Ways of Curating’ hal foster review

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ExhibitionistsHal Foster

Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich ObristPenguin, 192 pp, £9.99, March, ISBN 978 0 241 95096 8

Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World – And Everything Else by David BalzerPluto, 140 pp, £8.99, April, ISBN 978 0 7453 3597 1

The Surrealists liked to proclaim that everyone who dreams is a poet, and Joseph Beuys that

everyone who creates is an artist. So much for the utopian days of aesthetic egalitarianism;

maybe the best we can say today is that everyone who compiles is a curator. We curate our

favourite photographs, songs and restaurants, or use numerous websites and applications to

do it for us. Although ‘curating’ promises a new kind of agency, it might deliver little more

than a heightened level of administration, as cultural interests are packaged as ‘curated’

consumption. Often enough this packaging is algorithmically automatic: ‘If you like that,

you’ll love this.’ Such ‘curating’ suits a postindustrial economy in which our main task, when

it is not to serve, is to consume. And when we curate songs or restaurants, or Spotify or Eater

do it for us, what do we actually produce? As ‘cognitive labourers’, we manipulate

information, which is to say we curate the given, and this compiling often presumes a good

amount of compliance. Who among us considers what is signed over when we click ‘I agree’?

This problem is not taken up by the Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in his brief account

of his formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on by the

Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about ‘how curating took over the art

world – and everything else’. But both do point out how far we have come from the original

avatars of the term (whose root is cura or ‘care’): the curatores, the civil servants who

oversaw public works like the aqueducts in ancient Rome, and the curatus, the priest who

attended to private matters like the soul in the medieval period. They also include, as any

potted history of curating must, the arrangers of Renaissance Wunderkammern (the cabinets

of curiosities whose objects pertain more to natural history than to art history), the keepers of

royal collections of art, the décorateurs of paintings in the salons of the 18th century, and the

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organisers of such museums as the Louvre after the royal collections were nationalised.

Several of the scholars who founded the modern discipline of art history, such as Alois Riegl,

were also important curators (Riegl oversaw the textile collections at the Museum of Applied

Arts in Vienna in the late 19th century). Closer to our time, however, a divide opened up

between the university and the museum, as some academics were attracted to theory while

most curators stuck to connoisseurship. This divide was less marked between academics and

curators who worked on premodern periods – the Renaissance expert Michael Baxandall, for

example, was greatly respected in both worlds – and some curators of 20th-century art are

much admired in the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of

such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more

telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate –

1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than

between scholarly curators and flashy exhibition-makers. This split first developed as the

modern art museum was penetrated by the culture industry, and then deepened as the

contemporary art world expanded into the global business of biennials and fairs; with the

first phenomenon came a demand for on-site entertainment, with the second a need for

far-flung attractions. Little wonder that spectacle came to rule the day.

Obrist evinces this split between curator and impresario in his account of his own lineage. He

picks out Henry Cole, the entrepreneur of the Great Exhibition in 1851, who erected the iron

and glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park not far from where Obrist currently works in the

Serpentine Galleries. He also cites Sergei Diaghilev, the animator of the Ballets Russes, as a

pioneer of the ‘modern form of Gesamtkunstwerk’. Of course leaders of early 20th-century

movements like Futurism and Dada were showmen too: Marinetti published his ‘Founding

Manifesto of Futurism’ on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, and Tristan Tzara was a

relentless promoter of Dada events. The avant-garde, mass media and scandal have often

gone together; the difference today is that the proportions are way out of whack.

At the same time Obrist pays homage to serious curators who were not primarily

provocateurs: the German Alexander Dorner, who directed the Hanover Museum from 1925

until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1937, commissioned avant-garde artists to design radical

exhibition schemes; the Dutch Willem Sandberg, a member of the Resistance, who as curator

and director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam between 1945 and 1962, championed

experimental artists as they groped for a way forward after the Second World War; and the

American Walter Hopps, who, with his staging of a landmark Duchamp retrospective in

Pasadena in 1963, sparked a rethinking of Dada for an entire generation of Pop, Minimalist

and conceptual artists in the United States. Obrist reserves his highest praise, though, for his

immediate godfathers: the Swede Pontus Hultén, who, as head of the Moderna Museet in


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Stockholm, organised the first Warhol retrospective in 1968 and went on to be the founding

director of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los

Angeles; the Swiss Harald Szeemann, who advanced Post-Minimalist art involving

unexpected materials and methods with his legendary exhibition Live in Your Head: When

Attitudes Become Form in Berne in 1969; and the German Kasper König, who pioneered the

display of site-specific sculpture with an exhibition in Münster in 1977 (he has restaged this

Skulptur Projekte every decade since). That Obrist singles out these three is telling, for they

can be seen as transitional figures between the old school of modernist curators like Dorner

and Sandberg and the new breed of spectacular exhibition-makers today. Szeemann actually

preferred the label Ausstellungsmacher, and Obrist calls König a ‘cultural impresario’ as if

there were nothing problematic about the job description.

In our time this line of exhibition-makers has split in two. Curators like Okwui Enwezor, who

heads the Venice Biennale this year, and Lynne Cooke, senior curator at the National Gallery

in Washington, continue to produce ambitious theme shows à la Szeemann and König. But a

problem had already emerged in the 1990s: as some artists began to act as curators, rooting

in storage rooms and exposing objects that museums would prefer not to exhibit, some

curators began to behave like artists, juxtaposing works as if they were just so much aesthetic

material to manipulate. Obrist shies away from this tendency: ‘I don’t believe in the creativity

of the curator,’ he writes. Yet whatever his critics say, Obrist doesn’t fit the category of flashy

exhibition-makers either. The standout figure here is Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large

at MoMA, who is more likely to appear in the celebrity pages than in art magazines (he has

arranged mostly vacuous retrospectives for crossover stars like Marina Abramović and

Björk). Life-styling of this sort is depressing: such ‘curationism’ has little relation to

scholarship, let alone to criticism (both are decidedly uncool), and little of the sense of service

to patrimony or public that still motivates some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the

practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must

understand the apparatus he or she is ‘threaded through’ in order to challenge, if not to

change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to be so threaded, and many

curators only too eager to do the threading. Szeemann and König came up against a rigid

system that they worked to free up; the new breed of exhibition-makers appears content not

only to inhabit that loosened system, but to be the ‘agents’ (as they like to say) of its

exploitation by the fashion, music and entertainment industries.

Obrist is earnest in his commitment to his artists; he describes his first encounters with the

Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the French Christian Boltanski and the German

Gerhard Richter as conversion experiences. And though he looks all of his 47 years, his

energy has not flagged: a recent profile in the New Yorker counted roughly two thousand

trips, 2400 hours of taped conversations and two hundred catalogues over the last twenty


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years (he has assistants, but still). Obrist arranged his first exhibition in a tiny kitchen while

he was a student at St Gallen, and apparently he hasn’t cooked, or slept, much ever since;

most of his life is spent on the road, seeking out collaborators and dreaming up exhibitions as

if there were no tomorrow. Indeed the present – the sense of presence – is foremost in his

sights. Obrist reports an epiphanic conversation with Matthew Barney in January 2000 about

‘a new hunger among artists for live experience’, and like his curatorial colleagues in

‘relational aesthetics’, Nicolas Bourriaud, head of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and

Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Moderna Museet, he is devoted to ‘time-based’ art,

especially performances and installations staged by artists of his generation like Rirkrit

Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster – apparently

more formal work is too slow.[1]

For Obrist curating involves not only extensive collaboration but also ‘infinite conversation’.

In 2006, with another ‘mentor’, Rem Koolhaas, he launched the Serpentine Marathon, a

‘24-hour polyphonic knowledge festival where all kinds of disciplines meet’, and he has

adapted this strategy of accumulation to other forms too, with compilations of ‘manifestos for

the 21st century’, instructions for artworks to be made by others, as well as hundreds of

interviews. This is not for everyone (for Sartre hell is other people; for me other people

talking non-stop is a worse place), and certainly not enough attention is given to the quality of

the discourse, or of the ‘community’ effected. For Obrist the doing is all.

These books by Obrist and Balzer, along with other volumes by Terry Smith and Paul O’Neill,

help us to pick out three preconditions for the recent shift in exhibition-making, which should

be grasped dialectically.[2] The first was the conceptual art of the 1960s, especially as it

prompted the ‘post-studio’ and ‘post-medium’ practices of the 1970s and 1980s. As Obrist

says, conceptualism challenged ‘the idea of art as the production of material objects’,

permitting almost anything – a statement, a snapshot, the slightest gesture – to qualify. On

the one hand, this opened up the field of art, as is evident in the interdisciplinary terms that

Obrist sees as essential to contemporary production – the Gesamtkunstwerk, the library, the

archive, the collection, the laboratory. On the other hand, this interdisciplinarity has often

come at the cost of disciplinary rigour, and the expansion of art has also meant an extension

of its administration – in the sense of its market management as well as its academic study.

Moreover, what art is a better match for an economy of ‘cognitive labour’ than one given over

to immaterial knowledge? Obrist champions the ‘creative self’, which is the very term used by

Luc Boltanski in his analysis of the ‘new spirit of capitalism’, and the Obristian motto ‘Don’t

Stop’ perfectly suits the work regime that Jonathan Crary called, in a recent polemic,

‘24/7’.[3]

Second, the shift in exhibition-making with Szeemann and König has had ambiguous


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consequences, which might be captured by way of a statement made by Jean-François

Lyotard – ‘the exhibition is a postmodern dramaturgy’ – on the occasion of his 1985 show at

the Centre Pompidou, Les Immatériaux, which Obrist regards as another landmark. (The

press release suggests the flavour of the event: ‘A whirlwind of stopped paths where you will

draw your own. Sites of biogenetics and visual arts, architecture and astrophysics, of music

and food, of physics and clothing, a maze of linguistical machines, of habitats and

photography, industry and law. Miles of invisible wiring. And our questions: reality, material,

equipment, matrix of meaning, and who is the author?’) On the one hand, this ‘postmodern

dramaturgy’ suggests a way in which the theme show, opened up to philosophers like

Lyotard, can stage key questions of the time, as Les Immatériaux did in relation to his theses

about the end of ‘master narratives’ and the rise of new knowledge protocols. On the other

hand, such staging can easily slip from inquiry into showmanship. There is a further twist

with Obrist, who in the end is more networker than impresario, for if we are to believe Luc

Boltanski, networking is more conducive to the new spirit of capitalism than spectacle is. In a

sense Obrist is a human aggregator, almost a social-media-in-person or a hive-mind of one.

This is implicit not only in his hectic meeting and greeting but also in his semi-anonymous

prose, which calls to mind the language of a collective Wiki-brain. For a Bildungsroman of a

kind, Ways of Curating doesn’t display much personality; Obrist is rather like Warhol in this

regard (certainly they share a compulsion to record), a cipher who is at once iconic and

spectral.[4]

Third, 1989 is a hinge moment for this generation of curators. Born in 1968, Obrist pins his

hopes on the transformative years when he came of age, and in many ways he is a product of

the cultural interchange facilitated by ‘the new Europe’. Inspired by the Martinican writer

Edouard Glissant, Obrist is also taken by notions of artistic ‘creolisation’ and ‘archipelic

thought’. Yet what Glissant and Obrist call a new mondialité that allows for cultural alterity

others might see as a globalisation that homogenises such differences. It is both, of course,

and that is what must be understood. At times Obrist is almost Panglossian about our

neoliberal age; I suppose it would be hard to move as fast as he does if he weren’t powered by

positive thinking.

And what about all those shows, conversations and books, with the prospect of many more to

come? Obrist is exemplary but not singular in this respect, and it prompts one to wonder for

what present, let alone what future, such archives are compiled. What viewer-reader, now or

later, will be able to process it all? (Could it be that all this curating needs a … curator?)

Obrist presents his project, especially the conversation marathons, as a ‘protest against

forgetting’ (a phrase borrowed from Eric Hobsbawm, one of his many interviewees), but his

avant-gardism also commits him to ceaseless innovation. One of his guiding principles is that

an exhibition ‘should always invent a new rule of the game’, or at least ‘a new display feature’.


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And Obrist thinks in terms not of specific histories of forms, genres, mediums or even

exhibitions, but of one big ‘history of the format’; the last lines in his credo concern how

‘digital curating’ will develop ‘new formats’ for ‘our future’. All this flying around, inventing

rules and reformatting might indeed be a protest against forgetting; it could also be a fast

track to oblivion.

[1] I attempted to account for this ‘hunger for live experience’ in the LRB of 19 March.

[2] Thinking Contemporary Curating by Terry Smith (Independent Curators, 256 pp., $20,

2012, 978 0 916365 86 8); The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) by Paul

O’Neill (MIT, 192 pp., £19.95, 2012, 978 0 262 01772 5).

[3] 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary (Verso, 144 pp., £7.99,

June 2014, 978 1 78168 310 1).

[4] Obrist also resembles Peyman in Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island: ‘Peyman, for

us, was everything and nothing … both individually and severally, our scattered, half-formed

notions and intuitions, fields of research which would otherwise have lain fallow, found no

bite and purchase on the present moment – he connected all these to a world of action and

event, a world in which stuff might actually happen; connected us, that is, to our own age …

And, at the same time, he was nothing. Why? Because, in playing this role, he underwent a

kind of reverse camouflage (some anthropologists do speak of such a thing). The concepts he

helped generate and put in circulation were so perfectly tailored to the age on whose high seas

they floated, their contours so perfectly aligned with those of the reality from which they were

drawn and onto which they constantly remapped themselves, that you’d find yourself coming

across some new phenomenon, some trend – in architecture or town planning or brand

strategy or social policy, in Europe, the States, India, it didn’t matter what or where – and

saying: Oh, Peyman came up with a term for this; or: That’s a Peyman thing. You’d find

yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman had named or

invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements and precipitations, everywhere,

till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.’

Vol. 37 No. 11 · 4 June 2015 » Hal Foster » Exhibitionists

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