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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS CONCERNING THE COLLECTING, SORTING, PRESENTATION AND MEDIATION
By Beatrice von Bismarck
The term “curatorial action” is derived from “curator” which in general means an administrator, and in the art field specifically a custodian of museum collections. According to the etymological meaning which goes back to Latin “curare” (in English: “taking care”), the curator was responsible for the gathering, sorting, keeping and mediation of the objects in an art institution’s custody.
Prototype of the “free curator”
The professional profile began to develop in the late 18th century along with the rise of museums and exhibitions. After 1945, in the wake of the rapidly growing number of collecting and exhibiting art institutions as well as the strongly expanding art market, it gained additional definition. Professionalisation and differentiation in the art field caused the term “curator” to become an occupational title structured hierarchically as well as regarding content.
The emergence of the “free curator” who is no more exclusively active on behalf of one institution employing him/her, but offers his/her work on the internationally networked and broadly diversified exhibition market, can be understood as a structural after-effect of this development. Harald Szeemann (1933–2005) is considered as the prototype and paradigm of this new professional category. The foundation of his position was the exhibition Wenn Attitüden Form werden (When attitudes become form), which he organised in 1969 when he still was director of the Berner Kunsthalle, and which rendered him eligible as director of documenta 5.
Szemann was the first in the history of this large exhibition in Kassel to define a thematic orientation for the event: Befragung der Realität – Bildwelten heute (Investigation of reality – image worlds today). This procedure was also decisive for his own continuing curatorial practice, which he called “intellectual migrant work”. The exhibition became a work in its own right (comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s room installations for the surrealists), the curator an impresario, an “Auteur” in the sense of the French author’s film. At the same time, artistic practice itself increasingly integrated public appearance.
“Curating” in dance, too
In the context of these developments, the job description of “curating” gains independence of the occupational title. Of those tasks which were originally bound to the institutionally positioned post of the curator in art institutions, the curatorial especially focusses on mediation. With the aim of creating publicity for cultural materials, information and procedures and rendering them fit for reception, the exhibition – in the sense of an interdisciplinary performance space – becomes the central medium. In this context, curatorial acting is no longer relevant only in the art field, but also in dance, theatre and film or the humanities, social and natural sciences.
It detaches the curators from the former invisibility of their own position, gives them leeway not normally common in the institution, and a prestige quite similar to that of artists. Curatorial acting turns out to be a form of practice which can be employed by curators but also by all other actors in the cultural field. Artists of various disciplines, critics, gallery owners, dramatic advisors or scientists not only from the original fields of art history and cultural studies, but also from philosophy, literature, theatre and dance studies, ethnology and sociology can avail themselves of curatorial procedures in order to take part in the processes of the production of meaning.
While social and organisational competence count among curators’ basic skills, their reputation also rests heavily on their symbolising abilities. Like hardly any other profession in the cultural field, curatorial practice defines itself by creating connections. The acts of collecting or gathering, sorting, presenting and mediating – the trade-specific tasks of curators – can be applied to objects of various origin, information, persons, places and contexts between which they create references.
A state of “becoming”
The possibilities of these references are numerous and can be reconstructed ever anew. Being “curated”, the compiled materials and information are in a state of “becoming”, they gather changing and dynamic meanings in the course of combination processes. The procedures of selecting, sorting and mediating create meaning and thus determine the respective position in the current discourse.
In the 1990ies, critical approaches with regard to representation, influenced by the questions and methods of postcolonial and gender studies, supplied the decisive discursive framework. For showing contemporary art, but also collections of cultural heritage, ethnography oder anthropology, it was important while dealing with materials, places and persons to integrate the interests of those involved in the process of creation and the exhibited result. This also implied making conflicts as well as hierarchies and dependencies between the participants visible, and opening up perspectives for changing them.
That the practical forms of curating also are employed in the rat race for the power of definition which decides about inclusion and exclusion in the art field, is vividly demonstrated by the handling of the occupational image of the curator since the 1980ies. Beginning de-professionalisation which opened up access to the post of curator for people with very different training and professional background, in the 1990ies was responded to by installing curator studies at various West European and North American locations – e.g., in Grenoble, Amsterdam, London, New York, Annandale-on-Hudson, Zurich and Vienna.
“Cultures of the curatorial”
The course of studies “Kulturen des Kuratorischen” (Cultures of the curatorial) which started in autumn, 2009 at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig takes up these perspectives of curatorial work with the aim to stay abreast of changes in the course of the disciplinary expansion and dislimitation of curatorial practice as well as the globalisation of the cultural field (http://www.kdk-leipzig.de/). The course not only strives to mediate methods of conceiving, organising and executing curatorial projects but also the theoretical means for the analysis, discussion and further development of exhibitions and other forms of cultural mediation.
In trans-disciplinary oriented seminars, workshops, lectures and excursions, tutors and students explore historical and current circumstances, the conditions and potentials which the curatorial has developed as its own method of generating, mediating and reflexting experience and knowledge. How relevant is the curatorial in the cultural field under the conditions of globalisation? How do procedures, strategies and effects of the curatorial compare with those of the arts and sciences? Where are there similarities or perspectives of mutual exchange? Which peculiarities does the curatorial show in specific art contexts, and what forms does it take in different cultures? Which functions is the curatorial endowed with in the respective aesthetic, social or economical contexts? The programme of the masters course “Kulturen des Kuratorischen” in Leipzig dedicates itself to questions like these in a mixture of theory and practice.
(29.12.2009)
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