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Exhibitionists
Hal Foster
Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Penguin, 192 pp, 9.99, March, ISBN 978 0 241 95096 8
Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World And Everything Else by David Balzer
Pluto, 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,
youll 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 dcorateurs 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 Hultn, 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 Knig, who pioneered the
display of site-specific sculpture with an exhibition in Mnster 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 Knig 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 la Szeemann and Knig. 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 dont believe in the creativity
of the curator, he writes. Yet whatever his critics say, Obrist doesnt 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 Abramovi and
Bjrk). 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 Knig 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 hasnt 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 cole 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 ONeill,
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 Dont
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 Knig has had ambiguous

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

Lyotard the exhibition is a postmodern dramaturgy on the occasion of his 1985 show at
the Centre Pompidou, Les Immatriaux, 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 Immatriaux 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 doesnt 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 mondialit 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 werent 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
ONeill (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 McCarthys 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 youd 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 didnt matter what or where and
saying: Oh, Peyman came up with a term for this; or: Thats a Peyman thing. Youd find
yourself saying this several times a weekthat 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
pages 13-14 | 2583 words
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