 |
THIS IS THE SHOW AND THE SHOW IS MANY THINGS |
|
In the last few years the work of the curator and, by extension, the exhibition as a space of work have been the subject of much reflection: the changes in the roles of the curator and the artist, in which there enter into play elements such as the context of the relationship, the idea of collective work and the exhibition as a channel of dissemination and information or the emergence of the independent (or multi-dependent?) curator. All of this has opened up new frameworks of discussion about the function and meaning of the collective exhibition, or what used to be known as a thematic exhibition.
|
BEA ESPEJO
For a time, the social function of the exhibition was as follows: the artist produced works, which were then selected and put on show by the curator in an exhibition, or simply rejected. The artist was regarded as an independent creator. The curator of the exhibition, on the other hand, was someone who mediated between the creator and the public, but was not strictly an artist. In this way, the respective roles of the artist and the curator were clearly different: the artist concentrated on the creation; the curator, on the selection. Thus the meaning of the creation was the primary element, while the selection, in contrast, was seen as secondary.
With the art of today having been defined as the identification between creation and selection, it follows that the relationship between artist and curator will have changed radically. It is no accident, then, that this should be one of the prime issues of debate on the contemporary art scene. Lectures, seminars, exhibitions and critical texts from the last fifteen years all offer us clues to understanding the key aspects of this change. With This Is the Show and the Show Is Many Things (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent), in 1994, Bart de Baere made a declaration of principles with regard to one of the first consequences of this new artist-curator relationship. The exhibition, defined by De Baere as ‘the creation of a context in which the needs of the artists would be made known’," was a chaotic space in which each of the individual interventions was dissolved in a colony of collective work. A show, at the time atypical, that was also one of the first instances of think the exhibition space outside of the context of the museum.
A host of studies of this question started to appear from that date on — Douglas Crimp’s text ‘The art of exhibition’ is from the same |
|
|
|
 |
|
The Producers: Contemporary Curators in Conversation (2).
Hiller, Susan and Martin, Sarah (eds.). Baltic, 2001 |
|
|
|
year, and also the seminar ‘Naming a Practice: Curatorial ‘strategies for the future’ organized by the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and the start of the Curatorial Training Programme’ for aspiring curators at the De Appel foundation in Amsterdam. 1996, the year of the first Manifesta, saw the first publication of Thinking about Exhibition, a reference manual for the study of the exhibition as a format and a practice, and the following year Papers d’Art devoted its August-December issue to analysing art criticism beyond the practice of writing with the publication of the first texts on the new role of the curator in our local context. The project Curating Degree Zero dates from 1998, as does one of the most important articles to be published by Michael Brenson’s Art Journal that winter: ‘The Curator's Moment - trends in the field of international contemporary art Exhibitions’. There is also Barnaby Drabble’s We Have Artist-Curators, Why Can't We Have Curator-Artists? (1998), and The Power of Display (1998) and Words of Wisdom. A curator’s Vade Mecum of Contemporary Art, (Independent Curators International, 2000), Curating now: imaginative practice/public responsibility (Paula Maricola, 2001), The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist (Jens Hoffman, 2004), Men in Black (Revolver, 2004), The Manifesta Decade. Art Exhibtions and Biennials in Post-war Europe (Barbara Vanderlinder, 2005), La era postmedia (J. L. Brea, 2005) and Curating with Light Luggage. Reflections, discursions and revisions (Maria Lind, 2005), and more recent publications such as Curating Subjects (Paul O'Neil, 2007) or What Makes a Great Exhibition? (Paula Marincola, 2007); these are just some of the studies whose key premise is to invite us to question the rationale of the exhibition.
With both the institution and the exhibition increasingly becoming channels for the dissemination of information, the two are now defined as not the result of a process but a place of production. Indeed, The Producers was precisely the title of the series of talks that organized by the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art and the University of Newcastle between 2000 and 2002, in which the new roles of contemporary curatorial practices were debated. The independent curator, who has come to be the leading figure in today’s globalized art world is, like the artist, a producer. The roles of both are now often identical, and between there is a shared idea of distribution, the same idea that is propagated by the museum, in a joint work of co-produced relations. Meanwhile, the place in which the exhibition is staged is seen as ‘a space of cohabitation, an open scenario half way between the stage set, the film studio and the documentation room." . The exhibition is continually re-inventing its format and, in Bourriaud’s words, ‘is no longer posited in terms of forms but of formats of representation, of readings of the world.’
Curiously, Ana Mª Guasch uses the same term for the collective exhibitions she deals with in her compendium L’art del segle XX a través de les seves exposicions. 1945-1995 (Akal, 1997). In her selection we find these collective shows addressed from the perspectives of history and anthropology as having given rise to the generation of new tendencies and ways of seeing and conceiving of a concrete reality. In itself, the collective exhibition as generally know it, be it in the format of a biennial, a collective exhibition in a gallery or museum, or those that in the last ten or twenty years have been perceived (even if they have not always been so received) as a ‘state of things’, as the ‘spirit of the time’.
Despite this common aim to be instruments for the communication of intentions, the collective exhibition today is reinventing itself with practices that seem far removed from what has been thought of up to now as a thematic exhibition. And this radical reappraisal is being closely followed by the retrospective exhibition, too, as Jennifer Allen explained at considerable length in her article in Frieze last May or, as we have already seen, in the premises of exhibitions such as those by Peter Friedl or Ignasi Aballí in the MACBA.
What is the meaning, then, of the collective exhibition? Why are they put on? What relationship do they have with the big international exhibitions? Is the biennial the great alternative to the collective exhibition? Is team working the new role of the curator in the collective show? Do today’s collective exhibitions really ‘mark an era’?
|
De Baere, Bart, cited in Luk Lambrecht, ‘This Is the Show and the Show Is Many Things’, Flash Art, 1994, p. 67.
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Postproduction, Lucas & Sternberg, New York.
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Op. cit.
|
|
