Paul O’Neill The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Cultures (2012)
O’Neill traces the development of the curatorial process and ideas through the 20th century detailing how the artistic curator developed from a person attached to an institution, responsible for the care and display of the artworks within its collection, through a period in the 1960s when the artist became more involved with the process of how their works should be viewed, and then later in the century the role of the curator becoming less attached to specific institutions and becoming more of an artistic creator of exhibitions.
Of course, it could be argued that from the beginning of the arts academies of France and later Great Britain the display of works very much influenced what value was placed on the individual works. The hierarchy of genres, with historical and religious subjects being at the top and still life paintings at the bottom, determined where on the walls the paintings would be hung, the history paintings got pride of place at eye level while the lesser genres of landscape, still life etc. would be placed higher up the walls towards the ceiling.
In the mid 20th century modernist ideas of media specificity espoused by Greenberg and others gave way to post-modernist ideas, blurring boundaries between painting, sculpture and performance creating a new approach to artistic events and exhibitions. This led to much greater interaction between curators and artists and led to the disassociation of the curatorial process from institutions and a greater role for individual curators.
This is exemplified by the exhibition in 1969 titled “557,087” curated by Lucy Lippard. As O’Neill writes:
By 1969, the convergence of artistic and curatorial praxis was causing confusion as to what actually constituted the authorial medium of the respective producers. A landmark exhibition in this regard was Lucy Lippard’s “557,087” for which, in many cases, Lippard herself installed or made work based on the instructions of absent artists. (O’Neill, 2012)
This led one critic to suggest that ‘Lucy Lippard is in fact the artist and her medium is other artists’ (ibid). This process later went a stage further and the Lyon Biennial in 2007 saw the curators Obist and Moison invite about 50 other curators to each present an artist which O’Neill describes as ‘curated curators curating artists’ (ibid).
The process of curation involves many different aspects of how artistic works may be presented to the public. As can be seen by the examples above, exhibitions may be for single or multiple artists, they may contain art from a single period or be a juxtaposition of works from different eras. They may also have a specific relationship to the site or be a ‘white cube’ type of display showcasing individual pre-existing works.
The siting of an exhibition can raise many issues. At one level the internal structure and surroundings will affect how the works are seen by the viewer, and importantly how individual pieces relate to each other. It may also be the case that an artist’s work relates to the surroundings both inside and outside the venue. In my own case for example much of my work is based upon the colours, shapes and textures that can be found in a close examination of the landscape of the Suffolk coast. For this reason, my choice of works that I would exhibit in a gallery in that coastal region has much more relevance to visitors to the exhibition.
O’Neill writes that ‘Whichever form exhibitions take, they are also the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, the point at which “signification is constructed, maintained, and occasionally, deconstructed”, where one can establish and administer meanings of art.’(O’Neill, 2012) I would also argue that they also form a critical part of the monetary economy as far as artists are concerned.
O’Neill, P., 2012. The culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts London.