Death to the Curator?
“Curators have been condemned as agents of recuperation, polluting some imagined ur-form of artistic value; as gatekeepers, bureaucrats and middlemen; as agents of destructive interpretation and micrological study, of globalisation and conformity.
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“…it is hard to remember… how exhibitions ever got made without the animating figure of the curatorial magus behind them.
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“It is quite rightly the artist’s task to create unreasonable organisations.
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The press release for the collective exhibition of primarily Norwegian artist-run spaces reads, “Death to the Curator”. I laughed – an old joke but a good one. Beneath the title (embedded as a subtitle in the image of a ‘zombie’ curator) the byline reads, with little more force and indignation, “This means you were not real artists to begin with.” The context for this institutional thread-pulling within the artworld's administrational quilt is an exhibition announcement via e-flux, paid and presented by the Kunsthall Oslo (a non-profit art space located in the heart of Oslo, Norway).
Elmgreen & Dragset, Death of a Collector, 2009, Mixed media, 100 x 600 x 200 cm: installation View, Elmgreen & Dragset, The Collectors, The Danish & Nordic Pavilions, 2009, 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia
Strangely, but serendipitously for this response, my associations with the Scandinavian artworld and the rhetorical death or dream of another art agent – the collector – is by way of Michael Elmgreen's and Ingar Dragset's installation Death of a Collector for the Danish and Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. The glee was instant then too. Met by Elmgreen's and Dragset's somnambulist vision, what I first projected as a curator not a collector floating face-first in a swimming pool, brought a brevity to what ought to have been a serious simulacrum of suicide or misadventure, as the art fashionista clinked around on the steps surrounding the pool which helped to Greek-up the ignoble stab-in-the-back theatre of the artworld.
To this day I still visualise a curator in that swimming pool in Venice. I am not going to lie and say ‘I'm not sure why?’ because I kind of do know why. My interactions with art collectors over the years has been brief and exclusive, involving being shown around domestic art collections that, on reaching the bedroom to view the painting above the headboard, became a little uncomfortable. My correspondence with curators, as both an artist and critic, has been productive and antagonistic in that order. Changing hats over the years has given me two perspectives on the curator. As an artist I knew I needed to stay on side with the curator if I wanted to engage in the art scene in a productive way, knowing curators were the gatekeepers for galleries, funding and influence (they simply talk and influence one another as evidenced in the consensus and double-booking that circulates one or two artists at any given moment of time in an art scene).
As an art critic I got the chance to extract my teeth from my tongue from time to time to critique the enterprise of the group show, the modus operandi of curatorial practice. I found when I wrote critically on a curated group show I felt the curator's rather than the artists' breath on my neck – that's saying something! In the act of reviewing the curated group show, the critical stress is placed on the curator as if it is the curator's vision you are addressing not the artists' (which it is in the curatorial framework). Especially so if it is an idiosyncratic curatorial practice that synthesises the artworks of an otherwise ragtag and headless bunch of artists into some mutually exclusive thematic. You could say that the curator combines artists to commandeer a singular identity; the curator is fully formed via via; the curator is bi-proxy everything but still a product of singular value; the curator is the middle, but invariably not a man.
Now launching next month (due to new Covid restrictions in Norway), the "Death to the Curator" press release states what are the shared grievances of this collaboration between artist-run spaces, targeting the curator exclusively as a motivating factor for artists to, ironically, come together. The organisers are quick to acknowledge that this is not a death-wish/desire/ or dream pertinent to now in particular. Perhaps that is why the image of the zombie curator is so apt, dragged again from the metaphorical grave – for she has not died… yet, unlike the author who died during French philosophical avant-garde of the 1960s.
No need to read between the lines, this statement is arresting in its tone and pointed-finger delivery. Personally, their grievances are my grievances. That said, the figure of the curator has always been an easy target (I have now written a trilogy of critical pieces on the curator over the years – see link at bottom of page for a related article). Easy targets, however, like the late Trump administration, become easy targets because the wavering concentric bands of cause and effect that strangle fate to a pivotal point in time and place are harder to point the finger at, especially when it is time to point the finger at ourselves when we vote strongmen (power) in.
These grievances regarding the curator are not local to Norway. They are grievances we have acknowledged and accepted globally, and continue to facilitate and play along with as artists. In our online image economy – one that has sedated the artist as a passive disseminator (and curator) of images rather than a disrupter and dissenting presence in public space – the curator's image cannot be filtered through her work, because her work is made up of the other, the artist or the institution she works for. That is why the curator's portrait becomes the linchpin of their Instagram feed; art surrounds their bodies while the artist is ventriloquised through their mouth. The curator is a cypher and a cheerleader for those artists that he wears and organises through selection and display. So even though, from the outside, the image of the curator is one of communitarian ideals, bridging the gap between the misconstrued, disorganised and glitchy individuality of the artist and its public, the curator's agency and social mobility bears the fruit of professional progression while the hops, skips and jumps of the artist's flat, stepping-stone economy never reaches the shore for reflection, as a sustained physical output and a pliable identity is needed to keep the artist from sinking and ultimately drowning.
And yet this “Death to the Curator” declaration, embedded in a press release, must come from the lived experience of working and being with curators, and so at one point in time facilitating the curator's professional advancement that is now being retrospectively questioned and perhaps denied. (The adjective “professional” is explicitly used to distinguish the professional curator from the amateur artist.) The professional curator, who finds institutional shelter on the back of the artist, is being questioned in this statement from the self-reflexive position of the still amateur artist. In this regard the statement could be read as a document of betrayal, or a critical reaction based on broken promises or broken ideals (or nostalgia for something that never was?), from which emerges an amateur ethos antithetical to that of the professional agenda of the curator. However the seat of power is always up for grabs; and in the end it is the community that votes who takes that seat.
In a recent Zoom conversation with an Irish artist, the subject of the curator came up. The artist had been asked during a Q&A following a presentation on her work “How she felt about curators?” Obviously, the person who asked the question had shown their cards by asking such a question. But the artist admitted to me that she was caught off guard by the question, and said nothing definitive in response. The artist then asked me what I felt about curators. The word “politician” immediately popped into my head, then my mouth, before I expelled it before thinking it through fully. Of course, the analogy fits in a curious way. The institutional maneuvering of the curator could be likened to the social massaging of the politician. There is also that political positivity, even in the face of cultural or economic downfall, that numbs the curator's and politician's lips as if they were lip-synching positivity. Even though, as tastemakers, the curator's hidden tongue has an equal amount of sour to offset the sweet (like all of us). And still, we vote curators in by inviting them into our studios to pick and mix as if a sweet shop. And we are candy-cane happy to do so.
The artist-run space was something that was common in my time as an exhibiting artist, especially in the Irish capital, Dublin. There was hope in their presence as a new artist, a presence that has since evaporated. That said, after graduating from art school I rejected an opportunity to exhibit at an artist-run space after being selected through an open-call process (by a curator) because I discovered I had to pay to exhibit. Later, I criticised this side of the artist-run project. Today, when no new artist-run spaces are being developed, I feel I have to retract that earlier criticism. The only way to achieve "unreasonable organisations" is amongst artists and artists alone. The second you invite in external bodies (with terms) you become more and more reasonable. Artist-run spaces that somehow transition from a temporary to an established existence eventually embrace the curator as a necessary and welcome agent within the field of the professionalised art scene – I miss the days of the Minecraft amateurism of those analogue artist-run spaces. The new breed of artist-run spaces are more self-conscious, professional and willing to ventriloquise the administrational argot, from "inclusiveness" to "community". Gone are the days of the artist counterculture on the ground; or perhaps the artist counterculture has gone underground, advised and hoped for by Duchamp in the 1960s.
The curator has been very much part of the artist-run space in the Irish art scene on my watch. Although it is difficult to determine the purebred curator from the hybrid “artist-writer-curator”, there are those whom are named and labelled curators whether they like it or not. These named curators work freelance or for established institutions. And even though they might flirt with writing or even, God-forbid, art-making, they are seen and objectified as curators first and foremost by their artist peers. If we were not to declare their death, what are curators good for? They organise, negotiate and manipulate funding towards concrete endeavours that involve the coming-together of artists in an art environment that is increasingly individualistic in its desires – some of the best art spaces locally have been curator-run. They thematise and corral artworks in a panoply of displays and sites that proffer new ways to think, view and read art. They procure access to offsite spaces for exhibitions that would never see the light of day if an artist was at the helm (of course there are rare examples of artists successfully taking the curatorial helm, such as the late Noah Davis or Damien Hirst and the YBA's right out of art school). They deal with the big guys upstairs so we don’t have to, which has a trickle-down effect with respect to funding if not whole-sale appreciation.
The press release states that “Such is the success of the [curator] model that it is hard to remember, or even to conceptualise, how exhibitions ever got made without the animating figure of the curatorial magus behind them.” True; especially for those artists that emerged out of the neoliberal era. The organisers also admit that artists have been playing along within this model as if there was “no other choice”, advancing the idea that the artist-run gives choice to the artist. However, we have to be clear how the curator is being defined here, 'being' being the definition of the curator being critiqued. Curation is not the problem per se; the curator is the problem. Being a curator exclusively is the problem. If you are an artist and you curate, fine.
Contra-curators the “real” artist is flexible and "unreasonable". This unreasonable contortionism sometimes leads the artist to bend over backwards before the curator whose mission is to organise the disorganised and disenfranchised artist, so that legs hook over shoulders and feet to become hands knotted in the dark within a white box. In Elmgreen's and Dragset's swimming pool the curator (sorry, collector!) is, as American punk band Minor Threat vocalised, “out of step”.
The Norwegian organisers are quick to temper their statement, admitting or accepting that they “consider themselves curators, even to the point of seeing curatorial work as an integral part of their artistic practice”. However, this is not a smoothing over of this death-to-the-curator declaration. Here the ‘artist-curator’ is been transformed into a good verb rather than a bad noun. Being an artist has always meant professional promiscuity. There is an explicit criticism being pronounced here, of individualism and careerism, as the curator becomes the scape-goat or perpetrator of the ills of the artworld, while the artist-run is a representation of everything ‘good’ that the artist has lost sight of in the interim of curator-fondling by the artist.
The curator tout court, who courts artists to sometimes go steady goes against the cultural norm of the step-stone artist. Curators represent individual and professional stability for themselves and the artists they work with. The artist has always had to work collectively among peers and institutions to get along in the real world outside the comfort blanket of art school or the studio. Art critic Peter Schjedhal writes that the first thing to do in art school is to form a group. The curator works with groups too but the artist is just a cog in the singular curatorial fusion and function of the curator. Curatorial practice is not a shared democracy. But when was art a democracy in the first place? Gore Vidal vehemently denied art ever was or could be democratic.
That said, I am not sure that exclusively using the curator to rebound off, like a bad breakup, is the best way to separate from the purebred curatorial administration. It almost suggests that without the death of the curator the motivation to act and organise is just not in the makeup of the contemporary artist, or has been lost somewhere since the advent of neoliberalism when an administrational dependency took root. Naming the curator as the offspring of neoliberal tendencies in the arts is fair enough, but who put the curator in that position in the first place? Was there (as stated in this press release) ‘“no choice” but to “throw her- or himself and her or his work into this trap”’ (Daniel Buren, Documenta V, 1972). Or are artists that easily led, waiting for the gimp collar to tie up their leaderless individuality?
The artist-run is definitely an alternative to the curator-run, but if the organisers are proposing a more communitarian art environment, doesn't the exclusion of one of the community (the curator) devolve this into what the curator is sometimes accused of as a producer of cliques? By using the curator as the sole excuse and motivation for the artist-run, the artist-run secedes more power to the curatorial project. The curator's presence becomes the very reason artists have organised themselves into one – the curator becomes the wolf that circles the sheep into their pens. Perhaps a communitarian project is all wrong for the artist in the first place. To fight difference with difference cliquehood would be a more powerful and punk claim, pulling away from the political promiscuity and public optics of the curator-run. More and more I think culture works out of necessity and antagonism. This Norwegian artist-run manifesto is posturing as punk. Calling out the curator and their death is kind of unreasonable; a way to get the party started, to motivate a movement that would have no friction otherwise. To call out the curator is a way of calling out individualism and careerism, so that the opposing force of collectivity and amateurism can be born again, unreasonably.
"It is quite rightly the artist’s task to create unreasonable organisations." This is a beautiful thought, a task that is both the measure and means of a band of ragtag artists and antagonistic to the good organising principles of the curator. But is it just a declaration? It infers ‘rights' within it articulation? Why does it need to be said? Why is the curator's existence a motivator for it being said? Is it a declaration that is, in its punk opposition to the increasingly polite and professional agents of the art administration, counter-curatorial for the sake of being counter-curatorial? In the end artists have to be motivated from an internal drive not an external provocation. The latter will just not last. The difference between a curator-run art scene and an artist-run one is the difference between tastemaking and "world-making". Of late, there has been way too much tastemaking■
Read related article For Generosity; Against Speed-Curating'