the suggestion of the word utopia as a trigger, including issues of how to reinvent utopia, as well as how to create personal utopia. The tension is to pose a question that can both act as an active theme, but is problematic and deep enough to be enough to be engaging. Building on diverse feedback from a number of artists, Utopia Station at the 50^th Venice Biennial became a platform for events, a way in which to engage with issues and debates in utopia, but grounded through the specific interventions of various artists.

Installation Shot from Utopia Station

The relationship that the exhibition supports between curator and artist is one of ‘action research’ (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). Both parties are participatory engagement towards exploring curatorial practice and exhibition-making, as well as combating financial and institutional barriers in the international art world. Specifically for the curator, it is this ability to act and react that is hidden behind what they cite as ‘experience’ (Jouvenet, 2001, 334). Furthermore, because of the crucial tension between looking out and looking in, this constant, ongoing research is a necessary activity to preserve not only the curator, but also the exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

Research in the Museum

 

While ‘unexpected’ curators such as Latour & Weibel (2002) state that the exhibition is an idea site for experimentations in representation because of its artificiality, for the curator/researcher, it is the inverse: the exhibition can offer this opportunity precisely because it is a real place.  Although Danto (1997) warns that the museum is becoming less important in contemporary art because it prevents the expression of how art and life are closely intertwined by isolating art from life, the response from the curator/researcher is often to envision the museum in new ways. As Clifford (1999, 345) argues, the museum is no longer a 1-way vehicle for knowledge transmission; rather museums should now be understood as "contact zones" facilitating various cross-cultural interactions and communications brought into dialogue within their spaces. 

 

This contact zone can take the shape of ‘looking out’ at the world, or ‘looking in’ at institutional practices.  London in Six Easy Steps (ICA, London, 2005), curated by Jens Hoffmann and Rob Bowman, invited six different curators or curatorial teams holding various relationships to the art world to curate a week-long exhibition. As each mini-exhibition brought a new public and focus to the ICA, the building served as a site of visually and politically engaged dialogue over the six weeks.

Installation Shot of Lecture Theatre from London in 6 Easy Steps

On the other hand, Andrew Renton and Kitty Scott’s Bankside Browser (Tate Modern, London, 1999) asked visitors to think about the processes of the institution itself. The curators asked artists to submit works storable within the standard archival box, and archived them through the institution’s computerized database. In individually requesting to view particular works, visitors were asked to ‘look in’ through the exhibition, and were introduced in a participatory way to some of the protocols of working with a museum as well as the large spectrum of strategies in characterizing art today.

 

 Thus, the curator no longer ‘possesses’ knowledge, but rather must negotiate the oeuvres and artists with which he or she works as complex mediators of various histories.  For Clifford, the museum is now a space of conversation rather than exhibition. As a result, the curator has the Herculean task of acting as what Obrist terms a ‘pedestrian bridge’, after Félix Fénéon, into and out of the museum. Ideas, publics, concepts, and materials travel across these bridges, which ensure the museum’s existence as a dynamically engaged, rather than static entity.

 

This task is not simple, as the current crisis in the reception of contemporary art is linked to a widening distance between artists and other cultural professionals, including curators, critics, historians, and funding bodies. The bulk of this separation is due to the necessarily intermediate role of the market, fundraising, and the private collector, all vital entities for the survival of contemporary art, and yet interfere with the public reception and encounter with a piece of work. As one Parisisan semi-independent curator stated, ‘a good exhibition is the result of a good conversation between a curator and an artist’. Thus, a main goal for the contemporary curatorial act is to renew the technology of the conversation – to open it up to new parties in new settings.  Thus, inaugurating an exhibition series of speakers or holding an exhibition symposium are just two ways in which the interview is being expanded in order to include the public in its knowledge production.  The curator/artist interview is a critical site for post-modern knowledge production in the contemporary art milieu. In making the discussion setting the foundation for the emergence of ideas, the interview uses globalism’s own tools to look into the exhibition, interrogating the artist’s intentions, as well as look out through the exhibition into its possible meanings in the world.

 

Once in the space, it is necessary to kick-start the conversation. In order to prompt publics to ‘look out’ through the exhibition to the global world and current events, as well as to ‘look in’ and reflect upon the role of contemporary art and individual existence, it is important to for the curator to intentionally disrupt the passive viewing experience. As several art professionals noted, including Antoine de Galbert and Caroline Bourgeois, the goal of the exhibition is to cause people to doubt, and rethink their surroundings, not only immediate, but beyond the gallery space. Caroline Bourgeois, head of exhibitions at Le Plateau in Paris, notes that the role of the curator is to question history and provide a framework of meaning for the oeuvres, while also posing questions and providing a venue for doubt.  In particular, Bourgeois notes that this is where the thematic exhibition comes in; its role is to provide a framework for social and self-interrogation over a specific theme.

 

The visual research exemplified through the contemporary exhibition afford a crucial additional opportunity than that in a text – the opportunity for critical self-reflection.  As Battock (1977) points out, art creates situations that cause man to observe, analyze and criticize his behaviour. In so far as the curator is responsible for the installation of the exhibition, he or she plays a crucial role in establishing these conditions of reflexivity. The goal for the curator/researcher is to find new, “non-classic” ways of exhibition-making (in other words, non-chronological means of display). In particular, as there is no handbook for the physical installation of contemporary works, the curator’s eye and impressions is very important to the construction of meaning in the exhibition setting. During the installation, many curators take on the role of the public, looking at the exhibition from their point of view, rounding corners and thinking about what any member of the public might experience at that point in time.

 

For instance, in preparation for the recent Jonathan Monk retrospective at the ICA, Continuous Project Altered Daily (London, 2005) curators Jens Hoffmann and Claire Fitzsimmons decided to mount Monk’s pink neon piece, A Fool and Her Money are Soon Parted (2004), in a strategic location. Displayed over the duration of the Frieze Art Fair, visitors to the exhibition were confronted with this piece, mounted on the far entryway wall above eye level, upon their entrance to the exhibition. Thus forced to raise their gaze, experiencing this ironic maxim in an almost religious way, visitors were made to feel Monk’s conceptual debate about what constitutes art, as well as inwardly reflect upon their own status as a visitor, or perhaps, collector of contemporary art.

Untitled (A Fool And Her Money Are Soon Parted), by Jonathan Monk (2004)

Of course, this necessitates a new approach to art; by seeing cultural productions as sites of debate about ideology, identity, and meaning, art no longer espouses the pure, Kantian gaze (Mahon, 2000). Despite Danto’s (1997) claim that contemporary art is ‘post-historical’, the contemporary act of curatorial research is anything but, seeking to root exhibitions in both social and art history, mixing generations of artists by tracing their influences, and venturing into the unexplored potential of archives.[8] In a special 2002 edition of BeauxArts, curator Nicolas Bourriaud stated, ‘art today has become a kind of general refuge for all manner of projects which are not immediately efficient or productive for industry or the consumer society’ (p.14). Indeed, these examples have demonstrated that for the curator/researcher, art today is a refuge for projects which seek to interrogate industry and consumer society.  The challenge is, then, to rethink the privileged place of the exhibition, as a predominately sensorial medium, over other aspects of visual culture (Charles Esche in Hiller and Martin, 2001).

 

 

 

 

 

Technologies of Feeling

 

The social research which takes place through the contemporary curatorial act involves a diverse series of talks, interviews, visits and texts that accompany the exhibition, whether in an institution or elsewhere, providing a variety of ways for the audience to engage with its contents. However, ultimately it is the aesthetic, embodied experience of visiting the exhibition that provides the real opportunity for conversation, engagement, research and reflection. Modern forms of knowledge are increasing visual (Rose, 2001).  The contemporary curatorial act is therefore well-poised for knowledge production as the aesthetic experience is something not only to be seen, but to be lived through (de Bolla, 2001). And while many theorists, including Wittgenstein believe that these experiences are too personal to be shared, de Bolla (2001) disagrees, noting, ‘the great value of art lies in its power to prompt us to share experiences, worlds, beliefs, and differences. . .And our affective experiences of art provide a terrain upon which these singular worlds, beliefs, and differences may be mapped’.

 

In the case of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor (2002) strove to break the usual containment of time and space inside the exhibition walls using methods from social, political, and cultural networks - transforming the exhibition project into a constant displacement of space, discipline, perspective, and interest. The show was composed of various platforms which question the realization of democracy, drawing on discourses of decolonization and liberation struggles, terrorism and the far reaching effects of capitalism and the state form. In this way, the exhibition was a ‘container for voices’ – but voices that could only be heard through one’s physical presence.

 

Interventions such as Documenta 11 work to challenge the passive notions of the white cube. In his reflections on the exclusivity of the white cube, O’Doherty (1986[1976], 82) explains that, ‘most of the people who look at art now are not looking at art; they are looking at the idea of ‘art’ they carry in their minds’. Thus, the role of the contemporary curator as social researcher is to get the audience to exit their pre-conceptions, re-focusing precisely on the physical reality of the exhibition through destabilizing the accustomed ways of viewing. In deconstructing (or rather physically re-constructing) the exhibition space, such as done with the John Bock exhibition Kulturkammer (ICA, London, 2004), curated by Jens Hoffmann, the curator/researcher physically incorporates the artist’s gaze into the exhibition environment, ‘looking in’ at the process of artistic research, not merely curatorial.

Installation Shot from John Bock: Klutterkammer

As Parisian curator Nicolas Trembley notes, it is this immersive, embodied artistic experience which is important; he is interested in the processes of socialization implicated through contemporary art.  Another Paris-based curator states that art and the exhibition can create new human rapports, but only in its practice, not its theory. Responding to these statements from sociology, Cossi (2004) concludes that the user or visitor of contemporary art is the container for the exhibition. Indeed, for a majority of visitors to contemporary art exhibitions, a main technique for making-meaning in contemporary art is by watching how they and others engage with each other and the oeuvre in the space.

 

Even anthropologist and theorist Raymond Williams (1977, 27) acknowledges that there are aesthetic considerations that cannot be reduced to social or cultural practice. As Raymond Williams explains, the original Greeks word aisthesis meant all of those things that could be sensed, rather than thought. However, German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714-62) later invented the term "aesthetics" to describe the process of comprehending beauty through the senses. Somehow, aesthetics was left isolated in this artistic discourse, away from its more embodied connotations. Thus, in seeking to solicit embodied reactions, the curator/researcher is again approaching the original Greek conception of the irreducibility of the sensed. In her exhibition The Real Me (part of London in Six Easy Steps, ICA, London, 2005), curator Gilane Tawadros chose to display several of artist Sonia Boyce’s hair pieces as venerated objects on plinths in the middle of the exhibition space. For Tawadros, the embodied reactions of dislike and disgust received from the visitor are an integral indication of the visitor’s own process of reflection on his or her constructions of race and racial stereotyping.

Glass Case by Sonia Boyce (1994)

Ultimately, creating knowledge in the exhibition format means an expanded role for knowledge production. Artistic knowledge is unique from any other kind of knowledge because it is “sensorialy embodied” {Carney, 1998, 378}.  It must necessarily, then, be entwined in the arena of practical knowledge. Sociology can thus take issue with the over-theorization of art. An exhibition is an exhibition because it is not a book. And while a text is a vital way to make meaning of an exhibition, it is not the only, if even the penultimate, way to make this meaning. The role of the exhibition of contemporary art is to get beyond the theory, and feel the issue; thus conversations with artists and curators cannot ask them to account for their practice by asking ‘why’ they chose a particular artist or work, but rather understand research as a collaborative, sensorial process, asking ‘how’ they came to make certain decisions (Acord, 2006). Robert Fleck points out that as a visual medium, an exhibition has nothing to do with language or discourse and everything to do with thought. ..thought is visual, direct, and unmediated by language (in Kuoni, 2001, 63). As a result, new forms of documentation are required in archiving exhibitions. Joining the traditional catalogue is a wealth of new media including CDroms, DVDs, websites, and even the distribution of limited edition artworks.

 

Thus, it is true that the aesthetic encounter with the artwork is an integral facet to knowledge production, not a simple misrecognition of the political economic factors of the art world as Bourdieu would have it. The research/curator knows, that while bringing artists and artworks into the museum or exhibition setting can dramatically alter their meaning and message, ultimately, through these ‘acts of originality. . .men are nevertheless changed in unpredictable ways’ (Rosenberg, 1972, 211).

 

 

 

 

 

Reflections on Social Research – The Path Ahead

 

“Only the curators do not exist, because their physical presence is not really necessary – all we need is the spirit with which they have managed to fashion their own armour, which, if it is to be effective, is also destined to become that of many others”.[9]

 

 

 

If contemporary art and the contemporary curatorial act aim to renounce and overcome its stereotypes of public elitism and market dependence, it is due to the spirit and engagement of the curator/researcher, as well as of the artist and other cultural professionals. And yet, every form of social research takes hostages, and thus must be engaged in with the most delicate reflexivity. As Gilane Tawadros points out, ‘we talk now about artistic processes as a form of research. . .but whether the process of making art has the same status as being an area of discovering knowledge and creating knowledge. . .I’m not sure and even within that there are different cultural hierarchies and processes of validation’ (Hiller and Martin, 2001). As discussed in this essay, both sociology and contemporary art are concerned not only with the analysis of culture, but as Boutoux (2006, 201) points out, they must also examine, epistemologically, the difficulties in discerning the implications of the analysis of culture.

 

In particular, the curator as social researcher must be critical of the sites where he or she engages in research. Despite the increasing activity in the international biennale and Manifesta circuit, there is a significant centre/periphery divide in the international art world, with multiple social, cultural, and symbolic boundaries separating local art scenes from London, New York, and other ‘hubs’ of contemporary artistic activity (Quemin, 2002). American artists are simply still more sought after by collectors and museums than others, and while many note that Asia is the rising artistic centre, individual Asian artists seldom rest in the public eye for more than a biennale or two. Furthermore, Venice simply remains the most frequented biennale, its authority even enforced by new biennales in geographically political peripheries.

 

Manifesta was conceived to address these issues, based on an invitation to a guest curator into a host city with a dominant host city identity which would be greater to that of the guest (Boubnova in Tidman, 2002). However, Manifesta served to develop a sustainable international network of curators, but not of artists (Boutoux, 2006).  We can see this effect as what Wilk (1995) terms ‘structures of common difference’; globalization in this sense creates a hegemony of form that allows for and indeed demand local variation.  The result is that these international activities celebrate particular kinds of diversity while suppressing others. As Clémentine Deliss points out, the remedy perhaps requires veering away from the international exhibition format and ‘transvesting’ power from the traditional knowledge-base rooted in the institution to one elsewhere in Africa or other geographical peripheries. (in Gillick & Lind, 2005, 27)

 

Both social science and curators have same problem – they want to keep their finger on the global pulse, but they risk creating knowledge in an isolated setting. If museums are the new universities, than the white cube risks becoming the ivory tower. Culture is one aspect of social reality which we can analyze, but it is not a discrete entity or a well-bounded institution that we can isolate and examine independently from other social phenomenon (Wuthnow, 1987). This is not to say that we must leave the museum behind; rather the inverse – this essay has given a number of examples to demonstrate how the museum itself can play a more integrated role in the social world. The white cube must be allowed to get a bit ‘messy’, while keeping in mind that the problem with publics is not a problem of taste, but rather a problem of genre (Heinich, 2001, 323). The prevention of social exclusion in contemporary art, as cited by Zolberg (1992), requires a turn towards Iliyana Nedkova’s notion of ‘holistic curatorship’, with the curator acting as researcher, bridge-builder, caretaker and ultimately, a collaborator with artists, educators, mediators and publics (Wade, 2000, 125).

 

It will be interesting to see how the contemporary curatorial act and the role of the exhibition changes with the ‘young generation’ of curators now entering the art world. Indeed, the bulk of international curatorial training programs were established after 1992, including de Appel in Amsterdam, Bard College in New York, Rennes University, Konstfack Stokholm, and Goldsmiths in London. In contrast to the figure of the curator/researcher, these new curators are generally emerging, again, from a background in art history, topped with a Masters in curating. As Andrew Renton pointed out, ‘my generation of curators is the very last generation of curators who can curate without having taken a course in curating. . .  now curating practice is becoming just like art practice in that way. . .for both fields academic training is becoming the norm’. And yet, as this essay has shown, there are other dynamics going on in art institutions that makes any kind of university-based training useless (Mc Allister Johnson, 1985). Will the young generation embrace the engaged, research-based principles of the curator/researcher, constantly pushing artistic inquiry forward, or will we see a continuation of the ‘cult of the curator’, the subsuming of artistic activity under curatorial and institution prerogative?

 

Perhaps these young curators can look to cultural sociology and anthropology for new ways to make meaning in their work, but also for important lessons in curating in a socially and culturally responsible manner. As a discipline that has also undergone countless bounds and shifts as a tool of social research, sociology can offer some cautions to curators of contemporary art: avoid the ‘appropriation’ of artists and voices from the periphery (establish constant links with them and strive to understand how moving artworks between contexts necessarily edits and transforms their meaning). Every exhibition must be a careful look into what voices are allowed to enter the sphere of knowledge production.  In the new ‘strong program’ for cultural sociology, the aim of analysis is less to uncover the impact of meaning on social life and identity formation, but rather to see how social life and identities constrain potential meanings, via a robust understanding of the codes that are at play in the cultural objects under consideration (Alexander and Smith, 2001). The contemporary curatorial act is well positioned to uncover these relationships in powerful, visual, and embodied ways, but requires constant vigilance on the part of the curator/researcher to ensure that the knowledge produced is global in scope, and not restricted to the elusive ‘museum’.

 

 

 

 

 

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New Approaches in Contemporary Curating, Spring 2006