Curatorial Challenges

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating

Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen, Anne Gregersen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351174480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Curatorial Challenges investigates the challenges faced by curators in contemporary society and explores which practices, ways of thinking, and types of knowledge production curating exhibitions could challenge. Bringing together international curators and researchers from the fields of art and cultural history, the book provides new research and perspectives on the curatorial process and aims to bridge the traditional gap between theoretical and academic museum studies and museum practices.

The book focuses on exhibitions as a primary site of cultural exchange and argues that, as highly visible showcases, producers of knowledge, and historically embedded events, exhibitions establish and organize meanings of art and cultural heritage. Temporary exhibitions continue to increase in cultural significance and yet the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution has changed. As exhibitions gain in significance, so too do curatorial strategies. Arguing that new research is needed to help understand these changes, the book presents original research that explores how curatorial strategies inform both art and cultural history museums in contemporary society. The book also investigates what sort of critical, transformative, and perhaps even conservative, potential can be traced in exhibition cultures.

Curatorial Challenges fosters innovative interdisciplinary exchange and brings new insights to the field of curatorial studies. As such, it should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students engaged in the study of curatorial practice, museum studies, the making of exhibitions, museum communication, and art history.

Part I

Curating within the changing role of museums as Bildung institutions

As the number of museums has grown dramatically worldwide in recent years, the traditional role of the museum as a Bildung institution is increasingly challenged. From the beginning of the public museum’s history during the European Enlightenment, exhibitions have constituted a fundamental aspect of their purpose: museums are defined as institutions that put objects— of art, science, cultural history—on display for the public. As an institution, the museum “speaks exhibitions,” to quote curator Bruce W. Ferguson.¹ And yet the vast technological, economic, cultural, and political changes of the last decades present a range of new challenges to museum exhibitions and the curators who create them, profoundly impacting the presentation of art and artifacts, methods of display, professional interconnections, and relationship to the public.

The chapters presented in this section discuss a series of very different exhibitions that address topics and themes in a wide range of fields—from art to medicine, fashion, colonial history, and contemporary migration. The exhibitions also span a vast geography, from Istanbul to London and Helsingør, in public and private museums that include new cutting-edge institutions to established collections with long histories as traditional Bildung museums. Nevertheless, all of the chapters share a focus on the exhibition as a privileged public space in the Western museum tradition. They investigate the exhibition as a historically situated space in time, within which specific exhibitionary strategies can think with things and imagine “social truths,” and consolidate and question them framing and activating public discussion and (self-)reflection, as well as creating spaces for learning and unlearning.

Curatorship is “a dangerous practice,” according to art historian Donald Preziosi in his chapter “Curatorship as Bildungsroman: Or, from Hamlet to Hjelmslev.” The text functions as a theoretical frame for the rest of the chapters in Part I. Preziosi argues for curating as an “epistemological technology: a craft of thinking” or “a creative performance using the world to think about, and both affirm and transform the world.” Through a deconstructionist analysis, he relates the curating of exhibitions and museums to the fundamental cultural strategies of religion and societies as such, because curating is a way of fabricating “social truths.” For Preziosi, curating involves the managing and articulating of what should be remembered and what should be forgotten or hidden, thereby legitimizing power. He introduces the metaphor Bildungsroman, traditionally an educative narrative, to define curating as an ongoing process that is never neutral, innocent, or permanent, and when it presents the fictions of factual representation, is also a form of critique.

How curating exhibitions can discreetly bring about a critique of cultural representations and social truths is central to art historian Ahu Antmen’s chapter, “Curating the Nude in Istanbul.” Reflecting on her own curating of the exhibition Bare, Naked, Nude – A Story of Modernization in Turkish Painting, Antmen views the exhibition as an experiential, visually rhetorical situation, a designated space to see and think within a certain framework. Rejecting the well-known classical tradition of the nude in Western art history, Antmen focuses on how the genre was translated in Turkish art, using the exhibition to communicate its many cultural translations and tensions. In contemporary Turkey, the limits of exhibiting the nude are being tested, and while major public art museums are currently closed to the public, private museums have become potential spaces for adventures into knowledge, rather than emblems of authority. Within this context, Antmen explains her approach in Bare, Naked, Nude as focusing both on aesthetic transformation in terms of style, as well as how what she calls an “other modernity” becomes visible. As a modernist image, the nude meant very different things in different contexts. For her, the exhibition becomes an exercise in learning and unlearning of established “truths” and new knowledge.

The exhibition as testing ground is also at the core of science historian Karin Tybjerg’s chapter, “Curating the Dead Body between Medicine and Culture.” Here Tybjerg addresses the role and limits of collecting and exhibiting the contested material of the human body. She discusses historical material collected for medical purposes, arguing for exhibitions that simultaneously present the specimen as medical object and as human material with cultural and existential connections. She explains how she curated the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen to present a synthesis between medical and cultural modes of display, while also attempting maintain open discussions at the same time focusing on medical practices and research. In this way, Tybjerg argues, the museum can play an important role mediating between the medical profession and the public, who themselves are subject to medical care and decisions.

In “Fashion Curating: Unpacking a New Discipline and Practice,” ethnologist Marie Riegels Melchior analyzes recent fashion exhibitions and sees a change from historical surveys to spectacular shows or explorative laboratories, that is, exhibitions that change the focus on fashion objects from popular to “high art” visual culture. As part of this development, Riegels Melchior argues, the museum is sometimes treated more like an open use, collection-free gallery space that risks becoming a commercial venue for the fashion industry. She relates this shift to the new profession of educated fashion curators, who function as independent auteurs, often organizing the museum spaces into events that conform to recent changes in museums that focus on visitor-friendly experiences, younger audiences, and other strategies used to legitimize the museum institution in contemporary society.

Art historian Mathias Danbolt is also concerned with how exhibitions address their public. His chapter “Exhibition Addresses: The Production of Publics in Exhibitions on Colonial History” focuses on how exhibitions in museums can work as catalysts in bringing critical publics into being. Danbolt argues that curatorial modes of address condition and produce particular forms of publics, which are not predefined as in visitor studies. By analyzing the curatorial strategies in two exhibitions on colonialism in European museums of maritime history, London, Sugar and Slavery, at the Museum of London Docklands, and Tea Time: The First Globalization, at the M/S Maritime Museum of Denmark, he demonstrates how each exhibition engages with colonial legacies in radically different ways, and thus create very different publics.

Modern culture scholar Sabine Dahl Nielsen focuses on the creation of new and critical publics by developing a strategy of “multi-sited curating,” combining and connecting the exhibition site of the museum institution with a network of other exhibition sites in urban public spaces, which sometimes comprise potential sites of social conflict. Her chapter, “Multi-sited Curating as a Critical Mode of Knowledge Production,” argues for the critical potentials of multi-sited curating when dealing with urgent contemporary challenges such as migration. Dahl Nielsen bases her argument on her cocuration of the exhibition(s) Transit: Mobility and Migration in the Age of Globalisation, which is based at Denmark’s KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge, with installations in train stations, transit spaces, and local trains that travel from the center of Copenhagen to its suburbs. The project not only exhibits already existing art works but also actively commissions new art projects and involves contemporary artists in curating specific sites themselves. In this way, the multisited exhibition, like the aforementioned exhibitions in this section that probe subject matter, contexts, publics, and disciplines, transgress the traditional institutional boundaries of the museum.

Note

1Bruce W. Ferguson, “Exhibition Rhetorics: Material Speech and Utter Sense,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (New York: Routledge, 1996), 183.

1Curatorship as Bildungsroman

Or, from Hamlet to Hjelmslev

Donald Preziosi

Curatorship—the practice of curating—is, to put it bluntly, a dangerous practice. As a theatrical performance, it involves the critical use of parts of the material environment both for constructing and deconstructing the premises, promises, and potential consequences of what are conventionally understood as realities, or social, cultural, political, philosophical, or religious truths. It is a way of using things to think with and to reckon with—to struggle with and against—their possible consequences. It is an epistemological technology: a craft of thinking.¹ As such, it is not innocent or innocuous, and may even be terror-inducing, eliciting what Plato referred to as theios phobos, or “divine fear” or “holy terror.” We always and everywhere navigate the world in relation to our perceptions of its formations; perceptions that are continually changing as the world turns.

Curating entails the conscious juxtaposition and orchestration of what in various Western traditions were distinguished as “subjects” and “objects”: what are conventionally differentiated as “agents,” and as what is “acted upon.” Curating not only precedes and is more fundamental than exhibitions, galleries, collections, and museums; but it is also not unique, nor exclusive, to any of those institutions and professions. In fact, it is not even an “it” at all but is, rather, a way of using things: potentially any things.²

In short, curating is a creative performance using the world to think about, and both affirm and transform, the world. It is semiautonomous of other copresent social practices, existing primarily in explicit or implicit relation to what it is contrasted with. And the most important “other” in that equation is religion: artistry and religiosity are deponent or dependent positions with respect to representation, inextricably interrelated. Neither art nor religion exist autonomously, but semiautonomously, each defined primarily in relationship to its other. Contemporary debates over curatorship thus will be more adequately understood and reckoned with as aspects of this more fundamental discourse. For those of us concerned with the so-called challenges facing museums, exhibitions, and collections, any investigation into such issues should more realistically unfold within these broader and deeper contexts. What is being curated coexists with its curations. Above all, curating itself is a challenge to what is taken as reality.

A very great deal is therefore at stake in the critique of curatorship. In fact, there are three general dimensions to that practice. Whether we use the term to refer to the caring, organizing, and managing of objects or phenomena, whether material or virtual, curating is, firstly, a form of stagecraft, or the orchestration of entities or phenomena in space-time. Secondly, it is a mode of dramaturgy, or the practice of dramatic orchestrations. Thirdly, the theatricality of curating is also a rhetorical practice, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Thinking and doing exhibitions
• Part I Curating within the changing role of museums as Bildung institutions
• Part II Exhibitions and/as research
• Part III Revisiting the past and challenging canons
• Concluding remarks
• Index