On Curatorship, Institutional and Otherwise (more notes on embedded criticism)

The Storr-Enwezor polemic was indeed far from over, and culminated in the thoroughly ungratifying exchange at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney that you can relive in the video below. I was in the audience, seated directly behind Okwui, who was with Terry Smith, who had a bone to pick with me about my citation of him in the earlier essay but never got to pick it because of what happens in the video. That's Thomas Berghuis asking the trolling question by the way. In any case, the rule is, you never attack from the podium. Always from the floor. This was published in Volume 37, issue 4 of Broadsheet in December 2008.

The title of this essay, or rather, of this loose sequence of notes that rehearse, repetitively but with modest variation, a handful of familiar ideas, should provide a clue, at the outset, to an ambiguity lying at its heart. The title is, like the essay, inadequate, and inherently so. To indicate continuity with a similar, earlier essay, its syntax had required a single noun to describe its subject. But where it is safe to say that criticism, on whose current state that earlier text had offered several thoughts, is a generally accepted term, no single word exists to describe what it is that curators actually do. The Oxford Dictionary’s official term, curatorship, refers less to an activity than to the state of being a curator, while the two most popular alternatives, curation and curating, are derivatives of a back-formation — the latter a gerund at that! — that was only accepted into the dictionary two years ago, and, as the red wavy lines on my screen tell me, are still not considered legitimate by the leading brand of word processing software. Curatorship, then, at least according to those twin linguistic pillars of my dictionary and my spellchecker, is the least worst option.

This lack of consensus is appropriate, for as each conference paper, book chapter and superficial magazine profile on the subject inevitably attests, the referent itself is not constant; almost, but not quite. Not that there is a causal relationship here; though it is now appears alongside seemingly any organisational activity involving art, the flexibility of the word ‘curator’ is hobbled to a large degree by its etymology, closer in structure to ‘doctor’ or ‘author’ (who do you know who docts or auths?) than to ‘painter’ or ‘writer’. It is more that curatorial practice embodies a series of tensions, conflicts between its propositional and meditational approaches to meaning, between intellectual and technical priorities, between experimental practice and accessible forms of presentation, between authority and the potential for reflexivity, each of which is resolved differently in the hands of individual practitioners operating at distinct institutional and commercial registers. Moreover, it persists within, affected by and often pretending to affect, a sociopolitical context that is in a state of permanent — and, at the time of writing, overt — crisis. Should overstatement be required, one might say that all cultural activities taking place within this framework are themselves in crisis, but curatorship, whatever its ultimate definition, and understanding it is not the best descriptor, seems, for the moment, under no such threat.

Criticism, on the other hand, seems particularly apposite to such a trope, with the event, or at least the imminence, of the practice’s perceived irrelevance frequently framed along the lines of crisis or, with even greater gravity, death. Naturally the prognosis is melodramatic; criticism as a specialised activity continues to be practised and to be practisable. But it does so with fewer potential outlets, its column inches having been usurped by belletrism and the advertising copy that goes by the name ‘art writing’, while, perhaps more pressingly for critics, its authority as an arbitrating mechanism is in steady decline. But for all the attention that critics have paid to the demise of their profession, surprisingly little time has been spent entertaining the notion that they themselves might have been responsible for this very passing. But perhaps this reluctance isn’t so surprising; with so little time left, is there any dignity in such reflection? Better, it seems, to note, with a touch of resentment, the ascendancy of those curators who were so quick to occupy the seats they left empty (or from which they were pushed by the invisible hand of the market), assuming the authority of the critics, performing their legitimating function with so much aplomb but so little rigour. And in whose interest? What use is there in one curator attacking another from the podium — in the name of dialogue, of all things — beyond invalidating a competing curatorial premise? Settling old scores? Where is the dignity in that?

Criticism is not dead, at least not yet, for its life has still not passed before its eyes. Should it, in whatever time it thinks it has left, discover a taste for situational irony, it might look to the current prominence of curatorship and think of its own days in the sun, not out of nostalgia, but in the interests of continuity. For if curators would ultimately displace the authority of the critics, they did this as the critics’ most attentive students. After all, had criticism not once made itself so broadly relevant, so vital to the discursive framing of artistic practice that it was near impossible to ignore? Did it not once speak with a confidence that would, regardless of the intentions of its authors, establish its pronouncements if not as orthodoxy then at the very least as principle, to be taken up and used in practice? This was a period in which criticism enjoyed, or at least remembers enjoying, considerable influence on the presentation, reception, and arguably even the production of art. By the late 1980s and certainly by the early 1990s, works of poststructural art criticism, in particular, constituted foundation texts for the teaching of art history, theory and practice. Not only did the generation training during this period assimilate many of the theoretical contributions and intellectual positions offered by poststructuralism, but its embrace of disciplines outside of those within the conventional purview of art history — from psychoanalysis to postcolonial studies to political economy, and further, to literature and film studies — would serve as a model for the increasing emphasis within curatorial practice on porosity and flexibility, conditions demanded by the new information economy and emergent artistic paradigms alike. So while the practitioners of specialised forms of criticism, especially those complemented by academic research, no longer feel that the same sense of purchase for their work, it continues to inform current practice, albeit under different conditions.

If poststructuralism actively rejected modernist criticism’s tendency to isolate aesthetic developments, and specifically artistic developments, from the rest of collective life — and it might be said that defining this boundary was one of modernist criticism’s central preoccupations — it nevertheless persisted with the ideal of critical distance, that is to say, the possibility of a position at sufficient remove from their objects to allow for the production of an unaffected criticism. As I have argued elsewhere, criticism, when understood as commentary on art, artists and developments inside or affecting the art world, has increasingly issued from positions of embeddedness, which is to say, that it has been offered not by professional critics, but by curators, and is thus ever open to the potential for conflict of interest. While there remains the question of whether a real distance was ever possible, it seems more constructive to look to the potential that proximity might hold for criticality, a criticality not limited to the tradition of critical writing. In this sense, the concept of embedded criticism might be extended to the conditions of practice currently affecting curatorial inquiry.

Much of the current potential for embedded criticism lies in the practices characteristic of what Mick Wilson has described as the discursive turn, that ‘strange complementarity and synchronicity between the ascendency of the curatorial gesture and the advocacy of language exchange as a paradigm of practice’. To this confluence might be added the increasing confidence of cultural practitioners — which is to say curators and artists alike — in appropriating the language and modes of address of specialised forms of criticism. Stimulated by the institutional legitimation of conversational and collaborative artistic forms, this faculty has seen the primacy of exhibition making in curatorial and artistic activity complemented and in some cases even displaced by a conscious emphasis on initiating and facilitating various forms of discussion. Apart from preparing critical writing in industry publications, these activities also include the creation of new platforms for discussion, from public events promoting varying degrees of audience participation, to significant training and publishing programs directly operated by artistic institutions. Given the centrality of discourse production to the work of curators, and the significant portion of this activity that is focused on curatorial practice itself, from postgraduate programs to conferences and publications, we might say that embedded criticism describes not only the problematic phenomenon of curators performing the role of critics, but also the potential for that critical faculty to be self-directed. We might say that, in light of the genealogy sketched out above, two of the defining of conditions of curatorial practice are authority and reflexivity — the legitimating authority once enjoyed by criticism; and a reflexivity that has been practised by artists for decades, but never with such authority.

It should be stressed that following this line of thought is by no means intended to perpetuate certain myths that have propagated around curatorial practice, nor to apologise for vanities and excesses attending it that are unfortunately all too real. Contrary to journalistic cliché, the role of the curator has not so much changed — this would imply the impossibility of earlier modes of operation — as expanded to include new possibilities, while much remains the same. Indeed certain quarters manifest an overt hostility to the idea of reflexivity, while for others there seems to be little or no awareness, or at the very least acknowledgment, that a discursive turn has even taken place. It has also become possible to affect reflexivity as a decoy for carrying on business as usual, or as a device to preclude criticism. More often, however, change has occurred in a negative sense, where, in a shift mirroring those in other related professions — most notably art history, and of course, criticism — economic, bureaucratic and institutional conditions have forced curators to take on administrative and promotional responsibilities, managing departments or entertaining patrons, at the expense of sustained research and engagement with artistic practice, a shift that results in less rather than more intellectual and practical freedom. So although I will refer to concrete examples, the figure of the curator sketched here is an abstraction, neither a cynical caricature nor a utopian paradigm, more of the base unit of the sum total of potentialities presented by current practice — an altogether optimistic abstraction.

No discussion of contemporary curatorship is complete without mention of biennales, and with good reason. After all, it was the rapid proliferation of the large-scale exhibition form that was the vehicle for the ascendancy of the curator, for whom executive roles were created, while they were at the same time ostensibly freed from the orthodoxies and responsibilities of the institutions for which they continued to work, precisely because of each event’s transience and, to some degree, the novelty of the form. As good students of criticism, curators, have, of course, been able to instrumentalise these structures to question problematic aspects of their form, such as power relations between curators and artists (as with Molly Nesbitt, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Utopia Station at the 2003 Venice Biennale), or their affirmation of geocultural hierarchies (as with Okwui Enwezor’s shifting platforms for Documenta 11, and various iterations of the Gwangju and Havana Biennales). The frequently noted tendency of biennales to homogenise the presentation of art, no matter the context, exists in uneasy tension with their decentering effect, the creation of opportunities for artists working outside of the art world’s traditional centres. By the end of the 1990s, it was clear that the curator was an archetypal figure of globalisation, not simply as its agent, but as the self-aware embodiment of its contradictions, from labour relations to international market dynamics.

Along these lines, no discussion of biennales is complete without mention of the notion of spectacle, but for somewhat less solid reasons. Most often, spectacle is equated with scales of assembly — of which biennales are the obvious example — as if a smaller exhibition could not be spectacular simply because of its modest size. If Guy Debord is frequently invoked as the progenitor of the term, most recently on the cover of an issue of Art Asia Pacific covering the plethora of biennales opening across the region in this year’s Asian autumn emblazoned with the title of his best known book, his theory on the subject seems only partially understood. Very early on in his formulation of the term, Debord is at pains to point out, paraphrasing Marx, that ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship among people mediated by images’, and that it is the totality of social life, the singular spectacle, or society of the spectacle, in Debord’s terminology, that is the immense accumulation, not of images, but of a plurality of spectacles, capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image. The distinction is important, for it describes relationships of power and exploitation that have invented a visual form for themselves. The real test of the biennale’s status as spectacle, and its reflexive response to that status, is better understood not, therefore, in terms of its scale, or how quickly visitors are forced to take it all in, but in its production, reproduction and mediation of the social relationships that constitute spectacle.

Among other constants, critical reception of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s 2008 Biennale of Sydney generally included two observations of relevance here. The first was to reiterate the widely accepted view that the highlight of the biennale was the use as a venue of Cockatoo Island, a former penal colony and shipping works in the middle of Sydney Harbour. The second was to note Christov-Bakargiev’s allusion in her catalogue essay to the idea that the exhibition was a decoy. Precisely what the exhibition was a decoy for was never clearly delineated, and although Christov-Bakargiev offered suggestions elsewhere — these included creating an opportunity to work with certain artists and an attempt to elude the tendency of the thematic marketing of large-scale exhibitions to delimit their reception — the possibility was left open, no doubt intentionally.

Cockatoo Island was indeed a striking choice, anticipated only by Jonathan Watkins’s use of Goat Island in his 1998 biennale Every Day — a far smaller component, but one made memorable by the inclusion of Martin Creed’s Half the Space in a Given Room. Playing into international and parochial perceptions of Sydney as the ‘harbour city’ — indeed every biennale venue was located on or overlooking the water — the walls of the island’s abandoned and unadorned architecture nevertheless undercut this ideology by bearing mute witness to the city’s secret history of punitive, colonial, racial and industrial exploitation. Importantly, the site had been rarely visited by even long-term inhabitants of the city, and, with the exception of Urs Fischer’s John Kaldor Art Project on the island’s northern shore two years earlier, it carried none of the history of viewing that mediated presentations at other more established venues. Visitor experience of the venue, from the half hour ferry ride and its inevitable association with Venetian vaporetto trips, to the negotiation of unfamiliar terrain and the need to actively seek out the work, was one of anticipation and discovery, transacting in an economy of desire remarkably similar to that which underpins the spectacle of tourism.

Simon Sheikh, following Frazer Ward, has noted that within the history of institutional critique, exhibition-making is certainly of spectacular origin, constructing modes of instruction and address reproducing and at the same time constituting the values of the emergent bourgeois public sphere: rationality, order, and so on. So too is the biennale form itself, developing out of the world fairs of high capitalism to exploit the popular bourgeois pastime of tourism, in the context of competition between former city-states to establish a certain primacy within newly liberal-democratic nation-states. Of course, it is unfair to criticise a given biennale on the basis of the origin of its form, and indeed a self-reflexive understanding of this origin now informs the construction of a great many biennales, including, importantly, Christov-Bakargiev’s exhibition. But for the purposes of thinking through that biennale, it is equally important to observe the points of convergence between exhibition-making and tourism: both providing a certain confluence of knowledge and pleasure, of information and experience. That much-criticised — perhaps over-criticised — aspect of biennales, the vernissage, with its emphasis on exclusivity and self-representation, seeing and being seen, shares the sense of performance and ritual of tourism; there is a striking similarity in the extent to which participants in both activities seem intent on actively caricaturing themselves.

The decoy function of Christov-Bakargiev’s biennale, then, was to use what would become its most celebrated moment to highlight the spectacular potential of the exhibition’s presentational form at its most basic, spatial level, in the construction of human experience. Appropriate to its avant-gardist sensibilities, its fetishisation of the 1960s as a period of change and its romantic account of modernist art, Revolutions: Forms that Turn might be described in terms of Renato Poggioli’s ‘agonistic moment’, the drive to self-immolation that ‘welcomes and accepts this self-ruin as an obscure or unknown sacrifice to the success of future movements’.

Agonism has of course taken on a somewhat different sense in recent contemporary art debates, due in no small part to the influence of the pluralistic model of democracy advanced by Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe’s notion of an agonistic public sphere has found particular resonance with the coupling, in much curatorial practice, of a melancholic resignation to the failure of attempts at radical social change with a pragmatic approach to the potential for institutional platforms to play a role in shaping and enfranchising their publics, which is to say, as legitimate sites of contestation.

It was this second sense of agonism that defined another moment of the Art Compass series of biennales initiated by Sydney, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale, Annual Report, an exhibition explicitly, rather than implicitly, concerned with its own status as spectacle. Taking as its point of departure the brutally suppressed Gwangju uprising of 18 May 1980, a moment that has arguably defined each edition of the biennale since its inception in 1995, artistic director Okwui Enwezor and curators Ranjit Hoskote and Hyunjin Kim posited the exhibition as ‘a forum for collective authorship’ and as ‘a space of encounter … a site of intense negotiation between the public, artworks, artists, curators and producers’.

Crucially, Enwezor sought to decentre the exhibition’s authorship, attempting to reject, as he did with Documenta 11, the figure of the curator as auteur by employing a collaborative curatorium, in contrast to the model utilised in Sydney, which has persisted — one might speculate for financial reasons — with the structure of a single curator, advised in Christov-Bakargiev's case by a team of ‘comrades’. The curatorium’s central project, titled On the Road, was similarly counter-authorial, restaging a host of solo artist exhibitions — including an entire Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective — that had taken place since the beginning of 2007, each of whose source was fastidiously footnoted in a curious form of curatorial citation described self-effacingly by Hoskote as a ‘workmanlike survey of developments’. This was offset by five ‘position papers’, smaller experimental group exhibition projects organised by younger curators, and a number of ‘insertions’, new works commissioned for the biennale. Most strikingly, the approach to displaying these three major components was to mingle them across the biennale’s exhibition spaces — even the points at which three of the five position papers began and ended were not immediately distinguishable — so that without reference to wall labels or the exhibition guide, it was possible to read the entire project as a single collective statement.

Both of the biennale’s propositions, considering itself as a forum for collective authorship and a space of encounter, were intended to reflect aspects of the Gwangju uprising, an expression of democratic power constructed in direct opposition to a dictatorial state, indicating ways in which ‘modes of collective expression and coalition-building can transform the streets into a veritable space of encounter for the social demands of the civic body of the citizens’. As a reflection, though, the biennale was also posited as a model for emergent forms of civil society coherent with Mouffe’s agonistic democracy, albeit one framed in terms that were less Mouffe’s than of Agamben’s ‘coming community’. In this sense, it constituted very much the reflexive use of an institution, one with rather extraordinary ties to its local community — if the centrality of the biennale to the self-image of Gwangju, a city with barely any other contemporary art infrastructure, is any measure — as the platform for a spatiotemporal allegory of an imagined world, an attempt to invert the function of spectacle from the ‘autonomous movement of the non-living’ through a determinedly localised (and Bakhtinian) redirection of presentational desire economies toward a merging of adventure-time and everyday-time, rather than a touristic separation from everyday life.

To some degree, the discursive turn in art has been represented and enacted as the introduction of conversational activities into contemporary art as a means of contextualising and elaborating artistic practice, and in some cases constituting that practice. This view is not so much incorrect as incomplete. As Wilson notes, the use of the term ‘discourse’ is deliberate, as a device for conjuring and performing power, thus its occasionally overlooked importance for curators as they attempt, should they as embedded critics feel the inclination, to grapple with the consequences of their recently acquired authority. The ascendency of non-exhibition-based discursive activities, which provide the appearance, at least, of horizontality between institutions, curators, artists and audiences, should not obscure the reflexive understanding that exhibition-making, the spatiotemporal structure of experience, is itself a discursive activity.

In 2008, the Biennale of Sydney and the Gwangju Biennale both departed from such an understanding, providing exemplary, not to mention compelling, reflections on exhibition-making in relation to the language of power, which is to say, to spectacle, through markedly different uses of agonism. But where the latter proposed a viable alternative in its collectivity, Sydney, despite its sincere attempts to do otherwise, offered an account of the contemporary that was so authorial as to be idiosyncratic. Reflexivity in curatorship is a condition of the practice that is highly worth amplifying in order for criticality to remain in play even without critics. But in order to avoid the endgame of an authority that reflects on its authority and does little else, this reflexivity must be directed toward the progressive dissolution of authority through the resources that very authority provides. To appropriate, for a moment and with complete awareness of its limitations, the romantic, egalitarian language of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s biennale, the role of any avant-garde should be to necessitate the conditions of its own dissolution. Indulgences aside, this might be worth bearing in mind, should embedded criticism one day face its own crisis.