Issue # 09/11 Freely distributed, non - commercial, digital publication CURA- TING CRI- TIQUE: 02 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique CONTENTS / 5 FOREWORD MARIANNE EIGENHEER 7 CURATING CRITIQUE – AN INTRODUCTION DOROTHEE RICHTER AND BARNABY DRABBLE 11 MERZ-THINKING – SOUNDING THE DOCUMENTA PROCESS BETWEEN CRITIQUE AND SPECTACLE SARAT MAHARAJ 19 CURATORIAL CRITICALITY – ON THE ROLE OF FREELANCE CURATORS IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ART BEATRICE VON BISMARCK 24 EXPERIMENTS ALONG THE WAY –I AM A CURATOR AND SUPPORT STRUCTURE PER HÜTTNER AND GAVIN WADE IN AN INTERVIEW WITH BARNABY DRABBLE 29 WORDS FROM AN EXHIBITION RUTH NOACK AND ROGER M. BUERGEL 32 FALSE ECONOMIES – TIME TO TAKE STOCK REBECCA GORDON NESBITT 39 GOING BEYOND DISPLAY – THE MUNICH KUNSTVEREIN YEARS MARIA LIND IN AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL O’NEILL 43 THE CURATORIAL FUNCTION – ORGANIZING THE EX/POSITION OLIVER MARCHART 03 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique 47 EXHIBITIONS AS CULTURAL PRACTICES OF SHOWING: PEDAGOGICS DOROTHEE RICHTER 53 CURATING ART AFTER NEW MEDIA – ON TECHNOLOGY, TRANSPARENCY, PRESERVATION AND PLAY BERYL GRAHAM AND SARAH COOK IN AN INTERVIEW WITH BARNABY DRABBLE 59 PRODUCING PUBLICS – MAKING WORLDS! ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ART PUBLIC AND THE COUNTERPUBLIC MARION VON OSTEN 68 ‘WE WERE NOBODY. WE WERE NOTHING’: SOUNDING MODERNITY & ‘MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT’ SARAT MAHARAJ AND GILANE TAWADROS 72 EASY LOOKING – CURATORIAL PRACTICE IN A NEO-LIBERAL SOCIETY UTE META BAUER IN AN INTERVIEW WITH MARIUS BABIAS 78 THE WHITE WALL – ON THE PREHISTORY OF THE ‘WHITE CUBE’ WALTER GRASSKAMP 04 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique CURATING CRITIQUE MARIANNE EIGENHEER, EDITOR BARNAY DRABBLE, DOROTHEE RICHTER, GUEST EDITORS The reader presents a cross-section of the voices that populate the ongoing debate about, on the one hand, how and in what terms curating functions as a critical cultural practice, and on the other, what methodologies and histories exist with which we can critically analyse curatorial work today. This collection of essays was first published in 2007 by Revolver, in Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education as the first ICE Reader. The Reader was quickly sold-out and it is in the spirit of wishing to make the valuable contributions within available to a broader public that we are reissuing the entire book as an issue of the on-curating journal. The Book was conceived of by its guest-editors Barnaby Drabble, curator and lecturer ECAV and Dorothee Richter, curator and head of Postgraduate Program in Curating, Zurich University of the Arts, and commissioned and edited by Marianne Eigenheer, director of the Institute for Curatorship and Education at Edinburgh College of Art and editor of the ICE series. We are very grateful to all authors and contributors for their permission to re-publish, and to all supporters of the original publication. 05 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique FOREWORD MARIANNE EIGENHEER “Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.” Michel de Montaigne (Essays, 1580). When, in 2002, we began to consider what the future tasks of the new Research Institute for Curatorship and Education ICE in Edinburgh could be, we knew on thing for sure: we did not want to simply establish another “school for curators” or develop a next curatorial course and thus promote the process of institutional detachment that we have been witnessing frequently over the last few years, perpetuating the automation of self-reflexive autonomous systems within closed “contextualisations”. (The fact that we preferably deal with different discourses especially within the Anglophone and German research traditions becomes evident with the reader presented here; it brings together basic texts from both approaches, which, as we know, are often significantly at variance). “There once was a man who wanted a new boomerang. But, try as he might, he could not throw away his old one.” Our interest in research lies in mediating the complexity of what we define as art in the widest sense of the term, in other words in developing an “operating system” that attempts in all its facets to balance order and change, old and new, theory and practice, and, after reaching a solution, to frame new questions that are immanent to the process. By developing projects with different foci in terms of content we wish to create situations where propositions made rigid through the uncertainties of “not-knowing” are dissolved and penetrated, in order to gain new insights and place them in an context that is accessible to all participants involved in the process. Cultural globalisation impels us to neither negate our own background nor to take it as the only premise but to question it time and again in the contextual flow of ongoing projects. Whenever possible we try to design our ICE projects as diversified as possible in terms of content and cultural orientation and to collaborate with local, national and international partners. Patrick Panetta: How do you understand the term “curate”? Hans Ulrich Obrist: Curare. The Curator as catalyst. Extending and intensifying (from: The absurdity of Marking art, 2007) One of our main concerns is to avoid fitting the various participants involved in the curatorial process into a hierarchical; instead, we attempt to assemble different voices and create a multi-facetted image that enables us to visualise and experience interdependencies, permeabilities and transitions. In the course of the process many issues that are usually regarded as given facts – issues that have in the past shaped the views of artists, curators and other observers of Western culture, and still do today – suddenly become blurred and imprecise, no longer logically consistent. However, this can be resolved if one engages in the social processes that characterise contemporary life, as for example Zygmunt Baumann describes so convincingly in “Liquid Life” (2005). By means of polylogue, presentation and mediation are able to lend a higher degree of specification to the curatorial process and thus attain a significant and indispensable position in today’s complex art system. “In the contemporary production of images we won’t be able to understand the inherent driving forces if we don’t look to the other spheres of modern life.” (Alexander Dorner) Since the end of 2003 we have been developing interdisciplinary projects in which we include in our joint work not only the interrelated visual language but also the discipline’s specific discourses. For us it is important that young artists become involved in the curatorial process in museums and similar institutions and learn how to transpose their works of art to these specific spaces. They collaborate with scientists “in the lab” in order to explore new ways of exhibiting, including scientific objects. Of course, filing the required research applications is not always easy because, as a rule, we are not looking for new solutions but seeking novel questions, and combining this artistic approach with a scientific modus is often quite problematic. However, as the following quote by the Nobel laureate and geneticist François Jacob (Die innere Statue, Autobiographie, Zürich, 1988) shows scientific research is increasingly taking into account, and incorporating, a more artistic understanding of its approach, and the work of artists: “How does one trace research work? How comprehend a fixed idea, an enduring obsession? As in mental work focussed on a minute fragment in the universe, on a ‘system’ that is 06 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique continuously revolving, having been rotated to and fro? Above all, how does one envision the feeling of being in a labyrinth with no exit, that incessant search for a solution, without making reference to what has proven to be the solution – without being blinded by is evidence?” THE ICE READER It is this kind of research work on and around art, together with artists, scientists, curators and many other partners that we wish to present on a regular basis in the ICE readers. The first volume containing a selection of diverse texts and interviews not only provides a theoretical basis for inspiring discussions but also shows how different the approaches are between the UK and continental Europe. For this reason we have included the texts in both English and German; it shows how differently specific terms are sometimes used and understood and thus helps to uncover the source of some of the misunderstandings that we frequently face. In 2004 Barnaby Drabble, PhD student at the Edinburgh College of Art ECA and his colleague Dorothee Richter approached me in my capacity as director of ICE and asked me whether I would be willing to edit the first ICE Reader Curating Critique. They wrote the introduction and were responsible for the selection of texts. We are happy that the stimulating volume has now been published and hope for a broad and interested audience. Edinburgh, April 2007 07 Issue # 09/11 : Curating Critique 01 CURATING CRITIQUE – AN INTRODUCTION Irit Rogoff “What is a Theorist?” in DOROTHEE RICHTER AND BARNABY DRABBLE Katharyna Sykora et al (eds.) Was ist ein Künstler?,Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2004 02 “Criticality as I perceive it is precisely in the operations of recognizing limitations Information of one’s thought, for one does not learn something new until one unlearns something old, available online: www.curating 1 otherwise one is simply adding information rather than rethinking a structure.” degreezero.org 03 The end of the Nineties saw a spate of symposia and related publications looking at Roland Barthes independent and freelance practice in the field of curating, discourse about a growing Mythologies, Paris: Editions de field of practice that many of us felt had for too long remained in the dark. Since then, Seuil 1957 against the backdrop of changing working conditions for curators, the blurring of traditionally distinct roles in cultural work and an increase in the number of curatorial study-programs, curatorial practice has moved into the spotlight.