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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

The role of the curator

Glenn Close But No Cigar

18:21 / 06.12.06

Recent years have seen a decisive shift in the role of the museum / gallery curator, from a custodian of art to something closer to a movie producer, or even to an 'auteur'. Well-known contemporary examples include Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jens Hoffmann, Francesco Bonami, Maria Lind, Polly Staple etc.

What do you think - if anything - of this shift? Does it signal an exciting new(ish) limnal postition between artist and curator, or does it signal only members of what was traditionally considered to be a hands-off, academic profession overstepping the mark? Can a curator be a 'creative', and if so what are the limit-conditions of her/his creativity?

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19:08 / 06.12.06

Clearly with the shift in museums the role of the curator has to change somehow. Museums, to remain relevant, have to become somewhat more than wunderkammers, and the museums that are doing that most effectively either have a very different notion of what a curator is, or they have no curators as we are used to thinking of them at all. Other museums often have to struggle against their curators to accomplish such modern necessities as exciting educational programming and community collaboration.

According to the last information I heard, at Te Papa Tongarewa, the National Museum of New Zealand, they've exchanged exhibition curators for concept leaders. Concept leaders organize and facilitate teams that include education staff, collections staff, and content experts in order to collaboratively develop effective exhibitions. They do have content area directors who seem to be fairly traditional in terms of their job description— they know the stuff, they protect the stuff, they get the stuff to and from other museums, and they write about the stuff.

I'm planning to become a museum curator, but I'm getting my MA in museum education. I want to be someone who combines the expertise of a curator with a passion for education, and who realizes that education is the foremost service that a museum can provide. The kind of learning that can take place from actually seeing and interacting with real objects is irreplaceable. If museums were only meant to be storehouses, we might just as well lock all that stuff in ever-expanding vaults. To me the new curator is first an educator with a firm grasp on modern learning theory, then a collaborator with communities and individuals, then an expert and a researcher, and finally a caretaker. Collections and conservation staff can do a fine job of taking care of objects.

Please bear in mind that I'm speaking as someone primarily familiar and concerned with anthropology, cultural, and archaeology museums. Contemporary art museums have different concerns, and I'm less familiar with their issues.

20:46 / 07.12.06

I think its quite common at the moment for exhibiting artists to double up as artistic curators and i have noticed that a lot more than i have the curator becoming auteur. I see this involvement of the artist in the curation process is a natural evolution of the kind of cultural bricolage evident in the YBA movewment, but, instead of making gestures with different cultural citations, gestures are made with the combination of other artists work.

This has been used to great effect recently in edinburgh's fruitmarket gallery with Tacita Dean's show and the Dada's Boys exhibition.

Glenn Close But No Cigar

12:36 / 09.12.06

I'd argue that the 'artist as curator' paradigm has been with us a lot longer than that of the 'curator as auteur', and has little if anything to do with the yBas. Witness the 19thC 'Salon de Refuses', the Grosvenor Gallery in London, the work of Marcel Broodthaers.

That said, there have been some very interesting artist curated shows recently. Michael Raedecker at the Approach, Tacita Dean at the Camden Arts Centre, and the 2006 Berlin Biennial, curated (in collaboration with Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni) by Maurizo Cattelan.

Many Ravishing Imperfections, I'm interested that you characterise education / community work as being at the cutting edge of curatorial practice (I'm a curator of contemporary art, and things are a little different on my patch). Can you elaborate on the kind of education work that interests you?

19:46 / 09.12.06

Thanks for the pointers i'll check the work you mentioned out.

I wasn't really attempting to lay the responsibility for the artsist as curator paridigm at the feet of the yba, i was actually trying to describe the way i think about that particular paradigm after seeing Tacita Dean's show at the fruitmarket.

I saw The entire show as a work in its self and i thought that resulted in some interesting points about the nature of creativity especially with regard to bricolage. The way I see it, Th yba approach is to gather a few cultural citations and juxtapose them in a form of conceptual collage. although i know this approach was not invented by the yba, I think it is their work that it appears so strongly that it actually begins to blot out any other concerns whatsoever.

With this in mind, it seemed the logical evolution of this process is to take away the actuial references and replace them with the actual works themselves, making your statement and gestures that way.

so i suppose, to get on topic, I think that the blurring of the line between artist and curator is evidence of changes in the way that creativity is concieved, moving away from the idea of the genius creator and towards that of the bricoleur, the artist which provides a new or different reading of culture by digesting parts of it and expressing hir particular take through the means which are most appropriate.