The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World 9781350114890, 9781350115361, 9781350114906

Citation preview

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Also available from Bloomsbury Aesthetics, Arts, and Politics in a Global World, by Daniel Herwitz Cosmopolitan Aesthetics, by Daniel Herwitz The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts, edited by Tomáš Koblížek The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts, edited by Andy Hamilton and Lara Pearson The Curatorial, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice Between Work and World Sue Spaid

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Sue Spaid, 2020 Sue Spaid has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Artwork in Cover Photograph: © Foundation Antoni Tapies, Barcelone/VEGAP, Madrid and DACS, London 2020. Photograph by Luk Vander Plaetse Courtesy Almine Rech Brussels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spaid, Sue, author. Title: The philosophy of curatorial practice: the work and the external world / Sue Spaid. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026783 (print) | LCCN 2020026784 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350114890 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350184015 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350114906 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350114913 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Art–Exhibition techniques. | Curatorship–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N4395 .S67 2020 (print) | LCC N4395 (ebook) | DDC 707.4–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026783 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026784 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-1489-0 PB: 978-1-3501-8401-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-1490-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-1491-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements

viii x xv

1 Introduction 1 1.1 Philosophical orientation 1 1.2 Aspect-seeing 5 1.3 Curatorial discourse 7 1.4 Overview 9 2

The curator 13 2.1 Care 13 2.2 The imagination 17 2.3 Set membership 18 2.4 Organizing principles 21 2.5 Constituency 28 2.6 Inferential properties 31 2.7 Work ’n’ world 33 2.8 The floor plan 36 2.9 Understanding versus interpretation 38 2.10 Exacted exhibitions 41 2.11 Collectors 44 2.12 Tastemakers 50 2.13 Administrators 51 2.14 Exhibitors 53

3 Spectators 57 3.1 Candidates for reception 57 3.2 The Institutional Theory of Art 61 3.3 Tools for interpretation 66 3.4 The presentation–reception model 69 3.5 Tools for understanding 72 3.6 Spectator types 74 3.7 Peer reviewers 77

vi

4

Contents

Curated exhibitions 81 4.1 Paradigm shifts 81 4.2 Schematism 84 4.3 Contextualism 92 4.4 Institutional memories 99 4.5 Unasserted thoughts 102 4.6 Aesthetic unreliability 103 4.7 Cognition 107 4.8 The paradox of incompleteness 115

5 Aesthetics 119 5.1 Relational objects 119 5.2 The Identity Theory 125 5.3 Events 129 5.4 Farewell to ‘lone authors’ 138 5.5 Exhibition users 143 5.6 Collectivity 147 5.7 Dualisms 153 5.8 Belief 160 6 Meaning-making 163 6.1 Anti-essentialism 163 6.2 Inductive reasoning 164 6.3 Two-term systems 168 6.4 Generative symbols 171 6.5 Co-present references 174 6.6 Three-term systems 175 6.7 Frege’s legacy 178 6.8 Ratiocination 179 6.9 Guitar lessons 181 6.10 Husserl’s role 184 7

Artistic directors 187 7.1 The compleat cycle 187 7.2 Space-time 190 7.3 Attention 191 7.4 Exploration (prolonged DA) 193 7.5 Interpretation (temporary IA) 196 7.6 Presentation (IA followed by DA) 198 7.7 Reception (DA followed by IA) 198

Contents

vii

8 The Übercurator 201 8.1 Artworld theories/scientific hypotheses 201 8.2 The curator as ‘meta-artist’ 204 8.3 A curatorial crisis 209 8.4 Überartists 213 8.5 Agency 215 Notes References cited Index

219 247 258

Illustrations Figures 1 Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

2 Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, National Gallery of Art, London 3 Checklist, ‘30 Americans’, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia 4 Claude Monet, ‘Haystack Paintings’, Gallery 243, Art Institute of Chicago

5 Maurizio Cattelan, ‘All’, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City 6 Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled (exhibition copy), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City

22 23 42 43 48 49

7 Käthe Kollwitz’s, Municipal Lodging, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont 86

8 9 10 11 12 13

Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Homeless, public domain

87

Unknown artist, www.greendiary.com

87

Cynda Valle, Madonna and Child, private collection

88

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 89 Marcel Duchamp, Apolinère Enameled, Philadelphia Museum of Art

93

Joseph Albers, Homage to a Square, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City

112

14 Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

15 Cleopatra’s Needle, Central Park, New York City 16 Roberto Matta-Echaurrien, The Earth Is a Man, Art Institute of Chicago

113 132 136

17 Roberto Matta-Echaurrien, The Spherical Roof Around Our Tribe (Revolvers), Museum of Modern Art, New York City

137

18 Barry Le Va, Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

158

19 Barry Le Va, Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

20 Timeline for Picasso’s ‘Brothel Painting’

159 173

Illustrations

ix

Tables 1 2 3 4 5

Aggregates 19 Presentation–Reception Model

71

1979 Exhibition’s Impact in 1979, 1994 and 1996

101

Imaginative Perception, Ordinary Perception and Cognition

107

Aesthetic Attitudes Befitting the Compleat Cycle

192

Preface Since no one book can summarize the myriad approaches that this vast, global field’s practitioners employ, I imagine some readers baulking at this book’s problematic title The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice. This book rather identifies the general conditions that distinguish curated presentations of visual art from non-curated ones. By presentation, I mean the production and implementation of site-specific artworks, public art, commissions, as well as exhibitions, indoors and outdoors. The curator refers to the person(s) responsible for presenting artworks to some public, whose reception plays an equally vital role. This book’s main premise is that visual art is closer to scores, scripts and texts than previously thought, since each presentation reflects a particular performance. After all, ‘the function proper to knowledge is not seeing or demonstrating; it is interpreting’ (Foucault 1994: 39).1 Thus, an artwork’s public presentation reflects some curator’s interpretation, leaving audience members to weave narrative threads given the context proffered by the exhibition. The approach described in these pages parallels Mieke Bal’s call to replace third-person ‘expository’ narratives, originally derived from ‘the tradition of the great realist fiction of the nineteenth century’, with exhibitions destined to enliven second persons.2 She continues: I would like to review this original situation of speech so that the ‘first person’ becomes once again visible. Then I want to highlight and analyse the exchange between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ persons, emblematized by the act of saying ‘Look!’ – an exhortation by implication address to a second person. Finally, once the first and second person positions have become explicit and interactive, the status of the ‘third person’, the object of their pointing, may be involved in other ways than simple objectification. (1996: 5)

Rather than framing exhibitions in literary terms, my approach employs scientific terms since artworks, and their accompanying presentations, are comparatively nonpropositional. Exhibitions afford curators the opportunity to test the efficacy of their hypotheses regarding the most appropriate way to interpret artworks poised for the public who in trying out the curator’s proposed art historical lenses and thematic frames serves as peer reviewers.

Preface

xi

In emphasizing reception, the view developed here is especially dependent on spectator agency and thus complements the plethora of ongoing research addressing the artworld’s top-down, exclusionary practices. Such research aims to uncover why certain artists have been given opportunities, what is shown and which kinds of artworks are collected. Following the Greeks, Hannah Arendt singled out the spectator’s significance, since only the spectator ‘occupies a position that enables him to see the whole play – as the philosopher is able to see the kosmos as a harmonious ordered whole’ (Arendt 1981: 93). Being neither autonomous (each actor enacts his/her part) nor in a position to understand what’s happening, actors are merely parts of some whole. She noted that the term ‘theory’ is derived from theatai, the Greek word for spectators (93). As for spectators’ defeating the artworld’s exclusionary practices, I’m reminded of activist curator Cecil Fergerson, who co-founded the Black Arts Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1968. This council persuaded LACMA to mount several historic African-American Art exhibitions in the early 1970s. In 1995, he and his wife Miriam presented ‘African American Representations of Masculinity’ (1995) across three Los Angeles venues. Their exhibition was in ‘response’ to the 1994 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition ‘Black Male: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.’ Curated by Thelma Golden, ‘Black Male’ travelled to the Hammer Museum in 1995. The Fergersons’ decision to organize an alternative exhibition always struck me as the most productive outcome for artists and art lovers alike, since more exhibition opportunities have a greater reach than do protests that risk escalating into endless cycles of picketing. Far more than mere displays of art, curated exhibitions furnish: relevant concepts that aid spectators’ capacity to distinguish artefacts from artworks, applicable frames for identifying later artworks’ contents and the opportunity to vary artworks’ contents owing to changing contexts. Envisioning how audiences will respond to their exhibitions, curators embed visual cues that engender particular responses. Audience members have different experiences, owing to the way inferential capacities reflect spectator types and cognitive stock. As Chapter 8 details, exhibitions that require further interpretation double as artworks. My philosophical motivations for writing this book are threefold. (1) Philosophers tend to treat artworks as autonomous singletons, despite the fact that artworks are typically selected and experienced in particular contexts, whether an exhibition, community or natural environment. (2) The curator’s largely invisible hand (as it should be) has led philosophers to exaggerate the role played by artists’ intentions, which proves misleading, since artworks’ shifting

xii

Preface

contexts and diverse audiences contribute equally to their presentational histories, whence meanings arise. (3) Although philosophers tend to view visual art as the kind of thing that need not be performed, this book demonstrates that artwork presentations are effectively performances that reflect some curator’s interpretation, much the way symphonies, films and books are performances of scores, scripts and texts, interpreted by conductors, filmmakers and publishers, respectively. For these reasons, it is hardly surprising that continental European curators claim ‘authors’ rights’ in keeping with their legal traditions (France’s droit d’auteur or Germany’s Urheberrect), a view that butts heads with Anglo-American notions of copyright, which exclude ‘ideas’, let alone performers’ ‘interpretations’ of extant artworks (Baldwin 2014: 15). Although this text distinguishes curators from artists, I neither deny that curators have authors’ rights nor do I dwell on this point, though I do flesh out exhibitions’ co-authored parameters. My focus here is rather the ongoing, collective process of meaning-making. Given how much presenters glean from prior presentations, which they later apply when conceptualizing extant and proposed artworks, authorial ‘origination’ is rather indefensible. Even before the pandemic closed down public art spaces, curators were already rethinking our profession’s carbon footprint. For at least half a century, we curators, as well as artists, have depended on air travel both to present artworks abroad and to explore artistic practices happening elsewhere. Moreover, few art insurers actually insure artworks shipped via ecological options such as boat, train or FedEx/DHL, even as shipments become outré. During this same period, artists across the globe have transformed degraded sites, resulting in innovative prototypes (replicable strategies) for reforestation, landscape/stream restoration, coral reef regeneration, groundwater preservation, phytoremediation, habitat restoration, rainwater harvesting, wasteland protection, regenerative agriculture, renewable energies and managing stormwater runoff (Spaid 2002, 2017). Already in motion, the next ecological transformation will occur indoors, as citizens amp up their protests against museums awash in fossil-fuel funding, while curators and artists consciously devise alternatives to air travel, crating/ shipping artworks, building/painting walls, digital printing, sticky vinyl and large print runs. I imagine object labels one day listing each artwork’s carbon footprint alongside the artist’s name, title, date and materials, much the way packaged foods list calories. Both the Museum of Modern Art’s $450 million expansion into the former American Folk Art Museum and LACMA’s $650 million Peter Zumthor–designed amorphous building straddling Wilshire Boulevard are

Preface

xiii

exemplary of moves by American museums to showcase collections, in order to reduce carbon footprints. Knowing full well that a transformation is underfoot, it’s increasingly clear that what we consider art today and how we currently experience it will no doubt change a lot by 2030, the year UN IPCC has identified as the last chance to drastically reduce carbon emissions. As museums, museum trustees/staff and artists start calculating their carbon foot prints, I imagine that there will be many more museum exhibitions comprised of artworks from the museum’s collection, local artists and local collectors. More and more museums will reward visitors who access exhibitions via public transportation. If museums stop shipping particular artworks across the globe to be assembled en masse, provenance may one day be irrelevant. As such, artworks’ contexts may vary less over centuries and their presentational histories might reflect published rather than exhibited presentations, enabling art writers to resume responsibilities lost to curators, during the era when exhibitions held sway. Finally, I worry that firsthand experiences with contemporary art will only occur in commercial venues, such as auction houses, art fairs and galleries. No doubt, the next decade will inspire/force huge transformations in visual art. How the urgent need for artworlders to reduce their carbon footprints will affect curated exhibitions – this book’s central topic – is anybody’s guess. I imagine a far-greater emphasis on artworks that avoid shipping, installation/ de-installation and then storage. Even if the ‘curated exhibition’ is a relic in ten years’ time, the ideas described herein will remain in play, so long as curators are responsible for interpreting artworks to be presented to some public. Those who read this book closely may find it somewhat repetitive. I wrote it imagining readers searching for explanations, who thus find themselves smack in the middle of the text. For this reason, I circle back and forth as much as possible, so that readers can grasp how later points relate to earlier ones. I also aim to identify aspects of analytic aesthetics that prove useful for understanding visual art. On this level, this book represents my efforts to demonstrate that analytic aesthetics has more in common with continental philosophy than ordinarily believed, which is why I elaborate upon many well-known analytic arguments. Although I occasionally touch upon ethical issues related to curatorial practice, such as truthfulness of curator’s claims, fidelity to artists and authenticity, my primary concerns here are epistemic. As such, this book’s orientation is epistemological, since it’s meant to characterize curatorial practice, exhibitions and artworks as accurately as possible. I thus devote a large chunk of

xiv

Preface

this text to describing exhibitions’ role in knowledge production from providing first-hand experiences to engendering third-person knowledge and eventually second-order knowledge (common knowledge) that becomes art history. To my lights, cognitive scientists ought to study curatorial practice, since this process offers an as-yet-untapped macro-model for micro-cognition.

Acknowledgements I have often said that everything I know (and not just about art) I learned either by working alongside artists or by trying to write about their artworks. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have worked with hundreds of artists on as many exhibitions. I’ve certainly learned a lot since 1986, when I got my first taste of the artworld by helping three artists attract visitors to ‘On the Waterfront’, a DIY exhibition in a DUMBO loft on a Sunday afternoon. At the time, I was working sixty-hour weeks as an interest-rate swap analyst for PaineWebber in midtown Manhattan and had no plans to study philosophy, let alone enter the artworld. Two years later, when a promised posting to a London job fell through, I suddenly felt an urge to become an art writer, so I enrolled in the MA programme in philosophy at Columbia University. There, I encountered Arthur Danto with whom I remained friends until his passing in 2013. Arthur seemed so pleased by my having become a gallerist and art writer that he tried on numerous occasions to dissuade me from pursuing a PhD. At the time, he seemed a bit disenchanted with the field. Were he still alive, he would no doubt find the range of topics, styles and voices permeating aesthetics these days exhilarating. Another important character from that era is Gary Kornblau, who left Columbia right before my arrival. He gave me my start in the artworld, selling advertisements for the bimonthly journal Art issues. which moved me from NYC to Los Angeles in 1989. In September 2005, hundreds of people showed up for the debate, sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, titled ‘Aboutness vs. Isness’, during which Arthur and I publicly debated our divergent views. Since I didn’t manage to get a word in edgewise that evening this book is effectively my defence of isness, which probably would never have come to pass had I not found aboutness so problematic. My differing account largely stemmed from my having worked so closely with artists. While I wholeheartedly agree that artworks are the kinds of things that urge interpretations, aboutness is hardly co-present with artworks upon completion. As these pages make clear, if aboutness does exist, it can take decades to furnish it since it arises from consecutive presentations in public exhibitions and articles over time.

xvi

Acknowledgements

A year later, I moved to Philadelphia to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Temple University. Back then, Temple faculty included six philosophers working in aesthetics and several working in phenomenology, all of whom significantly rattled me, especially Joe Margolis. Most amazingly, ‘Art and Society’ was a required course for several Temple majors, so I had great fun assigning students to experience the PMA’s Duchamp galleries, which are discussed throughout this book. For the first five years, my dissertation was focused on the imagination. At the very last minute, Fred Dewey suggested I switch to curating. I was initially quite hesitant, since no philosophical material existed on this topic. Plus I didn’t imagine Temple letting me tackle such an interdisciplinary topic. Soon after, I presented ‘The Role of Exhibitions in Conceptualizing Artworks’ at the 2012 Eastern Division meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics (ASA). Not only was Ivan Gaskell’s response instructive and encouraging but Sherri Irvin agreed to be on my dissertation committee. Moreover, the audience’s questions and interest indicated that I’d finally stumbled upon a hot topic. Although I defended my dissertation in Spring 2013, I continued refining its ideas by presenting its various aspects at universities and ASA conferences. The very next year, Rossen Ventzislavov published ‘Idle Arts: Reconsidering the Curator’ in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (JAAC). The gloves were off! The curator’s role had seeped into the philosophy sphere.1 Not only did JAAC publish my rejoinder but, in 2018, Rossen and I publicly debated ‘Are Curators Artists?’ at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Such a book would be unthinkable without images. I especially thank gallerist Almine Rech and photographer Luk Vander Plaetse for supplying such a dynamic cover photograph, and the Foundation Antoni Tàpies (Barcelone/ VEGAP, Madrid and DACS, London) for granting permission. I heartily thank the copyright holders who agreed to publish their images herein, especially those who offered them for free such as Museo Nacional del Prado, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pomona College Museum of Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. I also thank those whom I tracked down: painter Cynda Valle, photographer Scott McIntyre and conservation-archaeologist Per Storemyr. A giant ‘thank you’ accrues to my husband Jean-François Paquay, who generously printed and bound manuscripts for me to rework. Finally, I thank the many artists whose ideas, ambitions and concerns continue to inspire my curatorial and philosophical endeavours.

1

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s approach, various terms and summarizes each chapter.

1.1  Philosophical orientation For too long, the artworld has lacked its own theories for understanding how people experience visual art. To grasp such experiences, artworlders initially adapted literary theory and then folded in film theory, given its additional capacity to accommodate imagery. In emphasizing the wordless interplay between work and world, The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice aims to furnish the artworld its relevant model, such that exhibitions ‘bring the work [emphasis mine] in contact with the external world [emphasis mine] by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications’ (Duchamp 1973: 140). No doubt, exhibition titles, object labels, explanatory panels, brochures, guided tours and catalogue essays literally envelope exhibitions in words. Despite this plethora of words, curated exhibitions avail requisite references sensorially, thus tethering work to world – in other words, enabling audiences to access and assess contents of otherwise ineffable artworks. The telltale sign of the curator’s invisible hand is spectators’ ready capacity to infer concepts. If inference fails to flow, the exhibition is probably not curated! Although this book arises out of the philosophical tradition known as analytic aesthetics, it effectively bridges both traditions, since continental philosophy permeates the artworld. When I moved to New York City in 1984, the artworld was already awash in theories proposed by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Although most of these authors never really address curating or exhibitions, per se, their views have grounded the artworld’s understanding of visual

2

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

art experiences since the 1960s. For example, exhibitions and artworks that demonstrate the falseness of prevailing views are said to deconstruct earlier positions (following Derrida), while Barthes (following Marcel Duchamp) challenged authorial authority. Foucault demonstrated how nineteenthcentury scholars employed the archaeological (or rule formation), a methodology familiar to curators. The naturalists, economists and grammarians employed the same rules to define the objects proper to their own study, to form their concepts, to build their theories. It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal, by isolating, as their specific locus, a level that I have called, somewhat arbitrarily, archaeological. (Foucault 1994: x)

Thanks in part to continental philosophy, most artworlders share a wholesale suspicion of authorial authority, institutional theories of art, autonomous artworks and artists’ intentions, a view that was less true of analytic aesthetics until quite recently. Around the millennium, literary scholar Roger Seamon summarized analytic aesthetics’ models as having passed through the chronology of Mimesis, Expressionism, Formalism and Conceptualism. Each of these author-centred models presupposes the possibility that the artist’s intentions are determinate rather than determinable (Margolis 2009: 136), and cast spectators in the role of attempting to ascertain the creator’s intent. They suggest that visual artists make artworks with some intent to prod viewers to see, believe, feel or consider something in particular. The spectator’s pet project then is to determine what the artist must have wanted him/her to see, believe, feel or consider, in light of the artwork’s construction and the artist’s historical circumstances. Focused on presentation, these paradigms presume some symmetry between presentation and reception, even though viewer responses vary from person to person and often overwhelm presentation. In fact, vision scientists have identified three distinct exhibition experience types, as discussed in Chapter 3. This book aims to challenge views that privilege presentation over reception, since such views place undue weight on various contributing factors, such as (1) the artwork, (2) the artist’s intentions, (3) the curator and (4) the viewer’s cognitive stock, since the viewer with the greatest cognitive stock is believed to be best suited to grasp what the artist intended when he/she created the object at hand. How thus can we explain that ordinary school children are often quite capable of finding artworks meaningful in ways that elude their parents and

Introduction

3

teachers? Is it a question of cognitive stock, or could it be something else far more profound, perhaps unteachable or even unlearnable? Analytic aesthetic’s tendency to overemphasize artists’ intentions has led some philosophers to view each artwork as having only one accurate meaning, though many legitimate interpretations. The philosophical trick, then, is to identify the method that determines which legitimate interpretation is the correct meaning. But who gets to adjudicate this? The artist? An artwork’s owner? Some ‘meaning umpire’? And if there is only one correct meaning (or best meaning), how is it that the same artwork continues to appear in different exhibitions, some with even contrary hypotheses? Is the curator who dares to challenge the artwork’s correct meaning an imposter, or at best a prankster, keen for fun at the public’s expense? Is the artist who lends his/her artwork a willing accomplice to this prank, or just a desperate co-conspirator, eager for some quick publicity? A similar dilemma arises for the philosophical puzzle regarding classifying art. Arthur Danto theorized that the artworld develops theories that enable its members to determine what qualifies as art. George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art presumes that artworks undergo a baptism, whereby someone acting on behalf of the artworld confers the status of art on some artefact that was created for the artworld. Danto’s view problematically fails to capture how artworld theories originate, while Dickie’s position elevates the artwork’s status prior to its actual presentation to an artworld public. All of these aforementioned philosophical explanations neglect actual factors, which this text aims to reinstate. Philosophers working in the analytic tradition have tended to treat visual art experiences as distinct experiences with discrete objects (singletons), something that is rarely true since spectators typically experience artworks in particular contexts, whether specific sites or exhibitions. Curated exhibitions typically feature numerous artworks working in concert with one another either to test the curator’s hypotheses about the exhibited artworks or to convey the curator’s view concerning some novel way to approach some artist’s oeuvre, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the artist’s intention. Hardly singular experiences, over time, spectators encounter the same artworks in multiple exhibitions, granting them access to varying contents, which defeats the strategy of appealing to particular contents, let alone titles, to distinguish artworks.1 Analytic aesthetics’ advancing verificationist schemes such as expression and depiction presume autonomous artists who both create and present their artworks (Kulvicki 2006). Given the ideologies underlying the twin myths of the autonomous artist – deserving full credit as the lone author – and the sovereign exhibitor – who discovers ‘greatness’ – I worry that such polarizing

4

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

roles collude to exclude all of the influential collaborators along the way. What are the philosophical ramifications of crediting the many behind-the-scenes collaborators, all the while keeping the roles of curator and artist distinct, given their separate projects and aims? My approach is alternatively enactivist (Thompson 2007: 13). I view artworks as inviting spectators to grasp something particular given the world at hand, which includes first and foremost the artwork’s immediate environment, its relationship to nearby things (art and nonart), either installed on some permanent site or temporarily presented in some exhibition or art-fair booth. Monroe Beardsley defined object-directedness as ‘a willingly accepted guidance over the succession of one’s mental states by phenomenally objective properties (qualities and relations) of a perceptual or intentional field on which attention is fixed with a feeling that things are working or have worked themselves out fittingly’ (1982: 288–90). In light of Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘actants’, which refers to entangled human and nonhuman actors alike, Beardsley’s object-directedness is cast here in a dynamic relationship with Edmund Husserl’s notion of ‘directed consciousness’, originally inspired by nineteenth-century philosopher Franz Brentano’s phenomenology (Brentano 1995). Not surprisingly, Foucault rejected Husserl’s privileging: [The] observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice. (1994: xiii)

Those who consider curating a discursive practice are likely under Foucault’s spell. As we shall see, artworks are relational objects, bar none, whose contents reflect myriad influences. In fact, art’s capacity to inspire imaginations over centuries is what makes art so invaluable. Having already itemized so many of analytic aesthetics’ shortcomings, readers may wonder what value it holds for the artworld. The analytic tradition proves helpful for grasping (1) cognition (e.g. Immanuel Kant’s first critique), (2) meaning-making (e.g. Gottlob Frege’s sense/reference distinction, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s language games, Gareth Evans’s analysis of reference, Roger Scruton’s generative symbols and Danto’s indiscernibility thesis) and (3) reception (e.g. John Dewey’s Art as Experience, Husserl’s directed consciousness and Richard Wollheim’s twofold seeing). When assembled as they are here, these views demonstrate collectively how curators create contexts and spectators infer

Introduction

5

concepts from curators’ presentations. When possible, I identify links between the analytic and continental traditions. Although I can find no good reason to explain why philosophy has overlooked curators’ efforts, I do imagine that some curated exhibitions leave spectators feeling as though they have lost all autonomy.2 Still, most art forms, save improvised skits, have artistic directors who mediate spectatorial experience. Like most performances, art exhibitions remain incomplete and are entirely transient. Despite insufficient material resources, research time or access to the most fitting examples, exhibitions still feel whole (like a complete set). Unlike a symphony whose digital recording or radio broadcast serves as a stimulating substitute, art exhibitions lack ‘stimulating’ surrogates. Even travelling exhibitions, whose checklists basically remain the same, vary dramatically from site to site, since team members, environment (e.g. exhibition layout), facility (e.g. physical building) and milieu (e.g. particular community) play such crucial roles. Once an exhibition ends and the artworks have all been returned, all that physically remains are exhibition documents – the checklist, brochure/gallery guide, catalogue, installation shots, video documentation, critical reviews, exhibition archive and oral histories – most of which were generated prior to public engagement, yet they are relied upon to explain, sustain and bear witness to the curator’s original hypotheses. Moreover, once the curator finally has the opportunity to stand back and experience the exhibition, his/her hypotheses may very well have evolved. Comparable to science experiments, the exhibition’s art historical impact rests on its capacity to transform the curator’s initial hypotheses into a publicly tested, peer-reviewed outcome that survives as institutional memories.

1.2 Aspect-seeing Change an artwork’s context and the spectator is prompted to focus on different aspects. Wittgenstein termed this ‘aspect seeing’, since the thing doesn’t actually change, yet we see it differently (Wittgenstein 1968: 195e). To my lights, his emphasizing that interpretations are not properties of things frees interpretations to be as imaginative as possible, so long as work (an artwork’s varying interpretations) remains tethered to world. Even so, interpretations have a job to do, so they must be accurate and apt, which led me to Scruton’s Art and Imagination, whose differentiating ordinary and imaginative perception lies at the heart of the curatorial enterprise.

6

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Ultimately, Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘aspect-seeing’ provided me my way in. All things, whether art or not, have numerous aspects (scale, imagery, parts, colours, details, etc.), whose particular functions/meanings/purposes are not immediately identifiable. And this is especially the case for artworks. When a thing’s aspects appear to lack contents, one tries out various references in order to see which one makes some otherwise ineffable aspect meaningful. Indeed, this approach proves particularly relevant for curators, who invite spectators to focus on particular aspects that might otherwise seem like abstract blobs, but become meaningful if people can connect them to apt references sited in their immediate environment. For example, Joan Miró painted many colourful paintings whose titles suggest birds, yet their imagery does not. A curator who wants to prompt a Miró painting’s bird-aspect could place it adjacent more vivid bird paintings, thus availing a bird-reference. To explore an artwork’s meaning, one begins by comparing its various aspects, though typically one at a time, to references present in the world. In the opening words of the Tractatus Logicos-philosophicus, Wittgenstein identifies world as the totality of facts, not of things. For our purposes here, world comprises the set of references that are already conceptualized and are thus easily articulated. Being things, artworks are comprised of both conceptual and nonconceptual contents (aspects that currently eschew articulation). Artworks glean meaning by connecting to the world, yet this same relationship lets artworks pinpoint worldly matters that are otherwise obscured by all that is happening in the world. And in fact, each artwork’s work reinforces the world and vice versa. Consider myriad artworks from the 1980s by Gran Fury, Ross Bleckner and General Idea that cleverly drew attention to the AIDS epidemic, as art critics discussed their distinct works in those terms. The notion of curated exhibitions developed here accommodates postmodernists’ ongoing challenge to autonomous artworks, authorial authority, institutional theories of art and artists’ intentions. Curated exhibitions facilitate spectators’ access to contexts, concepts and contents, which gain currency as people apply them elsewhere. Throughout this text, I use the singular form of curator as a surrogate for the primary person(s) who stand(s) to receive credit/blame for presenting artworks, however collectively the production was organized. The curator could easily be the artist; some institutional representative such as an exhibition coordinator, museum director, or gallerist; or a half-dozen curators from several institutions working alongside a team of scores more. Finally, I prefer curator to the term ‘exhibition maker’, which former MoMA Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture curator Robert Storr uses. Focused

Introduction

7

on presentation, the term ‘exhibition maker’ underemphasizes the curated exhibition’s twin features: the significance of relational objects and public reception. I use the term ‘relational objects’ to convey the way multiple factors, including the exhibition team, environment, facility and milieu influence how spectators grasp each artwork’s contents.3 Based on the Latin curare (to take care of), curating entails presenting artworks generated by people with people and for people. From my experience, artists typically have the last word, though some curators disagree here. Marcia Tucker didn’t consider it the artist’s ‘business to mess with our titles … we had the authority to do what we wanted’ (2008: 82). Storr adds, ‘All decisions about the architectural layout and sequencing of works should reside with the exhibition maker, as well as ultimate decisions about lighting, signage, labeling, brochure and text-panel design and content, typography, wall colour or absence of colour and every other detail, large or small, that substantively conditions the encounter between the viewer and the work’ (2006: 15). Moreover, ‘the artist should politely be told that he or she is not to come on the floor until the show is fully in place and lighted’ (Storr 2006: 29). Since exhibitions are largely cooperative ventures, Storr’s ‘bossiness’ rather spoofs the cliché curator.

1.3  Curatorial discourse To my lights, neither philosophical tradition has sufficiently articulated the roles played by exhibitions, which inspire spectators to recognize: (1) mere objects as artworks, (2) the prevalence of theories useful for making sense of artworks, (3) the multiple interpretations each artwork avails, (4) relevant source material, enabling artworld professionals and children alike to grasp the artworks at hand, (5) the negligible role played by artistic intentions, which sometimes take decades to articulate, (6) some curator’s novel hypotheses concerning the exhibited artworks’ significance and (7) the variable nature of an artwork as it adapts to each new exhibition’s hypotheses at a later date in a different locale. The artworld is hardly better equipped to offer aestheticians answers to these conundrums. Today’s curatorial discourse primarily consists of interviews with curators describing their prior exhibitions or sociologists distinguishing various management styles. The field lacks generalizing schemes, let alone a unified methodology for evaluating whether practitioners have performed their duties effectively, precisely and successfully.4 The field also lacks mechanisms for determining an exhibition’s success, other than hearsay (witnessed and rumoured

8

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

accounts) and published reviews, which tend to address individual artworks on view, rather than exhibitions as a whole. The list of curators, beginning with Harald Szeemann’s now infamous ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ (1969), who were immediately ‘let go’ following some brouhaha associated with what is now deemed their most influential exhibition, is indeed too long to warrant relying on artworld institutions to accurately assess successful exhibitions. Absent relevant evaluative tools, the artworld has relied on art critics, whose awards/ pans serve as evidence of the curator’s performance. Given the art critic’s goal to discern each era’s best art from all the rest (the critic really must take a stand), it’s hardly surprising that exhibitions of groundbreaking/ underground art fail to receive critical attention, leaving later art historians to mine earlier exhibition archives to figure out how ‘now-important’ artists emerged on the scene. It’s quite common for precedent-setting exhibitions to go unnoticed, appearing entirely inconsequential during their run. Like artworks that fail to receive critical attention or are misunderstood, exhibitions also challenge the reliability of concurrent critics’ evaluative voices. Moreover, those exhibitions that do attract critical attention tend to gain more credit over time, further eclipsing the significance of those truly groundbreaking exhibitions that deserved hype or art historical attention. As discussed in Chapter 8, Szeemann’s ‘Attitudes’ is a great example of this phenomenon, since it was actually that era’s ninth (not first) exhibition to feature in situ art, casting doubt on its originality. Although curatorial discourse lends curatorial practice its sense of selfreflexivity on par with art criticism, it problematically treats exhibitions like texts with propositions and/or premises. For clarity sake, I prefer visual art experiences, proposals and hypotheses, which offer better analogies for exhibitions. Hardly propositional like logic, exhibitions are experiential (nonpropositional like science experiments), despite the prevalence of didactic panels, object labels, acoustiguides, cell phone guides, reading rooms and hefty catalogues. Curator Paul O’Neill considers the politics of ‘self-reflexive’ curating to be the foremost topic in curatorial discourse given the ‘uncertainty of curators regarding the definition of their institutional role’. He remarks: Exhibition curating has become self-reflexive about self-reflexivity itself. We are becoming so self-reflexive that exhibitions often end up as nothing more or less than art exhibitions curated by curators curating curators, curating artists, curating artworks, curating exhibitions (all of which can be rearranged in the order of your choosing). The principle is so dependent on the double negation of self that a responsible proposition and the negation of its negation mean one and the same thing. (O’Neill 2005c: 9)

Introduction

9

Of course, O’Neill’s assessment hinges on what he means by ‘exhibition curating’, which is why this book aims to clarify what curated exhibitions do, not what curators do. Since curators are presumed to be in the service of artists, whether dead or alive, curatorial discourse primarily addresses each curator’s success at highlighting artists’ contributions. As such, exhibitions demonstrate how particular artworks relate to either particular historical contexts historical contexts or artworks produced by other artists at the time, or some artist’s originality back then, influence since or relevance for today. While museumgoers may notice that they enjoy or appreciate a particular exhibition more than others, they typically associate their positive experiences with featured artworks, rather than the total experience enhanced by an exhibition’s particular presentational qualities. The curator’s behind-the-scenes role in securing particular artworks, structuring the event, setting up scenes, establishing vistas and producing explanatory material goes largely overlooked. There seems to be little or no attention paid to the way curators (and their many collaborators) create particularized experiences. Even art critics tend to assess individual artworks, rather than the structure or implementation of the exhibition as a whole, which inevitably facilitated their experiences. This move is akin to film critics evaluating individual characters, while ignoring the contributions of the script, camerawork, lighting, editing and soundtrack in enhancing the film’s presentational qualities. As discussed in Chapter 8, some philosophers view the curator as both composer and conductor, inspiring the move to credit curatorial work as on par with fine art (Ventzislavov 2014: 83).

1.4 Overview Chapter 2 introduces basic ideas regarding curatorial practice that distinguish curated exhibitions from both private collections and uncurated exhibitions. Following Wittgenstein, I don’t view interpretations as properties of objects, let alone artworks. I do, however, view interpretations as properties of exhibitions, because curated exhibitions are effectively constitutive sets, for which the curator follows particular rules in order to assemble each set, as well as its subsets. By constitutive set, I actually have in mind a singular set like the set of Fibonacci numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.), whereby the rule that produces the set is inferable from the set, whose potential members are likewise inferable from its current members.

10

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Chapter 3 describes the spectator’s role in facilitating candidates for reception, which I view as a stronger constraint than that of ‘candidates for appreciation’. This view thus exposes the problems posed by earlier models derived from Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art, which credit the artist or some artworlder with conferring the status of art upon artefacts. Chapter 4 articulates how exhibitions illuminate particular aspects of artworks. That spectators stand in judgement challenges the widely held view that artworks gain their status as art by appeal to power structures associated with reputable artworlders or museums’ authorial status. Exacted exhibitions prompt audience members to weave narrative threads, which are particular to the set of artworks comprising a given environment at a particular point in time. Research conducted by the Association of American Museums indicates that audiences read only 7 per cent of all of the available didactic material, so spectator-generated narrative threads typically trump external narrators such as didactic panels, exhibition catalogues and even critical reviews. Since spectators’ first-hand art experiences tend to override external narrators, I employ the literary term narrative thread to convey stories told from the perspective of a theatrical play’s characters (spectators in the case of exhibitions), rather than some external narrator’s omniscient stance. That audience members’ prior experiences with particular artworks tend to override the curator’s stated aims proves that artworks are far more powerful objects than mere accessories assembled to illustrate some curator’s claims. The exhibition’s layout proves crucial to the curator’s ability to prompt spectators to generate narrative threads derived from the exhibited artworks’ selection and sequencing. The view of curated exhibitions proposed here is modelled after scientific argument, which combines ideas, expectation and observation. A curator begins with hypotheses (ideas) concerning particular artworks that he/she aims to test. To hone particular hypotheses, he/she selects a particular set of artworks whose placement and inclusion in particular groupings inspires spectators to make inferences (expectation) regarding the exhibited artworks (observation). Those narrative threads that spectators rehearse over time in varying contexts become the institutional memories that engender predicative art historical lenses (effectively common knowledge surrounding movements, such as Cubism or Abstract Expressionism) or conventions regarding practices such as Relational Aesthetics. Exhibitions not only let curators test various hypotheses about the artworks on view but also effectively engage the public

Introduction

11

as peer reviewers, the way academic peers select and publish scholarly papers. Although Mieke Bal references ‘speech acts’, she assigns exhibitions a similar role. Exposition is always also an argument. Therefore, in publicizing these views the subject objectifies, exposes himself as much as the object; this makes the exposition an exposure of the self. Such exposure is an act of producing meaning, a performance. (1996: 2)

Chapter 5 describes how one’s experiences of curated exhibitions differ from that of experiencing singular artworks (the neutral approach typical to analytic aesthetics). As already noted, visual art experiences have relational features, since the exhibition team, facility, milieu and environment serve to influence audience reception, alongside the artworks and viewers’ cognitive stock. I worry that the philosophical treatment of artworks as singular objects overlooks the way each exhibition opportunity is part of an event whose cumulative effect engenders an artwork’s presentational history. Artworks that accrue meaning are eventually valued as objects of care (public treasures). Chapter 6, the text’s most densely philosophical section, provides an overview of the philosophy underlying the conceptualization of artworks. Such meaningmaking strategies ground curators’ interpretations, engendering exhibitions that prompt viewers’ particular grasp of artworks’ contents. Despite the number of notable philosophers who cite art’s ‘nonexhibited features’ (an artwork’s numerous contents) as the primary reason that people appreciate artworks, few employ historical examples to explain how people actually discern contents that are described as embodied, yet are not necessarily perceptible. By nonexhibited features, I have in mind Danto’s thought experiment, whereby each of nine red square paintings has different contents, yet they are visibly indistinct. Philosophers have discussed several versions of this problem, such that contents are present, yet people need additional tools to suss them out. Consider: Georg Hegel’s absolute spirit (1817), Husserl’s eidos (1901), Martin Heidegger’s essence (1935), Jean-Paul Sartre’s analogon (1940), Susanne Langer’s expression (1942), Maurice Merleau-Ponty ‘invisible’ (1964), Maurice Mandelbaum’s ‘nonexhibited’ properties (1965), Wollheim’s seeing as (1970), Scruton’s symbol (1974), George Dickie’s conferred status (1974), Danto’s content (or artworld theory) (1981) and my generosity (Spaid 1999). Although ‘nonexhibited features’ are rarely obvious or visible, one points to exhibited properties to defend them. This explains how artworks that were once mysterious and inscrutable suddenly seem easily

12

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

accessible. Exhibitions play a major role in helping audience members to access artworks’ otherwise undisclosed contents. After walking the reader through the curatorial process in Chapter 4, where I describe how the curator discovers an artwork’s many ‘exhibited’ and ‘nonexhibited’ features, which he/she assesses in order to determine the rules needed to assemble the checklist, Chapter 6 summarizes how the philosophical literature since Frege has handled meaning-making. As alluded to in this book’s subtitle, my preferred solution for interpreting otherwise inscrutable artworks merges Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing with Scruton’s notion of generative symbols, enabling one to toggle between work and world, where an abundance of ready references await spectators. The tools curators generate to glean meaning prove indispensable, since curated exhibitions illuminate contents, concepts and contexts that might otherwise go unnoticed. Chapter 7 discusses artistic direction more generally, demonstrating the curator’s link to other artistic directors, whether musical conductors, theatre directors or filmmakers, since each cycles through four phases (exploration, interpretation, presentation and reception), which largely take place in their imaginations. As it turns out, each phase requires a different approach to the aesthetic attitude (disinterested satisfaction). According to painter/aesthetician Kevin Melchionne, taste, as in personal preferences, is ‘marked by pretending, exaggerating, vacillating, conforming, wishful thinking and pure invention’ (2011). One can only imagine the damage done by irresolute exhibitions meant to cultivate or complement some curator’s taste. As we shall see, the process of producing exhibitions requires the curator to suspend his/her personal taste, otherwise he/she will fail to exact an exhibition that best tests those hypotheses deemed worthy of investigating. When a curator’s taste gets involved, he/she has greater difficulty empathizing with those who don’t grasp or gravitate towards artworks the way he/she does, leaving one with a rather inexact exhibition. Clear reasons defeat taste. Chapter 8 concludes with a discussion of the recent artworld debate on whether some curator-organized exhibitions are themselves artworks. By analogy, I return to the inverse discussion of when an artist-curated exhibition is an artwork (or not).

2

The curator

To survey the ins and outs of curatorial practice, this chapter begins with notions of care, the imagination and the implication of curated sets and ends by discussing artworld roles often confused with curators, such as collectors, tastemakers, administrators and exhibitors.

2.1 Care The English noun curator, a translation of the Latin noun curator, comes from the Latin verb curare, which means to take care of. Exactly what the curator is expected to care for has been the subject of an ongoing debate for some time now.1 As noted in Chapter 1, this text focuses on the curator’s role in conceptualizing and presenting artworks for public audiences, which requires a heightened sense of care in terms of (1) an investment in the enduring significance of the artworks being presented; (2) a respect for the preferences of artists, living or dead; (3) the appropriate conveyance of ideas to diverse audiences; and (4) empathy for various spectators’ approaches to art.2 One could call these four points the cardinal rules of curatorial practice. Exemplary of respecting an artist’s preferences long after his/her death, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Art Curator opts to suspend Marcel Duchamp’s Hat Rack (1916/1964) from the ceiling and exhibits six Claude Monet ‘haystacks’ side by side (Figure 4).3 Since conservators restore artworks, while registrars both monitor loans of artworks and report each artwork’s physical condition, few theorists consider the actual physical care of artworks to be the curator’s purview. However, curators working at institutions with few employees often take on these additional duties. Some theorists argue that the curator represents the interests of the exhibition’s host venue, whether a museum, gallery or nonart venue when dealing with artists, collectors, benefactors and/or lending institutions. Others consider the

14

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

curator’s role as pleading for the artists’ interests when negotiating with hostvenue staff, potential lenders, designers, benefactors, exhibition funders and/or other artists. Beatrice von Bismarck describes a recent shift whereby ‘curators are less advocates of the various art audiences vis-à-vis artists and art, but [are] rather the agents of art and artists in public’ (2006: 154). By contrast, Irit Rogoff considers ‘the curatorial’ a separate sphere altogether, making the curator’s aesthetic vision, in terms of his/her practice, his/her primary concern (2006: 132). The curator’s aesthetic vision concerns the specific experience that selected artworks are expected to prompt among spectators, as envisaged by the curator. For those who worry that ‘the curatorial’ primarily serves the exhibition maker, a curator’s capacity to successfully negotiate the terms of his/her aesthetic vision no doubt benefits both the host venue and participating artists alike.4 Even though curators provide host venues access to artists and artists access to exhibition opportunities, those who consider curators ‘gatekeepers’ mistake curators for judges. Art writer and occasional curator Dave Hickey contests the curator’s capacity to advance anyone’s programmatic interests, let alone those of artists, host venues or curators. Seeking to override the curator’s authorial intent, Hickey remarks that ‘the meaning of the show emerges from the show itself ’, which is incidentally the position proposed here, since this text emphasizes the spectator’s role in devising each exhibition’s narrative threads. In contrast to my characterizing curators as agents of care, he views curators as ‘more or less inspired art herders’ (2008: 206).5 He admonishes: ‘Curating is a very corrupt discourse.’ Here, Hickey errs. For one, curating is a practice not a discourse, though its self-reflexive tools (talks, tours and texts concerning its activities) certainly form a discourse. Not surprisingly, there are multiple views regarding how meaning and, therefore, knowledge arise from exhibitions. To date, the baptism approach institutionalized by George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art and Hickey’s feeble-bumbler account remain the primary explanations for curated exhibitions’ effectiveness, though neither explains how meaning happens, whether proposed by some curator on behalf of an artist or emerging via some self-organizing scheme. One wonders why the philosophy of art has yet to accommodate emergence as easily as the philosophy of biology has (O’Neill and Wilson 2008). Contrary to the notion of some autonomous curator calling all the shots, the curator, whether the artist himself/herself or some institutional representative (exhibition coordinator, curator or gallerist), typically works in concert with peers, staff members and/or nonart experts to configure compelling and meaningful art experiences. For grammatical simplicity, I use the singular

The Curator

15

curator throughout this text, but there could very well be multiple curators working collaboratively.6 Setting the stage for the most effective audience engagement requires honing organizing principles that guide both the curator’s selection of appropriate artworks and each artwork’s eventual placement, so as to effectively demonstrate his/her hypotheses, while prompting each spectator’s capacity to grasp and propagate the exhibition’s narrative threads. I employ the plural hypotheses, rather than the singular hypothesis, since exhibitions typically propose multiple points that curators aim to test as plausible. As Ivan Gaskell remarks, ‘Curators are the guardians not only of things and their records, but of intellectual alternatives to normative assumptions’ (1996: 157). In some cases, the hypotheses being tested are appreciated as invaluable explanations, yet many more dissipate. Memories implanted by later exhibitions that successfully challenge, and thus dismiss prior narrative threads, sometimes override earlier institutional memories. Visual art experiences typically occur in the context of the presentation of multiple artworks, whether in a gallery, public square, studio or warehouse. Hardly meant to convey an activity particular to sight, the term ‘visual art experience’ distinguishes presentations of objects, whether paintings, sculpture, photographs, installation art, performance art, film/video, participatory art, digital art or new genre from presentations of theatre, film, music and dance, though all are twostage art forms (Spaid 2019b). Such first-hand, multisensorial perceptual events, whether indoors or outdoors, accompany experiences of artworks, cultural heritage, monuments and buildings alike.7 Indicative of the importance of firsthand experiences, Marcia Tucker recalls how she was surprised to learn that Arshile Gorky’s Portrait of the Artist and His Mother, which hung in her office at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ‘was as different from the slides and reproductions [she’d] seen as Mount Fuji is from its postcard picture’ (2008: 80). The occasion of an exhibition not only inspires artists to imagine how spectators might experience their artworks, but some combination of artists’ reasons and motivations for making their artworks and the curator’s particular perspective influences their eventual presentation. In Chapter 5, I note that people sometimes use the terms artwork and work synonymously, yet the former references the visible item, while the latter reflects what is appreciated about it, given its historic importance. Work reflects some description of its value, what Donald Davidson termed a ‘pro attitude’ (Davidson 1980). Simply put, work describes those artistic efforts, ideas and influences that engender its uniqueness. In explaining the artwork’s significance, it is/does the work. As an artwork’s conceptualized counterpart, work reflects the spectators’ assessments of its specialness.

16

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

By toggling between work and the world’s already conceptualized facts, spectators gain access to potential references. Although work need not be an exhibited feature, its identification informs the tangible artwork that spectators experience as an object, performance or installation. When viewers experience visual art presentations, they infer contents by assessing to an artwork’s numerous aspects either in relationship to those of nearby artworks or world itself. Work is to artwork as memories are to bodies, which explains why work, like shared memories, endures, even after artworks vanish or are destroyed. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917/1950) survived as work until 1950. Whether the curator acts on behalf of the host venue, particular artists, art’s varied audiences or his/her aesthetic vision, he/she exerts a curatorial intent. As it turns out, curatorial intent is similar to artistic intent, since it too is subject to the Intentional Fallacy, whereby contradictions (asymmetries) arise between the curator’s articulated aims, the artwork presentation, audience reception and the exhibition’s eventual impact. William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s Intentional Fallacy (1946) reflects the conflict that arises when an artist’s stated intention fails to correlate with an artwork’s actual reception. For example, an artist may claim that his/her artwork is satirical, but if viewers fail to appreciate its humour, the work may prove offensive (Beardsley, 1997). With curatorial practice, the implications of the Intentional Fallacy seem to intensify. On one hand, it hardly makes sense to consider artworks, created by others, as direct evidence for curatorial intent, as articulated on didactic panels and catalogues. At best, exhibited artworks offer indirect evidence for curatorial intent, yet they provide direct evidence for spectators’ narrative threads. Not surprisingly, factors lying beyond the curator’s control tend to override whatever curatorial intent there is (ideally). Similar in effect to Beardsley’s ‘object-directedness’, curatorial intent is thought to direct viewers’ attentions to the presentation. Despite the high level of transparency afforded exhibitions accompanied by written texts (press releases and/or catalogues) meant to articulate the curator’s position, it’s not unusual for audience reception to contradict curatorial intent.8 When reception predominates, viewers’ varied experiences exemplify Edmund Husserl’s notion of ‘directed consciousness’.9 As briefly noted, visual art experiences typically feature numerous artworks by one or more artists, rather than singletons. In light of the vulnerability of curatorial intent, the curator adopts a scientific approach. He/she originates explanatory models, thereby transforming curated exhibitions into laboratories that introduce, test and disseminate various hypotheses concerning the artworks on view. When the proposed hypotheses

The Curator

17

are graspable, tenable and eventually believed, they have sticking power. Even if the exhibition proves successful, some later curator will likely present an exhibition that counters its hypotheses.

2.2  The imagination Von Bismarck terms the process of conceiving suitable exhibition strategies processual (2006: 153). Curatorial practice primarily concerns thinking and imagining, though not the classically philosophical sort that demands withdrawing from the world of appearances. The eventual installation of artworks is comparatively procedural and therefore the least imaginative aspect of curatorial practice. Exemplary of the imagination’s special role, the curator must imagine each spectator traversing the forthcoming exhibition, all the while keeping in mind each artwork’s dimensions, proportion, duration, position, fragility, patterns and colours. In addition to having to imagine what it’s like to skirt around artworks the curator may never have experienced before, or worse still, don’t yet exist; the curator must have keen proprioception skills for negotiating both actual and imagined space, while remaining cognizant of each artwork’s relevant interpretations.10 As already mentioned, the curator’s primary goal is to select and position artworks so that audiences readily grasp the particular hypotheses the exhibition has been assembled to demonstrate. The curator’s secondary goal is to exact an exhibition, whose believability either bolsters or challenges claims made by prior exhibitions and/or art historical texts, effectively enabling whatever narrative threads the audience weaves to become the prevailing institutional memory over time. All of these activities are performed in the curator’s imagination, sometimes years before the physical artworks arrive on the scene. With these points in mind, one could say that the curator’s purview is the mental, as opposed to the physical, care of artworks. As Paul O’Neill has mentioned on several occasions, curators have been variously described as ‘creator, technician, midwife, horse doctor, DJ, nomad, art agent, manager, mediator, platform provider, self-promoter, scout, diviner, fairy godmother, chiropodist and even God’ (O’Neill 2005a: 35). Instead of excluding the physical labour curators perform in the normal course of carrying out their work (such as lifting, packing, hauling and installing art), I rather emphasize the primarily mental quality of the care performed by the curator. Mental care refers to the curator’s strategic efforts to anticipate and solve problems long before they happen, as well as his/her skill at envisaging how spectators will experience the

18

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

exhibition and what cues they need (and when) in order to comprehend the artworks at hand. Curators consider all of the possible contexts for works of art and then select the best possible themes and arrangements that enable viewers to glean each artwork’s relevant contents. This mental process distinctly parallels Ludwig Wittgenstein’s observation that ‘we interpret it and see it as we interpret it’ (1968: 193e), what philosophers call seeing as, thanks to Richard Wollheim. Given each artwork’s numerous aspects, the curator directs each viewer’s attention to those aspects he/she deems relevant for his/her purposes, not unlike the filmmaker or theatre director who shares some situation with his/her audience in order to direct audience attention to pertinent information.11 As already noted, the curator’s main skill set concerns his/her vivid imagination, since curators must hold hundreds of past art experiences (including each artwork’s appearance and dimensions) in his/her memory in order to identify relevant artworks. Such imagery includes each artwork’s particular features, such as scale, medium and location; some conjecture as to what tools and labour are required to install it, so that a budget can be proposed; how the artwork fits the site; and how each relates to the others on view. A possible holdover from when duping slides cost time and money, curators tend not to request images of artworks until a project is under serious consideration. Of course, today’s curators have easy access to online images.

2.3  Set membership An artwork is connected to its environment via membership in some aggregate of objects, which belongs to the studio (or work space), an exhibition, a private collection or a warehouse (such as a custom’s depot, storage unit or grocery store).12 An aggregate is ‘composed of, or formed from, some other entities’ (Potter 2004: 21). Of course, it’s possible that the artist has lent an artwork from his/her studio (or the collector from his/her art storage) to an exhibition, so the object effectively belongs to two different aggregates simultaneously, but what I aim to tease out here are the different notions of belonging afforded artworks in terms of ownership (property) and constituency (membership in a particular set). Whether an artwork belongs to the artist, exhibition or collector indicates a particular kind of membership that suggests special opportunities and commitments. Philosopher of Mathematics Michael Potter categorizes aggregates as either fusions, whose quantitative value is equal to the ‘sum of its parts’, or collections, whose value as a collection is always greater than as a fusion. ‘Collections,

The Curator

19

Table 1  Aggregates Fusions

Collections

(= sum of parts) ~belonging (membership is arbitrary) Uncurated exhibitions

(> sum of parts) belonging Curated exhibitions (intrinsic value)    Membership indicates constituency. Public/private collections/museums

Art-fair booth, gallery inventory, auction house Unimpactful collections Artist’s studio, storage units, warehouses, grocery stores

Impactful collections (extrinsic value) Membership indicates specialness. Private homes

unlike fusions, can always be characterized determinately by their membership [emphasis mine]’, whereby ‘x ∈ y reads as “x belongs to y”’ (Potter 2004: 23). With this in mind, one need only review the list of insured artworks to determine which artworks belong to collection c. By contrast, a gallery’s inventory list g affirms neither belongingness nor membership, since there are numerous reasons why one might find others’ artworks listed (accidentally delivered there or awaiting pick up). Similarly, an artist’s studio inventory list s might include numerous artworks acquired by trade, mostly because other artists suggested that they trade artworks. As a result, a fluctuating studio inventory conveys belongingness in terms of ownership, but not constituency. Aggregates g and s inhabiting galleries and studios tend to be fusions. In the case of the artworld, the greater quantitative value that accrues to private collections is an advantage typically attributable to some collection’s reputation. In attempting to tease out what makes membership in a private collection special, I reserve this perk for collections whose purchases matter because they engender price ripples elsewhere. By contrast, private collections whose acquisitions don’t have an impact remain fusions. I attribute the advantages afforded art collection membership to the set’s reputation, rather than the owner(s), since even a collector with a terrible reputation whom dealers assiduously avoid (he/she takes years to pay) could have a renowned collection that boosts the value of every artwork that enters it. The opposite could also be true. The collectors are enthusiastic patrons, yet most artworlders remain unconvinced of their collection’s direction. Moreover, when collectors die, their collections’ reputations remain intact. When a collection is sold, its reputation is transferable, so it’s not owner-dependent. Collections are revered as sets. In ‘Collecting as an Art’, Kevin Melchionne emphasizes the significance of display as the means for the collector’s set to achieve its distinctiveness.

20

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice While it might seem inessential that the pieces of a collection are displayed in one place, I think the fact that they almost always are remains telling. For it is through display [emphasis mine] that the collection comes to take on an artefactual power of its own. In other words, a certain solidity of identity begins to accrue to it (Melchionne 1999: 153).13

What he calls the ‘solidity of identity’ is what I term the set’s reputation, which is more or less hearsay. Melchionne considers those collectors who define what ‘counts as collectible’ to be participating in the ‘social construction of aesthetic perception’. They transform objects from ‘rubbish’ into ‘collectibles’ (Melchionne 1999: 152). I worry, however, that this view is rather a modified version of Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art, whereby the collector, rather than some other artworlder, ‘confers status’. Melchionne rightly suggests that collections highlight specialness, illuminate originals and convey stories in ways that individual objects do not. Either way, collectors who exhibit their collections invite the public to substantiate their bets. Collectors who exhibit their collections take collecting one step further, since they recognize the significance of reception, enabling viewers to evaluate their collection’s specialness. My emphasizing reception poses a serious challenge to Dickie’s ‘status-conferring’ theory, which requires neither presentation nor reception. In my view, the public confers status by visiting exhibitions, publishing art articles and electing to secure and protect particular artworks in its public collections. That high-powered collectors such as Eli Broad, Gustavo and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Maurice and Paul Marciano, Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Bernardo Paz, François Pinault, Mitchell and Emily Rales, Don and Mera Rubell, Charles Saatchi and scores more across the globe have opened public institutions indicates the potential value curated exhibitions add. The collection’s curator, sometimes working with the collector, presents selected artworks with various publics in mind. Such exhibitions frame the collection in a manner meant to attract audiences, further enhancing its reputation.14 Like many artworld members, collectors often recommend favourite artists and artworks to museums. If collectors’ purchases single-handedly conferred status, then they wouldn’t feel compelled to persuade others to collect their favourites, let alone sponsor artists’ museum exhibitions. Were collectors’ personal purchases sufficient to confer status, they wouldn’t gift resources to museums that they could otherwise use to expand their collections, let alone open up their own exhibition spaces. When museums accept collectors’ gifts of artworks, they do so with particular collections and publics in mind. Such moves reflect set members’ capacities to address various publics. Seasoned

The Curator

21

professionals, such as Robert Storr, find it baffling that beloved artworks such as paintings by Jess, Pavel Tchelitchew, Forrest Bess and thousands others rarely see the light of day, as if their publics no longer exists (Storr 2006: 16).15 Membership in a reputable collection or museum exhibition tends to augment an artwork’s extrinsic value (monetary), relative to similar artworks that are members of other aggregates, such as the set of unsold artworks stored in the artist’s studio or gallery inventory. However, when artworks assume membership in respected collections, the benefits owing to collection membership sometimes elevate the value of related artworks elsewhere, such as those for sale in an art-fair booth (art-fair booth fusion). These advantages (e.g. price increase, increased publicity and greater demand) sometimes accrue to artists’ remaining artworks, as if membership in one group lifts up another group (the aggregate of unsold artworks) indirectly. It’s hardly surprising that membership in esteemed collections offers distinct advantages elsewhere. In fact, the greater the collection’s reputation, the greater the extrinsic value of the entire collection, making each artwork more valuable as part of some collection than as part of a fusion (e.g. the aggregate of artworks produced by the artist over his/her lifetime or some gallery’s inventory). According to Potter, collections function differently than fusions: A collection does not merely lump several objects together into one: it keeps the things distinct and is a further entity over and above them. Various metaphors have been used to explain this – a collection is a sack containing its members, a lasso around them, an encoding of them – but none is altogether happy. We need to be aware straight away, therefore, that collections are metaphysically problematic entities if they are entities at all and need to be handled with care. (Potter 2004: 22)

Since it’s not problematic to view art collections, whether private or public, as property, the metaphor of the sack containing its members works well. With art collections, the sacks in question could be the exhibition spaces or homes/ warehouses associated with public and individual collections. Since collections keep things distinct, collectibles can be sold or traded at will, something that is also true of exhibitions. With curated exhibitions, however, too many trades and substitutions diminish the curated set’s value as a collection.

2.4  Organizing principles The next question that comes to mind is: ‘What is a curated exhibition?’ Is it possible for an exhibition to be uncurated and titled ‘Untitled’, like artworks

22

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

titled Untitled, whose lack of a title typically reflects some artist’s worry that language subsumes experience? If so, how do curated exhibitions differ from uncurated exhibitions? If curated exhibitions feature artworks mediated by curators, wouldn’t unmediated, unadulterated art experiences be preferable, just as natural foods trump processed foods? If exhibitions are presentations of artworks, much the way concerts are performances of symphonies, should the philosophy of exhibitions be distinct from the philosophy of art? Curated exhibitions are a type of collection, since they too are aggregates of ‘hand-picked’ artworks that present ‘something more’ than the sum of their parts. Presumably, the advantage accrued to collected artworks is that the collection itself defines ‘what counts as collectible’, making membership in some reputable collection invaluable. Again, collections owe their reputations to the aggregate as a set, not to their owner(s), since collections are typically co-authored by some combination of the owner(s), art consultants, contributing artists, other collectors and art dealers offering invaluable information and/or sweetened deals.16 And just because one can afford to buy art doesn’t mean that one can purchase whatever one wants, whenever one wants. Those collectors who are neither on the dealer’s prospecting list nor part of the placement strategy routinely find themselves blocked from the primary market.17 Unlike art collections, curated exhibitions are valued for something other than their extrinsic value, yet they still offer ‘something more’ than art collections in

Figure 1  Rogier van der Weyden, The Descent from the Cross, 1435, Oil on panel, 130" x 166” (330 cm x 422 cm). ©Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

The Curator

23

general, yet distinct as well. A curated exhibition’s ‘something more’ reflects its greater inferential properties, which can falter should key artworks vanish and weak substitutes replace them (Melchionne 1999: 152). Can every artwork appear in any and every art exhibition? The answer of course is ‘yes’, so long as there is physical space enough to accommodate each artwork’s scale. This supposition is nonsensical for curated exhibitions, since curated exhibitions serve certain artworks better than others and vice versa. Not surprisingly, the more specific the exhibition’s focus, the more illuminating its theme. Consider two imaginary exhibitions ‘Hand Gestures in Early Netherlandish Painting’ and ‘Flemish Primitives’, both of which featured numerous paintings renowned for their subjects’ hands, including Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (1435) (Figure 1) and Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) (Figure 2). Those who experienced (or know about)

Figure 2  Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, 1434, Oil on oak panel, 32” x 24” (81.3 cm x 61 cm). © The National Gallery, London.

24

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

the first exhibition are primed to study hand gestures painted by fifteenthcentury Flemish masters. As a result, those who visited ‘Flemish Primitives’ and noticed these two paintings likely recalled the earlier show, inducing them to attend to various figures’ hands in order to develop/affirm their own hypotheses regarding Flemish Primitives. Curated exhibitions use visual cues to highlight relevant aspects that guide spectators to identify references that facilitate their greater appreciation. If the curator of ‘Flemish Primitives’ positions both paintings in a manner that inspires spectators to recognize not only their common subject matter (hand gestures) but also this exhibition’s mode of reasoning (the curator’s having selected and positioned every artwork to illuminate fifteenth-century painting’s focus on dramatic gesticulation), then ‘Flemish Primitives’ does what ‘Hand Gestures in Early Netherlandish Painting’ did without specifying it. As Chapter 4 details, the curator employs schematism to conceptualize these paintings in terms of dramatic gesticulations, given the hands’ visibility. By contrast, the curator who alternatively displays them to convey ‘motherly love’ employs contextualism, since emotional states and feelings, unlike hand gestures, are not necessarily empirically verifiable via perception. Exemplary of the way curated exhibitions offer something over and above collection membership is Tate Modern’s twenty-five-year survey for Damien Hirst (one of the world’s most famous living artists, if not the wealthiest ever) during the 2012 London Olympics. Clearly, curated exhibitions offer something over and above ‘conferring status’, ‘publicity stunts’ or ‘authorial validation’, otherwise there would have been no good reason for Hirst to assist the Tate round up seventy artworks, most of which were already housed in reputable collections. Back then, numerous writers claimed that what Hirst most stood to gain was critical scorn. They thus wondered why he would bother to risk public derision.18 Furthermore, his helping Tate Modern to locate already sold artworks cost him valuable studio time, whenever he assisted the registrar to secure loans and worked with the curator to prepare the catalogue. What could Hirst have anticipated gaining from all of this redundant work? One can’t imagine genuine art patrons discovering Hirst by visiting Tate Modern between Olympic events. Putting the show together was like a big 180-degree turn for me. I’m looking back at all this work and trying to make sense of it. Some of it is great and some of it is unrealized and didn’t make it in there and some of it is just shit. It’s 25

The Curator

25

bloody years of work and, of course, I’m proud of it, proud that I put the effort in, but there’s also one part of me going, ‘How did that happen?’19

Hirst’s excitement suggests that he was pleasantly surprised by how much he could glean from his own exhibition. And what better way to explore one’s own oeuvre than from the spectator’s vantage. As this book aims to demonstrate, this perspective is highly influential. When exhibition curator Ann Gallagher commented that his artworks are duplicitous (they say one thing and then deny it), he wryly remarked, ‘I don’t think there are answers. I think there are only questions. And I think it’s for viewers to decide what the answers are.’20 Since museum exhibitions grant individual artworks provenance, lenders tend to benefit far more than the art-stars, who long ago reaped the benefits of their artworks having entered reputable collections. Hirst’s retrospective broke Tate Modern attendance records for a living artist’s exhibition, making this career survey ‘win win’ for all parties involved. On first glance, an artwork seems no more constitutive of its current exhibition than a Pringles® tube feels tied to its particular grocery-store shelf. After all, thousands of artworks have appeared in any number of museum exhibitions, just as Pringles® tubes feel at home in any store retailing potato chips. To distinguish curated exhibitions from uncurated exhibitions, I characterize curated exhibitions as aggregates that not only share a common subject matter, such as hand gestures, but set membership reflects modes of reasoning, or organizing principles. I. Designed to test the curator’s hypotheses, a curated exhibition presents particular artworks in a manner that makes the organizing principle(s) visible. One soon realizes the way curated exhibitions organized for private collections such as Miami’s Rubell Museum, Bruxelles’s Vanhaerents Collection or Venezia’s François Pinault Collection establish modes of acquisition as on par with modes of reasoning. That is, set membership is constitutive, since members are selected and juxtaposed in a manner that prompts spectators to recognize, identify and deliberate upon the curator’s modes of reasoning (Potter 2004: 3). If spectators cannot identify the curator’s organizing principles, then the curator’s hypotheses cannot be inferred, tested and woven into narrative threads that engender institutional memories. Unlike the set of artworks comprising an uncurated exhibition, curators employ reasoning and deliberation to determine which

26

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

artworks deserve membership in the set comprising a curated exhibition, otherwise any artwork is a potential member of any exhibition set by virtue of its shared subject matter, something so basic as a common colour, historical era, geographical region or scale. The question still remains, ‘What is that something over and above associated with curated exhibitions?’ What does a curated exhibition offer that tenders more, yet is not extrinsic like a financial gain, a reputation boost, an attendance draw, a publicity stunt or a press boondoggle? Although an artwork’s inclusion in some art exhibition is typically considered positive, like its membership in some special art collection, the way a curated exhibition is conceived effectively augments each artwork’s intrinsic value. A curated exhibition is a set whose organizational principles are readily determinable, thus facilitating people’s capacity to infer the ‘modes of reasoning’ that inform set membership. Moreover, selected and positioned artworks illuminate properties and interpretations attributable to ‘set members’, many of which are not necessarily present. Even though galleries routinely debut artworks in art-fair booths and auction houses display artworks in their offices prior to auctions, these sets are fusions, no different than grocery stores, since neither format adds extrinsic or intrinsic value. The main motivation for such exhibitions is to enhance the chance of artworks locating buyers. Sellers expect that such added visibility will increase demand for exhibited artworks, since the opportunity to boost their extrinsic value depends on their entering reputable collections. With auction houses and art fairs, the primary goal is sales, not contents, which is the curated exhibition’s purpose.21 Exhibitions presented in warehouses, galleries or museums that prompt people to regard each artwork as singular, independent of said exhibitions, remain fusions, since set membership neither highlights their common subject manner nor inspires an awareness of their organizational principles. By contrast, even a ‘Gallery Artists’ exhibition can be a curated presentation, if it’s organized to illuminate gallery artists’ common subject matter and prompts spectators to consider the organizer’s mode(s) of reasoning. Exhibitions are conceived so as to reveal particular features of the artworks on view. In this case, the artworks indicate belongingness to some whole. When curated exhibitions illuminate contents that wouldn’t be grasped otherwise, they augment each artwork’s intrinsic value. Like curated exhibitions, art collections require ‘modes of reasoning’, but only curated exhibitions exhibit rules of inference – ‘rules for reasoning from meaningful premises to meaningful conclusions’ – thus

The Curator

27

enabling curators to extrapolate potential members from the massive global set of available artworks (Potter 2004: 12–13). As members of a particular exhibition, juxtaposed artworks visually amplify one another’s features, so as to reveal each other’s shared concepts and related content. When the curator’s organizing principles are noticeable, one begins to notice how contents available for one artwork highlight contents elsewhere. As a result of exploring artworks and comparing and contrasting them, viewers begin to generate patterns and themes that enable them to form narrative threads about members selected and displayed in the curated exhibition. Exhibitions whose members prompt spectators to identify patterns and themes can be said to exhibit inferential properties, that is, aggregate properties that prompt spectators to form inferences concerning the featured artworks. The viewer obtains the organizing principle from the aggregate and then infers other rules that cover various members or at least the members of particular clusters. Curated exhibitions are constitutive sets because rules devised by the curator to select and position the set’s members are those that spectators later infer from the presentation. One might assume that the greater the symmetry between presentation and reception, the more successful the exhibition. In such cases, the gap between what the curator has proposed and what spectators infer approaches zero. Problem is that a perfectly received exhibition tends to engender little or no public deliberation, making it a non-starter. In Chapter 8, I discuss the tendency of ‘uncurated’ exhibitions to maximize asymmetries. When inference doesn’t work, additional interpretations are needed. By employing rules to discover relevant artworks, curators can thus identify potential members of some set whose presence alongside related artworks facilitates the viewer’s revelation of desired content. By imagining what it would be like for audience members to experience these artworks together and at what proximity, the curator then determines whether this related artwork is also a set member and where it should go. Once the exhibition is on view, audience members ascertain the contents that the exhibition aims to illuminate by inferring relationships from juxtaposed artworks, what I term relational clusters. This phrase characterizes the way curators construct groupings to focus viewers’ attentions on aspects, such as hand gestures, that alert people to specific contents. As New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz notes: The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged

28

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny. (Saltz 2007)

What I call relational clusters, Mieke Bal has termed ‘collocation’ (1996: 125).22 Before analysing three paintings hanging adjacent to one another at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, she asks ‘What does the collocation of two twosomes do for viewers who come here, not as art historians but as respondents to images?’ (1996: 118). By two twosomes, she means Caravaggio’s Amor Vincit Omnia (1602) juxtaposed with his earlier Doubting Thomas (1600-1601), as well as the former juxtaposed with Giovanni Baglione’s later Heavenly Amor Defeats Earthly Love (1602–3). A few pages later, she concludes: No expository agent can foresee, programme or totally preclude such visual experiences. Some of this must simply be left to luck, intuition, and to the art itself … somehow they ‘work’ together; and to hang them so close, and so well-lit that they invite viewer participation … . But the effect of the display is much more than the accumulation of the effects of the three works. Its cultural-political story could not have been told by any of the three alone. Nor could it have touched me, allowing the constative to become highly performative, and the ‘second person’ to participate beyond the expository agent’s programme. (128)

Every exhibition presents relational clusters ‘working together’ to amplify meanings, which adheres with artists’ claims. Edvard Munch wrote, ‘I have always worked best with my paintings around me. I arranged them together and felt that some of the pictures were connected to each other in content. When they were positioned together, there immediately arose a resonance between them and they became totally different than when displayed individually. It became a symphony’ (Knausgård 2019). Antoni Tàpies remarked, ‘By selecting certain pictures and omitting others, it’s possible to make my work mean something quite different’ (Catoir 1991: 91).

2.5 Constituency As compared to a curated exhibition’s underlying organizing principle, which requires set members to exhibit the set’s mode of reasoning, rather basic rules govern membership in other types of sets such as the (1) artist’s oeuvre, (2)

The Curator

29

artist’s studio, (3) art collection and (4) new grocery-store products. Broadly speaking, the respective rules are the following: (1) this belongs, in the sense of constituency, though not necessarily ownership, to the set of artworks the artist has produced over his/her lifetime; (2) this belongs, though not necessarily in the sense of either ownership or constituency, to the set of objects the artist owns, borrowed or stole; (3) this belongs, in the sense of ownership, though not necessarily constituency, to the set of artworks some art collector currently owns and (4) this belongs in the sense of constituency and ownership to the set of novel products that some focus group has determined are most likely to attract grocery shoppers. The notion of constituency applies to sets whose members are constitutive of a particular set, such that membership engenders set identity. Even though the artist may not be directly involved in the production of every artwork, the fact that the artist sanctions his/her artworks makes each one a constitutive member of his/her oeuvre (Irvin 2005). One might wonder why I don’t consider constituency a feature of art collection members, especially since I have already claimed that a collection’s reputation reflects the overall collection, not its owner(s).23 Constituency seems irrelevant for art collections, since collection reputations prove indifferent to collectors who regularly trade their holdings. Were constituency a factor, the collection’s reputation would reflect its inventory, rising when key artworks enter and falling when key artworks leave. In fact, highly publicized sell-offs of key artworks at record prices have been known to boost a collection’s reputation, even if prized artworks no longer belong to the set. If the market perceives that some reputable collection’s massive sell-off of high-dollar artworks will engender fresh capital to begin collecting anew, the collection’s reputation will remain intact so long as new bets anticipate tomorrow’s art-stars. For these reasons, art collections prove invaluable as a sum, though not necessarily as a set. Were art collections constitutive sets, each collection’s overall reputation would drive set member prices more than artists’ individual markets, potentially increasing each member’s price beyond what the art market could bear for particular artists. It might seem surprising that grocery stores’ ‘focus-grouped’ sets feature constitutive members that are assembled and displayed according to rules. And in fact, grocery-store chains depend on consumers’ fidelity to brands, which dictate display rules, to increase profitability. Just as grocery-store chains sell the same products under different labels for far more and far less than other brands or stores, artists’ prices vary wildly depending on their context representation. With the first three types of sets, one need only review set lists to determine where

30

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

members belong, whereas determining product placement in the focus group– derived set requires modes of reasoning.24 Interestingly enough, knowing the artist, collector or focus group members would be insufficient to infer what other members belong to these sets; however, it might help. By contrast, knowing the curator would definitely not help one guess which members belong to his/her set. Oddly enough, a total stranger could ascertain the curator’s rule and propose additional member(s) that the curator happily accepts, because he/she has overlooked them. Unlike curated exhibitions, whose constitutive sets exhibit inferential properties, knowing the rules for sets (1), (2) and (3) doesn’t enable one to extrapolate which other objects also belong to the set. These rules are basic, precisely because they lack inferential power. For example, it’s not unusual to visit an exhibition of new artwork by an artist whose art one knows quite well and feel like one would never have guessed in a million years that that this artist had made this artwork. For such cases, the oeuvre seems inconsistent, yet oeuvre membership is constitutive all the same. New members may not appear constitutive of the artist’s oeuvre, yet one imagines that the constituency of later artworks in relationship to earlier artworks will one day seem self-evident. Furthermore, there would be no obvious way to know whether a signed artwork found sitting on the curb is a member of the artist’s studio, some art collection or a gallery inventory, even if it looks exactly like something some artist would have created, some collector might have purchased or some dealer is likely to exhibit. By contrast, the curator who has never before seen this object might yell out, ‘Hey look! That belongs in our show!’ Soon after, the artist shows up, but even she is at pains to guess where it belongs, since her gallerist had consigned it, but no one knows who last borrowed it or whether it was returned. The fact that one cannot tell to which set some lost artwork belongs coheres with our initial intuition that any artwork could be included in any show, something that is not true of artworks in curated exhibitions. Curated exhibitions augment each member’s intrinsic value, since the act of demonstrating the exhibition’s organizing principles simultaneously expands each member’s contents. In response to some curator’s claim that this now ‘found’ artwork f belongs in their show, his co-curator replies, ‘No it doesn’t. Are you crazy?’ After a heated debate, they might (1) rearrange the floor plan to clarify the hypotheses intended by the addition of f, (2) substitute f for some other artwork(s) in the set, since both come to realize that f is the strongest example of what they have in mind, (3) forget f all together, (4) organize multiple exhibitions that all need

The Curator

31

to include f, (5) reconceive the entire exhibition to accommodate the organizing principle prompted by f’s inclusion or (6) save f for a later exhibition, where it ‘poses the perfect fit’.25

2.6  Inferential properties What do I mean by posing the perfect fit? Curated exhibitions juxtapose artwork x and artwork y in ways that make r, the ‘rule of inference’, obvious. Absent a public exhibition that has been curated to highlight the underlying organizing principles, it’s difficult to guess what rule some studio, collection or gallery is following, even if the artist, collector and/or dealer actually do follow specific rules.26 For example, the artist may use only yellow or the collector only purchases artworks that cost $3000 or less, but only a curated exhibition designed to make these rules visible could demonstrate these suppositions.27 One may have surmised rule r and even feel totally convinced that r drives this set, but only public exhibitions confirm such rules as they invite public deliberation.28 Without a public exhibition, r remains a hunch. Melchionne considers ‘collecting a means of the aesthetic cultivation of the individual’ (Melchionne 1999: 154). Exhibitions of art collections thus accrue identities associated with impeccable taste, which distinguishes collectors’ sets from curators’ sets. One could argue pace Merleau-Ponty that art collections exhibit particular styles on par with collectors’ sartorial prowess, thus art collections seem ruled more by style.29 Unlike collectors engaged in programmes of aesthetic cultivation, curated exhibitions enable spectators to gain access to the curator’s proposed interpretative schemes, so that they can infer, consider and affirm ideas and hypotheses proposed by the curator, independent of personal preferences.30 A curated exhibition’s outcome is meant to be objective like science and normative like ethics, since it proposes models for others to follow. Given each artwork’s multivalency, one might baulk at the very idea of objective exhibitions. Hardly meant as ironic, sardonic, pretend or patently false, curated exhibitions are presented with accuracy in mind, which requires future exhibitions to dissuade spectators of earlier exhibitions’ outcomes, the way experiments affirming new scientific theories do. Given that artworks are far more elastic than nature, curated exhibitions seem far more vulnerable to bias than scientific experiments. Even so, conclusions drawn from scientific experiments and curated exhibitions alike are meant to engender universals, not particulars.

32

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Finally, both depend on outside examiners (repeat experiments in the case of science and repeat applications in the case of the artworld) to confirm outcomes and disseminate findings. Those sets that become curated exhibitions exhibit inferential properties, something that is not true of aggregates comprising the artist’s studio, the artist’s oeuvre or private collections. With curated exhibitions, the curator uses some rule r to discover potential members of the set. As the ‘found artwork’ case above illustrates, sets comprising contents of a studio, collection or gallery are not rule bound, otherwise one could easily assess where f belongs. So long as the curator articulates rule r (or hypotheses) to be demonstrated (tested and validated), then anyone can identify artworks belonging to the set exhibiting r. Unlike rule r, collections governed by identifiable styles prove to be comparatively subjective. As should be clear by now, set membership in a curated exhibition is hardly random. As members of a structured set, whose members are selected based on organizing principles, each member noticeably informs (as in shapes) the set’s constituency, something that is not true of art collections, fusions or ordinary aggregates. Two vectors are at work here – a curated exhibition’s constituents and their arrangement, or sequencing – which join forces to stimulate reception. Storr remarks, ‘Selection is the initial, and, in many ways, the touchiest, stage of this negotiation since it inevitably means stating preferences’ (2006: 21). He continues, the ‘sequencing of works in the first rooms of an exhibition becomes a primer for learning how to read other, perhaps more complex material that follows. Cacophonous beginnings or stately and contemplative ones set a tone for the whole installation that may be borne out by what comes after, or [is] contradicted by it’ (25). Drawing inferences, though not interpreting artworks, is a large part of audience reception. Reception, which joins perception, inference and understanding, remains the public’s particular contribution. Even if the curator’s prerogative is some clever new interpretation, he/she cannot force some desired reception. This coheres with my associating curated exhibitions and scientific experiments, since the scientist practicing extraordinary science does not easily persuade other scientists to adopt his/her views. Just as spectators deliberate long after exhibitions end, scientists eventually decide of their own accord to embrace new approaches. With this in mind, one might describe curated exhibition e as a unique set of artworks arranged to effect a special attitude. But we already have a feeling that

The Curator

33

such sets are particular, not unique, since members can be added or substituted to effect an experience that seems so similar that everyone deems it the same exhibition (for all practical purposes). If so, what guides and constrains the set’s selection and display? How far can e be stretched before it becomes something else, altogether?

2.7  Work ’n’ world A casual visit to either an artist’s studio or an art gallery can leave one feeling unable to wrap one’s head around the artist’s practice. The very inscrutability of some artistic production makes one wonder whether anyone has a clue about what the artist is doing, what his/her artworks mean or why his/her actions matter. I thus attribute productive conceptualization to those curators who take great effort to link work and world, since artworks cannot speak for themselves.31 As Gaskell reminds us, ‘No art object “speaks for itself ” though it may appear to speak as many mutually incomprehensible tongues as there are visually monolingual viewers. Curators are multilingual interpreters in the visual Babel of the museum’ (1996: 157). If work is an artwork’s conceptual counterpoint, then one can toggle between an artwork’s initially inscrutable aspects and potential worldly references, whose forms are linguistic and then back to work itself, thus deriving work from world. Like a Pringles® tube lying prone on some grocery-store shelf, an artwork is always delineated by its site, whether stored in an artist’s studio, housed in a private collection or displayed in a public exhibition alongside nonart ephemera (e.g. photos, journals, sketchbooks, advertisements, exhibition announcements and posters). Of course, the lone artwork sitting in storage or doubling as a one-work exhibition is the rare moment where the set is actually a singleton, whose status as curated depends entirely on its context.32 As one can imagine, visitors try to absorb as many objects as possible. Supposedly, human beings can focus on only six percepts at a time, so most spectators grasp a rather modest set, only those things which they can consider or reflect upon simultaneously. Viewers expect the immediate environment to provide whatever tools they need to distinguish art from nonart. For example, visitors must discern performers enacting Tino Sehgal’s This Progress (2006) from docents.33

34

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

In the context of a studio visit, the viewer might notice several clipped newspaper articles tacked to the wall, a wax-coated hotplate, paint-splattered walls, resin-drizzled floors and several sculptures barely visible through their plastic wrap. Such real-world clues offer the visitor a foothold onto the artist’s oeuvre. The studio visitor imagines that the artist is currently a painter, who applies wax and resin and finds inspiration in particular articles. Similarly, guests experiencing artworks in some home notice art juxtaposed with furnishings, family photographs displayed on the piano and coffee-table books stacked to demonstrate preferences. Together, these components affect particular experiences. Within the artist’s studio or collector’s home, residue from studio activities or the collector’s personal belongings helps to connect the artworks to the world. By contrast, artworks displayed in exhibitions feel comparatively isolated, practically clipped from the world from whence they originated.34 This could explain why aestheticians tend to treat artworks as singletons, rather than as members of some set. If artworks sometimes feel void of any context that connects them to world, curated exhibitions are meant to reconnect artworks to references present in the world. One could argue that the curator’s most daunting task is to devise relational clusters that effectively link work and world, a task made all the more arduous since spectators rely on artworks, not words. The curator is tasked with anticipating what spectators expect the exhibition to do. II. To aid spectators’ capacity to link artworks to the world, curators create relational clusters that illuminate adjacent artworks’ shared references. New Museum of Contemporary Art founder Marcia Tucker described the research she undertook to get a foothold on artworks prior to exhibiting them: Just about every exhibition I organized taught me something important. I learned from the research I did in art historical sources, but my real education came from reading the books that the artists I worked with loved, or from reading in areas outside the arts – science, math, religion, philosophy, even murder mysteries – because a foray into those fields led me to think about an artist’s work in a way that art historical research could not offer. (2008: 160)

To avail these references, the curator posits artworks in relationship to other exhibited artworks. Such research guides the curator’s placement of selected artworks, garnering relational clusters. As we shall see, curators are often forced to transform partial checklists (the original set’s members plus late additions/subtractions as they become known)

The Curator

35

into what must appear to everybody else as a seamless exhibition, capable of testing either the same hypotheses or slightly modified versions in light of the altered set. Try doing this with a grocery store, let alone a grocery store list! When some grocery-store staple, even as obscure as a jar of cumin, is not available, everybody who expects it to be readily available immediately notices its absence. Similarly, dinner guests will consider one’s Thanksgiving dinner compromised should one substitute pigeon for turkey, even if there are no turkeys available. Not so an art exhibition! A riot would surely break out if some institution advertised some famous artwork, which they never delivered.35 However, as long as the curator can test the same set of hypotheses, which the audience can infer from the artworks on view, the checklist, which by now includes numerous substitutes, proves flexible, though not infinitely so. As already noted, routine checklist modifications are inevitable. The curator rarely gets access to everything on his/her wish list. Sometimes it turns out that artworks are actually committed to another exhibition, despite having been promised to this show; shipping gets constrained as exhibition budgets get slashed; artists end up being too busy with other projects and some dealers are overly protective of their artists, making it difficult for curators to get loan requests.36 Only when curators creatively ‘make do’ with far less than they need does curating approach art making. In contrast to viewers who claim to ‘know what they like when they see it’, curators are typically motivated by artworks that defy their ability to understand them. Louis Frank, co-curator of the Louvre’s ‘Léonard de Vinci’ (2019–20) recently made a startling admission: ‘When we began our work we didn’t understand anything about Leonardo … we had to start all over again to understand’ (Williams 2019). On the very first page of Tucker’s autobiography, she wrote, ‘The work I like most is always [emphasis mine] the art I don’t understand – the stuff that sticks in my mind but eludes me in every other way. It nags at me, making sure that when I least expect it, it’ll interrupt my dinner or my sleep with stupid questions, like “Why do I make you uncomfortable?”’ (2008: 1).37 As if to assuage this madness, Leo Steinberg remarked, ‘If a work of art disturbs you, it is probably a good work. If you hate it, it’s probably great’ (Tucker 2008: 81).38 Wrestling with how to make sense of artworks that simultaneously fascinate and disturb, yet elude them all the same, curators originate the most appropriate tools for interpretation and then mount an exhibition to test whether these tools do indeed aid the public’s understanding. Such tools either stand the test of time, eventually becoming tools for understanding, or evaporate along with the exhibition.39

36

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Even when the curator aims for an exhibition with a ‘scrupulously realized interpretation of the works’, viewers are afforded experiences inevitably seen from ‘a variety of perspectives’. Storr continues: Rather than [taking] one form, exhibitions take many, some more, some less appropriate to their timing, their situation, their audience and above all their contents. None of them is ideal and none exhausts the potential meanings of important art. A good exhibition is never the last word on its subject. Instead it should be an intelligently conceived and scrupulously realized interpretation of the works selected, one which acknowledges by its organization and installation that even the material on view – not to mention those things which might have been included but were not – may be seen from a variety of perspectives and that this will sooner or later happen to the benefit of other possible understandings of the art in question. (2006: 14)

2.8  The floor plan In light of what we now know about constitutive sets, one might claim that the most basic notion of an art exhibition is its checklist, which starts off as a ‘wish list’, since there is usually a huge difference between the beginning checklist and the final checklist attending an exhibition. And the list typically varies, as the exhibition passes from one host venue to the next. In fact, the difference between an exhibition’s multiple checklists poses a huge philosophical question. If the curator and title stay the same, though the artworks and placements change dramatically from venue to venue, is it still the same exhibition? Most of the time, the host venue opts to lay out the show, since its employees usually know its facility better, and its curator wants to add related artworks from both the museum’s collection and that of local patrons keen to lend artworks from their collection. Is this still the same exhibition? Which factors identify the exhibition as the same one and which factors determine that it’s a different one all together? Just as the curator begins with a working checklist that evolves into a ‘final’ checklist, he/she begins with a preliminary floor plan that gets finessed as the exhibition develops. Once the curatorial team begins to install the artworks, some team member may identify an even better way to produce the desired experience, causing the floor plan to shift a bit. So long as team members concur about the kind of experience their exhibition aims to effect, they can negotiate the best way to produce this outcome. In this regard, the second venue’s curator

The Curator

37

is also a team member, selecting and placing additional artworks so as to offer spectators the desired experience. As Storr observes, ‘Exhibition makers must know their own mind and then clearly interpret how it works to all concerned, including those who hire them, their colleagues at all structural levels and, above all, the artist[s]’ (2006: 18). There may even be curators who actually eschew floor plans or generate checklists with far more artworks than their facility could accommodate, forcing them to improvise on the spot, the way some filmmakers shoot movies. Whether planned in advance or improvised on the spot, an exhibition’s eventual floor plan implies far more information than an interior decorator’s furniture layout: it conveys some overall planned experience comprised from series of relational clusters, whereby artworks are situated so as to work off of one another, inspiring audience members to make connections between artworks at hand and their world. As we shall see, the particular placement of each artwork in relation to nearby artworks (or architectural details) triggers thoughts that help spectators infer the organizing principles, making floor plans the most basic tool for interpretation. In light of the aforementioned exhibitions featuring Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (Figure 1) and Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (Figure 2), other basic tools for interpretation include their being categorized as Early Netherlandish or Flemish Primitive, which designates the time period 1435–1560, as well as the curator’s staging them to invite viewers to focus on the painted figures’ hand gestures. Less basic tools for interpretation involve the curator’s inspiring spectators to notice the way the figures feel framed, even boxed in, by their surroundings; the intimacy such settings afford, these figures’ interrelationships, as well as the handling of paint affording sensually-draped fabrics. The curator must also provide viewers tools for understanding, such as all-over perspective, to help them negotiate depth of perception. The floor plan’s success as a tool for interpretation depends on its capacity to activate relational clusters. Although Hans-Georg Gadamer neither discussed curating nor mentioned relational clusters, he recognized the significance of juxtaposing pictures as an interpretative device. Even though he did not discuss curatorial work per se, he clearly grasped the way curators’ presentations demonstrate interpretations. Gadamer wrote: It is possible to demonstrate something by means of contrast – e.g., by placing two pictures alongside each other or reading two poems one after the other, so that one is interpreted by the other. In these cases demonstration seems

38

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice to obviate verbal interpretation. But in fact this kind of demonstration is a modification of verbal interpretation. In such demonstration we have the reflection of interpretation and the demonstration is used as a visual shortcut. Demonstration is interpretation in much the same sense as is a translation that embodies an interpretation, or the correct reading aloud of a text that has already decided the questions of interpretation, because one can only read aloud what one has understood. Understanding and interpretation are indissolubly bound together. (2006: 400)

Gadamer’s notion of correctly reading aloud recalls video artist Gary Hill’s Remarks on Color (1994), which features his then eight-year-old daughter reading Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour aloud. Hill’s video upends Gadamer’s claim that ‘one can only read aloud what one has understood [emphasis mine]’.40 From my experience, few eight-year-old readers grasp Wittgenstein enough to read it so well. Even so, one might say that demonstrations, translations and ‘correct readings’ are authentic presentations, when they facilitate what Nelson Goodman considers ‘compliance’ (Goodman 1968: 117), Sherri Irvin describes ‘as the artist’s sanctioning of features of the work’ (Irvin 2005) or my ‘poses the perfect fit’. Of course, some curatorial team’s presentation reflects its having interpreted artworks based on some prior understanding, but far more enduring are those narrative threads that viewers form themselves, take away and later recall. With curating, it is not so much the beautiful installation, wonderful presentation or faithful assembly (presuming the artwork has many parts) that matters most, although these are important goals. The exhibition must guide viewers to infer the significance of the experience at hand, which was presumably laid out to prompt spectators’ responses. As we shall see in Chapters 5 and 6, reception is not just the flip side of presentation, but its outcome, which is typically asymmetrical.

2.9  Understanding versus interpretation Since one of my purposes here is to show how curators, art historians and critics generate both tools for interpretation and tools for understanding, it’s important to distinguish interpretation from understanding. Gadamer’s last sentence in the passage above summarizes his well-known position, whereby interpretation and understanding are bound together via presentation, which doesn’t quite ring true. Composer John Cage was among the first to decry the way understanding

The Curator

39

precludes experience (Kostelanetz 2003: 250). As already mentioned, Tucker and Storr consider understanding long-term goals, making each new presentation a temporary interpretation en route to understanding. In contrast to Gadamer, who requires reflective interpretation (active thinking), pragmatist Richard Shusterman considers understanding – which for him includes pre-reflective judgements and direct experience – sufficient. Indicative of understanding’s influence, Shusterman notes the way ‘understanding grounds and guides interpretation, while interpretation enlarges, validates, or corrects understanding. … Moreover, it need not be an explicitly formulated or conscious understanding and the ground it provides is not an incorrigible ground’ (Shusterman 2000: 131). British aesthetician Roger Scruton viewed understanding as the rational laws that constrain one’s imagination, a process that typically engages pre-reflective thinking. Since each viewer brings along his/her own tools for understanding, whether observational skills or past experiences, philosophers like Alva Noë divide these tools into sensorimotor skills and conceptual skills. As he remarks, To perceive something, you must understand and to understand you must, in a way, already know it, you must have already made its acquaintance. There are no novel experiences. The conditions of novelty are, in effect, the conditions of invisibility. To experience something, you must comprehend it by the familiarizing work of the understanding. You must master it. Domesticate it. Know it. (2009: 473)

Noë’s position dovetails with Shusterman’s view of understanding as ‘basic’ or as philosophers like to say, ‘It comes for free.’ As we shall see in Chapter 4, people who are unfamiliar with photographs don’t immediately identify the subjects floating on the paper’s surface. To do so, they need tools for understanding. Once they master ‘photograph-reading’, they do so effortlessly. With practice, tools for understanding come for free. Given these divergent views, I gather that artworlders consider understanding thick like common knowledge (or art history), while philosophers treat it as thin (automatic like cognition). So long as understanding colours perception, Cage’s worry is justified. Exemplary of philosophical notions of understanding’s being automatic include Martin Heidegger’s notion of equiprimordiality, Wittgenstein’s notion of convention, Arthur Danto’s notion of artworld theories and Dickie’s social institutions, whereby artworks are presumed to speak for themselves because they are products of pre-existing cultural systems, leaving few gaps between work and world. Philosophers’ tendency to consider artworks

40

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

conceptualized at the onset reflects the view that for artists to produce art at all, they must already have the requisite concepts. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Noël Carroll’s endorses this view since he considers it impossible for artists to create artworks absent prior artworld frames, which must mean that he believes that artworks exit studios fully conceptualized (1995: 252). Artists renowned for producing avant-garde art, however, tend to produce artworks that audiences, including curators and critics, find difficult, if not impossible, to frame, let alone decipher. Although some philosophers consider rule-breaking a variant of rule-following, as if the rule for avant-garde artists is to obliterate convention, this view does not account for the fact that rulebreaking typically results in inscrutable artworks that eschew identification. Such artworks, which may not even be recognizable as art, demand new tools to interpret them as art, giving rise to new concepts, frames and lenses. Consider Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 1992 artwork Untitled (Free) (retitled Untitled (Free/Still) when MoMA acquired it in 2011), for which he installed everything from 303 Gallery’s backroom in the gallery and converted the backroom into a kitchen where he cooked and served passers-by Thai curry. Since then, artworlders have devised numerous theories, notions like ‘generosity, exchange, hospitality, experiential art, social practice, relational aesthetics, social justice or inclusivity’ to explain/defend this artwork’s relevance. When work and world are in sync, as is typically the case with curated exhibitions, the curator’s interpretation makes the artwork seem easily understandable – something that may be true today, but was unlikely to have been the case when first exhibited. Most important, the artwork will not necessarily remain understandable, should future curators fail to identify interpretations that make it relevant for tomorrow’s audiences. I have in mind the way grasping Renaissance paintings requires researching biblical stories and mythology, which yesteryear’s viewers likely knew offhand. In Chapter 4, I distinguish tools for interpretation from tools for under­ standing in a manner that echoes Shusterman’s view of interpretation and understanding, whereby unique tools devised for interpreting once avant-garde practices become second nature, enabling yesteryear’s tools for interpretation to become tomorrow’s tools for understanding (pre-reflective, direct) that are more generally applicable. Here I have in mind the way art historical lenses such as cubist or surrealist make an artwork’s contents immediately noticeable. Even so, exhibition visitors are often content just to explore individual artworks, rather than actively reflect upon the curator’s ‘modes of reasoning’.

The Curator

41

2.10  Exacted exhibitions The threefold requirement of curator, checklist and floor plan seems maximal, when compared to Susan Feagin’s identifying theatre as ‘based on a script’, written or otherwise.41 In contrast to exhibition checklists, theatre scripts generally specify far more information – a dramatist, characters, dialogue, scene settings, stage directions and line directions. An exhibition checklist need not be prepared by the curator, although the curator typically supervises its preparation. Moreover, an exhibition checklist typically designates only each object’s author, title, completion date, materials, dimensions, lender’s name plus contact information, insurance value and desired courtesy line. As Figure 3 illustrates, checklists typically list objects alphabetically by artist’s name, giving its users no clue as to how and where to place the objects, let alone the experience the curator intends to effect.42 The curator’s written exhibition proposal typically specifies reasons and goals for mounting the exhibition, so one might be able to infer rules regarding placement from that document, but there is little guarantee. Sometimes checklists are subdivided by gallery to convey which artworks belong together in each room, but this hardly informs anyone about the appropriate relational clusters, unless lists are designated ‘Gallery One (clockwise beginning with the east entrance)’.43 As noted above, relational clusters invite viewers to connect artworks to world in ways that they might not otherwise. For example, the Art Institute of Chicago owns six of the twenty-six Les Meules à Giverny paintings produced by Claude Monet in the early 1890s (Figure 4). By displaying multiple haystacks at once, as Monet originally did when he exhibited fifteen during his 1891 exhibition at Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris, viewers can easily grasp their connection to seasonal and hourly time, something that is not necessarily self-evident should one view only one painting at a time. Interestingly enough, the notion of time isn’t lost on audience members who experience only one of these paintings, so long as they have access to some institutional memory regarding Monet’s original goal to capture available daylight. No doubt, the local grocery store’s organic-food section has both an inventory list and display guidelines. Are such sections fabulously curated by ‘organicfood curators’? As already noted, a grocery store’s presentation and product ordering may be ‘well thought-out’ (i.e. it exhibits a mode of reasoning), since its organization stimulates shoppers’ preferences. Still, it’s not an exacted exhibition, since shoppers don’t weave narrative threads. For the organic-food section

42

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Figure 3 ‘30 Americans’ checklist detail, 2019, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Photo Credit: ©Jean-François Paquay.

to be ‘curated’, its organization would have to demonstrate some particular interpretation, whereby its significance as foodstuff transcends their being ‘chemical-free’, ‘fair trade’ or ‘locally sourced’. To be a ‘curated shelf ’, one must treat foodstuff as artworks that warrant some interpretation. Unfortunately, the adjective curated gets bandied about a lot, rendering it more an honorific than indicative of presentations with novel or useful interpretations. Curating entails far more than merely selecting and arranging, which is what collectors, keen to publicize their cultivated taste, do so well. III. Exacted exhibitions enable audiences to experience artworks in a particular way. As one can see, the Art Institute’s mini-Monet-haystack exhibition invites viewers to experience these paintings as ‘portraits of time’, rather than as landscapes. Since curated exhibitions invite spectators to infer whatever organizing principles connect their members, most spectators visiting the Art Institute of Chicago rather spontaneously notice sunlight falling on haystacks at different times between late summer and early spring, as well as Monet’s having depicted its reflection on the snow at dusk and dawn. Of course, audience experiences (reception) can turn out quite differently from what the curator envisioned. In 1974, Scruton remarked that ‘there is such a thing as defending an interpretation as appropriate to a given work of art and in doing so, one may persuade another, by means of reasons, to experience the work in a certain way’ (Scruton 1998: 337). Although he doesn’t address curating, art criticism or art history, he anticipated the stance advanced here, whereby the curator and his/her

The Curator

43

Figure 4  Claude Monet, ‘Stacks of Wheat’, 2003, Gallery 243, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo Credit: ©Scott McIntyre.

team, which sometimes includes the artist’s input, produce an experience that is designed to inspire audiences to regard the artworks at hand in a particular way. However, as detailed in Chapter 4, reasons alone prove insufficient. Curated exhibitions encourage audiences to adopt certain attitudes regarding the artworks on view, attitudes that are neither merely ‘pro’ nor aesthetic. Echoing Gadamer’s connecting demonstrations to interpretations, Storr reminds curators: The primary means for ‘explaining’ an artist’s work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling. Space is the medium in which ideas are visually phrased. Installation is both presentation and interpretation. Galleries are paragraphs, the walls and formal subdivisions of the floors are sentences, clusters of works are clauses and individual works, in varying degree, operate as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and often as more than one of these functions according to their context. (2006: 23)

Andrew Renton doubles-down: ‘The job of the curator is to make the show selfexplanatory, … actually the works explain each other’ (O’Neill 2012: 36). Although it’s easy to dismiss Storr’s grammatical mapping of art exhibitions to essays, with each gallery functioning as a separate paragraph, his takeaway points

44

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

concern: the way exhibitions visually phrase ideas, the curator’s presentation and the overriding importance of audience reception. He continues, Ordinary people are sensitive to their surrounding and what is in them if you let them be. Based on that basic aptitude they are or can become visually literate if you lead them into and through spaces filled with things in a manner that encourages them to heed the clues they are consciously or subliminally picking up, clues that the exhibition maker has left for them. (Storr 2006: 23)

Unlike Gadamer who considers understanding and interpretation two sides of the same coin, Storr connects the viewer’s experience to the curator’s interpretations, leaving understanding to be some ultimate goal. Of course, there’s no way to prevent audiences from coming away with entirely unexpected ideas and attitudes. It’s hard to imagine, however, curators wasting resources on intentionally misleading presentations, so audiences’ divergent responses indicate that something is amiss. Routinely despised exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial, are remembered despite their unpopularity and thus prove no less influential than those exhibitions most people love. For good, a public backlash might even encourage latecomers to ‘look’ closer and scholars to scour available research for greater insight. We now have several interrelated variables under consideration: curators, artworks, collections, constituency, relational clusters, floor plans/check lists and exacted exhibitions. Of course, an art collector might claim that his/her collection is no less ‘curated’ than first-rate museum exhibitions, since he/she doubles as the curator. And in fact, public exhibitions originated in the early nineteenth-century when collectors jointly assembled exhibitions, though not necessarily from their personal collections, but presumably using skills honed as collectors (Haskell 2000: 49). While collectors can easily wear the curator’s hat and many do, it turns out that collectors position their hats differently, since their efforts typically reflect different goals, motivations, intentions and audiences.

2.11 Collectors With the exception of collectors’ owning private exhibition spaces or lending their collections to public institutions, private collections rarely have public viewings, which is mandatory for curated exhibitions. As we have seen, numerous motivations drive collectors’ purchases, not the least of which is to aesthetically cultivate the individual, experience personal growth (learn to live with challenging artworks), manage investments, peddle influence, complete a collection or practice patronage

The Curator

45

(financially support galleries and/or artists). This description of the collector’s motivations complies with Melchionne’s characterizing collecting as a ‘complex world of wandering, hunting, rummaging, examining, selecting, bargaining, swapping, buying, preserving, restoring, ordering, cataloguing, completing, upgrading, researching and displaying’, whereby collectors demonstrate their enchantment with the world (1999: 151). If exhibitions enable curators to test their hypotheses regarding exhibited artworks, collection exhibitions afford collectors’ public affirmation. Collectors who aspire towards the ‘aesthetic cultivation of the individual’ eventually find ways to validate their taste. Unlike Melchionne, I consider neither collecting nor curating to be artistic pursuits, even when related exhibitions inspire people to experience things in novel ways, what he describes as ‘giving shape to the world’ (1999: 154). Borrowing pragmatist John Dewey’s notions of the artistic as concerning ‘production, creativity and expression’ (Dewey 2005: 48–9) and aesthetic experience as one of ‘consumption, appreciation and interpretation’; Melchionne’s collector is a ‘passive consumer of aesthetic experience’ who exhibits artistic tendencies, so long as he/she is ‘engaged in defining [emphasis mine] what counts as collectible’ (1999: 149–52). He likely means collecting things, more generally, not necessarily artworks since sellers define what is collectible. Straying afield of artistic practices (minimally, ‘a process of doing or making’ (Dewey 2005: 48)), Melchionne appraises classification as the artistic medium for taste-formation, embodied in collecting. He clarifies, ‘Through the new acquisition, the meaning of the collection as a whole is called into question. The stakes are real: my collection is the embodiment of my taste. It is my conviction rendered concrete in interrelated acts of acquisition. Each one represents a decision that forever alters all the others’ (Melchionne 1999: 152). Being a collection, the sum is greater than its parts, so each new addition enriches the whole. As compared to interpretative practices, which require judgement calls, classification is far simpler. An African wooden statue fits collections devoted to wooden sculptures, table-top sculptures, African objects or Ethnic arts. Unlike curators, collectors need not pose the perfect fit. Melchionne’s characterizing classification as an artistic medium seems to render all interpretative practices such as curating, art history or criticism artistic. Consider museums, where three centuries of curators have opted to acquire and display thousands of originally nonart objects such as altars, furniture, statues, scholar’s rocks, devotional tools, vessels and more recently photographs (Rosenberg 2010).44 Hardly an artistic medium, the curator’s interpretative schemes sometimes become art historical lenses, while his/ her focus on presentation reflects his/her critical expertise, even when he/she

46

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

displays ordinary nonart things in ways that engender aesthetic experiences. That nonart things are appreciated as art owes more to their reception as art than to some collector or curator’s capacity to transform ordinary objects into art by sheer force of his/her ‘conviction rendered concrete’. Artworks face their futures, while the curator always glances backwards. Interpretations alone are insufficient to facilitate nonart’s reception as art. Even when the curator’s goal to exact an exhibition inspires viewers to appreciate unfamiliar art, as is the case for avant-garde practices and nonart objects, such as obscure tribal tools that are not considered art, the curator’s contribution proves more scientific than artistic. Scientists don’t make the matter under their study: they rather devise appropriate ways to study it. Even if some curator presents a collector’s collection of obscure tribal artefacts in the exhibition ‘Obscure Tribal Tools’ and displays them in a novel manner that accidentally prompts viewers to appreciate their display as some artwork titled Obscure Tribal Tools, it is unlikely that this display would later be collected (acquired for money), let alone preserved as either a collection or an artwork, the way installations involving collections of objects, such as those by Marcel Broodthaers (and other artists soon to be discussed) remain en masse.45 In fact, curated exhibitions are typically dismantled. Unlike artworks or theatrical plays, which are repeatedly presented over time, exhibitions become objects of discussion once their tours end, making them no less virtual than Danto’s thought experiment featuring nine indiscernible red square paintings (Danto 1981).46 It is hardly accidental that exhibition titles appear in quote marks like essays, songs and poems, whereas exhibition catalogues and artworks are italicized, indicating their higher ranking and intended permanence. Furthermore, if the crate containing the collector’s artefacts featured in ‘Obscure Tribal Tools’ – the first exhibition to feature the collector’s obscure tribal tools – is determined to have been stolen soon after it returned from that exhibition, it would be an act of forgery for the collector to replicate his/her tribal tool collection, the way artists do when they refabricate lost artworks or repair damaged ones. Should the stolen crate turn out to be insured, the collector would likely use the insurance money to resume hunting for more obscure tribal tools. Imagine that another curator stumbles across installation shots depicting those obscure tribal tools, which he/she shows some collector, who offers to have them fabricated so that they can be exhibited as ‘exhibition copies’ in ‘Obscure Tribal Tools II’. No matter how one slices it, the curator exhibiting the collector’s surrogates is exhibiting fakes, since collectors lack the authority to sanction tribal tools, let alone replicas. If the original crate is suddenly found, the curator is under no obligation to replicate any of its prior presentations (as currently or

The Curator

47

formerly displayed either in the collector’s home or in ‘Obscure Tribal Tools I’), as is the curator presenting installation art.47 If the curator opts to display the collection in one of these three ways, he/she would select the arrangement that provides evidence for his/her hypotheses regarding all of the exhibited objects. Curators have no particular fidelity to collectors, though they routinely honour lenders’ stipulations. If the curator opts to faithfully reproduce the collection’s current home display, the curator need not credit the collector’s arrangement, the way he/she would an artist’s installation.48 Should the collection’s presentation in ‘Obscure Tribal Tools II’ differ from its earlier presentations, the curator might opt to display photographs of the tools displayed elsewhere adjacent this version, thus crediting the collector and/or prior curator, while distinguishing his/her efforts. Albert Barnes’s stipulating in the Barnes Foundation’s charter and bylaws that his display remain intact as the idiosyncratic installation that forms the ‘sack’ enveloping his collection’s members, no doubt reflects his recognizing (over six decades ago) curators’ greater fidelity to artists than collectors.49 Barnes’ bylaws rather grant the collector recognition for his display tactics, which are variously appreciated and bemoaned.50 Were the obscure tribal tool collector to insist that the curator reproduce his/ her presentation as a part of the loan agreement, the curator would be right to view the collector as interfering with the curator’s role in augmenting intrinsic value. As already discussed, curated exhibitions augment each member’s intrinsic value, while private collections tend to augment each member’s extrinsic value. As a result, whatever properties are inferred from particular relational clusters can be attributed to any of the cluster’s members. If the collector demands that his/her collection display be faithfully replicated, then the collection becomes a singleton and loses its role as a sack, whose individual members the curator could alternatively spread throughout the exhibition, so as to explicate features of other tools on view. Interestingly enough, artists such as Georges Adéagbo, Kader Attia, Polly Apfelbaum, Guillaume Bijl, Barbara Bloom, Christian Boltanski, Karsten Bott, Marcel Broodthaers, Mark Dion, Sylvie Fleury, Renée Green, Thomas Hirschhorn, Emily Jacir, Pierre Leguillon and Claes Oldenburg have exhibited either archives or collections as their art. Being artworks, these collections are singletons that eschew division, unlike ordinary collections. If an element is lost or goes missing, the artist (and sometimes the exhibitor) either acquires/fabricates a substitute or ignores it altogether. Unlike an art collector’s collection, one could say that each member is substitutable, though not necessarily fungible. Installation art gains its value as a set, whereas collections gain their values from set members.

48

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

By effectively combining the benefits derived from an art collector’s collection (invaluable as a sum) with those afforded a curated exhibition (invaluable as a set), an artist’s collection qua artwork gains both extrinsic and intrinsic values, since the members are members of two types of collections. With an artist’s collection as art, membership in the collection (artist’s installation) increases each member’s extrinsic value, while the arrangement of the members as an installation (curated exhibition) augments the artwork’s intrinsic value. Although the artist’s collection as a set is augmented in two ways, its value as an artwork depends on its reception. Artefacts generally have a greater extrinsic value when they are received as art. Perhaps the most amazing example of the artist’s oeuvre as an exhibition was Maurizio Cattelan’s 2011 career survey ‘All’ (Figure 5), which purportedly

Figure 5  Maurizio Cattelan, ‘All’, 2011. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Photo Credit: ©Sue Spaid.

The Curator

49

featured every artwork that he ever made (collectors actually lent artworks, many of which are priced in the millions of dollars), suspended like a Calder mobile from the skylight of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. If every collector actually lent his/her artwork to the show, the insurance and shipping costs alone would eat up most exhibition budgets. As Untitled (Figure 6) indicates, this extreme exhibition included ‘exhibition copies’. This point, however, has never been discussed, presumably because museums rarely fabricate exhibition copies for such expensive artworks. How does one ‘toss out’, let alone destroy an ‘exhibition copy’ fabricated from Carrara marble? Whether carved by Chinese artisans or local lasers, shipping marble from Italy to China and/or directly to New York City doesn’t come cheaply. Even if private patrons, as opposed to museum trustees, covered the cost of fabricating exhibition copies, I wonder how Cattelan collectors who refused to lend their Cattelans would react if they later found out that their artwork’s edition size was increased to accommodate these copies.51 I doubt that collectors who purchased Cattelans early on thought to sign contracts preventing him from expanding edition sizes.52 For his 1997 exhibition at Paris’ Galerie Perrotin, Cattelan unabashedly exhibited exact copies of Carsten Höller’s rather personal artworks, which were concurrently on view at the then nearby gallery Air de Paris.53 Perrotin even recommended to those collectors who had purchased Höller’s artworks that they also consider acquiring Cattelan’s copies.54

Figure 6  Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled (exhibition copy), 2011, Carrara marble. Photo Credit: ©David Heald.

50

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

As already mentioned, the curator wouldn’t consider disassembling an artist’s installation, unless some rule invited curators to exhibit parts, as was the case for Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise (1941–2), whose presentation of miniature replicas varied from site to site when it travelled to six venues in Sidney Janis’s exhibition, ‘Abstract and Surrealist Art in the United States’ (1944).55 Although some museums have agreed to display donors’ collections in their entirety, I know of no museum other than the Barnes Foundation that actually treats collectors’ collections like artists’ installations, whereby the curator appreciates a collector’s presentation so much that the collector’s arrangement doubles as an installation of sorts, rather than as raw material for the curator’s recurring presentations.56 Unlike collectors, curators have professional agendas, but they try to downplay personal motivations. Like artists, curators stand to gain the selfsatisfaction of a job well done, an impression that sometimes takes years for others (participating artists, viewers or local critics) to corroborate. Curators’ professional agenda includes presenting hypotheses, highlighting references previously not noticed, providing viewers a novel experience, presenting artworks previously not displayed, plus persuading viewers to accept one set of art historical lenses and thematic frames over another. As I hope to demonstrate, none of these activities has anything to do with individual preferences, let alone taste, though curators do require access to artists’ artworks, otherwise they don’t stand a chance of transforming a checklist into an exhibition.57

2.12 Tastemakers These days society increasingly blurs the boundaries between curators who curate exhibitions and professionals who organize nonartworld activities, which, as already noted, is also sometimes called curating. Even more worrisome than nonart experts’ self-identifying as curators is the net effect of professional tastemakers, who consider themselves curators, though their actual field is rather collecting or collection management. This trend suggests that numerous fields value sets whose sums are greater than their parts. In Chapter 8, I explain that this blending of roles has produced a certain anxiety in the artworld, since it opens up the possibility for curating to be considered an artistic practice all its own. Furthermore, the blurring of boundaries between curators and professional tastemakers leads the public to overlook curated sets’ inferential properties. Although I find it unlikely that audiences would confuse

The Curator

51

a curated exhibition with an artwork, I imagine uncurated exhibitions being received as art. As I’ve tried to show, sets that exhibit a mode of reasoning (the collector’s style), though not common subject matter, fail as curated exhibitions. One other explanation for the rise in professionals who self-identify as curators (from zoo curators, film curators, rare book curators to recipe curators) is that there’s an increased demand for experts who consider it their responsibility to safeguard treasures and/or defend esoteric cultural opportunities. In most of these cases, this is less the presentation of artworks and more the care for objects, and hence the job title ‘collections manager’ proves more apt. In contrast to those defenders of cultural opportunities and treasures, most exhibition curators are charged with producing persuasive, coherent exhibitions, not planning programmes or care-taking objects. It’s no wonder Storr, who worries that people tend to associate curators with ‘the care or preservation of art’, prefers the job-specific title exhibition maker (Storr 2006: 14). One may also wonder why there is a sudden need for the curatorial moniker to penetrate so many different fields. I would argue that one reason the appellation curator is deemed relevant for so many fields is because people erroneously associate curating with tastemakers, who not only have good taste but have ready access to interesting things that other people are keen to experience, which offers ‘added value’, aka ‘something more’.58 When it comes to tastemaking, this ‘something more’ is not intrinsic, but extrinsic value. Although this justifies higher ticket prices, it fails to illuminate contents, concepts or contexts, since taste’s purview is primarily perceptible. Despite the increasingly blurred boundaries between curating and taste-based pursuits, curators tend to perform their duties independent of taste in order to empathize with the needs of everyday spectators. Otherwise, wasted resources become missed opportunities in the name of personal agendas.

2.13 Administrators O’Neill’s anxieties regarding the ‘uncertainty of curators regarding the definition of their institutional role’, as mentioned in Chapter 1, seem worlds away from those of nonart theorists who specialize in studying curators. Sociologist Christoph Behnke claims that forty years ago people who organized exhibitions on behalf of institutions and/or managed nonprofit art institutions were often considered ‘arts administrators’, in contrast to today’s impresarios, who often ‘lack professional qualifications [but are] charismatic leader[s], able to bring about

52

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

the reproduction of cultural institutions’ (2010: 28).59 He uses ‘reproduction’ to mean something like preserving a tradition, as in continuing the importance of making extant artworks available to the public, thus archiving history. Behnke’s emphasizing impresarios engaged in ‘reproduction’ is curious. Musical arrangers, theatre directors and filmmakers are under no special obligation to be faithful to some original score, play or script. Moreover, we blame or credit the performer, not the artist, for unrecognizable performances that are panned or lauded for innovation, respectively.60 By contrast, fidelity to artists is of paramount importance for curators. Since directors and conductors compensate composers and writers whose artworks they perform, I suspect that this has more to do with economics than logic or ethics. In the artworld, not only do visual artists typically front the money to make their art, but curators rarely remunerate them when they borrow artworks, leaving visual artists free to demand more control. Decades before today’s curatorial crisis erupted, sociologist Paul DiMaggio posited three roles for ‘managers of the arts’: (a) ‘an aesthetic orientation, which reflects the symbolic capital of the art’, (b) ‘a managerial orientation, which is based on efficiency, market orientation, growth and measurability of action’ and (c) ‘a social orientation, which refers to education and the public’ (1987: 74). More recently, political scientist Kevin Mulcahy distinguished four types of arts administrators based on their capacity for ‘coalition building’ and ‘skillful use of rhetoric and symbols’. They are the (a) intendant, who ‘performs the traditional tasks of high culture, which are related to the reproduction of cultural traditions’, (b) the impresario, who ‘ensures the financial survival of an institution with the goal of short-term successes and popular appeal’, (c) the managerialist, who ‘tries to improve the institution’s financial situation and takes advantage of marketing techniques or tries to ensure the predictability of processes with aesthetic innovations being pushed into the background’ and (d) entrepreneur, who ‘seeks to mobilize symbolic rhetoric to forge broad coalitions of stakeholders ready to protect and promote the individual and societal values of the arts and culture as well as their aesthetic integrity’ (what he terms ‘advocates of culture’) (2003: 176). Since the arts administrator is also a ‘cultural policymaker’, who interfaces with various groups, Mulcahy recognizes that the curator must be conversant in different ‘languages’. Behnke adds, ‘From a field theoretical perspective, the arts administrator primarily moves in three fields: first, the political field, which is here a subfield of cultural policy; second, the field of cultural production and each of the subfields such as, for example, the field of contemporary art

The Curator

53

and, finally, the economic field together with the subfield of philanthropy which is especially important in the US’ (2010: 29). He thus concludes that contemporary art curators are like arts administrators, even though few curators would describe themselves as such. This analogy seems particularly unhelpful, since curators and arts administrators have totally different goals and commitments. In fact, the philosophical field of engineering ethics offers a better analogy, since it distinguishes management’s more general duties and concerns from those of professionals, whose loyalty extends to a wider ‘professional’ community, in particular those engaged in their fields of research (Harris et al. 2009: 167). Whether curators function as the visual version of art historians, demonstrating a particular artist’s strengths or themes, or art critics, making a case for artefacts to be experienced as art, they structure their exhibition’s arguments to appeal to fellow curators, historians and critics alike, as well as their viewing public, none of which are duties expected of arts administrators.

2.14 Exhibitors I now return to this chapter’s opening question, ‘Can exhibitions be uncurated?’ It may seem counter-intuitive, but there are even museum galleries that are not necessarily curated. Sometimes, even Louvre Museum galleries seem more like haphazard painting assortments that unwittingly assail curators’ thematizing schemes, like an artwork consciously titled Untitled. One imagines that Louvre professionals (whether inside curators or outside consultants) determined long ago what to hang in each gallery. Ever since, paintings have been shuffled about to fill vacancies as artworks go out on loan, engendering what appear more like random groupings. As a result, Louvre galleries sometimes look like no one has put much thought into how particular experiences should be effected, which is not unlike the criticism ascribed to Paris’ anthropology museum, Musée du quai Branly.61 As discussed above, even uncurated museums have checklists and floor plans, otherwise no one could find anything. It thus seems that mere selection and placement are insufficient to characterize curated exhibitions. Every art collector, museum and grocery-store owner keeps an inventory list, which denotes each object’s location, if not for themselves then for their insurance agents.

54

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

As one might suspect, exhibitions whose situated artworks fail to prompt relevant thoughts qualify as uncurated. Interestingly enough, many Louvre curators attend the École du Louvre before entering the Institut national du patrimoine, so maybe the problem is institutional. According to the Louvre’s website, the ‘curator is in charge of developing, safeguarding, studying and publicizing the collection in his or her care’.62 At the Louvre, the curator’s exhibition-related duties are as follows: Curators may be called upon to contribute articles about exhibitions mounted by colleagues, as well as [to organize] temporary exhibitions and fresh initiatives within their own departments. Temporary exhibitions highlight a specific period, artist or style, and the curator must take account of the needs of general museum-goers, scholars and experts alike. Detailed knowledge of the museum’s reserve collections enable him or her to inject new life into the permanent collection, especially as this can help negotiate loans requested by colleagues. Working regularly with the research and restoration centre of the Musées de France, curators are responsible for analysing and interpreting new information about specific works provided by chemists, physicists and other experts. Last but not least, curators have a part to play in the training of the museum’s lecturers and guides and students at the École du Louvre.63

While this brief found on the Louvre’s website acknowledges that curators must organize temporary exhibitions and fresh initiatives that ‘inject new life into the permanent collection’, it describes exhibitions more like sets organized around common subject matters (e.g. specific eras, themes or styles), forfeiting common modes of reasoning. Moreover, curators must ‘take account of the needs of general museum-goers, scholars and experts alike’. I imagine some readers whole-heartedly disagreeing with my characterization of the Louvre as uncurated, because their experiences do not mesh with what I describe here, so let’s just call this the ‘Disheveled Museum’ case, so as not to get bogged down by whether my assessment rings true or not.64 I rather aim to acknowledge the distinct possibility, plus institutions’ legitimate reasons for opting out of curated exhibitions, as I next discuss. At the beginning of this chapter, I asked whether viewers wouldn’t benefit more from unmediated, unadulterated experiences with artworks. Whenever I’ve encountered ‘Disheveled Museums’, I’ve found myself wondering whether uncurated exhibitions that present artworks chronologically or regionally aren’t more genuine, absent extraneous meddling interpretations, since they function more like documentaries than manipulative Hollywood films.65

The Curator

55

Even when the objects themselves are left to spur visitors’ attentions, scientific experiments that test people’s actual exhibition experiences prove that individual objects, as opposed to carefully selected and positioned sets of objects, are insufficiently programmed to inspire reflection, let alone goad aesthetic judgement (Spaid 2018: 606). In elevating creativity and treasures, uncurated exhibitions grant all the attention to artworks, yet none to their presentation, thus ignoring the curator’s role in feigning immediacy. The extreme opposite are those exhibitions presented at BOZAR in Bruxelles, whose dependence on scenographers routinely favor display at the expense of artworks. Initially, Douglas Crimp’s review of Rudi Fuchs ‘documenta 7’ (1982) sounds more like an uncurated exhibition: ‘Fuchs willfully distributed works by each artist throughout the galleries so that they would appear in perversely unlikely juxtaposition with works by various other artists. The result was to deny difference, dissemble meaning and reduce everything to a potpourri of random style, although Fuchs liked to speak of this strategy as affecting dialogue among artists’ (Bal 1996: 142–3). Bal rather defends Fuchs’ inspiring approach, since she considers his ‘exhilarating exhibitions’ neither random nor potpourris. For her, they are rather exemplary of curators whose unexpected combinations engender ‘events’. She rather admires the way ‘the curator’s hand was visible, the subject of the display was part of the object. So even if I didn’t always like his choices – and certainly not his exclusions – I knew this was his doing and I could hold him accountable for it. He was like a first-person narrator’ (143). One might argue that uncurated exhibitions are more like raw footage than documentary films, leaving viewers free to assemble their own aesthetic experiences, a feature that is no less true of curated exhibitions. Absent some heavy-handed curator’s specific directions in terms of circulation and interpretation, spectators freely decide when and where to stop and focus their attention. With uncurated exhibitions, do spectators construct their own experiences, or do they flit about trying to locate familiar artworks, in order to gain a toehold? Rather than treating featured artworks as key players, providing evidence for the curator’s claims, artworks exhibited in uncurated exhibitions are either ‘celebrities’ or ‘nobodies’, giving viewers no good reason to attend to the nobodies. By contrast, curated exhibitions assign every artwork a starring role, since every artwork is necessary for the hypotheses to be tested. Well-orchestrated curated exhibitions attempt the objectivity associated with documentary films, whose aim is to steer viewers closer to some underlying account. Simply put, uncurated

56

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

exhibitions are fusions, whose set is reduced to the subset of members that the spectators actually notice and reflect upon. Now that we have some terms and distinctions under our belt, I want to discuss artworks from the spectators’ perspective, in the context of exhibitions. Ignoring the role exhibitions play in framing artworks is like analysing a poem torn from its book, characters absent from their plays, scenes clipped from their films and so on. At this section’s onset, I asked whether there shouldn’t be two separate fields: the philosophy of art and the philosophy of exhibitions. As must seem clearer, artworks and their presentations are so entwined that separating the fields risks further obscuring how exhibitions conceptualize artworks.

3

Spectators

This chapter surveys the spectators’ many roles from ‘goers’ to stakeholders, whose tenacity pays off, since they facilitate artworks’ potential for being candidates for reception, a view that disputes the Institutional Theory of Art’s focus on candidates for appreciation.

3.1  Candidates for reception Even though it can take decades for artworks to be considered candidates for reception, George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art (1974) reduces this messy process to a single act – that of ‘baptism’. He describes the artworld’s minimum core as consisting ‘of artists who create the works, “presenters” to present the works and “goers” who [not only] appreciate the works’, but ‘whose presence and cooperation [are] necessary in order for anything to be presented’ (2007: 431). Dickie rightly distinguishes the ‘goers’, yet he accords greater agency to ‘status-conferrers’, whether the artist, the artwork’s stakeholders or its presenters, as if status-conferral ensures the success of an artwork’s presentation. Dickie’s view thus ignores the impact of audience reception in facilitating institutional memories along the way.1 The view defended here emphasizes reception, and thus counters the view associated with Dickie that someone in the artworld, most likely ‘the artist who creates the artefact’ or some exhibitor, confers the status of being a candidate for appreciation, which is how artefacts gain their special status as art (Dickie 2007: 432). By artefact, he means either a thing made by some human being (e.g. drawing, fire, plant, car or film) or some object appropriated by some artist as his/her art, such as Eduardo Kac’s GFP (green fluorescent protein) bunny, Alba.2 No doubt, curators and collectors regularly propose candidates and their selections often appear exclusionary, yet nothing they can do will ensure the

58

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

artefact’s status, let alone its longevity as an object of care (Tucker 2008: 129).3 Mieke Bal calls spectators the ‘second-person addressee’ and credits them as the ‘primary and decisive condition for the exposing to happen at all’ (Bal 1996: 4). Perhaps the reason so few contest Dickie’s view is that it sounds plausible. Moreover, the idea of accrediting artists or anyone else with elevating artefacts to the level of artworks seems inconsequential. Problem is that it neglects the spectators’ role. And curators are first and foremost spectators. The public, whether exhibition visitors, collectors or people who primarily glean art from social media, must eventually feel convinced of the merits of whatever artworks are presented. Since this process sometimes takes decades, it’s easy to lose track. Marcel Duchamp said it best: ‘In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History’ (Duchamp: 1973: 138). As I clarify below, presentation and reception make up a two-step process that is typically asymmetrical, rather than symmetrical as philosophers have historically presumed. One cannot expect some presentation, whether a singular artwork or its many exhibitions to cause a particular audience reception, any more than one can infer the curator’s presentation from some spectator’s reception.4 A more apt description of the way candidates for appreciation gain their status as artworks awaits those who recall the existential maxim ‘existence precedes essence’. It almost seems self-evident that over time artworks gain stakeholders who facilitate later presentations, which lead to wider receptions, eventually becoming objects of care. Chapter 2’s brief survey of curators’ attitudes towards understanding suggests that presenters tend to be drawn to artworks that elude them, which suggests that ideal candidates for presentation have existence, yet lack identifiable essences. Curators use presentation opportunities to try to grasp artworks. Recall that R. Mutt (Duchamp’s alias) presented Fountain (1917) in an exhibition inviting any artist from any country to exhibit any two artworks for a $6 entry fee, so its very presence announced its status as a candidate for appreciation. Its rejection prior to the opening indicates that it was not yet a candidate for presentation. Alfred Stieglitz claimed not to appreciate it, yet he photographed it to do his part to ‘fight bigotry in America’.5 Despite its weeklong Gallery 291 presentation following its ejection from the ‘Big Show’, it still failed as a candidate for reception, since no one mentioned its presence there. Perhaps everyone viewed it as dispensable or no one considered it a serious candidate for presentation. Louise Norton’s publishing ‘The Richard Mutt Case’

Spectators

59

in the second issue of The Blind Man (May 1917) finally made Fountain a candidate for reception. Therein, Fountain found its public. Absent reception, status-conferral is a non-starter. Rather than characterizing why certain artefacts qualify as art, Dickie opted to define art ‘by specifying its necessary and sufficient conditions’. His citing Duchamp’s readymades as exemplary of the act of artists and friends elevating artefacts to artworks totally overestimates the significance of appreciation, which is an insufficient condition, since status-conferral (if it actually occurs) is furnished by posterior recipients of presenters’ efforts rather than appreciative presenters (Dickie 2007: 430). For example, Henri-Pierre Roché’s photographing a urinal suspended from a doorway in Duchamp’s apartment made Fountain a candidate for presentation. Duchamp’s decision to include Roché’s photo in the Boîte-en-valise made both this photograph and his miniature Fountain candidates for reception. Regarding Fountain, philosopher Ted Cohen claimed ‘that in order for it to be possible for candidacy for appreciation to be conferred on something, it must be possible for that thing to be appreciated’ (Dickie 2007: 433). Apparently Cohen found this ‘thing’ (Fountain) so ugly that he claimed that it could not be appreciated under any circumstances. He did, however, imagine people appreciating Duchamp’s gesture as a protest ‘against the art of its day’ (433). Hardly a protest, Duchamp rather presented this ‘thing’ to test the limits of the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition rules (De Duve 1996: 90). Its appearance is appreciated, whether one finds Fountain disgusting or recognizes its ‘doleful charm’. That its appearance prompted its initial rejection illuminates the need to split presentation from reception. Dickie says he sees no problem with Cohen’s point since ‘the possibility for that thing to be appreciated’ is a ‘constraint on the definition’, but I find ‘the possibility for that thing to be appreciated’ an incredibly weak criterion, since it covers almost everything ever collected, if not made by an artist (2007: 433). Being a candidate for appreciation, a.k.a. mere existence, is an insufficient condition. Artworks resting in an artist’s studio are no less candidates for appreciation than those on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). The primary difference between these two modes of appreciation is that the latter are also candidates for reception and thus risk rejection. Although Norton characterized Fountain as the ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ in her Blind Man review, its ejection from the ‘Big Show’ eclipsed any possibility of its being a candidate for presentation until Sidney Janis purchased a similar urinal thirty-three years later in a Paris flea market.6 Janis requested Duchamp to sign it R. Mutt and

60

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

exhibited it in ‘Challenge and Defy’ (1950). And another fifty years later, this same urinal was bequeathed to the PMA.7 In light of Fountain’s initial rejection, Duchamp must have realized that being a ‘candidate for reception’ poses a far-greater hurdle than Dickie’s criterion of being a ‘candidate for appreciation’, which effectively requires only one endorsement. Consider that Pablo Picasso completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Figure 14) in 1907, but didn’t exhibit it until 1916, despite a surfeit of cubist exhibitions. Supposedly, key artworlders such as Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein despised this painting, even after André Breton published it in La Révolution Surréaliste alongside his 1925 essay ‘L’oeil existe à l’état sauvage’ (‘The Eye Exists in a Wild State’). In 1939, MoMA purchased it to exhibit in their Picasso survey, so even it took thirty years to gain its public. Realizing the public’s significance, over and above status-conferral, Duchamp found a novel way for the public to engage his artworks as ‘actants’ invested with event-mobilizing capabilities. He stealthily arranged for dozens of his artworks, including most of his collaborative artworks, to join over 1,000 objects8 promised to the PMA in 1950 by Walter and Louise Arensberg.9 Two years after completing Étant donnés, Duchamp arranged for PMA director Dr Evan Turner and board president Bonnie McIlhenny Wintersteen to view his life-size diorama installed in his studio, setting up a situation whereupon his death, the Cassandra Foundation would donate it to the PMA should its trustees accept this gift (Taylor 2009: 48). Of course, there was no guarantee that the museum board would approve its accession, let alone opt to display it in perpetuity. Given this controversial installation, witnessed through two eye-level peepholes (a life-size, naked woman seemingly left to die on the side of the road), one wonders what Turner must have told his board to persuade them of its significance for their collection. Supposing such arguments held little sway, the PMA board already had fifteen years of experience with the Arensberg Collection, which since 1954 had occupied twenty-two galleries. No doubt, among its main attractions was Gallery 182, designed by Duchamp to dwell his oeuvre adjacent Gallery 183, which since 1969 has housed his life-size diorama. His extreme efforts to assemble scores of artworks and ephemera under one roof likely persuaded the board to acquire his last artwork. Ever since, millions have experienced his oeuvre as a constitutive set. On a related note, the primary argument posed in 2008 by Barnes Foundation trustees in favour of moving the Barnes’ collection from Merion, just outside Philadelphia, to a site within walking distance of the PMA concerned its greater possibility for reception. As should be clear by now, the reception of the ‘goers’,

Spectators

61

as Dickie called them, most influences art’s status, not some status-conferring act made manifest by stakeholder preferences, museological authority or inclusion in temporary exhibitions (Dickie 2007: 432).10 Dickie might counter that appreciation always precedes reception, since the opportunity to exhibit artworks often motivates presenters to search for reasons to appreciate them. Even so, being a candidate for appreciation proves trivial, as compared to being a candidate for reception. Furthermore, artefacts deemed artworks by their creators are automatically candidates for appreciation, even if their creator later repudiates their status as art.11 Comparatively few are ever experienced as candidates for reception, since presentation opportunities prove disproportionately limited.

3.2  The Institutional Theory of Art Acting in the manner Edmund Husserl attributed to the Ego, art’s publics routinely perceive and imagine. ‘To his conscious life – for example, his sensuously perceiving and imagining life, or his asserting, valuing or willing life – the Ego can at any time direct his reflective regard; he can contemplate it and in respect of its contents, explicate and describe it’ (Husserl 1967: 31). Spectators assert, contemplate and judge art experiences and then direct their reflective regard in order to describe, explicate and evaluate the contents of these experiences. Few would deny that the artworld is a social institution, as Dickie pointed out four decades ago (1971). In fact, some people complain that artworlders never stop talking about artists and their shows. Why is the artgoing public so vocal? What are they discussing? And why do these ongoing debates matter? In this section, I flesh out the spectators’ role in the artistic process in order to explain the significance of reception, which to my lights situates art lovers in the driver’s seat. In the long run, it isn’t enough for an artwork’s status to be identified as art (or baptized as art as the philosophical lingo goes), let alone exhibited. In fact, some New York Times writer might describe some artist’s exhibition as his/her best ever and several collectors might purchase artworks from the show, but what really matters for art history is whether they endure in the public’s memory. To achieve this, these artworks have not only inspired theories regarding what matters to the contemporary art arena but they must also influence future artworks.12 As a result, artworlders constantly invent new tools for interpretation, what Arthur Danto called ‘artworld theories’, to explain why yesteryear’s nonart and arty artefacts are suddenly considered significant artworks.

62

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

As it turns out, the development of such tools is an arduous process that usually involves many people working across decades and continents, who propose and test potential theories along the way, long before conventions gain traction. It’s noteworthy that art historians convened to analyse the ‘state of art criticism’ concurred that they rarely, if ever, research earlier reviews, since they don’t find them useful. I imagine, however, that early reviewers’ interpretations had since become convention and thus seem self-evident, rather than enlightening, as they would have been when originally published (Spaid 2008). In What Is Art? An Institutional Analysis (1974), Dickie notes that there are at ‘least three distinct senses of “work of art”’: (1) the primary or classificatory sense (belongs to a certain category of artefacts), (2) the secondary or derivative sense (comparable properties derived from some paradigm case already considered a work of art) and (3) the evaluative sense (something like ‘Sally’s cake’ that is deemed a work of art) (2007: 428). Given his stated goal to transform ‘paradigmatic (artefactual) works of art [into] nonartefactual “art”’, one imagines him employing some evaluative claim, such as an interpretation, to transform artefacts into art (428). Problem is that such a strategy recalls the non-identity thesis, whereby w = o + y (interpretation y transforms artefact o into artwork w). Rather than privileging the evaluative sense, Dickie opted for the classificatory sense in order to avoid the non-identity thesis. He next identified ‘artefactuality’ and ‘nonexhibited properties’ as the necessary twin conditions of the classificatory sense. I prefer either nonexhibited features or nonexhibited characteristics, since the phrase ‘nonexhibited properties’ is an oxymoron. Encouraged by Maurice Mandelbaum’s 1965 essay ‘Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts’, Dickie felt that Mandelbaum’s discussion of games’ nonexhibited features, in particular their ‘non-practical interest to either participants or spectators’, could help him to discover art’s special features, thus potentially forming the basis for a definition of art (427). Dickie grounds his distinguishing artworks as exhibiting some ‘nonexhibited property’ in Danto’s famous remark, ‘To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of history of art: an artworld’ (1964: 580). Moreover, Dickie claimed that Danto’s view concurs ‘with Mandelbaum that nonexhibited properties are of great importance in constituting something as art’. Although Dickie correctly recognized Danto’s system as classificatory, he failed to grasp the way people invent or apply artworld theories, which indicate whether ‘a thing belongs to a certain category of artefacts’, in order to present art to the public (2007: 428). Absent actual presentations of art, whether exhibitions or articles, categories hardly matter, let alone some artwork’s particular medium, movement, innovations or appropriate response.

Spectators

63

Dickie makes the case that the nonexhibited feature that all artworks share is ‘the action of conferring the status of art’, which he claims artists have historically done themselves (430). As Norton’s critical efforts on behalf of R. Mutt demonstrate, the recognition of important artistic moves rather requires committed stakeholders willing to do the hard work of interpreting and then disseminating an artwork’s significance.13 Even if this enables artworks to become candidates for presentation, they must also become candidates for reception, which requires some additional compulsion to present (exhibit/publish) them in a matter that enables recipients to form institutional memories, as did Norton’s article illustrated by Stieglitz’s photograph. Paradoxically, contemporary art’s capacity to violate its social institutions (to catch artworlders off guard) reflects information gaps among its various participants (practitioners, stakeholders, presenters and the goers). Were the artworld not so out of sync, contemporary artists would neither need stakeholders nor could they destabilize audiences as they routinely do. Danto’s view is predicated on some actual presentation, whereas Dickie defers to status-conferring artworlders who determine which artworks classify as art prior to their presentations. Moreover, Dickie’s view fails to capture the significance of context for classification. For example, the fish tank sitting in the artist’s kitchen is deemed part of his/her art installation when it is a candidate for reception: otherwise its inhabitants remain the family pets. Moreover, artwork presentations often make otherwise nonexhibited features visible, so they are no less dynamic. They become exhibited features when some particular presentation brings them to light. Over time, those features originally considered nonexhibited are believed to have been present all along. Finally, if the nonexhibited feature of ‘status-conferral’ is what characterizes artworks, as Dickie insists, then his view suffers a paradox, since presentation renders ‘status-conferral’ entirely visible. According to Dickie, ‘Danto points to the rich structure in which particular works of art are embedded: he indicates the institutional nature of art’ (429). Dickie next adopts Danto’s artworld to refer to the ‘broad social institutions in which works of art have their place’, employing institution to indicate ‘an established practice, law, custom, etc.’. This move proves not only self-defeating but also downright ironic, since the ‘R. Mutt Case’ specifically demonstrates the uselessness of artworld institutions when evaluating systems-disrupting contemporary art practices. If some spectator still has a lingering doubt as to whether an unfamiliar artefact qualifies as nonartefactual art, he/she cannot necessarily rely on artworld conventions, let alone its agents, to identify it as art. Social institutions only work for conventional practices. When R. Mutt relied on the artworld to receive his art, his peers failed him.

64

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Not until exhibitors started requesting Duchamp to produce objects for exhibitions did his readymades become candidates for reception. Implicit in the demand for refabrication is their status as candidates for presentation, something that is not true of Duchamp’s original readymades, especially those like Fountain, whose disappearance nullified presentation, let alone reception. Although Dickie correctly claims that artworld agents propose artefacts to be considered as art,14 he overlooked the public’s role in status-conferral, which enables artworks to endure as objects of care. Indicative of Duchamp’s appreciation of the spectator’s importance, he ensured Étant donnés’ permanent display in Gallery 183. Duchamp’s inviting nine collaborators to finish his artworks effectively recruited life-long stakeholders. He realized early on that his oeuvre needed a much larger public in order for its members to become candidates for reception. Over five decades, Duchamp requested that his sister Suzanne Duchamp inscribe Bottlerack (1914) as a readymade; the collector Walter Arensberg hide an unknown object inside À Bruit Secret (1916); Gallery 291 owner Stieglitz photograph Fountain (1917) soon after ‘Big Show’ directors rejected it; his sister Suzanne and Jean Crotti install Unhappy Readymade (1919) blowing in the wind; Man Ray document dust accumulating atop the Large Glass, thus producing Dust Breeding (1920/1967); inventors purchase Rotoreliefs (1935) at the 33rd Concours Lépine; hundreds of collectors display their Boîte-en-valise (1935–41), miniature replicas and photographic reproductions of his artworks, stored in leather cases; Arturo Schwarz fabricate thirteen different replicas (1964), including Hat Rack (1916/64), in editions of 8 + 4 artist’s proofs; and Maria Martins (his earlier model, muse and mistress) confer the status of definitively complete upon Étant donnés (1946–66) during her 1966 visit to New York City.15 The outcomes of each of these nine collaborations certainly defied whatever classificatory senses of art existed when first presented, thereby requiring eventual presenters to do far more than confer status. Successful presenters found ways to link his artworks to world, as when Norton described Fountain as the ‘Buddha of the Bathroom’ or Stieglitz linked its rejection to bigotry, more broadly. Realizing how inexplicable his artworks were, Duchamp published several facsimile notebooks that related his artworks to the world (Sanouillet and Peterson 1973: v–vi).16 In 1957, Duchamp delivered the paper ‘The Creative Act’, which articulates how work and world join forces: ‘All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work [emphasis mine] in contact with the external world [emphasis mine] by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the

Spectators

65

creative act’ (1973: 140). Further emphasizing the spectator’s role, Duchamp remarked how ‘posterity gives their final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists’ (140). As a result of the PMA’s in-depth Duchamp collection, Duchampian scholarship long ago moved beyond the days when writers only ever categorized his artworks as ‘readymades’, Dada or proto-conceptual art. Despite Duchamp’s success at generating dozens of artworks whose creation anticipated/invented, rather than followed/adopted some artworld convention, Noël Carroll claims that ‘the artist cannot create, nor could an audience decipher, an artwork without an artworld framework. The historical circumstances of a work are in this way constitutive [emphasis mine] of its art status’ (1995: 252). As I have tried to show, artists can and do create artworks that lack frameworks, which audiences are certainly not equipped to decipher.17 And artworks that are later viewed as having anticipated, rather than having adopted, artworld frameworks and theories prove most deserving of the honorific artwork. So far, I’ve tried to capture the way artists, writers and curators work in tandem over many years, presenting artworks over multiple platforms (exhibitions, articles and websites) in hopes that they survive as candidates for reception. As a result of these forums, whether publications or exhibitions, the public eventually adopts objects of care from the set of candidates for reception. One could say that over time, the public effectively adjudicates which artworks deserve protection and conservation.18 Of course, the public doesn’t literally select which artworks it likes best, but without a public to experience the artworks, write about them, debate their merits and opt to visit them over and over and in varying contexts, artworks would lack their rich presentational histories. Absent a public, they remain mere candidates for appreciation. As we shall see in Chapter 4, an artwork’s enriched presentational history helps to insulate it from extinction. Those objects that prove to be regular candidates for reception eventually become objects of care, once collectors, including museums, accept responsibility for their preservation. By acknowledging responsibility, I have in mind some combination of the following activities: (1) preparing condition reports, (2) conserving the artwork as needed, (3) offering the artwork safe, secure storage and transportation, (4) providing proper insurance and/or consignment documentation, (5) offering public viewings and (6) occasionally loaning artworks to other institutions. Dickie’s 1997 version of the Institutional Theory of Art, which describes an artwork as an artefact ‘created to be presented to an artworld public’, proves no more illuminating as a tool for discerning which artefacts qualify as art than his

66

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

position twenty-three years earlier. His added criterion ‘created to be presented’ not only doesn’t consider the necessity of actual presentations but it still eclipses audience reception. This leads one to wonder about the status of the vast majority of artworks that were ‘created to be presented’, yet are never actually presented. I don’t wish to suggest that never exhibited artworks are not art, but it’s difficult to imagine that something only the artist has experienced has a particular status, whether as art or nonart, especially since Dickie’s theory presumes that the artworld is a social institution. Presumably, the social in social institutions hinges on discussions among interested parties, but the public cannot engage in discussions of some artwork that no one save the creator has experienced, which is why Duchamp replicated his lost artworks. One could argue that the notion of social institutions in the context of contemporary art is a contradiction in terms, since avant-garde artworks rarely arrive with an articulated social context (thorough art historical research is required to determine the exact circumstances), though they probably exhibit a social pretext (some rather basic explanation). Whether exhibited or published, art must be a candidate for reception, which is why Dickie’s ‘created to be presented’ proves no less trivial than either his twin conditions of ‘artefactuality’ and ‘nonexhibited properties’ or his earlier ‘candidates for appreciation’.

3.3  Tools for interpretation Dickie also overlooked the distinct possibility that artworks are sometimes presented absent ‘goers’, such as during installation shots or when Fountain was displayed in Stieglitz’ back room, yet ‘goers’ play a role, present or not. Given people’s second-hand experiences with artworks via websites, books, newspapers and magazines, the artworks may actually be absent, yet their presence is felt, especially by doubtful/suspicious viewers. One hopes for goers whose divergent receptions, preferably both agreements and disagreements, inspire new exhibitions or lead them to pen novel interpretations, thus augmenting each artwork’s presentational history. Dickie considered the underlying social institutions that govern the artworld to be among art’s nonexhibited features, yet such systems are more properties of the artworld than its artworks, unless one assumes artworks are constitutive of the artworld, which is far from true as Fountain demonstrates. He remarks, ‘[With] objects [that] are bizarre, as those of the Dadaists are, our attention is forced away from the objects’ obvious properties to a consideration of the objects in their social context’ (2007: 430). Were artworks actually constitutive of

Spectators

67

their social contexts, linking work to world wouldn’t require heaps of extra work. Artworks that are original and ahead of their time totally defy what it means to be constitutive of the artworld. Such artworks move the course of history, rather than reflect some current status.19 Dada only seems constitutive of some social context, such as the First World War since historians like Amelia Jones employ this as a tool for inter­pretation (Jones 2004). One hundred years later, historians and philosophers are still exploring, discovering and articulating Dada’s underlying motivations, given the never-ending search for new tools for interpretation.20 Dickie once proposed adding the ‘subsystem or genres such as Dada or happenings’ to the existing system to ‘furnish an institutional background for the conferring of the status on objects within its domain’ (430). In hindsight, Dada may feel like a categorizable subsystem with scores of parallel events in Zürich, Berlin, Köln, Paris and New York City, but its organizing principle rather channelled chaos, confusion and especially surprise, so it could hardly be a subsystem of some system. By its own admission, Dada was its own system, though one might argue that its radicalizing spirit echoed that of futurist movements in Russia and Italy a few years earlier. During the first public Dada soirée in 1916, Hugo Ball exclaimed, ‘I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people’s inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own’ (De Duve 1991: 126).21 By wanting and getting ‘their own stuff ’, Dadaists asked the system to stuff itself, defying the possibility for a subsystem. Inscrutable new art rather indicates the current system’s failure, making it impossible to simply add a subsystem to an existing system as Dickie advises (430).22 Not only does unfamiliar art depart from the old regime, but new presentations illuminate system failures, propose viable replacements and inspire divergent receptions, which require ever more presentations to persuade spectators of their legitimacy. Decades following Dada’s demise, museums continue to present exhibitions that revitalize its reception and refresh institutional memories. Dada’s exhibition history includes: ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ (1936), MoMA; ‘Dada 1916-1923’ (1953), Sidney Janis Gallery, curated by Duchamp; ‘Dada, exposition commemorative du Cinquantenaire’ (1966–7), Musée National d’art moderne, travelled to Kunsthaus Zürich; ‘Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage’ (1968), MoMA; ‘Dada and New York’ (1979), Whitney Museum of American Art; ‘The Dada & Surrealist Word-Image’ (1989), Los Angeles County Museum of Art; ‘Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York’ (1996), Whitney Museum of American Art and ‘Dada’ (2006), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., travelled to Centre Pompidou and MoMA.

68

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Each new exhibition contributes a perspective that inaugurates additional tools for interpretation. MoMA’s 1936 show introduced Americans to the prior twenty years of European avant-garde art, accompanied by the art of the insane; while the 1953 show gathered artworks available for sale to collectors who finally deemed Dada art collectable.23 Being a museum focused on American art, the Whitney regularly presents exhibitions that tie American art to concurrent European avant-gardes. That the Whitney has twice sought to link New York to Dada (1979 and 1996) suggests that its first attempt didn’t quite stick. In the midst of Postmodernist Art, an era when scores of artists produced artworks featuring text, it is not surprising that LACMA curator Judi Freeman wanted to set the record straight with her precedent-setting exhibition of artworks that anticipated 1980s’ ‘text-mania’. Claiming to be the first ever US exhibition to focus exclusively on Dada, 2006’s cross-continental exhibition was quite a spectacle. Featuring 400 artworks by 50 artists, including large-scale kinetic sculpture, films and sound recordings, ‘Dada’ (2006) highlighted the movement’s presence in six cities (New York, Zürich, Berlin, Köln, Hannover and Paris).24 As I have tried to make clear, contemporary art that fits some existing artworld paradigm typically lacks a revolutionary prowess, while art that reinvents what it is to be art rarely fits. New art is not only an unwitting accomplice but also spawns systemic ruptures. Historical exhibitions, by contrast, present opportunities for devising coherent and cohesive contexts for such ruptures, leaving such seamlessness closer in truth to fiction. In contrast to Dickie, who attempts to define artworks, I find discerning artworks from nonart difficult, which is why I consider presentation and reception mandatory provisos. In fact, there are hundreds of cases of artworks that are presented and received over and over, yet it still takes decades before the public considers them invaluable as art. And the reverse is true! Some artworks are immediately accepted as art, only to be neglected years later, as I quoted Robert Storr lamenting in Chapter 2. I rather aim to steer readers away from the single act that could be viewed as status-conferring, ‘baptismal’, annunciating and the like and towards recurring receptions, whose impacts are unpredictable and whose outcomes are rarely reversible. That is, once the public receives Duchamp’s shovel as art, no one will dare to use it as a shovel, even in a dire emergency. Despite Dickie’s emphasizing the many players, as well as the artwork’s presentation, the Institutional Theory of Art strangely takes reception for granted, as if presentations never result in failures, rejects or flukes (Danto 2008a).25 In fact, Dickie comments that conferring can go wrong with nonart, ‘while that does not appear to be true in art’ (2007: 436). He later remarks that the person doing the conferring takes responsibility for the object in its new status, but this

Spectators

69

paints a process of reception that is top-down, as if audience members blindly accept whatever artefacts status-conferrers present as art. One great example of Dickie’s having misunderstood the significance of failures is that he explains Fountain’s ‘success’ in terms of its having taken place ‘within the institutional setting of the artworld’ (432). As briefly discussed, its initial presentation was a dismal failure. The exhibition’s organizing committee rejected it, since they deemed it unoriginal, plagiarized and indecent. Despite being members of Duchamp’s milieu, the exhibition organizers failed to grasp its import as a readymade, even though it was at least his sixth readymade.26 The year before, he exhibited two at Manhattan’s Bourgeois Gallery (De Duve 1996: 90–1).27 Rather than confer status on objects as Dickie claims, presenters, whether writers or curators, propose tools for interpretation based on references culled from the world that help make sense of artworks’ otherwise inscrutable aspects.28 Over time, spectators select and popularize those tools that have most helped them glean the most meaning. Exhibitions, not status-conferring manoeuvres, highlight nonexhibited features. Institutional memories, not exhibitions, ensure that artworks remain vital, eventually becoming objects of care. As one can see, reasons aroused by post-presentation chatter, not statusconference, designate whether artworks on view will continue to be candidates for reception. Dickie effectively got it backwards, as he assumed that candidates for appreciation undergo some prior baptism that effectively immunes them from poor reception later on. Rather, millions of artworks are considered candidates for appreciation, but far fewer survive as candidates for reception and even fewer become objects of care. Duchamp similarly remarked, ‘Millions of artists create; only a few thousand are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less are consecrated by posterity’ (1973: 138). Those ‘goers’ who couldn’t have witnessed an artwork’s multiple prior presentations, due to their late arrival on the scene or generational impossibilities, remain unacquainted with the many public exhibitions and forums that led said artworks to become candidates for reception in the first place.

3.4  The presentation–reception model As briefly noted, Danto’s classification system that requires an artworld theory is predicated on presentation, yet its validity rests on public reception. This might seem odd to readers who are familiar with his theory as laid out in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981). I call the version presented there his Casual Theory, since he treats presentation and reception as two sides of the

70

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

same coin. If the presentation causes the public’s reception, its presentation can be inferred from the public’s reception. With the Casual Theory, the symmetry between the two is not in doubt. Whatever reception the exhibition engenders is viewed as the direct result of presentation, whether intended by the artist or directed by the curator. Less familiar is Danto’s earlier essay ‘Basic Actions and Basic Concepts’ (1979), where he describes the possible asymmetries between events and their outcomes. These four different scenarios can also be applied to the presentation and reception of artworks to explain how some objects are received as presented, while others remain either flukes or failures. I call this version his Causal Theory, since one can easily imagine the way the same event affords multiple outcomes. Since I have described the Causal Theory’s application to art and nonart experiences elsewhere, I simply summarize its gist before proceeding (Spaid 2013). In ‘Basic Actions and Basic Concepts’, Danto defines actions as representations that cause events, thus distinguishing his theory of action from Wittgenstein’s followers’ notion of ‘something left over’ and Donald Davidson’s locating the concept of agency in bodily movements (Danto 1979: 483). For Danto, artworks belong to the ‘class of things that are representationally characterizable’, which includes nonart billboards and print ads. Since artworks are also received as ‘representationally characterizable’, it seems logical to view artworks as exemplary of Case 1 actions. Thus, art and nonart are distinguished by their differing receptions. He effectively employed this method in Transfiguration of the Commonplace, yet he strangely glossed over it. Some thirty years later, he finally connected his distinguishing artworks from mere things to his earlier paper regarding ‘basic actions’. He notes, ‘I proposed that the difference was in one being about something and the other not – the one possessing meaning and the other lacking it. This was in fact a systematic solution urged on me by the work I had done in the theory of knowledge and the theory of action’ (Danto 2013: 325). In light of Danto’s ‘nine red-squares’ thought experiment, whose paintings depict distinct contents, the painting Nirvana is a ‘representationally characterizable’ event (nirvana expressions) that causes a ‘representationally characterizable’ event (thoughts about nirvana). Reflecting back on why he delineated causal episodes, he recalled: I wanted to get causal relations to hold not merely with billiard balls, but with us. Since I saw us as representationalist beings, representationalist states could be causes or effects. When they are, then in addition to the causal relationship there is a relation of satisfaction or dissatisfaction between cause and effect. … Let R be a representation, like wanting the door to become open. Then that causes the

Spectators

71

door to be opened by me, satisfying the representation. There are two relations between cause and effect [Case 1]. Otherwise there is a failure [Case 2] or a fluke [Case 3] (Danto 2008a).

The presentation–reception model (Table 2) expands Danto’s original eight-cell table of ‘causal episodes’ by offering specific examples cited in Transfiguration, his comments concerning Cases 2 and 3 outcomes and mine regarding Cases 1 and 4 outcomes (Danto 1979: 481). Table 2  Presentation–Reception Model (R = ‘Representationally Characterized’ Events)a Presentation Reception Comments Regarding Transfiguration Case (Cause) (Outcome) Outcomes Examples 1

R

R

2

R

not R

3

not R

R

4

not R

not R

It is an artwork when Andy Warhol’s Brillo the representation Boxes, Picasso’s tie, is true and its being Duchamp’s shovel, true is explained Roy Lichtenstein’s by its impact Portrait of Madame when the resulting Cézanne, six titled representation is red squares or J’s two satisfied. paintings ‘It is action, when the Erle Loran’s diagram of representation is Cézanne’s portrait true but its being of his wife, J’s true is explained Untitled rejected through the impact as art, a tie painted of the person whose by a child, Brillo representation it is cartons, ordinary on the world.’ advertisements, billboard, posters, television programmes or stories. ‘It is knowledge when An ordinary the representation snowshovel or a is true and one’s forged ‘Picasso’ tie. having that representation is explained by whatever confers truth on that representation.’ It is an experiential Giorgione’s primed happening if the canvas. effect is satisfied by its cause.

In Transfiguration, Danto uses ‘representationally characterizable’ events instead (1981: 83).

a

72

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Danto used titles or actions to delineate each of nine indiscernible red squares, whose particular contents illustrate ‘basic actions’: Case 1 (six titled paintings, J’s readymade and J’s Untitled), Case 2 (a failure should J’s Untitled painting be rejected as art), Case 3 (a fluke should Giorgione’s primed canvas be received as art) and Case 4 (Giorgione’s primed canvas received as nonart). Since one responds to a painting of Kierkegaard’s Mood with thoughts that differ from those inspired by either Red Table Cloth or Nirvana, ruminations triggered by particular artworks serve as content. Were their labels switched, one’s thoughts would likely reflect the corresponding titles, despite the artist’s actual intention. Presuming the paintings are signed and/or dated verso, content misattributions require revision, no less so than misreadings. Table 2 does more than demonstrate the significance of reception and by association, spectators. One can use this model to differentiate artworks from nonart expressions and ordinary things. Danto considers Case 3 exemplary of how knowledge applies to mere objects. Danto offers G. E. M. Anscombe’s example of a detective who ‘achieves knowledge’ by following a shopper and correcting his/her mental list of the shopping cart’s contents as products are added and removed (Danto 1979: 483). Since viewers can misread works, they are culpable if they do not revise their responses to reflect their enhanced cognitive stock. Table 2 specifically explains Danto’s eventually demoting Giorgione’s ‘monochrome’ and artworlders’ eventually recognizing Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915) as art.

3.5  Tools for understanding Not unlike theatre and film directors, curators select and sequence artworks so that audiences can readily weave relevant narrative threads. To prompt particular inferences, curators exact exhibitions whose greater believability challenges claims attributed to earlier exhibitions and/or texts, effectively enabling the spectators’ narrative threads to become the prevailing institutional memory over time. One could say that this process produces what Danto terms an ‘artworld theory’, which establishes the terms for future cases that the current paradigm is meant to cover. I emphasize current paradigm because future cases that fit earlier paradigms are typically too derivative to require some artworld theory to legitimize their acceptance as art, or they might even inspire a new theory that justifies their being derivative of earlier artworks (as was the case with appropriation art).

Spectators

73

In addition to knowing the set and how best to sequence it so that relevant relational clusters do the work, the curator holds the entire exhibition (scale, colour, relationships and all) in his/her imagination until the show is laid out. Commissioned artworks provide special challenges, since ‘you have no idea what they’ll turn out to be, especially if the artist changes his or her mind – which happens all the time’ (Tucker 2008: 84). Few art forms exist for so long in the artistic director’s imagination before they begin to take shape.29 Throughout this text, I employ the verb exact, rather than devise, since successful exhibitions result from the curator’s extensive self-reflection, exhibition-criticality and viewer-empathy. Emergence author Steven Johnson attributes institutional memories to trails left by slime mould cells (Johnson 2001: 64). I thus employ the notion of institutional memory to indicate artworld consensus, some general summary of select reviews, articles and public attitudes surrounding particular artworks in the form of common knowledge, once time has elapsed. These endure long past the exhibition’s physical presentation. Robert Stecker considers each artwork to have a ‘single, comprehensive, true (correct) interpretation’, a view that he calls Critical Monism (Stecker 1997: 134).30 Although an exhibition’s institutional memories are hardly reducible to the mono-theorist’s singular meaning, some combination of the work that endures and the convention that develops to explain its significance could be what mono-theorists have in mind when they claim that each artwork has only one meaning. It seems however that an exhibition’s relational features, including the facility (distinct architectural features), milieu (particular community) and environment (exhibition layout) engender visual art experiences whose meanings prove multivalent. Such a view runs counter to those of mono-meaning theorists, who tend to treat artists as lone authors of singular artworks. Critical Monists do not reject multivalency: they simply distinguish an interpretation (among many) from the (sole) meaning. In fact, Stecker claims that Critical Monism and Critical Pluralism are compatible. If they really are compatible, one wonders what one gains from being a steadfast Critical Monist. Alternatively, Kevin Melchionne notes how ‘real works of art introduce complex art historical, cultural, intentional and interpretive contexts, requiring us to appraise our responses under a variety of rubrics’ (2011: 8). An artwork’s inclusion in ‘a variety of rubrics’ enables its multiple contexts, whether historical, cultural or intentional to be fleshed out over time. When successful, exhibitions foster institutional memories whose sticking power reflects the exhibition’s capacity to shape beliefs that foment long-lasting

74

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

memories. Such beliefs increase the likelihood that memories will evolve into what David Lewis calls common knowledge, which is a tool for understanding. When applied to art, common knowledge takes the form of second-order knowledge: ‘Every artworlder knows that every artworlder knows that x’ (Lewis 1969: 52–7; Kelp and Pedersen 2011).31 Absent the verifiable evidence that exhibitions afford, artworlders would have no way to know for sure that ‘Barnett Newman zip paintings typify Abstract Expressionism’, ‘In 1912, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso all experimented with collage’, ‘Marcel Duchamp’s first readymade is Bicycle Wheel’ or ‘Donald Judd and Robert Morris boxes, though not Warhol boxes, typify Minimalism’.32 Being facts, they exemplify the way even common knowledge is born from theory (characterizations of zips, collage, readymades and Minimalism). One imagines that Danto considered art exhibitions one way that artworld theories are transmitted, yet he nowhere specifies this. The common knowledge associated with artworks, which subdivides into art historical movements and exemplary artworks that form particular canons, is often described as exemplary of intersubjectivity. Although Husserl’s notion of intersubjectivity was initially the human quality of empathy that makes it possible for human beings to grasp the values and attitudes of others, it evolved under Martin Heidegger into a kind of sensus communis, whereby membership in some particular milieu ensures shared attitudes and beliefs that make communication possible. Heidegger’s notion of equiprimordiality characterizes people’s shared attitude towards objects in terms of their local use. One could argue that contemporary art is particularly predisposed to disrupt equiprimordiality since it routinely challenges artworld theories, shared attitudes and beliefs regarding what ought to qualify as art. In contrast to sensus communis, common knowledge is explicit, since it is communicated via published books, reviews and essays, rather than merely presumed. As Chapter 4 details, common knowledge constantly evolves as tools for interpretation become tools for understanding that replace outmoded views. One could say that common knowledge is to art history as institutional memories are to exhibitions and work is to artworks.

3.6  Spectator types Since the 1990s, several philosophers have defended so-called neutral views, which range from Affect Theory and Neuroaesthetics (high-tech version of

Spectators

75

Beardsley’s ‘object-directedness’) to Object-Oriented Ontology. To demonstrate the neutrality of objects, scientists have conducted scores of laboratory experiments that measure people’s responses to images of actual artworks in terms of pupil dilation, eye movements (reaction times, gaze duration, saccade length, scan paths), heart rate, skin conductance and neural responses as measured by EEG and fMRI. Such tests typically occur in ‘labs’, where perceiving subjects are not only wired to sensors, but they cannot wander at will, as they would in an art exhibition. With the subject’s agency effectively annulled and objects ‘flashed’ void of any context, it’s no wonder researchers erroneously credit underlying objects with whatever ‘agency’ is said to direct people’s attention, prompt perception, trigger reception and eventually inspire judgement. Such sterile environments reinforce ‘neutral’ views. Fortunately, some vision scientists have started conducting experiments in actual art exhibitions. As we shall soon see, these experiments not only defy earlier efforts but also capture extraperceptual contents in action. As it turns out, visitors actively engage some combination of foreknowledge, name recognition, relaxation techniques, social interactions, label reading and deep reflection. Scientific experiments performed in actual exhibitions prove that there is more than meets the eye, since it is possible to register cognitive penetration influencing perception, thus curbing object agency and reducing the possibility for ‘neutral’ views. Even if objects spur visitors’ attentions, actual experiments in exhibitions suggest that individual objects, as opposed to a carefully selected and positioned set of objects, are insufficiently programmed to inspire reflection, let alone goad aesthetic judgement. This finding coheres with the ‘Dishevelled Museum’ case discussed at the end of Chapter 2. In 2000, John Falk and Lynn Dierking found ‘close causal relationships between [1)] the physical context (alluding to the assessment of the exhibition itself: the choice of artworks; installation labeling; and didactics) and the scope of a contemplative experience and between [2)] the socio-cultural context (alluding to group dynamics: talking while visiting, visiting for social reasons; seating opportunities) and the social experience’ (Kirchberg and Tröndle 2015: 180). Hardly ‘causal’, such relationships exemplify Charles Peirce’s semiotic triad, which ties the set of objects to some curator’s presentation (the sign) and audience reception (the interpretant), thus granting spectators the last word. Attempting to repeat Falk and Dierking’s findings, Volker Kirchberg and Martin Tröndle followed up with a psychological test that actually mapped people’s physical behaviour within an exhibition. Statistical data led them to identify three kinds of spectators: contemplative (typically teachers), enthusing

76

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

(primarily students) and social (mostly women), whose time frame stretched from preconception to exhibition experience to post-visit reception (Kirchberg and Tröndle 2015: 174). After testing six potentially relevant factors from (1) pre-visit expectations, (2) socio-demographic statistics, (3) personal relatedness to art, (4) the visitor’s mood upon arrival, (5) the post-visit assessment to (6) potential social group dynamics, they concluded that ‘art knowledge positively impacts the enthusing experience of the exhibition’. Fortunately, negative moods have little affect (176–7). Those who value contemplative experiences credit ‘excellent’ artworks, ‘good’ information/didactic panels and ‘fair to satisfactory’ seating arrangements. By contrast, those reporting social experiences rate exhibited artworks on par with seating arrangements, somewhere between ‘Satisfactory’ and ‘Good’ (179). Not surprisingly, ‘talking while visiting’ lessens contemplative experiences, yet enhances social experiences (179). Using a Likert Scale from 1 (low) to 5 (high), Kirchberg and Tröndle calculated nine emotional and eight cognitive index variables for each visitor. Comments like ‘This artwork made me think’, ‘This artwork moved me’, and ‘This work connects with that work’ indicate contemplative experiences. ‘Deeply thinking about the art, being moved by it, assessing the interaction with the other exhibited works and considering the specificities of presenting the selected artworks are all part of a contemplative experience of this exhibition’ (181). Driven by an ‘aha-effect’ (185), enthusing visitors registered the greatest emotional connection (physiological reactions), yet they tend to exhibit just one cognitive assessment, that of beauty. Although contemplative visitors are design sensitive and tend to focus on particular artworks, they have less intense physiological reactions, while social visitors casually stroll about, seeking objects of interest. Social visitors appreciate surprises, but they connect more with companions than exhibited artworks and respond emotionally to those artworks that make them laugh (181). ‘The determination of the social-experience type by cognitive reactions to the selected artwork reveals a counter-image to [that of] the contemplative-experience type’ (181). ‘In other words, the less the visitor takes into consideration the content of the artworks, the higher is his or her level of social experience’ (181), which resonates with research to be discussed in Chapter 4 regarding ‘aesthetic unreliability’, such that articulating one’s thoughts tends to alter one’s appreciation of the object under reflection. Kirchberg and Tröndle contend that their findings corroborate Antoine Hennion and Bruno Latour’s classically neutral approach, which frames

Spectators

77

‘artworks and exhibitions as inherent aspects unto themselves’ (181). Kirchberg and Tröndle proudly exclaim, We found almost no impact of socio-demographic traits or expectations on the exhibition experience. Instead, causes for the tripartite exhibition experience could be found significantly through immediate encounters and assessments of exhibition aspects (artworks and arrangements, information and seating); imminent social context of the visit (company, talking); differing spatial behavior patterns; different physiological reactions to the artworks; and the individual rating of selected artworks; and the correlation to one of the experience types (186).

To my lights, Kirchberg and Tröndle’s experiment countermands the plausibility of neutral views, for which objects are said to direct visitors, since they conclude that ‘the museum experience has a much larger effect on the visitor than one might have thought’ and that ‘the curator can indeed influence the visitor experience by paying more attention to the aspects of exhibition composition’ (188). Moreover, their research demonstrates the way visitors’ varying cognitive states penetrate perception, since what they think or know influences their actual experience. Differing exhibition experiences not only indicate cognitive asymmetries but also reflect the varying interpretative tools visitors select, whether additional information, seating access and/or shared conversations. Moreover, those visitors who exit the exhibition, yet continue to engage it via discussion or reading, further activate extraperceptual contents. That vision scientists have scientifically proven the importance of more information, so as to inspire creative thinking/imaginative reflection and thus prompt visitors’ cognitive states, indicates the role played by extraperceptual contents, whose magnitude, thrust and impact are thus far largely entangled in perception, as sub-personal factors. Even if extraperceptual contents cannot as yet be measured, let alone disentangled from perception, it is imperative that such contents be exposed and described, so as to develop experiments that enable scientists to identify them (Spaid 2018).

3.7  Peer reviewers As briefly noted in Chapter 1, curated exhibitions are modelled after scientific argument, which merges ideas (curator hones hypotheses to exact an exhibition),

78

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

expectations (spectators infer tools for interpretation and understanding from appropriately situated artworks) and observations (artworks offer evidence for narrative threads that spectators weave), which incidentally correspond to principles I, II and III of Chapter 2, respectively. Like scientists’ laboratory experiments, exhibitions offer curators the opportunity to identify, demonstrate and publicly test their various hypotheses regarding a particular artist’s oeuvre or a particular theme running through artworks by multiple artists. Both the curator (first and foremost a spectator) and the artist (the primary audience for his/her artwork) await peer reviews. Even artists who curate their own exhibitions typically use the occasion of an exhibition as an opportunity to reflect upon what their oeuvre has thus far achieved. Although Damien Hirst didn’t curate ‘Damien Hirst’, his 2012 Tate Modern survey, he likely had a huge hand in it. In a YouTube video that features him chatting with exhibition curator Ann Gallagher during installation, Hirst points to artworks that he claims she and Tate Modern Director Nicholas Serota insisted that he include.33 Either way, this exhibition provided an opportunity for spectators, including Hirst, to reflect upon his twenty-five-year career. In that classic way that has left philosophers since Socrates nonplussed, Hirst exclaims, ‘I still don’t know what I’m doing!’34 One could say that art-making’s time frame is the future, while curating’s time frame is the past. That is, an artist’s actions are present, while curators probe what has already happened, is still happening or happens precisely because something else happened first. By recasting the past or reframing the present, curated exhibitions offer opportunities for public deliberation and self-reflection, ultimately influencing art history’s understanding of past events and those future exhibitions that build upon or defy accepted theories, made possible by earlier exhibitions. While some view an exhibition’s capacity to impact the future as exemplary of its status as art, I consider influential exhibitions exemplary of curatorial success. Chapter 8 explores arguments surrounding curating as art making. Not unlike clever, eye-catching ‘art-fair art’ that offers one-dimensional, gotcha-like spectacles, exhibitions that fail to provoke further reflection exist only in the now. Yet unlike movies that go straight to DVD, exhibitions risk slipping into the forgotten past, since there’s no chance for uneventful exhibitions to become sleeper hits or cult classics. Like artworks, exhibitions compete for viability with past and future exhibitions. When narrative threads derived from later exhibitions successfully challenge or override yesteryear’s institutional memories, texts influenced by earlier explanations tend to fall out of favour, enabling new tools for interpretation to eclipse earlier tools for understanding.

Spectators

79

Like historical events that lack a registration, exhibitions that took place in long-forgotten venues or are currently deemed thematically outré (or passé) risk disappearing from historical records, once they are dropped from artists’ résumés. Even those exhibitions that later art historians deem formative can end up dropped from résumés, as younger gallery assistants, new to the artworld, ‘tidy up résumés’, by eliminating earlier exhibitions that occurred long ago in unfamiliar spaces, in order to make room for impressive exhibitions. Such actions sadly result in incomplete and spotty exhibition histories. Sometimes all that remains as evidence is some dusty exhibition checklist. Even exhibition catalogues risk not surviving cross-country moves. Fortunately, digital records have forced better record-keeping, as search engines sometimes dig up unrevised records. In light of the role that spectators play in generating and preserving institutional memories, I imagine readers asking themselves: (1) whether aboutness is derived from the artworks themselves or from the way exhibitions contextualize them, (2) how exhibitions’ related components direct spectators’ attentions to artworks’ proposed contents, (3) whether artworks and their ensuing presentations could be objects of ongoing events even if they physically disappeared (Goodman 1968: 114),35 (4) whether experiences with autonomous artworks are even possible, (5) how decisions made by exhibition teams constrain spectators’ imaginations, (6) how the curator exacts an exhibition to highlight artworks’ nonexhibited features, (7) whether artworks appearing in consecutive exhibitions with contrary themes complicate their meanings and thus jeopardize author-centred theories (Mimesis, Expressionism, Formalism and Conceptualism) (Seamon 2001: 144; Goodman 1968: 52) as opposed to the spectator-oriented approach presented here36 and finally (8) how art historical lenses and contextual frames sometimes evolve into forms of seeing-in, thus functioning more as tools for understanding (a kind of ‘aided seeing’) than seeing as, which is a tool for interpretation typically applicable to ambiguous figures. To clarify the importance of these eight philosophical issues, Chapter 4 articulates what exhibitions do in light of their many functions, while Chapter 5 summarizes these issues in relationship to aesthetics. It’s hardly surprising that art historians with outrageous hypotheses have sought to mount exhibitions in order to persuade others of their positions.37 Rather than presenting novel art experiences for effect, curated exhibitions avail visual clues that help audiences experience artworks in ways that expand artworks’ contents beyond previously accepted art historical lenses and conceptual frames. As Chapter 4 demonstrates, exhibitions that challenge conventional frames must build in the relevant tools

80

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

for interpretation so that audiences easily grasp artworks’ contents. Rather than recommend what curators ‘ought’ to do to make their exhibitions successful, I describe what their exhibitions do, even when they fail. Curated exhibitions are basic actions that cause future events, however asymmetrical their outcomes. Whatever positive outcomes curated exhibitions engender tend to accrue to featured artworks.

4

Curated exhibitions

This chapter demonstrates curators employing schematism (i.e. the generation of useful concepts derived from perceptible features) and contextualism (i.e. the gleaning of concepts needed to interpret nonexhibited features), thus inspiring spectators to form beliefs about artworks that prove relevant elsewhere, despite the paradox of incompleteness.

4.1  Paradigm shifts Most artworlders consider the exhibition the primary medium for visual art. Thinking About Exhibitions editors Reena Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne remarked in their ‘Introduction’ that since the twentieth century exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known. Not only have the number and range of exhibitions increased dramatically in recent years, but museums and art galleries such as Tate in London and the Whitney in New York now display their permanent collection as a series of temporary exhibitions. Exhibitions are the primary site of exchange in the political economy of art, where signification is constructed, maintained and occasionally deconstructed. Part spectacle, part socio-historical event, part structuring device, exhibitions – especially exhibitions of contemporary art – establish and administer the cultural meanings of art. (Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne 1996: 1)

As noted in Chapter 3, presentations engender reception. Exhibitions thus invite spectators to reflect upon artworks in a manner that invites them to experience artworks anew, owing to their formal beauty, allegorical potential, symbolic power, ineffability, role in upending/furthering some canon, some novel concept, intellectual idea or artistic discovery.1 When the presentation is well done, spectators remain oblivious to the efforts of curators working alongside exhibition team members to mediate their exhibition experiences.

82

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Curators sometimes include objects neither produced by artists nor originally intended as art.2 A curator might opt to exhibit a gorgeous marquetry table as art or a charming straw bale as a TV monitor’s nonart pedestal. Consider two seminal Museum of Modern Art exhibitions: ‘Machine Art’ (1934), conceived by then director Alfred Barr and curated by Philip Johnson and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ (1936–7), curated by Barr. The former presented industrial products, laboratory glassware and home appliances on pedestals like objet d’art, while the latter included paintings by children and the ‘insane’, prompting some lenders to pull loans from the travelling exhibition.3 Swiss curator Harald Szeemann went so far as to exhibit commissioned replicas of historical artworks like Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau (ca. 1930–7/1980–3) or fantastical machines fabricated on the basis of descriptions from the literature of Alfred Jarry, Franz Kafka and Raymond Roussel (Rigolo 2018: 130). Although there’s a plethora of philosophical material concerning the life of artworks post reception, that is, once the artworld finally considers them objects of care, there’s a dearth of philosophical material explaining how artworks eventually emerge from the massive pool of suitable candidates to be ‘consecrated by posterity’ (Marcel Duchamp’s term). And there’s never enough material concerning the artworld’s exclusionary practices, in terms of what it ignores and privileges. I imagine most philosophers first experiencing most artworks in art books and museums, which could explain the tendency to neglect the timeconsuming process whereby heretofore unknown or ignored objects, actions and situations become enduring events that the artworld eventually admires for their contribution to the field. To date, exhibitions, as well as their aims, methodologies and fields of operation appear to have escaped philosophical analysis. There is thus scant discussion among philosophers of art concerning the impact of exhibitions on singular works of art, how exhibitions mingle with audience response, let alone how curators differ from (and sometimes double as) critics, art historians, collectors, spectators or artists. As discussed in Chapter 3, any number of people plays a role in selecting candidates for appreciation. For the luckiest of artists, some professor admired his/her art while still in school and recommended him/her to gallerist friends, curators and critics, well in advance of this emerging artist’s even feeling ready to exhibit. Short of this form of immediate support, artists invite everyone they meet to visit their studio, where curators, friends, other artists and gallerists brainstorm every conceivable explanation for why these particular candidates matter more than the thousands of other artists’ projects awaiting presentation via exhibitions or articles. Once the oeuvre’s significance is identified, one can

Curated Exhibitions

83

sometimes discern which artworlders might especially appreciate particular artworks in light of prior preferences. Artists who fail to inspire stakeholders to generate further interest in their art often take their own fate into their hands, either by organizing group or solo exhibitions in artist studios, empty storefronts, artist-run spaces and cafés, or by entering their art in juried exhibitions. Let’s just say that the time frame between these early years when few people know about a particular artist and when his/her art ends up in a museum collection can range forty to sixty years, since collectors rarely take an interest in artists’ artworks until twenty years after they emerge onto the scene and then it takes another twenty to forty years before collectors start bequeathing their collections to museums.4 So why has aesthetics skipped over, perhaps the most interesting time frame, the period before common knowledge sets in, leaving the public to deliberate and shape artworks undergoing paradigm shifts?5 Edmund Husserl noted that ‘many an artist creates beautiful works without the slightest notion of aesthetics’ (1999: 8), which sounds a bit like Barnett Newman’s view that ‘aesthetics is for me as ornithology is for the birds’. How what artists create become treasured ‘artworks’ is a process that is altogether independent of and never simply the reverse of ‘how artists make artworks’, which Richard Wollheim’s ‘criticism as retrieval’ position addresses. Exhibitions effectively make artworks publicly accessible, thus stimulating discussions. Although this claim bears resemblance to George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art, which attributes an artwork’s status to some museological authority or person acting on behalf of the artworld, I am not discussing how artefacts become art, as Dickie does. I am rather interested in the actual process, whereby artworks come to be associated with particular contents, whether a singular meaning as Critical Monists claim or myriad meanings as Critical Constructivists claim. In either case, the relevance, usefulness and accuracy of tools proposed for gleaning particular contents are eventually judged by history. Exhibitions achieve their sticking power (again the analogy with trails left by slime mould cells) and thus influence artworlders’ interpretations of related artworks when exhibitions, critics or art historians defend earlier perspectives (e.g. art historical lenses and thematic frames). In what follows, I demonstrate how curated exhibitions tender beliefs about artworks that spectators derive from first-hand experiences with artworks, rather than persuasive second-hand texts. Curated exhibitions, whether in some artist’s studio or the national museum, transform private practices into public events. The curator’s hypotheses sometimes require the introduction of relevant historical material, relevant information detected using X-rays and ultraviolet

84

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

lamps, and particularized art historical lenses and thematic frames. As noted in Chapter 2, those exposed to the significance of Flemish paintings’ ‘hand gestures’ will find themselves comparing and contrasting every figures’ hand gestures, potentially prompting meaningful associations. Alternatively, being told that several objects hanging in Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘All’ (2011) (Figures 5 and 6) were actually exhibition copies likely ruins the magic for those impressed by thoughts of collectors allowing their investments to be suspended from the domed ceiling. Even when novel exhibitions introduce new paradigms, artworld paradigm shifts rarely require one to reassess the whole of art history, since art history follows a discontinuous trajectory, unlike science or even philosophy.6 Publicly accessible exhibitions provide platforms for the artworld to discover and discuss artworks, whose repeat presence magnifies perdurance, as public admiration grows for things lasting a long time.7 When viewers encounter artworks in exhibitions, however casually the show has been organized, they engage artworks, typically selected and sequenced by some curator to effect particular perceptions and accompanying thoughts. The curator’s tool kit thus includes a heightened imagination which facilitates seeing as, the capacity to visualize hypotheses, heretofore only articulated and selfscrutiny. These factors aid the curator’s success at generating exhibitions using observable artworks to convey particular hypotheses, whose validity audience reception confirms or denies. When successfully deployed, exhibitions inspire spectators to weave narrative threads that survive as institutional memories.

4.2 Schematism Philosophically speaking, how artworks are presented depends on how curators schematize them. The verb schematize as employed here stems from Immanuel Kant’s usage, as elaborated upon in ‘The Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding’ from The Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Kant noted that empirical concepts, which are derived from perception (exhibited features), elicit statements, what I’ve heretofore described as prompting or triggering responses. For example, spectators who reflect upon exhibited features such as facial expressions generate contents (embodied predicates) that provide the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for exhibited artworks to fall under selected concept(s). Lauchlan Chipman adds, ‘We might think of these descriptive predicates as representing the elementary sensory components of a concept. Kant’s view seems to be that it is possible to apply empirical concepts in

Curated Exhibitions

85

these instances because such concepts possess elementary sensory components which correspond to sensible features of the data which fall under the concepts’ (Chipman 1972: 39). Kant was discussing perception, yet his notion of ‘empirical concepts’ explains how spectators glean the curator’s organizing principles (the curator’s hypotheses) from artworks’ physical properties. Curated exhibitions prompt spectators to recall prior art experiences and to form beliefs regarding the artworks on view. For Kant, empirical concepts are derived from experience, yet philosophers like Arthur Danto consider an artwork’s contents to be ‘incarnate representations’, since they are independent of appearance. In other words, an artwork’s contents are embodied, though not necessarily perceivable. I employ the term contextualism to distinguish contents inferred from an artwork’s context from those gleaned from empirical concepts. Despite their being obscure or ineffable, Danto views ‘incarnate representations’ as capable of causing spectators to have particular thoughts about the artwork at hand. At first glance, such a view seems implausible since it’s difficult to imagine inscrutable imagery, as opposed to easily identifiable imagery, prompting spectators to generate fitting interpretations. Recall Danto’s thought experiment discussed in Chapter 3, for which he derived appearance-independent contents for nine indiscernible, square red paintings from either each artwork’s title or the artist’s own description of his/her artwork’s meaning (what the artist claims his/her work is about). In Chapter 2, I noted that spectators whose attention is focused on figures’ dramatic gesticulations (Figures 1 and 2) employ schematism. By contrast, the curator who aims to illuminate ‘motherly love’, which is not necessarily depicted, must construct relational clusters that prompt spectators to infer said inferences. For these cases, viewers deploy contextualism, since the respective dead and unborn child offers insufficient information to convey a mother’s love. My focus here is productive conceptualization, or seeing as, since interpretation is a crucial component of the curator’s tool kit, which requires a productive imagination to discover appropriate concepts (Kant 1951). By contrast, immediate conceptualization is characterized by what Kant termed determinant judgements, which harnesses conventional concepts. Consider Käthe Kollwitz’s lithograph Municipal Lodging (Figure 7), one of only eight plates originally published in Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics (1958). The artwork’s content, a family in need of shelter (as surmised from its title), isn’t immediately apparent from this image of a presumably, weary mother, snuggling with two young children in her care. Imagine spectators deriving the relevant

86

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Figure 7  Käthe Kollwitz, Städtisches Obdach (Municipal Lodging), 1926, Lithograph on paper, 18” x 22” (46 cm x 56 cm). ©Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont.

contents of Municipal Lodging from its placement in various exhibitions. Its placement adjacent artworks in exhibitions such as ‘Street Life’ (Figures 7 and 8), ‘Eco-Refugees Rendered’ (Figures 7 and 9) and ‘Facing Families’ (Figures 7 and 10) prompts spectators to identify different nonexhibited features for each case, such as homelessness though not fatigue, natural disasters though not poverty and exhausted mothers though not anxious nannies. Such contents are derived from juxtapositions within relational clusters, rather than either exhibition titles or empirical concepts directly observable in Städtisches Obdach (Municipal Lodging). As noted in Chapter 2, artworks exhibited in a curated exhibition gain their context from their environment, their relationship to adjacent artworks. Spectators begin by accessing artworks’ empirical concepts, which they readily apply to neighbouring artworks, as well as later artworks they encounter. So long as contents and appearances are said to remain independent, it would appear that no such rule, or schema, actually applies. Since the artworld only adopts, as valid, a small subset of predicates that spectators attribute to works, rules do exist, however hidden. As one may have noticed, attributed contents need not be believable. Furthermore, the possibility that contents are not necessarily self-evident leaves room for the possibility that contents are entirely contingent, which is not my view. However, those who expect artworks’ contents to remain

Curated Exhibitions

87

Figure 8  Thomas Benjamin Kennington, Homeless, 1890, Oil on canvas, 68” x 59” (172 cm x 150 cm). ©Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia.

Figure 9  Unknown artist, Digital photograph. Source: www​.greendiary​.com

88

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

stable encounter problems should they find themselves attending to slightly different contents from one exhibition to the next. Whether curators know it or not, they unwittingly employ schematism, contextualism or some combination thereof to determine the most appropriate way to convey each artwork’s contents. The interpretation process (deriving concepts for framing artworks in light of available contents) also influences the curator’s selection process. Under the guidance of empirical concepts or suitable contexts, the curator develops strategies that facilitate his/her selection of additional relevant artworks and the exhibition’s appropriate staging. The

Figure 10  Cynda Valle, Madonna and Child, 2011, Oil on linen, 24” x 18” (61 cm x 46 cm). www​.cyndavalle​.com

Curated Exhibitions

89

moment additional artworks are added, the curator must decide which artworks go where and why, so as to demonstrate the exhibition’s hypotheses. If one studies the artworks on view in a given gallery, one soon realizes the rules governing the selection, which can be as basic as artists’ nationalities. No doubt, some combination of era, scale, medium, colour, shape and content links every relational cluster in sight.8 Once interpretation is underway, the curator gains access to definite rules for selecting more artworks, either from the same artist’s oeuvre or from that of other artists. Not only curators but also critics and art historians employ schematism and contextualism to ascertain fitting concepts that categorize artworks’ contents, which helps viewers to recognize, identify and articulate artworks’ contents. For example, the viewer who identifies Picasso’s Guernica (1937) (Figure 11) as cubist employs tools for interpretation that guide him/ her to recognize in its flat imagery several lamps shining on a landscape replete with maimed figures, animals and corpses. The spectator who opts instead to experience this painting as surrealist gains alternative tools for interpretation that invite him/her to consider its subconscious messages, as well as its disturbing tenor, historical perspective and fantastical story-telling qualities, which grant it far more range than a typical history painting. It’s no wonder that this image still resonates as a horrific example of mass violence. Tools for interpretation advocated by the curator influence the selection and placement of nearby artworks, enabling spectators to glean the appropriate organizing principles. Should the curator propose the surrealist lens, Guernica’s contents (historical scene, fantastical, disturbing, subconscious thoughts) will

Figure 11  Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937, Oil on canvas, 11.5” x 25.5” (3.5 m x 7.77 m). ©Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. ©Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2019.

90

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

seem embedded in this painting. Such contents are available precisely because the curator projected the lens best suited to avail them, making nonexhibited features such as subconscious thoughts and fantastical imagery come alive. Replace the surrealist lens with science fiction, film noir or period drama lenses and new contents pop up, while others slip away. It’s tempting to consider the contents retrieved directly from the artwork, as if they’re looming beneath the painted surface, awaiting the right sleuth, though adjacent artworks contribute mightily to reception. As already mentioned, over time the artworld adopts artwork-specific conventions that distinguish which tools for interpretation are deemed most appropriate. Curated exhibitions sometimes defy such conventions, inviting viewers to experience them differently. For example, one can easily imagine some curator dispensing with the surrealist lens and exhibiting Guernica in ‘Political Art’ one year and ‘Highlighting Propaganda’ the next, so as to tease out Guernica’s contradictory backstories, which if true totally alter its contents. Seeing Guernica as propaganda requires demonstrating either that the events depicted weren’t as awful as Picasso made them out to be or that Spain’s antiFascist Republicans commissioned it as a slanderous slur meant to arouse proCommunist sentiments. Depending on the curator’s hypotheses, he/she selects tools for interpretation that highlight numerous artworks’ contents in a manner that both offers suitable evidence for his/her hypotheses and prompts spectators’ appropriate responses, thus determining whether the hypotheses prove relevant for appreciating the artworks on view. Sometimes tools for interpretation tested in one exhibition (or text) introduce novel concepts that curators deem applicable for artworks appearing in later exhibitions. Likewise, curators apply tools for interpretation developed elsewhere for artworks, enabling a newer exhibition to illuminate contents previously not noticed in exhibited artworks. Since curators routinely switch lenses, test contradictory themes or borrow tools for interpretation, one can see how exhibitions are organized to direct viewers’ attentions to particular aspects whose references are in the world, though not necessarily in the artworks. In describing a process whereby spectators (whether curators, writers or art lovers) employ whatever tools for interpretation pose the perfect fit, I am trying to capture the way numerous tools for interpretation remain in play, eventually forming a pool of potentially plausible interpretations. Meanwhile, as effective tools for interpretation gain favour, others, such as treating Guernica like

Curated Exhibitions

91

propaganda, are taken off the table given their implausibility or inadequacy. At this point, some might counter that the tools for interpretation that curators identify and users consider particularly enlightening work best, precisely because they retrieve what’s actually there, rather than speculate on what might be there. One might recall that surrealist art coincided with André Breton’s two Manifestos of Surrealism (1924 and 1929), neither of which Picasso signed. Thus, one might argue that the Surrealist Manifesto, not some Guernica-interpreter, pinpoints the very surrealist concepts, such as emotion, illogicality, dreams, fantasy and psychic activity, deemed appropriate tools for interpretation. Since Guernica depicts a historical event, rather than some dream, it deviates slightly from the surrealist manifesto, even if it employs surrealist imagery. Art historian Robin Adele Greeley corroborates this claim: Although Picasso never joined the surrealist movement, he nevertheless found it more compelling than other contemporary avant-gardes for its insistence on representations of sexuality and the body as mechanisms for construction of meaning within a wider social context. … Picasso utilized these aspects of Surrealism to develop a powerful imagery in which layers of private meaning were built up and made to stand for a range of issues beyond the personal. He also used them to conceptualize what might be called Guernica’s ‘unconscious’ – the traces of its own having been ‘performed’ or produced. (Greeley 2006: 151)

I return to this point in Chapter 6, where I distinguish referents articulated by artists at the onset, which are presumably retrievable, from references projected by spectators, prior to or post-presentation. The curator or writer who finds an artwork so befuddling that he/she must employ contextualism to grasp its contents clearly lacks access to its referents, so the tools for interpretation cannot be considered retrieved, as if the contents, once hidden, are now finally revealed. It’s unlikely that the surrealist lens is embedded in Guernica, even though Picasso would certainly have been familiar with this movement.9 The curator who includes Picasso’s Guernica in his/her surrealist art exhibition requests spectators to consider Guernica’s style constitutive of Surrealism given its similarity to paintings created by artists aligned with Surrealism. The spectators might very well respond that they don’t see the connection, thus rejecting the curator’s hypothesis. In fact, spectators who notice more differences than similarities set the artwork’s presentational history in motion, as ever more exhibitions are mounted to disprove or prove hypotheses arising from earlier shows.

92

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Even when concepts employed by the curator to determine the appropriate tools for interpretation become convention, they remain projected, unless the artist first referenced them. Otherwise, one risks the problem made famous by philosopher Donald Kuspit who in the 1970s claimed that the critic, who makes the artwork meaningful, is the true artist (Kuspit 1984: xii). Concepts are no less projected when artists later affirm interpreters’ claims. Of course, artists’ own claims tend to have an even greater authority. A related problem arises when conventions break down. That is, ways of interpreting symbols, styles, movements or modes rarely apply across eras, let alone geographical regions. In cases where conventions have broken down or fail to apply, curators employ some form of contextualism to derive contents that make the artworks come alive for their generation and locale.10 Despite curators’ fabulous imaginations and Kuspit’s controversial theories, neither curators nor critics are artists, precisely because they interpret artworks for the purpose of presenting them, not making them, as I noted in Chapter 2’s ‘Tastemakers’ section.

4.3 Contextualism To explain the difference between schematism and contextualism, I offer the example of Marcel Duchamp’s Apolinère Enameled (Figure 12), an original rectified readymade, whose inclusion in multiple exhibitions over the years has invited viewers to see it differently each time it reappeared in a new context.11 Kant employed the term abstraction to characterize the actualization of attention, whereby ‘only a single representation is made clear and all the remaining are obscured’, while Wittgenstein coined ‘aspect seeing’, which describes the process whereby one notices a different aspect of a familiar object each time one sees it.12 Given each artwork’s numerous aspects, curators try to draw spectators’ attention to those aspects that they deem relevant for their purposes, not unlike filmmakers or theatre directors who stage each scene to direct the audience’s attention to appropriate information. Each exhibition’s organization advances spectators’ capacity to weave new narrative threads. Apolinère Enameled’s backstory includes the fact that Duchamp altered a found sign, modified its original text and completed this incongruous gesture around the same time that Dada, an infamously absurd art movement, was taking shape in Europe. Duchamp aficionados, familiar with the myriad artistic attributes of Apolinère Enameled, may find good reasons to occasionally doubt, challenge, criticize or bemoan particular curators’ inclusion of this unusual

Curated Exhibitions

93

Figure 12  Marcel Duchamp, Apolinère Enameled, 1916–17, Gouache and graphite on painted tin, mounted on cardboard, 9.6” x 13.4” (24.4 cm x 34 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art. ©Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019.

artwork in their exhibitions. I would imagine, however, that most viewers accept its inclusion at face value, having no good reason to be sceptical unless the exhibition fails to demonstrate the curator’s explicit claims, as stated on didactic panels. In light of its various thematic possibilities, Apolinère Enameled has been selected for museum exhibitions whose themes are as varied as artworks that probe the boundaries between art and life (2012), New York Dada (1996) and Dada/Surrealist text art (1989). Although these three contexts are not necessarily at cross purposes, the third interpretation seems most plausible. Duchamp designated Apolinère Enameled a ‘rectified readymade’, which means that he transformed an everyday sign into a work of art. The original sign contained the text ‘Sapolin Enamel’ (some scholars claim ‘Ripolin Enamel’ instead), which he configured to read ‘Apolinère Enameled’.13 On the lower right hand side, one also notices that Duchamp transformed the manufacturer’s name and city, which originally read ‘Gerstendorfer Bros. New York, U.S.A.’ into some poetic pun: ‘Any act red by her ten or epergne, New York, U.S.A.’, so this artwork feels especially appropriate for an exhibition featuring early examples of text art.14 On the other hand, its

94

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

absurdist antics seem far too impractical to limn the boundaries between art and life, especially since Dada’s basic tenet was ‘anti-art’. Can an artwork be both ‘Dada and therefore anti-art’ and also about art and life? If not, then this artwork’s inclusion in both the first and second exhibitions initially appears contradictory. As a visitor to the third exhibition, I wove the following narrative thread: ‘During the early twentieth century artists began displaying text the way earlier artists employed figuration.’ Rather than requiring viewers to divine some hidden, albeit invisible, explanation for Duchamp’s having rearranged this sign’s letters, LACMA curator Judi Freeman’s hypothesis is supported by empirically derived concepts, visible to all who see the artwork’s text-based imagery. Even if dozens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings also feature text as imagery, one would find her theme no less tenable, since the exhibition ‘The Dada & Surrealist Word-Image’ (1989) made no claims to originality or avantgarde practices, limiting its components to Dada and surrealist samples instead. Given Apolinère Enameled’s 1916–17 date, however, some critics might take umbrage at this artwork’s inclusion in Freeman’s show. Not only was Duchamp living in New York City, but he later claimed not to have been aware of Dada antics, which began at Zürich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. In 1967, Pierre Cabanne interviewed Duchamp, who recalled noticing the word ‘dada’ for the first time in Tristan Tzara’s novelette, The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Fire Extinguisher, which he read in either late 1916 or 1917. He mused, ‘It interested us but I didn’t know what Dada was, or even that the word existed’ (Cabanne 1971: 55). When Tzara invited him to send an artwork for ‘Salon Dada: Exposition internationale’ (1921) at Galerie Montaigne, Duchamp famously sent nothing, save a telegram Pode bal-Duchamp (Bollocks) sent to Jean Crotti, leaving Nos. 28–31 on the checklist empty (Naumann and Obalk 2000: 88). This gesture has been variously interpreted as sheer reluctance, a polite refusal, an outright rejection and even a ‘Dadaist’ prank! Still, it might seems misleading, careless or even self-serving for the curator to include this object in an exhibition meant to capture Duchamp’s participation in an art historical movement that he routinely professed not to know. Given its date, I doubt any visitors to Freeman’s exhibition subsumed Apolinère Enameled under the concept of ‘surrealist’, since its date is way too early (first manifesto was in 1924). If this painting proves to be neither Dada nor surrealist, one could worry that the curator is inviting viewers to employ a false concept in order to interpret it. Is it just, as in fair, let alone truthful, for curators to encourage their audiences to experience artworks as ‘Dada’, even if they weren’t really intended as ‘Dada’? This seems to fly in the face of schematism, if not

Curated Exhibitions

95

the Identity Theory, whereby interpretations are embodied in works of art. How could ‘Dada’ be embodied in Apolinère Enameled, if the artist who produced the artwork was totally oblivious that this art movement was afoot? As I next explain, contextualism proves far more helpful when identifying Dada. Leaving aside the question of whether this particular curator’s action was just, several points ring true. The curator seems to have used the terms ‘Dada’ and ‘Surrealist’ to bookend the period dating 1916–38, which Apolinère Enameled fits, rather than to typecast these art historical movements. Duchamp may not have been a card-carrying member of the Dada movement at first, yet these days most art historians agree that his artworks from the mid-teens anticipated Dada’s revolutionary spirit and embody its anti-art ethos, so it’s quite possible that in 1916 there were at least two groups of artists, working on different continents (Europe and North America), whose art reacted to similar historical conditions or constraints imposed by that era’s contemporary art, a theory that I explore in detail below. Moreover, professions such as art history are often governed by ‘best practices’, which sometimes furnish practitioners useful ‘short cuts’, such as the movement New York Dada. Even if Duchamp didn’t self-identify as a Dadaist (he didn’t even live in Europe 1915–19), most art historians identify New York Dada as a movement all its own, whose participants included the coterie of artists and poets surrounding New York collectors Walter and Louise Arensberg (Crotti, Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Juliette Roche, Morton Schamberg, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Beatrice Wood), since their artistic activities seem so ‘Dada’ in hindsight. When using shortcuts, curators (and art historians) must be very careful that the evidence supports proposed shortcuts, since future curators are likely to adopt curators’ shortcuts, however ill-advised. Freeman is safe for now, since her exhibition seems more about noticing a perceptible trend that popped up during that era than about defining Dada and Surrealism; heck, she barely differentiates them. But what about curators who identify movements whose timeframes and/or practitioners defy the evidence? Eight decades after Dada happenings struck Zürich, Dada scholar Francis Naumann and American Arts curator Beth Venn presented ‘Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York’ (1996) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the museum’s second attempt to tie Dada to New York.15 To solidify New York Dada, the curators amassed artworks created between 1913 and 1923 by artists and poets living in New York City with limited access (mostly letters and publications) to Dada happenings in Zürich, Berlin and Köln.16 Ever since, art historians

96

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

have embraced New York Dada as a genuine movement, whose time span is bookended by Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23), as Naumann’s 1994 book title If You’re dada: New York Dada 1915-1923 avows. Even so, the Arensbergs had departed for Hollywood two years earlier, the same year Man Ray and Duchamp edited New York Dada (April 1921), a one-issue broadsheet coinciding with the Société Anonyme symposium ‘What Is Dadaism?’ (Naumann and Obalk 2000: 96). Its cover featured Marcel Duchamp’s (Rrose Selavy) Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette 1920–1) notably floating in a field of letters repeating ‘New York Dada’ thousands of times. This is the only evidence of ‘New York Dada’. No sooner than New York–based artists officially embraced Dada, its European variant started to fade. Famous for having claimed, ‘Dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival’, Man Ray left for Paris in 1921. Soon after, European Dada met its Waterloo. Tristan Tzara’s ‘Salon Dada’ (1921) exhibition was seized by a building manager and Picabia’s Parisbased Dada journal 391 denounced Dada (Ribemont-Dessaignes 1981: 117).17 In 1922, Tzara staged Dada’s funeral at the Weimar Bauhaus. Not having seen ‘Making Mischief ’ myself, I have always found it surprising that spectators identified New York Dada as its overarching narrative thread, especially since the only evidence of this movement’s American counterpart consisted of the 1921 publication New York Dada on view in the exhibition’s last gallery, entitled ‘Dada Invades New York’, which as Naumann recalls featured all of the Dada-related ephemera (Naumann 2019). Adding to my surprise that audiences readily embraced New York Dada as a movement, Dada archivist Rudolf Kuenzli’s ‘Making Mischief ’ review in Artforum noted that the curators specifically titled its last gallery ‘Dada Invades New York’, as if to suggest that ‘everything up to the last section [had been] proto-Dada’ (1997: 88). But Naumann now claims that the curators actually meant for all of the exhibited artworks to exemplify New York Dada, even Duchamp’s 1913 chocolate grinder painting, which he produced in Paris, prior to his arrival in New York. As Naumann reminds, Unlike other movements that preceded it, [Dada] is not a visual style with a specific beginning, middle and end, but a conceptual way of framing works of art – what the artists themselves called ‘a Dada spirit’ (or state of mind) and that could have existed (and indeed it did in New York) long before a word was invented to categorize it. (Naumann 2019)

As Naumann’s 1994 book title indicates, movements entail time spans, a distinction made clear by art historian Linda Nochlin’s careful assessment of

Curated Exhibitions

97

Realism’s location, duration, aims and diverse practitioners in Realism (Nochlin 1971). Establishing precise time spans matters for movements, though not genres, because as philosopher Catharine Abell explains, genres offer top-down categories that endure across eras and locales, are stable across media, are broadly accessible and thus prove useful (Abell 2014). Unlike genres, movements are bottom-up, spontaneous, improvised, have precise durations, begin locally and then spread elsewhere and are short-lived, unless they evolve into a genre or resurface as ‘pastiche’ (Spaid 2015a). Titling this exhibition’s last gallery ‘Dada Invades New York’ risked to confuse spectators all the more, since if there really had been a Dada invasion, it would have preceded the publication of New York Dada. Despite such contradictory messages, spectators recognized that this invasion was in name only, a clever way to suggest that what was happening in New York during the teens had ties to Dada in Europe, though there were no examples of European Dada to reinforce this connection. As we shall soon see, one could also claim that ‘New York Dada’ began in 1911 with a Dadaesque object made by an artist living there then. Although ‘Making Mischief ’ offered no solid evidence to link New York ‘mischief ’ to Dada antics prior to Duchamp’s possibly meeting Dadaists in Paris either in late 1919 or even later, the PMA presented the mini-exhibition ‘New York Dada’ (2010), curated by Duchamp scholar Michael R. Taylor and Dada scholar Emily Hage. Comprised of artworks drawn from its collection, it included the aforementioned 1913 ‘chocolate grinder’ painting. Despite Duchamp’s having painted it in Paris prior to 1915, Naumann and Venn included it in ‘Making Mischief ’, since after all it’s a study for the Large Glass. I imagine that Taylor and Hage selected it for their exhibition, since apparently no one objected to its inclusion in ‘Making Mischief ’ fourteen years earlier. Even so, the PMA’s webpage for this exhibition acknowledges that artists associated with the Arensbergs didn’t officially adopt the Dada moniker until 1921, which is incidentally the year Dada blew up, first in Europe, as noted above and then in New York, following the departures of the Arensbergs to Los Angeles and Duchamp to Paris in June followed by Man Ray in July.18 Although art history is never linear and loads of similar activities occur simultaneously in different parts of the world, curators who fabricate categories retroactively without good reason risk misleading audiences. Absent historical documents such as letters, press releases, checklists and published reviews to determine who did what when and for what reasons, curators are charged with devising and publicizing the best tools for conceptualizing artworks. This can get especially complicated with avant-garde movements such as Dada, whose

98

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

activities are not readily schematized, since they’re characterized less by a look and more by ‘metaphysical attitudes’ and ineffable ideas, leaving curators to contextualize artworks, which ‘New York Dada’ effectively does (de la Croix and Tansey 1980: 827).19 Still, art history’s sticky details don’t grant curators licence to assemble artworks using familiar, catch-all categories. They must have good reason, since curating carries a huge responsibility. And this is especially so when curators cannot simply appeal to empirical concepts to distinguish Dada from non-Dada, as they do when distinguishing suprematist, minimalist, or ‘Op’ paintings, which at first glance can look indistinguishable. However curators parse New York Dada (emphasize the First World War, electricity’s arrival, Duchamp’s Large Glass, the Arensbergs’s coterie or New York’s thematic balls) is how they end up contextualizing artworks. That is, they cull categorizing concepts from contents that are largely invisible in the artworks themselves. When one compares Dada’s ‘global’ variants, one does, however, notice shared practices, such as collaged texts, found materials, absurdist antics, poetic assemblage, film or an anti-art ethos, which formed the basis for the massive travelling exhibition ‘Dada’ (2005–6). As for resetting Dada’s start date, I imagine some future curator one day opting to demonstrate Georges Hugnet’s hypothesis, originally published in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936) catalogue (Hugnet 1951). Like Naumann, he dates Dada’s origin to 1915, when Duchamp and Picabia first befriended Man Ray in New York City, which makes Ray’s earlier Tapestry (1911), a checkerboard painting comprised of 110 coloured fabric swatches glued to a support, protoDada. Rather than staging an invasion as did ‘Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York’, Hugnet expands Dada’s era to cover art created before and after Zürich Dada, thus affording Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s far-flung costumes and sculptures made from cast off objects a key role here. Having spent a decade interacting with München’s avant-garde, the Baroness entered the New York scene in 1913 (Gammel 2002). Duchamp, who also lived in München, later described his three-month sojourn there in 1912 as the ‘scene of his complete liberation’ (Friedel et al. 2012). If one includes the influence of München’s avantgarde and Man Ray’s earliest antics, one realizes the possibility of characterizing New York Dada as a ‘diffusion’ more than an ‘invasion’ that Picabia likely dispersed when he left New York for Barcelona in 1916 and launched 391. Even if the category ‘New York Dada’ is just a sexy branding moniker, never meant as an actual art movement, art historians must admit that Tapestry is proto-Dada, if not Dada’s progenitor, pushing back New York Dada’s start date four years (Copley 1975: 8).20 Naumann rejects this possibility, since Man Ray

Curated Exhibitions

99

supposedly didn’t count it as an artwork until 1919 (Naumann 2019). In Ray’s very last interview of his life, scholar and collector Arturo Schwarz asked him whether it was true that there was no such thing as ‘New York Dada’. Ray replied, ‘Absolutely! There is no such thing. I would discourage it entirely. You can put me down as having said that.’21 Was this just another Dadaesque prank? Surely not! Proper names, whether titles of movements, artworks or especially exhibitions, have contingent, rather than necessary or essential links to their referents.22 As philosophers Tyler Burge and Dickie, or sociologist Pierre Bourdieu routinely point out, sometimes social conventions prevail. To my lights, the movement known as New York Dada has gained its currency more from recurrent use (practice) than historical accuracy (evidence), yet even proper names deserve plausibility. So long as New York Dada refers to the circle of avant-garde artists associated with the Arensbergs prior to their move, this proper name has earned its credence. As already mentioned, Freeman’s exhibition title ‘The Dada & Surrealist Word-Image’ suggests that everything in her exhibition was either Dada or surrealist, yet Apolinère Enameled was apparently not yet considered New York Dada in 1989, since it was not included in the Whitney’s earlier New York Dada exhibition. As a result, Naumann and Venn’s exhibition required them to demarcate New York Dada’s ineffable, indistinct and indeterminate parameters. Since they didn’t include actual examples of European Dada in their exhibition, they could not demonstrate how New York Dadaists veered from their Dada compatriots, living some 4000 miles away. Perhaps, this enabled visitors to sidestep potentially contradictory historical anomalies, while adopting the New York Dada convention.

4.4  Institutional memories One interesting study shows that when people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they sometimes get confused and their preferences change as they reflect upon their reasons. According to Kevin Melchionne, ‘In situations where aesthetic experience is accompanied by debate and discussion, the reliability of our knowledge of the experience decreases, calling into question the very discourse that is generated by the work of art. For this reason, critical discourse may be less reliable as a guide to our experience than we have supposed’ (2011: 8). Despite the ‘fallibility of reasons’, Melchionne still considers art lovers ‘reason shoppers’, since they are not only searching for good reasons but are just as

100

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

appreciative of explanatory reasons as they are the objects under consideration (2011: 10). In fact, one could say that artworld institutions, whether museums, schools or publications, are all in the business of generating compelling reasons. By proposing hypotheses coupled with related tools for interpretation, curated exhibitions facilitate each viewer’s capacity to grasp each artwork’s significance. By conveying contexts and availing concepts, exhibitions play the greatest role in lending exhibited objects, whether artworks or artefactual souvenirs, their respective contents. Marcia Tucker recalls the period in the early 1970s, following ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials’ (1969) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, when artists began using nonart materials such as logs, rope, felt and latex house paint to produce large sculptures (see Figures 18 and 19). The more gallerists chose to exhibit these unusual materials, the more articles were ‘written and published, arguments [were] generated by individual artists, [and] group shows [were] staged, yet this new idiom [emphasis mine] hadn’t penetrated the bastions of the museum world yet’ (Tucker 2008: 110). I thus suggest that exhibitions temporarily lend objects contents, because exhibitions are ephemeral and some contents expire, while others prove untenable. In this case, ‘Anti-Illusion’ shined a light on artists’ new procedures and materials, making it possible for future reflection in the form of gallery exhibitions and articles. In other words, exhibitions propose ways to interpret (however temporarily) the artworks on view. Being a collaborative process, exhibitions rely heavily on public reception. Spectators’ responses arise due to some combination of spectator type, the curated exhibition, each artist’s standing and the common knowledge surrounding an artist’s life and oeuvre. Even if curators typically work on behalf of artists, the path leading to an exhibition is full of compromises and constraints, especially since curators must consider their employers’ needs/ demands/wishes as much as those of their audiences, which of course includes the critics. Exhibitions succeed when appreciative spectators and critics alike spread the word, leaving each artist satisfied by his/her artwork’s most recent performance, but also wondering under what context future curators will present his/her artworks. Post-exhibition chatter indicates which of the curator’s hypotheses were accepted, overlooked or dismissed. Although curated exhibitions are meant to inspire audiences to weave narrative threads, most related thoughts vanish into thin air soon after exhibited artworks are returned to their rightful owners. All that remains once exhibitions end are those narrative threads that leave their trail in the form of those institutional memories that influence the artworld’s understanding of particular

Curated Exhibitions

101

Table 3  1979  Exhibition’s Impact in 1979, 1994 and 1996 Narrative Threads (1979)

Institutional Memories (1996)

The 1979 exhibition ‘Dada and New York’ demonstrates hypotheses, themes, concepts and categories supported by artworks and ephemera. Spectators use evidence to weave particular narrative threads. Some narrative threads➔ survive➔IM1996 Other narrative threads➔ disproven➔IM1994 Other narrative threads➔ forgotten➔ IM1979

By 1996, narrative threads formed as a result of the 1979 exhibition, such as the role played by Duchamp and the Arensberg Circle, survive as institutional memories. Widely considered common knowledge, the artworld treats this as convention (Danto’s ‘artworld theory’). Some institutional memories formed since 1979 survive until 1996. 1994 book disproves some institutional memories formed since 1979 Some post-1979 institutional memories are already forgotten.

artworks. Table 3 contrasts three kinds of institutional memories, those that are still valid years later, those that have since been disproven and those that are long forgotten. Consider the Whitney’s 1979 ‘Dada and New York’ show and its 1996 variant ‘Making Mischief ’. By 1996, a lot more research had been undertaken, so the set of participating artists was totally different, even though both exhibitions were based on the same historical periodicals. Visitors to the first exhibition wove very different narrative threads than those who experienced the second one. I imagine that by the time Naumann’s book arrived in 1994 most institutional memories from 1979 were either forgotten or disproven. Those still surviving in 1996 were viewed as ‘common knowledge’. Problematically, radical exhibitions that buck conventions tend to risk unfavourable impressions, though they often yield long-lasting overall impressions when artists, curators and historians return to the material years later to study it in greater depth. I imagine the Whitney’s 1979 show, which was on view at their then Downtown branch, is one such case, since it paved the way for scholars’ handily accepting Naumann’s 1994 book and 1996 exhibition. When artworks reappear in later exhibitions, memories are sometimes restored. As we shall see, a single exhibition is rarely sufficient to persuade audiences to adopt reasons, inferred from the exhibition, as their beliefs. As already noted, spectators often change their minds and become confused when they are asked to explain their preferences. Curated exhibitions offer viewers firsthand experiences that invite them to reflect upon whether the curator’s tools for interpretation aid their capacity to grasp presented artworks. After years of deliberation, followed either by repeat museum visits or experiences with related

102

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

exhibitions, spectators eventually feel prepared to formulate and share their own beliefs regarding the artworks in question, even though the artworks may no longer be on view.

4.5  Unasserted thoughts As acts of the imagination, unrealized exhibitions that never materialize beyond the proposal stage and remain stored in the curator’s imagination are what Roger Scruton called unasserted thoughts, since one entertains p as a possibility or as a supposition (1998: 88). Alternatively, realized exhibitions offer what Scruton termed ‘publicly observable states of affairs’ (11). In lieu of exhibitions, curators wearing their art historian hats sometimes conduct first-hand research with artworks and publish essays that introduce and defend their phenomenological findings or organize symposiums that urge larger, public discussions of some artist’s oeuvre or particular artistic themes. What exhibitions offer over essays and symposiums is that they yield demonstrations of curators’ hypotheses that can be verified as true or not or at least provide useful, plausible and handy theories. Hypotheses alone (absent the evidence) are introspective, speculative and/or solipsistic, lacking the exhibition’s empirical imprimatur. Those readers/listeners who have not had the chance to explore artworks under discussion cannot judge either the merits or the accuracy of written/spoken claims. One might worry that art history texts and exhibition catalogues, which transmit second-hand observations, generate knowledge in the form of privatized states of affairs. So long as art historical knowledge joins other publicly observable states of affairs, readers/spectators are justified in discussing and analysing artworks described in publications, which is how reviews and articles influence spectators’ beliefs.23 As it turns out, realized exhibitions are no less unasserted thoughts than their unrealized counterparts, still floating in the curator’s imagination. The fleeting nature of temporary exhibitions leaves them no less imaginary than imagined exhibitions. In fact, Francis Haskell titled his book The Ephemeral Museum to emphasize the significance of exhibitions’ temporariness, their fleeting nature, a point that distinguishes exhibitions from aesthetic experiences such as theatre, film and performances, which are either presented over and over, even if staged, directed, acted and received differently each time or recorded for posterity as film or an mp3.24 One of Haskell’s main claims concerns the way the ephemerality associated with temporary exhibitions results in an ‘heightened emotion and

Curated Exhibitions

103

intensity of observation that comes from an awareness that their experience of magic can only be short-lived’ (2000: 7). This particular view found inspiration in the earnest efforts of Marcel Proust, who left his sick bed after a night spent writing (a few months before his death) to experience the Jeu de Paume’s 1921 Vermeer exhibition. As Haskell surmised: The impermanence of the art exhibition induces a special excitement, epitomized by the conviction that it may never again again be possible to see something that it offers – something from very far away, or from an impenetrable private collection, or a comparison between pictures, the reassembly of a group of them. It may be one’s last chance, so one goes. (2000: 195)

4.6  Aesthetic unreliability Despite the plethora of asserted thoughts in the form of exhibition documents, the exhibition itself remains unasserted. What can be asserted, though, are an impactful exhibition’s narrative threads, whose sticking power as institutional memories measure the exhibition’s success at having inspired those narrative threads that survive. More literally, when terms, originated by some curator to grasp particular artworks, later become tools for interpretation that can be applied to other artworks, one recognizes the earlier exhibition’s impact. When a trail of institutional memories is left behind, exhibitions play a role in lending future artworks their contents.25 Tucker’s recalling how the museum exhibition ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedure/Materials’ led to gallery shows and articles offers further proof that tools for interpretation proposed by the curator can help people grasp later artworks. I imagine that this is what Danto had in mind when he claimed that artworks conform to some artworld theory. His view is often interpreted as suggesting that the ‘theory’ is either prior to or concurrent with art making, but to my lights, theories arise during presentation and gain currency as a result of reception. I imagine that those theories that are most likely to stick are already in circulation, so Danto’s insight that theories are prior to presentation coheres with the view proposed here, though my ‘long view’ includes earlier exhibitions’ hard-won effects. When viewers assess an exhibition’s narrative threads, they transform unasserted thoughts into asserted statements. Thoughts that occur as a result of experiencing particular artworks together can be asserted either as propositional attitudes that take the form of ‘I think x’, ‘I believe x’, ‘I desire x’, ‘I know x’ or common knowledge, which takes the form of ‘We know that we know x.’ The

104

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

beliefs viewers gain as a result of experiencing exhibitions have what Gottlob Frege terms assertoric force. That is, they feel true in light of the evidence presented by the exhibition (Dummett 1993: 354). This could explain why nearly 90 per cent of Americans considers museums, which typically present first-hand evidence, the most trustworthy source of information, even more so than books and print media.26 Contrary to the supposed merits of talking (or writing) therapies, whereby the process of actually articulating heretofore unspoken thoughts engenders agency, recent research shows that verbalization tends to deform aesthetic experiences, adding undue weight to certain parts, while distorting both recollection and even one’s appraisal of said experiences (Schooler and Schreiber 2004: 22).27 This recent research into the psychology of taste-making, preferences and deliberation confirms my view that exhibitions offer people evidence (or reasons) for their beliefs. But it also explains why people’s preferences tend to change once they attempt to articulate their reasons, an experience that is no doubt familiar to art writers who end up appreciating artworks that originally seemed uninteresting or irrelevant. There also seems to be a gap between what one gravitates towards and what one actually finds interesting, so when one begins to explain one’s reasons, one soon realizes that there are even better reasons for preferring something else. As a result, first-hand experiences gleaned from exhibitions routinely challenge spectators’ long-standing preferences, while simultaneously inspiring some viewers to adopt new ones. In light of recent empirical research that challenges introspection, which Melchionne discusses in ‘A New Problem for Aesthetics’, it turns out that our preferences may not be so authentic as most people, especially philosophers and art educators, have assumed.28 He terms this problem ‘aesthetic unreliability’, since it concerns the ‘variety of ways in which it is difficult to grasp our aesthetic experience and the consequent confusion and unreliability of what we take as our taste’ (2011: 1).29 He offers the example of subjects who selected posters to hang on their walls. Those who were asked to provide reasons for their selection were less likely to actually display their posters than those who were not asked to ‘analyse their feelings’ (7). Furthermore, whatever comes to mind when we look for reasons has a chance to serve as a reason. As philosopher Krista Lawlor writes, ‘A thought that comes to mind in the course of what one understands to be a search for reasons is taken to be a reason, simply because it occurs in the context of a search for reasons’ (Melchionne 2011: 9; Lawlor 2003: 558). Since curated exhibitions prompt various thoughts, viewers end up searching for reasons both to explain whatever ideas come to mind and to make sense of whatever they

Curated Exhibitions

105

are experiencing at that moment. For example, they might conclude that this particular relational cluster either ‘caused’ them to generate these particular reasons or provides evidence for those reasons they’ve fabricated, making it impossible for them to distinguish the problems necessitating explanations in the first place. Since the above-mentioned studies indicate that the very process of characterizing one’s experiences risks distortion, Melchionne worries that the ‘search for reasons [further] distorts our understanding of our prior experience’. In fact, ‘the more complicated the reason-giving process, the more likely it is to generate confusion and error’ (9). In light of the potential for both the ‘fallibility of reasons’, which I discussed earlier, and ‘aesthetic unreliability’ to overwhelm legitimate reasons, the merits of curated exhibitions seem entirely debilitating. To my lights, curated exhibitions overcome the ‘fallibility of reasons’ and ‘aesthetic unreliability’ in at least three ways. First, curators publicly stage exhibitions precisely because people do misremember and inaccurately describe their aesthetic experiences. Being shareable activities, not individualized events, spectators freely dispute one another’s descriptions and beliefs (insights, interpretations, attitudes) and when possible, revisit exhibited artworks (or installation photographs) to substantiate their memories. One could even argue that some critic’s misdescribing or misremembering prompts a greater public response, in that reviews that report erroneous descriptions enliven readers more than reviews with accurate details. Readers are more likely to react to writers’ misrepresentations. Second, curated exhibitions are not meant to be top-down, whereby exhibitions are designed to teach viewers what to think about the artworks on view, leaving some viewers confused by what they were meant to learn. Curators produce aesthetic experiences that definitely risk the many distortions Melchionne identifies. Fully aware of this, curators spend a great deal of time anticipating exactly how audiences will respond to each set’s members, given the way they have been selected and positioned. Curators also expend a great deal of time imagining how various arrangements prompt particular audiences to generate their own set of narrative threads, which double as ‘reasons to believe’. In the case of curated exhibitions, public reception matters most, so if the public leaves feeling confused about what they’ve experienced and unfor­ tunately this sometimes happens, then there will be little to discuss, let alone remember. If Melchionne is right that the less an exhibition is discussed the less distortion there is, then speechlessness seems like an advantage. However,

106

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

the narrative threads triggered by curated exhibitions must be discussed and remembered in order to have assertoric force, let alone develop into institutional memories. This five-step process ((1) proposed hypotheses ➔ (2) exacted exhibition➔ (3) narrative-thread weaving ➔ (4) institutional-memory trails ➔ (5) common knowledge) leaves plenty of room for distortions, over-exaggeration and appraisals requiring reappraisal, as thoughts get moulded and formed and exhibitions are folded into art history. Third and most important, since people are reason shoppers, as Melchionne claims, only direct experience can counter ill-begotten reasons. It’s far easier to feed people erroneous reasons via second-hand experiences, such as text books, lectures and especially the internet. Those who lack contact with actual artworks are resigned to accept as valid reasons posed by others. People who make the most ardent anti-art protestors are usually those who have not actually experienced whatever artworks they’re protesting, whether it be Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (1985), Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) or nonart examples such as 2012’s inflammatory ‘anti-Islam’ film. The act of inciting misinformed protestors rather infantilizes them, exploits their feelings of victimhood and serves to intensify their sense of helplessness. By contrast, the act of rejecting artworks that one has experienced firsthand proves emancipating. That said, curatorial care entails remaining sensitive to viewers’ varying levels of experience and expectations, which sometimes requires warning them in advance about potentially offensive artworks.30 Given the public exhibition’s role in opening up discussions, rather than closing them down, discussing an exhibition’s narrative threads can actually help to reduce distortions. Other viewers’ assertions about the exhibition provide additional evidence, helping one to discern whether one’s dispositions are justified or not, thus enabling one to adjust them accordingly. Shared beliefs (those that are asserted and widely discussed) that hold up in light of the evidence (the exhibition and other viewers’ beliefs) eventually generate secondorder knowledge (‘We know that we know x’) about the exhibition’s content and the most appropriate method for interpreting artworks included therein. What I have in mind here is not beliefs concerning appreciation (whether the public likes the exhibition or not), but beliefs that cause spectators to revise or expand their reasons for appreciating/dismissing artworks. Even temporary exhibitions that last only a few months engender institutional memories, which began as beliefs caused by public discussions about the narrative threads inferred from the exhibition. By contrast, objects situated in

Curated Exhibitions

107

never-changing exhibitions, such as galleries designated Pre-Columbian Art, Medieval Art, African Art or art from other ancient civilizations engender ongoing experiences, enabling viewers to return time and again to refresh their memories and ‘check’ the evidence.

4.7 Cognition In Chapters 2 and 3, I discussed the way exhibitions provide spectators tools for interpretation, such as art historical lenses (Flemish Primitives) or thematic frames (hand gestures in early Netherlandish painting). I next describe how tools for interpretation sometimes become tools for understanding. Consider the ‘minimalist’ box. The first time you saw one of Donald Judd’s wooden boxes, you may have thought, ‘My goodness, how could that be art?’ Yet years later, you automatically recognize it as a minimalist box. Furthermore, you don’t think twice about it since the notion of minimalism now functions as a tool for understanding. In Art and Imagination, Scruton distinguishes ordinary perception (OP), or seeing that, from imaginative perception (IP), or seeing as. Whenever older artwork o appears in a new context, one could say that the curator is inviting spectators to see artwork o as n, since each changed context furnishes access to different contents. Imagine that artworks are touchstones of a sort that can be rotated like ambiguous figures, enabling one to explore different facets with each new turn. Each new exhibition highlights different aspects present in the artwork, yet it stays the same (or mostly the same for multi-component installations). Still, viewers’ attitudes towards it may shift once they accept the viability of new contents. One might be tempted to term the kind of knowledge exhibitions engender imaginative knowledge, since such knowledge seems driven more by thoughts than sensory content. Scruton takes up this discussion from Wittgenstein, Table 4  Imaginative Perception, Ordinary Perception and Cognition Imaginative Perception

Ordinary Perception

Cognition

will dependent seeing as belief independent ambiguous figures tools for interpretation

will independent seeing that belief dependent Steady state

will independent seeing-in belief dependent tools for understanding, conventions, common knowledge

108

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

who first introduced the paradox of the duck–rabbit figure in Philosophical Investigations. Scruton notes, ‘Sensory experience, unlike “seeing as”, is internally related to belief; hence, unlike “seeing as”, it is not subject to the will’ (Scruton 1998: 114). For Scruton, ‘seeing an aspect as’, as in seeing an ambiguous figure as either a duck or a rabbit, ‘does not reduce to a set of beliefs about its objects, not even a set of perceptual beliefs’ since one sees it ‘without necessarily believing it to be there’ (Scruton 1998: 107–9). Therefore, IP, though not OP, can be changed at will, while OP is steadfast, though changing one’s location often alters one’s perception and thus influences experience. With exhibitions, the curator invites viewers to engage in a game of seeing as, which stands to become seeing-in, should exhibition hypotheses prove successful. At this chapter’s beginning, I noted that seeing Guernica as surrealist avails numerous contents that are relevant for its meaning, while seeing it as cubist doesn’t. Once it becomes common knowledge that it’s useless to try to see Guernica as cubist, since this historical lens fails to offer relevant information, seeing as suddenly bears greater resemblance to Wollheim’s notion of seeing-in, which like OP is internally related to belief and not subject to the will. One imagines a future date when everyone automatically regards Guernica as surrealist. At that moment, there will be no further need for public deliberation, just as everyone agrees that its imagery is flat (or flattened) and freed from depiction. Thus, what began as a game of seeing as sometimes evolves into an exercise in seeing-in, as spectators acquire new tools for seeing that. Tools for interpretation such as art historical lenses and thematic frames that enable viewers to grasp otherwise inscrutable artworks sometimes later function more like tools for understanding, should yesteryear’s tools for interpretation become convention. But of course, conventions are not necessarily permanent: they can be forgotten or even go out of vogue. Those conventions that remain constant engender a form of seeing-in, of which there are three types. For brevity sakes, let’s call the first type thematic seeing, since the public continues to interpret the artworks the way some curator invited them to temporarily experience them. Let’s call the second form aided seeing, whereby people employ technologies such as glasses or X-rays that enhance OP. Let’s call the third form trained seeing, since people’s art educations sometimes prevent them from shaking off acquired lenses. We now have three types of seeing as that effectively function as seeing-in, since their outcomes are steady, rather than fluctuating, as seeing as typically is. Since these steadfast types of seeing

Curated Exhibitions

109

as require object-belief (Scruton’s criteria for OP), they are not subject to the will (Scruton’s criteria for IP). I next discuss these three kinds of seeing as in detail.

Thematic seeing To determine the most appropriate themes characterizing the artworks on view, curators often begin the interpretation process with a game of seeing as. They might request spectators to engage what appear to be nonart as art or they might suddenly invite viewers to experience Cy Twombly drawings as physical diaries (or souvenirs from everyday actions), even though the artworld has associated them with graffiti scrawls for the past fifty years. Seeing Twombly’s drawings as physical diaries dramatically alters their meanings, since what were once considered exemplary of some universal alphabet are suddenly twisted into an artist’s private records.31 So long as one can see them either way, one is still seeing as. Once a convention is accepted that precludes artworlders from seeing an artwork otherwise, seeing as has effectively become seeing-in. For example, an abstract drawing that resembles a face exemplifies seeing as, yet seeing-in occurs when those same marks capably render a three-dimensional face, making it impossible to see it as mere marks. Seeing as is in play whenever one witnesses an exhibition. If the particular lens invoked by the curator enhances OP and secures beliefs about the object, seeing as is more like seeing-in, since the spectator no longer shifts his/her will. Exhibition experiences bolster one’s beliefs about the artworks’ contents in ways that looking at ambiguous figures such as the duck–rabbit doesn’t. Over time, the themes (whether genres, categories, rules or concepts) curators propose to aid the public’s capacity to grasp otherwise indecipherable imagery, scraggy marks, accumulated stuff, spliced bits and sprawls are no more subject to the will than sensory experiences. As briefly discussed, I have in mind the way movements’ styles, whether futurist, cubist, Dada or surrealist make inscrutable imagery suddenly appear intelligible, guiding viewers to engage contents that they might otherwise overlook. Although one can see many types of paintings as abstract, one could not see a Suprematist painting as cubist, even though both movements are derived from early-twentieth-century artists’ fascination with using planar geometrical forms to convey 3-D imagery. Seeing an artwork as cubist requires that one also believe this particular lens poses the perfect fit, since it enables the viewer to experience its features in ways that improve intelligibility. Thematic

110

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

seeing is thus analogous to Wollheim’s notion of seeing-in, since it subsumes seeing that under a representation.

Aided seeing Anthropologists have known for decades that human beings must develop skills to perceive the imagery present in photographs. Knowing how to read a photograph is a tool, or a lens, that most of us learn as toddlers, so we tend to take it for granted. In Oh What a Blow the Phantom Gave Me!, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter recalls visiting Sio, a primitive village in New Guinea: We gave each person a Polaroid shot of himself. At first there was no understanding. The photographs were black & white, flat, static, odorless – far removed from any reality they knew. They had to be taught to ‘read’ them. I pointed to a nose in a picture, then touched the real nose, etc. Often one or more boys would intrude into the scene, peering intently from picture to subject, then shout, ‘It’s you!’32

If some human beings need to develop new skills to see photographs, to see through microscopes or even to handle new prescription glasses, then human beings experiencing art no doubt require a special kind of seeing – special ‘seeing-that tools’ to see artworks more clearly. Since the millennium, curators have employed X-rays and UV radiation to discover what lies beneath surfaces, providing access to artists’ earlier thought processes. Few would describe the kind of straightforward seeing associated with photography as IP, unless of course one claims to see something less than obvious, the way one might see an image of a cumulus cloud as a polar bear. I return to this discussion in Chapter 5, but for now there is no reason to consider the tools for interpretation that curators, art historians and critics introduce to aid their audiences’ ability to receive nonexhibited features as mere examples of IP. Unlike the duck–rabbit example, the curator’s seeing as schemes are meant to function more like seeing-in, since curators rarely engage their audiences in fanciful interpretations. That is, they are meant to provide viewers helpful/ relevant tools for interpretation, though later exhibitions may introduce even better tools, which not every viewer adopts on command, precisely because seeing as is subject to the will, unlike seeing-in. Seeing-in stabilizes viewers’ capacity to grasp whatever there is to see, rather than routinely shifting the imagery’s appearance, as does the duplicitous seeing as.

Curated Exhibitions

111

Trained seeing With trained seeing, beliefs are derived more from education than experience. Being rigged, seeing as is transformed into seeing-in. It may be hard to believe, but art historians who earned their PhDs during the 1960s or 1970s often confess that they cannot perceive Joseph Albers’s colour-block paintings (Figure 13) anyway other than as planar. Those trained earlier or later claim to readily experience them as multidimensional, or even as pulsating, although the imaginary motion is clearly an optical illusion. Still, people’s multi-perceptual capacities grounds all Op(tical) Art. During the 1960s, the art critic Clement Greenberg disparaged Op Art for being too gimmicky. By the time art historians born in the 1940s and 1950s entered the scene, their educational frame had been structured, so that they could only experience such coloured patterns as flat.33 This point hinges less on the existence of art historians who have been trained not to see Op Art as optical and more on the way educational frames supersede alternative perspectives. Those art historians who experienced them first-hand prior to second-hand textbook accounts likely see them differently, since perception distorts less than verbal descriptions. Recall how difficult it is to relearn something that one first learned incorrectly. It’s difficult to overturn trained seeing precisely because it’s a form of seeing-in. As this and several upcoming examples show, it is sometimes difficult to get pre-trained artworlders to see things differently. They are effectively stuck in art historical lenses, demonstrating trained seeing’s internal relation with belief and its independence from the will for well-trained viewers. These viewers remain blind to thematic seeing (such as the ‘Op Art’ lens), even though it proposes the most interesting way to grasp particular (optical) planar paintings. They don’t simply opt not to see op paintings as pulsating … they just don’t pulse. Even when artworlders are playing games of IP, some have beliefs that are so fixed and wills that are so stubborn that they can only see one way (trained seeing). Trained seeing seems to operate no differently than the OP curators use to assess individual artworks as evidence for the exhibition’s hypotheses. This is not to say that art historical lenses or thematic frames are ‘properties’ of artworks, only to admit that viewers are just as lost without them as they are without their reading glasses. Over time, these tools become associated with artworks, as their presentational history absorbs their exhibition and critical histories. Thematic seeing that engenders an eventual paradigm shift (suddenly all geometric paintings from the 1960s like Albers’s Homage to a Square (Figure 13)

112

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Figure 13  Joseph Albers, Homage to a Square, 1959, Oil on masonite, 47.5” x 47.5” (121 cm x 121 cm). ©Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City.

get viewed through the ‘Op Art’ lens) transforms the game of IP (sometimes seeing geometric surfaces as pulsating) into an exercise in cognition (always seeing such surfaces as pulsating), since the move is motivated by fixed beliefs (all paintings from this era have optical properties), not some fickle will that flips between colour-block and pulsating imagery. Imagine what it must have been like to experience Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Figure 14) in 1907 without the cubist framework to guide one’s perception.34 Since the first museum exhibition of Paul Cézanne’s paintings didn’t occur until September 1907, most people viewing Picasso’s Demoiselles the year it was com­ pleted would have lacked Cézanne’s oeuvre as a reference point. Did Demoiselles appear flat, crushed or indecipherable? Would one have been able to imagine some relationship between the painting’s flattened imagery and its 3-D subjects?

Curated Exhibitions

113

Figure 14  Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, Oil on canvas, 8” x 7.8” (243.9 cm x 233.7 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©2020. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

Doing so seems second-nature today, but seeing these flattened, trapezoidal shapes with mask-like faces as ladies in 1907 must have been nearly impossible, which could explain why it took another decade before it became a candidate for reception. That both Henri Matisse and Gertrude Stein ‘despised’ it suggests that it left people flummoxed, no differently than when the Society of Independents exhibition organizers rejected Fountain or islanders first identified faces of friends floating on shiny paper. Next, consider whether Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is fauvist, cubist or surrealist. The standard view is that most of Picasso’s early paintings p are cubist, so when artworlders explore his paintings (perceives p), whether artworks from 1907 or 1967, they are apt to first view them through the cubist

114

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

lens (believes that seeing p as c is true), rather than the lenses of Fauvism (believes that seeing p as f is true) or Surrealism (believes that seeing p as s is true), the three painting movements most prevalent in France in the early twentieth century. Even though Picasso’s art was not included in the first ‘official’ cubist exhibition (the Salon d’Automne of 1912), his early paintings were likely included in every cubist exhibition thereafter, thus establishing them as prototypically cubist. I doubt that even viewers with keen imaginations could see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon through some alternative lens (such as the surrealist movement), even though André Breton actually published a photograph of it in his magazine La Révolution Surréaliste in 1925. However, some curator might opt to reorient this painting’s reading by including it in an exhibition meant to explore a specific theme, such as ‘African Art’s Influence’ or some politicized theme, such as ‘Colonialists and Modernists’, which either enhances common knowledge about the selected examples or proves woefully misleading. The only thing that makes Picasso’s 1907 painting vaguely surrealist is his referencing African masks, which anticipated the later surrealists’ passion for ethnographic treasures. For the 1926 exhibition that opened Paris’s Galerie Surréaliste, Man Ray exhibited some sixty Oceanic objects (owned by surrealist artists) alongside his photographs and paintings. A decade later, he photographed Carl Kjersmeier’s tribal arts collection in a manner that made each object seem monumental. In 2003, MoMA’s temporary Queens-based exhibition space (MoMAQNS) invited museum visitors to examine Picasso’s art through the lens of the oeuvre of his lifelong-buddy Matisse, whose originally wildly-coloured Fauve style and later super-flat, pattern imagery are rather antithetical to Cubism’s angular, brownish geometric shapes. Suddenly, viewers were asked to suspend belief and entertain at will the novel hypothesis that ‘seeing Picasso’s oeuvre as Matisseinspired is true’ and vice versa (seeing m as p-inspired is true). Indicative of the role new frames and lenses play, Paul Trachtman wrote, ‘Seeing Matisse and Picasso through each other’s eyes allows the viewer to look at modern art in a fresh way, with the same sense of discovery that electrified the artists and their friends and shocked their critics, nearly a century ago. We’ve come to look at Matisse as a more traditional, figurative painter, with all those lovely landscapes and odalisques (Turkish harem girls), while Picasso, with his cubist and violent abstractions, was shattering traditions like a Minotaur in a china shop’ (Trachtman 2003). Expecting to turn heads, MoMA chief curator John Elderfield remarked: ‘This exhibition is unique in illuminating the visual relationship of their works

Curated Exhibitions

115

throughout their long careers. It makes everything look different; the familiar histories will now have to be revised [emphasis mine].’35 Indeed, this exhibition changed the ‘work’, though it left exhibited paintings and drawings intact. I imagine that it was easier for budding Matisse and Picasso scholars (those completing their PhDs around then) to accept this exhibition’s many hypotheses than it was for older art historians who had been trained to view their oeuvre as on distinctly different paths. Those who witnessed this exhibition first hand, however, are likely predisposed to search for similarities, even as their mentors remain focused on stylistic differences.36 It would be interesting to study this exhibition’s influence on later Picasso-Matisse scholarship. As Scruton notes, OP is internally related to belief, but as this section demonstrates, IP, when in the form of thematic, aided or trained seeing begins as seeing as, but becomes cognition (or seeing-in), when one no longer shifts IP at will. Thus, the contents curators attribute to artworks can also fix how viewers perceive them. Similarly, educational paradigms and tools used to aid seeing can also alter viewers’ perceptual acuity.

4.8  The paradox of incompleteness While filmmakers often begin from a position of too much material (hundreds of hours of film footage that gets distilled into a ninety-minute format), curated exhibitions begin as unfinished and remain incomplete for various reasons.37 While the filmmaker may run out of money and/or time to shoot desired scenes, the curator has to make many more compromises to present an exhibition (absent the magic of film) to demonstrate his/her hypotheses. The exhibition must appear to cohere as a whole, despite absent (sought after) artworks, missing information and mercurial collaborators.38 Sometimes lenders refuse to loan artworks or change their minds just before the exhibition travels to its new venue. It may suddenly seem impossible to demonstrate the hypotheses proposed in printed exhibition documents, such as catalogue essays and brochures prepared in advance of cancelled loans. In contrast to the physical exhibition, the curator’s written claims are bolstered, though hardly proven, by easily accessible images of artworks under discussion. When lenders refuse to loan desired artworks or pull an artwork after the show is already in circulation, curators are left scrambling to figure out how to keep the relevant narrative threads from unravelling. Short of holding all available potential substitutes in his/her memory bank, the curator must

116

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

determine whether viable substitutes are available, how to rearrange artworks so as to gloss over bits of missing information or how to display the exhibition to meet ‘expectations’. This is the opposite of the artistic director who surprises audiences by performing the never before presented parts of a well-known score, as was the case with the Houston Ballet’s 2019 performance of a more ‘complete’ Giselle. When exhibitions are travelling and destinations get added along the way, loan forms for each artwork must be renegotiated. Few directors would consider presenting known plays or operas with missing protagonists, yet this happens all the time with exhibitions. Shows go on without their leading characters, because lenders refuse to cooperate with the curator’s project, artists refuse to lend artworks for shows whose hypotheses they reject; or worse still, the curator doesn’t even realize that the most fitting artworks are missing (reviewers often point this out). Try organizing an exhibition to revitalize people’s attitudes concerning contemporary ceramic art when three of the most interesting contemporary ceramicists refuse to lend artworks, since they viewed the ceramics context as either inappropriate or too limiting for their sculptures.39 The paradox of incompleteness conveys the way curators rarely secure all of the desired loans to affirm/provoke the accurate story/experience, rarely receive sufficient floor space and wall scale, or have enough time and resources available to ‘do the show right’, by conducting thoughtful research that enables curators to carefully characterize the artworks’ relationship to other artworks. The analogy here would be architects suggesting that their clients inhabit homes without doors or filmmakers projecting films with missing plot sequences, all the while acting as though the homes and films are finished.40 Not surprisingly, the curator’s capacity to successfully convey his/her curatorial intent remains debilitated, unless the curator implements imaginative strategies for overriding such experience gaps. Since the paradox of incompleteness risks diminishing an exhibition’s experiential and epistemic properties, curators employ novel strategies to bridge such gaps. Unable to sustain a live performance throughout an exhibition’s duration, curators sometimes encourage the artist to present some combination of props and videos indicative of the performance that occurred. When the Barnes Foundation refused to lend its postman portrait for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition ‘Van Gogh’s Postman: The Portraits of Joseph Roulin’ (2001), MoMA hung a life-size photograph in its stead with a wall label explaining this unusual stand-in. Sometimes, curators even present slides of key artworks in slide viewers to demonstrate the sense of belongingness that gets lost when obvious candidates are missing from the set. When initiated by

Curated Exhibitions

117

the exhibition curator, such proxies are not artworks, though they are on display. Artists who have lost formative parts of their artworks sometimes make lastminute adjustments to complete their artworks. The most obvious way curators compensate for their inability to present complete exhibitions is to produce a catalogue whose depth surpasses that of the exhibition. Despite or because of the paradox of incompleteness, survey after survey reveals that museums remain the knowledge source Americans claim to trust most, even more so than books. One wonders why museum curators are not considered masters of illusion. I earlier noted that critic and curator Dave Hickey describes curating as a ‘corrupt discourse’ (2008: 206). From my experience, curators participate in constant rounds of judgement calls and do their best to remain honest and truthful about what’s missing from their exhibitions.41

5

Aesthetics

In light of the notion of curated exhibitions developed thus far, this chapter surveys issues of interest to aestheticians such as the notion of autonomous versus relational objects, The Identity Theory of Art, the implications of artworks being events, collective work and epistemic value.

5.1  Relational objects The last three chapters were organized to bolster my claim in Chapter 1 that curated exhibitions fulfil three aspects of scientific argument: ideas (organizing principle(s)), expectation (links between work and world) and observation (artworks presented in a curated exhibition), which not only correspond with the three curatorial principles (I, II and III) identified in Chapter 2 but also reflect the particular roles played by curators, spectators and exhibitions, discussed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, respectively. As outlined in Chapter 2, curated exhibitions invite spectators to infer the curator’s hypotheses from the exhibited artworks (I). Spectators infer tools for interpretation from relational clusters, which prompt spectators’ capacities to connect work to world (II). The curator’s selections and juxtapositions provide observable evidence for whatever narrative threads spectators weave (III). In this chapter, I tease out this model’s particular implications for the philosophy of art. I also explain why I treat exhibited artworks as relational objects, rather than as autonomous objects created by lone authors. In contrast to studio practices, curatorial practice is always collective, since it joins artists, curators and the public in what I described in Chapter 1 as a relational engagement with objects ‘generated by people, with people and for people’. Even gallerists, gallery directors and exhibition coordinators, who advise exhibiting artist(s) on what to show, how to aptly contextualize their artworks (vis à vis advising the artist regarding appropriate titles and writing press releases)

120

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

and how best to display them, are engaged in curatorial practice. Of course, artists sometimes exhibit without curators, that is, they curate their own exhibitions, which this text does not preclude. In Chapter 8, I discuss whether the controversial practice of curators’ assembling apparently random artworks under the umbrella of an exhibition is curatorial practice or an art form all its own. In that chapter, I also analyse whether artists who create works of art using other artists’ artworks function as artists or as curators, as compared to artists who exhibit ‘collections’ or archives as installation art, which I briefly discussed in Chapter 2. Despite the historical importance of exhibitions, as well as art history’s focus on exhibitions, philosophers have tended to characterize aesthetic experiences as entailing direct engagements with singular artworks, which come ‘freely’ and are unmediated. Even philosophers focused on ‘aesthetic experience’, a type of experience that engenders feelings of pleasure, sustains contemplation and results in judgements free from concepts, rarely separate an artwork’s creation from its later presentations and receptions, so their views tend to overlook how aesthetic experiences arise in the first place (Dickie 1965 or Wollheim 1980). As a result, philosophers rarely treat aesthetic experiences as mediated by curators. Moreover, people who primarily experience artworks in books or online, where artworks are presented as singletons tend to forget that artworks’ meanings reflect prior exhibitions. The tendency of analytic aesthetics, the field of aesthetics whose logic and arguments form a branch of analytic philosophy, to focus on singletons can be traced to Aesthetics, in which Monroe Beardsley separates the art object from its experience, since the object, as he contends, controls the experience. He adds, ‘It is all right, I think, to speak of the object as causing the experience, but of course the connection is more intimate, for the object, which is a perceptual object, also appears in the experience as its phenomenally objective field’ (Beardsley 1958: 527). I have tried to provide a much more complicated description of this causal relationship: one that includes an artwork, surrounded by several other objects, whose organization was proposed by some curator, yet enacted by a team that conceives a particular exhibition for spaces designed by architects in concert with the wishes of some board of trustees acting on behalf of some community. To grant all of the causal power to some object, let alone the artist who made it or the curator who positioned it, seems a bit misguided, even if it is the only object in the room. All of these factors contribute to the spectators’ experiences, which then merge with their cognitive stock, as well as their ‘exhibition type’, as described in Chapter 3. To simplify this complex mess, I congregate these numerous components into a two-variable equation, such that a temporary

Aesthetics

121

exhibition’s presentation influences viewers’ receptions over time, resulting in institutional memories. At first glance, films seem exemplary of Beardsley’s ‘object-centred’ model, since neuroscience research has discovered that particular approaches to filmmaking drive viewers’ attentions more than others, ranging in strength from ineffectual ‘raw footage’ to the most successful ‘propaganda’. Despite Princeton neuroscientist Uri Hasson’s research, which attributes the viewer’s attention to some director’s intentions and the film’s cinematic impact, further experimentation may reveal that each perceiver’s judgements and interpretations depend on many more factors than mere perception, which explains why propaganda isn’t foolproof in its capacity to persuade all viewers. Furthermore, we hold viewers accountable for their behaviour, thoughts and deeds, despite some film’s capacity to reprogram viewers’ beliefs and attitudes. Like films, whose massive film-credit lists epitomize co-authored experiences, exhibitions feature numerous collaborative efforts, making it difficult to isolate some object as the root cause of one’s aesthetic experience as Beardsley claimed. Curated exhibitions thus challenge several widely held philosophical perspectives concerning visual art. The mediated nature of curated exhibitions, as well as visual art’s thematic pluralities, disrupt traditional philosophical features such as artists’ intentions, conventional interpretations, correct meanings, let alone the best fit, even when some curated exhibition visibly lays claim to its greater legitimacy.1 Moreover, each exhibited artwork’s relationality challenges the notion of singular ‘autonomous’ artworks that speak for themselves, though of course, as members of a collection, individual artworks can be clipped from the set. By relationality, I have in mind the way the artwork’s meaning reflects multiple inputs: some combination of producers, environment (the artwork’s placement viz. other artworks), facility (the building’s architectural features desired and maintained by others), spectators inhabiting a particular milieu (the specific community) and myriad stakeholders (ranging from regular visitors to those charged with an artwork’s survival). Artworks are relational objects, bar none, since variable inputs modify spectator experiences, as artworks appear and reappear in varying contexts over time. Exemplary of a facility’s role in mediating content, consider Gary Tinterow’s 1993 explanation for Met galleries specifically built to display nineteenthcentury European paintings and sculpture. We think it misleading to hang nineteenth-century paintings in modern-style rooms. A modern room, no matter how simple or elegant, is not invisible: it

122

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

colors our perception of things within it. … We sought to create noble spaces that are sober and restrained, spaces that recede sufficiently to allow the paintings and sculpture to be seen comfortably, without distraction. (Bal 1996: 98–9)

Mieke Bal concludes that galleries engender a ‘third person’ perspective.2 ‘Clearly, Mr. Tinterow’s stylistic decision does not yield up a neutral or historically accurate space, but the equivalent of a “third-person” fictional narrative, that literary style wherein the agent of ordering and focusing, highlighting and obscuring, selecting and ordering, puts a special effort into making these acts appear as “natural”’ (99). She notes that his publication’s cover image provides ‘a beautiful instance of two semiotic events: the rhetorical effectivity of narratorial guidance and the profound effect of fiction-as-truth’ (99). Since thematic exhibitions replay artworks in terms of their rich, diverse and even contrarian meanings, interpretation proves expansive, rather than reducible to some ‘correct’ meaning. By considering artworks objects of some enduring event that is set into motion as soon as they are presented in public, I assign their history and meaning to those institutionalized memories that stick as a result of prior exhibitions. My viewing the physical artwork and its ‘work’ as two sides of the same coin enables one to toggle from work to describable features of the world and back again. World provides a pool of ready references, enabling one to avoid the sticky problem of treating artworks like texts. Finally, each community receives an exhibition differently since its inhabitants reflect their milieu, whose members have been cultivated by multiple layers of ongoing cultural support and education, such as exhibition spaces, museums, art collectors, art critics and art schools. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this text concerns the curatorial practice associated with organizing art exhibitions, rather than the acquisition, conservation and maintenance of objects for private collections or museums. Art exhibitions feature artworks, whether paintings, sculptures, multiples, artworks produced per an artist’s instruction, interventions, sensorial art, performance art, video art, public art, land art and related ephemera, which prompt spectators to experience them, however temporarily, as art. I emphasize as art since these days contemporary curators regularly present objects, actions and/or situations that may not yet be deemed art and thus risk to be received as nonart. Readymades, found art and art made from unadulterated materials such as felt or glass (Figures 18 and 19) offer the most obvious kinds of art that risk to be received as nonart. But audiences could also confuse a Kalup Linzy soap opera starring Chloë Sevigny or his music video featuring the popular film actor

Aesthetics

123

James Franco for actual TV programmes, something that is unlikely to happen when artists exhibit paintings or framed photographs. Since exhibitions prompt spectators to grasp their organizing principles, as well as persuade viewers to experience artworks in a particular way, an exhibition’s success is measured by the institutional memories arising from some curator’s apt presentation of Linzy’s videos or General Hospital’s fictional character Franco (2009–12), a part played by actor James Franco, though initiated as conceptual artist Carter’s art project. As noted in Chapter 4, institutional memories shape those beliefs that develop into common knowledge, which can be articulated, verified and widely shared. Some contemporary art curators welcome opportunities to present artworks whose status as art is truly in doubt, such as Mei-Ling Hom’s table-top mushroom farm that resembles a beehive and Franco’s regular General Hospital role as part of Carter’s art project.3 Not surprisingly, curators who present nonart as art have their work cut out for them, since they must present the artwork in a manner that inspires spectators to take it seriously as art, and they must devise relevant tools for interpretation that make its reception as art not only possible but plausible.4 Philosopher Robert Fudge considers matter that is presented as art, but not accepted as art schmart (Fudge 2010). As noted in Chapter 3, Arthur Danto simply called it a failure (Danto 1979, 2008a).5 Not unlike a prosecutor who defends a case before a jury, the curator tests his/ her proposed hypotheses on his/her peers, the host’s community, as well as an array of curious critics. Just as the artist risks having his/her artworks rejected, the curator’s hypotheses risk being refuted, ignored, overlooked or overshadowed by more pressing issues. As discussed in Chapter 4, it sometimes takes numerous exhibitions with similar themes before spectators seriously consider the proposed hypotheses, even when they don’t doubt the artworks’ validity. Ultimately, those hypotheses that are accepted gain predicative value should these particular tools for interpretation become the convention for grasping particular artworks. As previously noted, conventions that are exemplary of seeing as, rather than seeing-in, can be changed at will. Consider Chapter 4’s Guernica case, whereby the surrealist lens helps identify much of the painting’s content, even though Picasso didn’t call himself a ‘surrealist’. Seeing Guernica as surrealist requires background knowledge to pick out its surrealist aspects. Moreover, Guernica’s existence helped to develop the surrealist lens. Absent requisite background knowledge, spectators glean tools for interpretation by comparing Guernica to the nearby cluster of surrealist preparatory drawings.

124

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Nearly thirty-five years ago, Noël Carroll reproached philosophy for its focus on individuated art experiences, yet he too neglected the curated exhibition’s role. In requesting spectators to recall prior art experiences, he ignores the artwork’s actual context. Regarding philosophy’s imagined spectator, he writes, ‘There is something strange about [philosophy’s] standard viewer, viz., that he or she responds to each work of art monadically, savoring each aesthetic experience as a unitary event [emphasis mine] and not linking that event to a history of previous interactions with artworks. As a matter of fact, I think this picture is inaccurate’ (Carroll 1986: 67). Carroll’s criticism of monadic responses is spot on, yet by crediting individual ‘recall’ he neglects the way particularly selected and positioned artworks prompt recall. For example, I noted in Chapter 2 that those familiar with Monet’s haystack series (Figure 4) experience time and daylight, even when confronted with only one. In contrast to the long, arduous interpretative process described in these pages, Carroll considers artworks embedded in whatever society gives rise to them, so conceptualization proves comparatively spontaneous. Carroll blames philosophers’ tendency to ‘focus our attention on the artwork that stands before us’ on Monroe Beardsley’s notion of ‘object-directedness’. The implicit picture of spectatorship that this approach suggests is of an audience consuming artworks atomistically, one at a time, going from one monadic art response to the next. But this hardly squares with the way in which those who attend to art with any regularity or dedication either respond to or have been trained to respond to art. … Entering the practice of art, even as an artgoer, is to enter a tradition, to become apprised of it, to be concerned about it and to become interested in its history and its ongoing development. (Carroll 1986: 64–5)

Since Carroll’s primary goal was to demonstrate the way art offers artgoers far more than atomistic aesthetic experiences, in particular, thoughts ‘devoted to concerns with issues outside the object’, he spent little time discussing how artgoers access relevant information beyond their instantly recalling it. For him, the tradition acts as a kind of ongoing exhibition that persists in one’s mind, as opposed to being present in one’s environment. Curated exhibitions facilitate enactivism as spectators access contents from their environment, which further prompts recollection. In contrast to Beardsley’s notion of ‘object-directedness’, Carroll introduces ‘other directedness’, which he describes as the ‘interpretive play we characteristically mobilize when interacting with art [that] takes other appropriate forms than

Aesthetics

125

those of directing stylistic amplifications and repudiations. For example, we may wish to contemplate lines of influence or to consider changes of direction in the careers of major artists’ (Carroll 1986: 66). For him, ‘other directedness’ refers to the way some artworks prompt ‘other characteristic and appropriate responses to art’ that are not necessarily aesthetic (Carroll 1986: 66). My suggesting that spectators connect work to world is similarly ‘other directed’. Another source for spectators’ ‘other directed’ thoughts is the artwork’s relational properties, its particular context given its environment, facility and milieu. For Carroll, the artgoer is an informed viewer who ‘“keeps up” with art without being a professional critic or a professor of art’ (Carroll 1986: 66). By contrast, the ‘spectators’ addressed in Chapter 3 range from experts, artists and locals to children, first-time art goers, tourists and everybody in between. Unlike Carroll, whose theory addresses up-to-date viewers, the curator aims to keep every exhibition-type engaged on varying levels. As Carroll points out, the problems associated with philosophy’s focus on singletons are numerous. This approach not only produces problems for the philosophy of art but also perpetuates misunderstandings regarding visual art practices, as well as how we experience artworks. As described in Chapter 2, the custom of referring to an artwork as work connects exhibited artworks to appropriate contents. When artworks are exhibited in varying contexts, work is either altered or enlarged, potentially modifying their meaning. That work may one day change even though the artwork remains physically unchanged is exemplary of its being a relational object. Artworks hardly arrive ‘readyto-show’ upon delivery, nor do their contents exist independently of current contexts and relational properties.6

5.2  The Identity Theory Although philosophers generally view interpretations as elastic, few tie interpretations to curated exhibitions, let alone emphasize the spectator’s role in conveying meaning. Not only do exhibitions propose tools for interpretation, but they also invite viewers to try out lenses and frames to determine which ones pose the perfect fit. Were experiences with curated exhibitions universal, every spectator would weave the same narrative threads. Spectators not only transform nonpropositional art experiences into propositions that facilitate public deliberation and verification, but they also distribute their narrative threads via conversations, reviews, future exhibitions, art school education and so on leaving a trail of institutional memories.

126

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

In contrast to standard experimental psychology models that treat individual artworks like visual stimuli, vision scientist Johan Wagemans’s team at UK Leuven’s Laboratory of Experimental Psychology routinely collaborates with artists. Their research shows that artwork reception involves the interplay of perception, cognition and emotion. As discussed in Chapter 4, curated exhibitions aim to level the playing field by providing tools for interpretation, which spectators routinely glean from exhibitions. Otherwise, appreciation favours experts over novices given the ‘interrelationships between attention, perception, memory and understanding’ (Wagemans 2011: 668). Seeking to rebalance inequities among exhibition visitors, their research shows the benefits of ‘providing participants with additional information, a difference between novice and expert participants and a shift with increasing experience with an artwork, in the direction of tolerating more complexity and acquiring more order from it’ (648). As briefly mentioned in Chapter 2, even ordinary perception requires sensorimotor skills, learned mechanisms that we automatically employ to ‘judge’ distance, scale in light of distance, shapes presented to us at oblique angles or colours distorted by light (Noë 2004: 178). For those who understand either depiction or sfumato, the human brain organizes the painted plane visible to the eyes as 3-D space, what Wollheim termed ‘seeing-in’. Those who uphold the Identity Theory (e.g. Danto’s notion of ‘embodied meaning’) consider an artwork’s meaning constitutive of the artwork. In contrast to Danto’s notion that an artwork’s meaning is embodied in the artwork (by the artist or its society) from the outset, this text proposes an alternative version of the Identity Theory, such that artworks are the kinds of things that compel interpretation. That the urge to interpret is constitutive of something being an artwork denies the Non-Identity Theory, for which interpretations are voluntary, rather than urgent. Already artworks – objects undergoing interpretation – are not mere artefacts awaiting legitimizing interpretations. What is in doubt is not their status as art, but how best to interpret them. Moreover, artworks and artists’ practices are often associated with particular tools for interpretation that aren’t embedded in the artwork per se, but are born from particular art historical lenses and thematic frames that artworlders construct at a later date to negotiate otherwise inscrutable artworks or practices. The very tools that the artworld develops to grasp artworks become so entwined with the artworks that artworks effectively embody their interpretations. Like adopted children, artworks absorb as much from the environment, facility and milieu in which they thrive, as they do from their material ‘DNA’ at birth.

Aesthetics

127

One might describe the meaning of emerging artworks as thin (or provisional), since meaning is still emergent, rather than thick (as in rich, layered or multivalent). Meaning awaits tools for interpretation. Curators rarely include objects that are totally doubted as art in exhibitions meant to offer spectators aesthetic experiences, yet some do just to see what happens. And if they don’t recur in later exhibitions, one could assume that no one received them as art. Two exhibitions, ‘Machine Art’ (1934) at MoMA and ‘Natuur en Kunst’ (1957) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, exemplify curators’ exhibiting objects not considered art as art to test spectator reactions. Artworks that are eventually associated with one specific tool for interpretation may seem to have just one meaning, but this is due more to the specificity of art historical constructs than limits imposed by artists at the onset, as Critical Monists presume (Stecker 1997). That some artworks can and do appear in numerous exhibitions with competing and contradictory themes indicates that their meaning is no longer provisional (thin). In fact, their meaning has become quite rich (thick). Given the originally indecipherable status of most artworks since 1860, art history books and exhibitions arose to furnish viewers tools for interpretation. These days, conventional art historical lenses such as Impressionism function more as tools for understanding, guiding one to recognize inscrutable imagery as portraits or landscapes. Thematic frames such as ‘Benday dots’ enable one to grasp relevant techniques, such as Alfred Sisley’s pointilist paintings inspired by that era’s optical discoveries. Movements like Impressionism and Pointilism began as tools for interpretations, which have since evolved into tools for understanding, since people employ them pre-reflectively, without thinking. What makes interpretation especially tricky is that interpretations are not properties of objects, although they are attributes of exhibitions.7 Wittgenstein remarked, ‘What I perceive in the dawning of an aspect is no property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects’ (Wittgenstein 1968: 212e). One wonders why Wittgenstein’s comments that link interpretations to ‘internal relations between it and other objects’ failed to inspire philosophers to recognize the way multiple artworks work off one another, rather than function as solitary objects, flying solo. ‘The dawning of an aspect’ refers to the way spectators regard an object and see different aspects each time they explore it. This aspect could be a bit of perceived matter that is noticeable, though not necessarily immediately meaningful. Once one recognizes the aspect’s significance, however, it seems totally self-evident, as if

128

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

it is and always was understood as such. Similarly, once tools for interpretation become ‘second-nature’, yesteryear’s tools for interpretation, such as the tools that were initially employed to recognize parades and faces in impressionist and cubist art, become today’s tools for understanding, making a particular artwork’s content seem self-evident. More problematic, sometimes viewers become so familiar with older artworks that they not only think that they don’t need tools, but they also stop looking altogether, leaving opportunities for later curators and art historians to notice what others overlooked, simply because they no longer look so closely. When philosophers do apply Wittgenstein’s observation that interpretations are not properties of objects to artworks, they often find myriad interpretations superfluous, unlike primary or secondary properties. Being a form of customization, interpretation boosts appreciation. Moreover, philosophers who uphold the mono-meaning theory of art, like Danto and Robert Stecker, claim that artworks have numerous interpretations, though only one meaning.8 Perhaps what Critical Monists mean by a ‘single meaning’, as compared to numerous interpretations, concerns the way an artwork’s ‘meaning’ reflects a unique set of tools for interpretation associated with it. Such a view freezes artworks in time and space, depriving them from being appreciated elsewhere and at a later date. So long as curated exhibitions aid viewers’ assessment of artworks’ exhibitiondependent contents, each artwork’s historical significance constantly evolves, even after the artist dies, as artworks enter different exhibitions that test different hypotheses. At this point, one might concede that what the artworld values most is not the best interpretation of an artwork but the way some artworks appear in numerous exhibitions and are thus deemed more versatile, influential and popular. Proof of the artworld’s obsession with provenance can be found in auction house catalogues, which list each item’s status-bestowing contexts (owners, exhibitions and publications).9 Given these points, one begins to wonder whether philosophy’s ‘mono-meaning theories’ aren’t the by-product of philosophy’s having mischaracterized art experiences as engagements with singletons, rather than as engagements with artworks appearing in varying sets whose contexts shift over time. Moreover, mono-meaning theories are effectively intentionalist, since they presume that each artwork’s meaning was embedded by some author at the onset. Intentionalist views focused on each artist’s intention at t0 ignore later presentations at tn. Finally, mono-meaning theories are typically expressionist, since they presume that an artwork’s meaning is something that can be both ‘dug out’ and transcribed

Aesthetics

129

into language like an expression. For millennia, philosophers have considered art’s contents as somehow buried within artworks, which is why Socrates ridiculed artisans for thinking that they know all sorts of ‘high matters’ and poets for not knowing their poems well enough (Plato 2001: 56). Intentionalists continue where Socrates left off, because they presume that what makes art special (aka its essence) is something the artist has done (the artwork), as compared to the artwork’s role in availing myriad contents over time, which leads the public to treasure the artwork as a thought-thing for all eternity.10 As if to echo the speechless Athenian poets whom Socrates encountered, Damien Hirst remarks, ‘I’m looking back at all this work and trying to make sense of it’, which nails the flaw inherent in intentionalist approaches that depend on the artist’s awareness of both his/her intentions and his/her capacity to express them, rather than the society that opts to exhibit and treasure the artwork. One could argue that another reason that artworks increase in value once they are collected is because they are placed in protective custody, something that is not true of artworks stored in some artist’s studio, which can be destroyed or reworked at will. The only way to rectify this problem, whereby artworks are viewed as objects whose meanings crystallize upon completion, even before their first exhibition, leaving everybody to later wonder what the artists must have meant, is to stop treating artworks like singletons, each created by a single artist and displayed alone for a solo spectator’s pleasure. Rather, artworks that society treasures are objects of ongoing events that continue even after the artist dies and don’t necessarily stop even when the artwork disappears.11 Unlike perishable or everyday goods, a lost or damaged artwork will not lose its rightful place in art history, even if it is no longer extant.

5.3 Events In this section, I consider the benefits of viewing artworks as ongoing events, rather than as stable objects (Brand 1976). Despite each exhibition’s persuasiveness and the beliefs spectators feel compelled to adopt (or not), individual artworks often reappear in entirely different contexts, leaving earlier views regarding artworks vulnerable to neglect, dismissal, forgetting and eventual replacement. Although exhibition catalogues with essays and pictures reinforce remnant narrative threads and help to solidify current institutional memories, they fail to capture the actual experience of encountering artworks in person, for the first

130

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

time; walking around, looking under, crawling through, bending over, being here with artworks playing off one another; and wondering what role each artwork is meant to play in the overall environment. This is not unlike the problem one has remembering a film seen a while ago. A visit to www​.imdb​.com may aid one’s recall of the story’s gist or the stars involved, but one barely remembers the characters so well, let alone particular scenes and events. One can reread a book, re-watch a film or review the video of a performance. Temporary exhibitions, however, are entirely experiential like dance and theatre, an implication that gets lost without being here in person (Spaid 2006). That’s why fans travel great distances to be reunited with artworks again, despite the worry that an artwork’s new context might prove less fitting. Although exhibitions are fleeting, each artwork has a presentational history that accrues over time, beginning with each artwork’s first presentation, making artworks enduring events. Like Foucault’s genealogy of the subject, an artwork’s presentational history accumulates until the artwork vanishes from memory, but when some event such as a curator requesting spectators to reconsider a neglected artist’s oeuvre prompts recollection, its presentational history starts gaining currency again. In 2011, the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) planted Sol LeWitt’s garden proposal that resembles his wall paintings. LeWitt never actually produced this artwork while he was alive, so the PMA’s presentation effectively inaugurated its presentational history and jumpstarted the public’s interest in LeWitt’s garden design. Photographs of prior exhibitions and published essays, whether penned by critics or curators, also contribute to each artwork’s presentational history, thus situating the artwork as an ongoing event that typically begins with whatever exhibition first facilitated the artwork’s reception. Some might worry that this approach risks rolling back Wollheim’s method of criticism as retrieval to activities occurring long before the making began (influential artists’ artworks, childhood memories, art school training, becoming parents, etc.) and continues long after artworks leave the studio (the artwork’s exhibitional future). Although this sequencing from prior influences to the artwork’s first presentation mirrors strategies that art historians use to identify the range of incidents that influence artistic practices and spectators’ receptions, each artwork’s presentational history begins with whatever event occasioned its first public presentation, whether in an alternative art space or a national museum. Given that an artwork’s presentational history begins with its first exhibition, it’s no wonder that curators like Franz Meyer consider an artwork’s initial presentation to be its most influential (Obrist 2008: 8).

Aesthetics

131

By presentational history, I have in mind the sum total of public information regarding an artwork, including its provenance, its exhibition history, as well as reviews, articles and catalogues where it is mentioned, all of which register changing societal attitudes concerning its (1) relevance, (2) connections to the world, (3) various interpretations and (4) impact as new communities arise to react to it. Indicative of the significance of recording presentational histories, Marcia Tucker included ‘object research’ among those comprising a museum curator’s scholarship: ‘That means tracking the exhibition history of the work, writing about its significance, its place in the collection’ (2008: 35). If one imagines that the artist’s initial efforts pose some initial conception C0, each artwork can be considered a continuous event at each point n, registered as E1 … En. Unlike a singular historical event, an artwork is an ongoing event that snowballs over time, as it reappears in multiple contexts (differing exhibitions, collections and articles).12 The following diagram visualizes this effect. C0 (conception)E1 (first exhibition)E2 (public discussion)E3 (first review)

En-1…En

E4 (acquisition) E5 (second exhibition)E6 (second article)…

Nearly a century ago, Alfred North Whitehead introduced the idea of a monument being considered an event when he described Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment in London as a ‘multiplicity and a series of events’. Steven Shaviro summarizes Whitehead’s thoughts here: Now, we know, of course, that this monument is not just ‘there’. It has a history. Its granite was sculptured by human hands, sometime around 1450 BC. It was moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BC and again from Alexandria to London in 1877-1878 AD. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed or otherwise cease to exist. (2009: 16)

Furthermore, ‘it is eventful at every moment. From second to second even as it stands seemingly motionless. Cleopatra’s Needle is actively happening. It never remains the same’ (Shaviro 2009: 17).13 I doubt that Whitehead envisioned pollution’s debilitating effect on the Cleopatra Needle sited in Central Park when he described this monument as being eventful at every moment. What he rather meant is that its historical placement in Egypt, whether in Heliopolis or Alexandria, offers a different

132

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Figure 15 Cleopatra’s Needle, Central Park, New York City. ©2020 Per Storemyr, https://per​-storemyr​.net (Sources: Library of Congress and Wikipedia Commons).

context than its placement in London or New York City (Figure 15), which changes with time’s arrow. Even if Central Park’s Cleopatra Needle has rapidly deteriorated since its placement there, I imagine that spectators’ standpoints have changed even more since the 1870s. As history marches forward, people’s attitudes towards ancient Egypt, public monuments, imperialist symbols and pollution change from one generation to the next. Even though temporary exhibitions (most last only a few months) are fleeting, their set members endure like buildings, films and public monuments.14 It’s worth noting that Whitehead considered events actual entities, which means that they are causally determined and make things happen, two conditions that are particularly true of candidates for reception, though not true of mere candidates for appreciation, such as artworks in private collections that escape rejection, precisely because they evade public scrutiny.15 As noted in Chapter 2, only privately collected artworks that are publicly accessible encounter reception. Those that remain candidates for presentation only risk rejection when they fail to find buyers at auction. Some spectator may find it horrifying that someone would purchase, let alone choose to live with some ‘behemoth’; yet privately collected artworks are immuned from criticism, unlike over-valued stocks at risk of being shorted. Whitehead termed the way actual entities can be rejected or excluded negative prehension. Shaviro juxtaposes Whitehead’s notions of actual entities (artworks qua events) and eternal objects (what I term work) to describe how candidates for reception end up objects of care, which he calls the process of actualization: ‘The process of actualization follows a trajectory from the mere, disinterested (aesthetic) “envisagement” of eternal objects to a pragmatic interest in some of

Aesthetics

133

these objects and their incorporation within “stubborn fact which cannot be evaded”’ (Shaviro 2009: 37). Whitehead considered eternal objects real, since they are full of potentialities, like the memories kept alive by Alfred Stieglitz’ photographs of Fountain, but they are not actual like the original readymades, whose disappearance prevented them from setting events into motion, requiring exhibitors to spawn replicas. Unlike eternal objects, actual entities can perish. Whitehead’s notion of events as causally determined coheres with Beardsley’s claim that the object controls the experience, my view that curated exhibitions engender institutional memories and Danto’s position that artworks are ‘representationally characterizable’ events that cause other ‘representationally characterizable’ events (Danto, 1981).16 As Danto has remarked, these relations are causal, ‘because we want our representations to be effective, that is, [to] make things happen! Or themselves be made to happen!’ (Danto 2008b).17 Generally speaking, an event is a ‘group of such incidents, a multiplicity of becomings: what Whitehead calls a nexus, … a mathematical set of occasions [singular events], contiguous in space and time, or otherwise adhering to one another’ (Shaviro 2009: 17). Shaviro notes that such becomings mark a ‘radical break with whatever was there before. For its part, continuity always has to become, precisely because it is never given in advance. … [A]n object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates itself afresh, over and over again’ (Shaviro 2009: 19). Temporal exhibitions offer artworks the opportunity to endure, to create new experiences and to be seen afresh.18 Why would one want to characterize an artwork as an event? People typically consider artworks to be static objects, stored in crates when they’re not on view. While artworks are facts that rarely physically change from one exhibition to the next, curators invite spectators to regard them differently, enabling them to notice aspects they didn’t notice before. If one were to assemble a list of critics’ published responses to a particular artwork over the years, one might notice several time-based features: (1) shifts in viewer expectation/patience, (2) changes in common knowledge, (3) altered values, (4) varying themes and contexts, (5) historical and regional influences and so on. As a result, each artwork’s contents constantly develop as time progresses.19 Every time a curator pulls an artwork out of storage to reconsider its relevance for a new age, its meaning is enriched. For example, three decades of exhibitions focused on the rivalry between Matisse and Picasso have since prompted spectators to accept what was deemed unfathomable in 1992.20 Although an artwork and its related work are not synonymous terms, people use them interchangeably to express appreciation for the energy, effort and

134

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

thoughts (articulated in words) that engender artworks. Despite the difficulty of reducing artworks to verbal descriptions, people learn about art from newspaper articles, art history classes/texts, catalogue entries or artworld debates among acquaintances. When artworlders discuss artworks, they begin by discussing events, such as a summary of what they’ve experienced, rather than the particular objects that caused those reactions. They use language to analyse a studio visit, describe the art fair, share an exhibition experience, explain what happened during the opening, tell whom they met and so on. The spectator witnessing the artwork in the studio, at the art fair, in an exhibition, at the opening and so on typically points out different aspects, given the changing locations, atmospheres and era. Each of these events is the outcome of a subject’s directed consciousness. One soon realizes that artworks on display belong to each spectator’s experience, so each art object is already framed as an event. To emphasize this point, I introduced the significance of environment, milieu and facility for reception in Chapter 2. Similar in effect to Wollheim’s criticism as retrieval method, whereby one works backwards to generate a description of how the artist made a particular artwork, treating artworks as events enables one to characterize the way later presentations recontextualize artworks, lending each artwork the features of some ongoing, mutable event, rather than a static, finished object. Each artwork is not only a member of the set of curated artworks but also a member of the set of every time it was exhibited. When artworks are considered events, they are enriched, since they are granted the element of time, dynamic contents, varying values and evolving attitudes, even as their physical properties remain the same. This parallels Carroll’s characterizing artworks as events, whose histories reflect previous interactions with artworks. In no way do I aim to associate artworks qua events with other kinds of events, such as mental or physical events. Nor do I aim to characterize events in such complex terms as having ‘unclear spatial boundaries and clear temporal boundaries’, tolerating co-location, being immoveable, taking up time and persisting ‘by having different parts at different times’. Since an artwork’s presentational history does exhibit such features, perhaps only an artwork’s presentation history, though not the artwork, is an event. I rather adopt the Quinean account that views events and objects as both having space-time features: events develop quickly in time, whereas objects are relatively ‘firm and internally coherent’ (Casati and Varzi 2010). Since we often refer to artists’ practices, rather than particular artworks, or study oeuvres produced over lifetimes, we are accustomed to evaluating artistic endeavours as events-engendering exhibitable products. Such products inform practices and vice versa.

Aesthetics

135

Acknowledging the way artworks appear in varying contexts over time to prompt different thoughts enables one to recognize how artworks’ meanings evolve as younger audiences gain in knowledge and older audience’s attitudes change. In 1890, no one could ever have imagined that impressionist paintings would be so popular as they are today. When curated exhibitions fail to offer the requisite tools for interpretation, confused visitors likely imagine that everybody else is getting something from the exhibition. As Chapters 4 and 6 assert, curators must employ a great deal of imagination to connect artworks to the world. Since curated exhibitions afford spectators the opportunity to experience artworks as a set, rather than as unique experiences with singletons, people infer elements of one artwork’s content from others in the set. Vary set members slightly and voilà, one triggers new inferences. Novel exhibitions such as the string of ‘Matisse Picasso’ exhibitions mounted since 1992 have directed viewers to consider previously overlooked or underestimated aspects. Most importantly, exhibitions are public events that make artworks available, memorable, reportable and discussable, all of which contribute to each artwork’s presentational history, which can accumulate even when artworks are hidden in storage, lost or destroyed, and only stops accumulating when spectators totally forget about or stop appreciating an artwork. Viewing an artwork as an ongoing event with a lively presentational history grants art lovers access to a range of contents culled from its exhibition history and critical records. As such, information associated with past exhibitions offers tools for interpretation. Tools for interpretation that are particular to artworks or artists’ practices, such as viewing a cubist painting through a cubist lens or thematic viewing of artworks, may begin as extraneous interpretations, but become more obvious the more artworlders automatically employ them to identify contents present in particular visual art experiences. Over time, some tools for interpretation may even come to function like tools for perception such as telescopes and amplifiers that augment seeing and hearing. In these cases, particular thematic frames and art historical lenses seem constitutive of the artwork, but as discussed in Chapter 4, they are projected rather than retrieved. By contrast, those thematic frames and art historical lenses, which exhibitions originally prompted and have since garnered a trail of institutional memories, survive as common knowledge and are thus considered constitutive. One might eventually consider particular tools for interpretation selfevident, giving one the sense that interpretations are embodied. For these cases, the artwork and its appropriate tools for interpretation cannot be split, the way one splits off ‘extraneous’ interpretations. For example, one cannot suddenly begin to see a cubist painting through some other art historical lens, such as

136

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Figure 16  Roberto Matta, The Earth Is a Man, 1942, Oil on canvas, 72” x 96” (183cm x 244cm). ©Art Institute of Chicago ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020.

a surrealist or futurist lens. One might argue, however, that some particular artwork was originally misidentified, so this new lens is the more accurate one. Even if artworks have only one appropriate art historical lens, myriad thematic frames remain. Seeing Picasso’s paintings as Matisse-inspired makes them no less Braque-inspired. That said, artworks that straddle art historical periods could be said to support multiple art historical lenses, should they echo the past and anticipate the future as do Roberto Matta’s paintings (Figures 16 and 17). Two Matta paintings, The Earth Is a Man and The Spherical Roof Around Our Tribe (Revolvers), characterize sci-fi fantasies, though the former straddles the fence between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, while the latter appears to have inspired the imaginary world of cyberspace, as captured in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels of the 1980s. As noted in Chapter 3, lost (or destroyed) artworks can remain so influential that they’re discussed as if they’re extant, though they vanished long ago. Examples include Duchamp’s readymades in the decades before replicas became available and Robert Morris’s numerous installations that people recall even though they were dismantled soon after exhibitions, as was the case for the Harrison Studio’s Survival Series (1970–2/2012). Being too large to store, several of Morris’s 1977 installations were refabricated for his 1994 Guggenheim survey.

Aesthetics

137

Figure 17  Roberto Matta, The Spherical Roof Around Our Tribe (Revolvers), 1952, Tempera on canvas, 79” x 116” (201cm x 295cm). ©The Museum of Modern ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2020.

Since 2009, three museums have fabricated and exhibited components from the Harrison Studio’s Survival Series, which was also too large to store. As earlier noted, the PMA installed LeWitt’s Lines in Four Directions in Flowers, which he apparently proposed to Fairmount Park Art Association in 1981, though it was never planted during his lifetime. One of the world’s most prolific living artists, LeWitt has really outdone himself as a ‘dead artist’, whose estate has since realized hundreds of posthumous concrete sculptures and wall drawings. This account of artworks as enduring events that take part in fleeting events (exhibitions) helps to explain the anomaly whereby exhibited artworks are not necessarily the direct outcome of stated artistic actions (typical of land art, conceptual art, community art, art farms or social-engagement practices). Unlike sculpture and painting, for which spectators can imagine the artist carrying out particular actions that generated said physical objects, some artistic outcomes are unexhibitable as is, since they‘re either monumental or faraway. As a result, these kinds of exhibited artworks tend to refer to artistic outcomes: (1) an exhibition document such as a photograph, notarized letter, certificate of authenticity or site map and some originating action, (2) an exhibited nonsite (maps and objects that reference particular sites) and its underlying site (some real place that’s inaccessible), (3) exhibited sketches and models for a built

138

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

environment, whether indoors or out and (4) some particular display as opposed to the numerous potential configurations afforded instructions, event-scores, templates or recipes.21 Given these examples, one soon realizes that exhibited materials don’t always convey whatever artistic actions originally sparked exhibitional interest. At first, this seems no different than the way an exhibited painting doesn’t necessarily indicate what processes the artist took to make it, so it hardly seems problematic that exhibited artworks differ from whatever processes artists undertook to arrive at the artworks on view. When exhibited artworks (the outcome of the artistic process) don’t obviously correspond with underlying actions, as is the case for the four anomalies described above, then the exhibited artwork’s presentational history also includes some description of its underlying process. As for allographic artworks like photographs, prints and multiples, each artistinitiated activity that generates a plate/mould to be printed/cast at a particular scale and in a particular orientation engenders a different artwork, independent of the edition size. If the artist changes either the scale or orientation, he/she effectively produces a new artwork, whose edition size reflects this change. Thus, if he/she alters the cast object’s orientation in twenty different directions, he/she creates twenty different artworks unless the edition is meant to accommodate twenty different poses. As the Maurizio Cattelan case discussed in Chapter 2 suggests, expanding the edition size of an extant multiple need not result in a new artwork.

5.4  Farewell to ‘lone authors’ The philosophical treatment of artworks as singletons, independent of current artistic, political, social or historical contexts sometimes leads philosophers to exaggerate (1) artists’ intentions (Danto and Noël Carroll); (2) artworks’ atemporal features (Nelson Goodman), which are rather ‘replayable’, enduring events that recur in various contexts and (3) artworks’ expressive/symbolic significance (Robin Collingwood (1964), Danto, Goodman and Roger Scruton). As a result, aestheticians have typically addressed artworks’ meanings as if they are texts penned by lone authors, even though they’ve experienced them as constitutive members of particular sets of curated artworks, arranged to prompt particular inferential properties.22 Since most curatorial work is deeply collaborative and ideally in concert with artists’ wishes, I neither esteem the curator’s significance nor green-light the efforts of capricious curators. I rather aim to challenge the notion of some autonomous artwork, believed to be neutrally displayed, as symptomatic of

Aesthetics

139

its era, rather than staged for effect. For nearly a century, philosophers have found multiple ways to challenge Immanuel Kant’s prerequisite that aesthetic experiences be governed by disinterested satisfaction, whereby viewers who engage art must either practice detachment or be psychically distant, yet few philosophers discuss the way artworks on display are already mediated for effect. As mentioned, spectators are free to customize their experiences by imagining artworks as extracted from their curated contexts or to explore them as though they are in exhibitions featuring only one artwork.23 Although this may undermine the curator’s efforts and certainly alters the visual art experience, it restores the spectators’ prerogatives. Some philosophers imagine spectators sporting the ‘aesthetic attitude’, whereby viewers remain blissfully unconcerned by each artwork’s original cultural, political and historical context, let alone the curator’s role. By contrast, Richard Wollheim found it impossible to view exhibited artworks in veritable isolation, such that aesthetical judgements are governed entirely by disinterested satisfaction, since no viewer has zero cognitive stock (his term for each viewer’s knowledge, beliefs and concepts), which psychologists and philosophers alike consider a prerequisite for aesthetic experience. Keen to challenge Jerome Stolnitz’ whole-hearted dismissal of contextual criticism, Peg Brand and Ted Gracyk not only recognize the difficulty of setting aside preconceived interests but also incorporate disinterested attention into their views. Brand’s brand of contextual interpretation justifies disinterested attention (DA), so long as one actively switches between interested attention (IA) and DA, whereas Gracyk’s Instrumental Autonomism attempts to suspend personal interests, prejudices and objections long enough to experience something one might otherwise outright reject (Brand 1997; Gracyk 2005; Stolnitz 1960; Wollheim 1980). These views are analysed in greater detail in Chapter 7. In summarizing Kant’s position regarding the special case of aesthetical judgements, Roger Scruton sheds light on the challenges the curator’s imposing role poses for philosophers, especially since curated exhibitions establish value and articulate related concepts, what Kantians term being ‘brought under a concept’ or ‘subsumed by a concept’; activities associated more with determinant judgements than with aesthetical judgements of taste. As Scruton points out, for Kant, ‘there cannot be properties that “confer value” on a work of art. The effect of any property must be determined a posteriori, through experience of the case in hand. This is part of what Kant meant when he wrote that the judgement of beauty is free from concepts: it involves no prior classifications or descriptions of its objects’ (1998: 24). Since the curator’s primary project is to identify hypotheses that capture numerous artworks’ significance and to figure out how best to display them so

140

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

that spectators can readily grasp each artwork’s contents, one might say that a curated artwork is always already ‘brought under a concept’. As I have attempted to demonstrate, future presentations invite spectators to continue the process of meaning-making and interpretation, so the imagination remains productive, which is a special feature of aesthetical judgements, though not determinant judgements. Spectators infer exhibition hypotheses, yet they remain free to imagine alternative interpretations of the artworks. Without this distinction between aesthetical and determinant judgements, one might think that thematic exhibitions constrain/limit/narrow down concepts, making exhibitions clear cases of what Kant termed dependent beauty, whose significance is grounded in prior concepts. Does the fact that an artwork’s contents are mediated by someone explain some Kantians’ reluctance to consider artworks, as compared to flowers, candidates for free beauty, independent of prior concepts? When some fine art curator, as opposed to a decorative arts or primitive arts curator, has already identified some artwork, whether an object, action or situation as a suitable candidate for fine art, beauty, special attention, recognition and/or value; do viewers remain disinterested as Kant envisioned? (Elkaïm-Sartre 2004: xxvi).24 Unless the exhibition’s purpose proves more educational (didactic) than experiential (indicative), I would respond ‘No’, to all of these questions. The asymmetry of the potential outcome coupled with the spectators’ role in both weaving narrative threads and spreading the word enables exhibited artworks to prompt aesthetical judgements. Recall the example of Käthe Kollwitz’s lithograph Municipal Lodging (Figure 7), whose inclusion in ‘Street Life’, ‘Eco-Refugees Rendered’ or ‘Facing Families’ offers spectators a thematic frame whose specificity focuses their attention on particular features, thus inspiring viewers to appropriately contextualize this and nearby artworks. Of course, the curator’s goal is to test hypotheses, not to direct viewers’ thoughts. And viewers are free to grasp (or liable not to grasp) the appropriate frame, either from their own hypotheses regarding the best tools for interpretation or to accept/reject the curator’s organizing principle. In light of the fallibility of reasons discussed in Chapter 4, spectators’ reasons are likely to shift as soon as they start describing their exhibition responses. In fact, one imagines people’s varied receptions continuing to fluctuate long after the exhibition closes. Could the very intentions that philosophers have long attributed to artists really be those of some curator lurking behind the scenes? Some critics worry that artworks are mere putty in the hands of some curator, whose contextual manipulations parallel those score arrangers, conductors, theatre directors and filmmakers who ‘mistreat’ original scores, scripts and/or novels? (Beaudoin and

Aesthetics

141

Moore 2010: 106; Schuller 1997: 8).25 In On Curating’s introduction, curator Carolee Thea remarks, Aesthetically, curators are more like theatre directors and it could be argued that they follow a performance paradigm rather than one based on the object or commodity. We could say they are translators, movers or creators whose material is the work of others – but in any case, the role of mediator [italics mine] is inescapable. While the art critic embodies the generalized gaze of the public, the curator inversely translates the artist’s work by providing a context to enable the public’s understanding. (Thea 2009: 6)26

Although Thea’s theatre analogy is spot on, it could go even farther. As noted in the preface, exhibition spectators not only have a complete vantage but they also continue scripting the exhibition’s dialogue long after the show ‘wraps’, something that concert, play and film attendees need not do, so long as scores, scripts and celluloid outlive their performers. This is how conservators, responsible for deciding how best to repair damaged artworks, play a role on par with curating (Spaid and Capdevila-Werning 2019a: 122). In The Psychology of the Imagination (1940), Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that what viewers appreciate most is some irreal object, some helpful interpretation, which they imaginatively create through the analogon (répresentant analogique) (Norihide 2012: 11). Mori Norihide remarks that Sartre’s stressing the appreciators’ role likely influenced Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne and Roland Barthes.27 Despite eighty years of philosophical work aimed at shedding doubt on the significance of artists’ intentions, lone-author theories grant artists’ intentions a greater priority over appreciators’ analogons, thus emphasizing object-directedness at the expense of subjects’ directed consciousness. Lone-author theories not only counter Barthes’s claims in ‘Death of the Author’ (1968), which validate/encourage readers’ responses/interpretations, but they take film’s Auteur Theory several steps further. The Auteur Theory merely casts particular film directors as authors, whereas lone-author theories credit authors as meaning-originators, squeezing out spectators. This perspective not only ignores the way each artwork’s value, status and longevity requires appreciators’ sustained or recurring interest in its perdurance, but also overlooks the public’s role in reinventing and circulating contemporary meanings over time.28 Philosophers focused on artists’ intentions sometimes presume that artworks are preceded by interpretative conventions that shaped their contents, rather than the other way around, as I have repeatedly tried to demonstrate. Interpretative conventions exist precisely because some curator or writer had been searching

142

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

for the most suitable lens for grasping particular artworks and others like it. Absent determinate lenses, curators have exacted exhibitions to test which lens, whether surrealist, political art, propaganda, science fiction, film noir, period drama or some combination perfectly fits Picasso’s Guernica (Figure 11). Sixty years on, Guernica still lacks a ready convention, yet it’s widely appreciated as political art. The primary problem associated with giving weight to artists’ intentions is that it grants introspection a primacy that one doesn’t normally associate with empirical knowledge. Even if most philosophers consider self-knowledge transparent and authoritative, contemporary philosophers since Donald Davidson have considered first-person knowledge secondary to first-hand experience coupled with the merit of other minds. Contrary to W. V. O. Quine, who accords knowledge to first-person accounts, Davidson considers thirdperson knowledge essential to all other forms of knowledge. As Davidson repeatedly argues, ‘Empiricism is the view that the subjective “experience” is the foundation of objective empiricism’ (Davidson 2004: 46) and ‘a community of minds is the basis of knowledge’ (Davidson 2004: 218). Although ‘knowledge of our own minds and knowledge of the minds of others’ are mutually dependent, self-knowledge is not prior, as philosophies focused on artists’ intentions suggest (Davidson 2004: 213). To demonstrate the problem inherent in artists’ intentions, Davidson quoted Robert Motherwell: ‘I would say that most good painters don’t know what they think until they paint it’ (Davidson 2004: 15). Rather than connect artists’ selfprescribed intentions to a particular artwork’s meaning, it seems more honest to focus on artists’ reasons and motivations for having produced what’s at hand, leaving an artwork’s significance to be the meaning that sticks over time, as curious recipients evaluate its importance and relevance, as it passes from exhibition to exhibition. Seeking to side-step the quagmire of first-person authority, Danto and Carroll employ the spectator’s third-person vantage to access artists’ intentions, yet Danto infers, while Carroll conjectures intentions. Carroll imagines some spectator in the process of wondering what the artist must have meant, divining intentions on behalf of the artist, as if to get inside the artist’s head during the process of completing the artwork. [Artworks] often come with features that are unusual, puzzling, initially mysterious or disconcerting, or with features whose portents are far from obvious. These features of artworks are the natural objects of interpretations, and inasmuch as they defy, redefine or complicate standing conventions, we do

Aesthetics

143

not explicate them by applying meaning conventions, but we ask ourselves what the artists in question intend[ed] to mean by them. (Carroll 1997: 307)

Even if Carroll’s process doesn’t consider the artist’s self-described intentions the ‘correct’ answer, his approach only works for interpreters who consider artworks vehicles for communication, a view that is not widely held in the artworld. One final consequence of ‘lone-author’ theories is that book reading remains the prevailing analogy for visual art experiences, discouraging potentially relevant models that are collective, relational and experiential, such as walking in parks (meandering around an exhibition), attending sporting events (championing particular artworks), playing games (solving artistic riddles) or conversing with friends (chatting about art experiences).29 Book reading (treating everything, including artworks like a text) is not even a viable model for lone-author theories, since advance readers, editors and eventual interpreters tweak contents. One could say that curated exhibitions place spectators directly on stage, where each doubles as witness and dramaturge, leaving visual art experiences to offer spectators opportunities for collectivity and customization.

5.5  Exhibition users The curator typically has the benefit of prior spectators’ efforts to grasp what the artwork means, even if the artist denies every account proposed thus far. When curators conceive exhibitions to test alternative conjectures, the organizing principles must also interest the lenders, whether artists or collectors invited to exhibit particular artworks, otherwise they will refuse to lend their artworks for the exhibition. In addition to the more basic question of artistic intent, the curator (like the art critic or art historian) also wonders what makes this artwork important for his/her audience and how he/she can make it meaningful for the greater artworld, whose support as stakeholders the curator is also courting. While interpretation may begin with an effort to surmise some artist’s intentions, it eventually evolves into a larger picture, whose significance most likely occludes artistic intent. To demonstrate the way artistic movements evolve in the absence of artists’ intentions, consider that the appellation ‘Impressionist’ only surfaced when critic Louis Leroy published a satirical review in Le Charivari regarding the 1874 Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs exhibition that took place in photographer Nadar’s former studio.30 Inspired by the title of

144

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Claude Monet’s painting Impression: Soleil Levant (1872), Leroy titled his review ‘The Exhibition of the Impressionists’. He wrote, ‘Impression I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it – and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! A preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more finished than this seascape’.31 Once Leroy aired this idea of some ‘faint’ impression, perhaps even Monet thought, ‘Wow, this Leroy guy is a real jerk, but he has strangely helped me to realize what I’m doing.’ Soon after, other members in this ‘anonymous society’, whose exhibited artworks were starting to influence one another’s studio practice, probably recognized they had a shared approach to painting, if not a marketing gimmick and three years later, they exhibited together as ‘Impressionist Painters’.32 Those artists who first exhibited together in the 1863 Salon des Refusés probably had more in common than mere rejection, which is why they continued to exhibit together (eight shows between 1874 and 1886). After all, they had similar ages (most were born between 1834 and 1841) and were mostly French avant-garde painters. Despite all that they shared, no one could say they ‘intended’ to paint in a particular style, since it took decades before the group’s members actually recognized, let alone admitted to what they shared. As briefly mentioned, the aesthetic attitude refers to the disinterested satisfaction (or disinterested attention), which philosophers influenced by Kant consider necessary and sufficient conditions for aesthetical judgements of taste. By contrast, philosophers like Scruton consider every feature of an artwork relevant to its assessment as an artwork and disavow the possibility of one’s regarding artworks with disinterested contemplation. The aesthetic attitude rather amounts to ‘spectator interest, whose object is the uniqueness or individuality of some work of art or other object of aesthetic interest’ (Scruton 1998: 22). Exhibitions, however, are designed to characterize novelty and significance more than ‘uniqueness or individuality’, values that typically encourage people to appreciate artworks as singletons, rather than as members of some set. When exhibitions present art and nonart alongside one another, mindful curators find ways to prevent nonart from accidentally prompting viewers to regard it as art. Similarly, the curator who first exhibits a particular artwork must carefully prepare audiences to acclimate to this unfamiliar object. Curators who present unusual candidates for reception adopt strategies for presenting artworks so that spectators can recognize new candidates’ exhibited and nonexhibited features. Chapter 4 chronicled curators’ strategies for determining artworks’ exhibited and nonexhibited features, while Chapter 6 will provide a theoretical explanation for how curators identify nonexhibited features.

Aesthetics

145

By granting spectator reception the dominant role in producing institutional memories, I follow Edmund Husserl who didn’t write on art per se, but considered experiences to be driven by each perceiver’s intentionality or ‘the directedness of consciousness’ (Føllesdal 2006: 105). One huge question concerns whether the source of ‘directed consciousness’ can be isolated. With visual art, one wonders which factors play the greatest role: the object (as Beardsley claimed); each perceiver’s prior beliefs, past experiences and/or prejudices; each perceiver’s affinity for particular artworks (mediated by art critics and/or prior art history courses); each perceiver’s response to his/her environment (mediated by the curator to effect particular responses and thoughts); or some combination of these and other factors.33 The range of references associated with Carroll’s ‘other directedness’ indicates the way directed consciousness extends beyond the object. As soon as one experiences something in an exhibition that one didn’t expect to see, it’s difficult to uphold one’s prior beliefs about an artist’s oeuvre. In Chapter 4, I ‘fleshed out’ the way exhibitions influence spectators’ beliefs regarding artwork interpretations. For Scruton, aesthetic appreciation concerns ‘the gaining of knowledge’ about aesthetic features, which requires aesthetic perception (‘or taste’) to discern. Such aesthetic features include ‘what it represents’, in terms of its ‘truthfulness’; or its ‘overall character or genre (whether it is tragic, comic or what)’, which plays an important role in aesthetical judgements (1998: 31). He regards aesthetical judgements to be ‘the simple cognitive procedure of judging that an object has certain aesthetic features and taste is the faculty of being able to discern those features’. In emphasizing an artwork’s aesthetic features, such as meaning, truthfulness or genre, Scruton’s notion of aesthetical judgement counters the classic notion, which reflects one’s feelings, while suspending the spectator’s will and desire. In Chapter 4, I noted John Elderfield’s history-revising exhibition ‘Matisse Picasso’ (2003), which MoMA billed as the first exhibition ‘to trace the artistic dialogue between the two men over the course of a nearly half-century relationship that was much closer, visually and psychologically, than ha[d] previously been acknowledged’.34 Soon after Elderfield curated ‘Matisse’ (1992) for MoMA, he organized a two-room Picasso and Matisse pairing, which was followed by the Kimbell Art Museum’s ‘Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry’ (1999–2000). Curated by Yves-Alain Bois, it inspired Matisse & Picasso, the 2002 Emmy-Award-winning documentary. All of this preceded MoMA’s blockbuster exhibition, organized by Elderfeld in concert with seven curators from four museums. A decade later, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the

146

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Metropolitan Museum of Art jointly organized ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Paris Avant-Garde’ (2012). More recently, the National Gallery of Australia exhibited ‘Matisse & Picasso’ (2019), so the rivalry continues. Given this flurry of Picasso-Matisse scholarship, it’s even more curious that Elderfield imagined that there were still heads left to turn! That MoMA’s press department so brazenly got away with describing its Matisse Picasso exhibition as ‘unique’ suggests that earlier attempts were unmemorable, leaving the field wide open for later versions to blaze a lasting trail. Regarding the Kimbell exhibition, Karen Wilkin lamented that despite its ‘illuminating comparisons, much of it was based on crude similarities and simplistic notions of direct cause and effect’ (Wilkin 2003). By comparison, she found MoMA’s later version ‘elegantly installed’ and ‘rich in intelligence’ (Wilkin 2003). It’s possible to follow Matisse and Picasso as they treat each other’s efforts as provocations, stimuli or triggers. You watch them assimilating and transforming each other’s declarations, sometimes ‘correcting’ the initial proposition, at other times swallowing it whole and at still others (as when Picasso flirted with Surrealism while Matisse ignored the whole thing) rejecting it. Minor events in one artist’s work turn up as major ones in his colleague’s and vice versa; small implications are turned into entire campaigns. And so on. (Wilkin 2003)

Her later positive response suggests that the earlier curator mostly made wild conjectures, the earlier exhibition’s hypotheses were too far-flung to be believable or in the intervening years she reflected on the earlier exhibition’s hypotheses and was finally ready to accept them. Steven Wright calls conscientious peer reviewers like Wilkin whose livelihoods depend on related exhibitions users.35 As the ones ‘who have a stake in art taking place’, users are the ‘framers of art, who ultimately generate its relationality. Usership breaks down obsolete binaries between authorship and spectatorship, production and reception, owners and producers, publishers and readers, for it refers to a category of people who make use of art and whose counter-expertise stems from that particular form of relationality known as usevalue in their lifeworlds’ (Wright 2007). Although each artwork’s presence is necessary to demonstrate the curator’s hypotheses, some overall institutional memory, compiled from spectators’ narrative threads outlasts any memory of the individual artworks on view. This is not unlike one’s recollection of a film, a philosophy course or a novel, whereby one remembers some overarching narrative, as well as some supporting details, though hardly every character, let alone every scene. In addition to engendering

Aesthetics

147

narrative threads that survive as institutional memories, exhibitions enable art lovers to discover a particular artist whose oeuvre captures their fancy just enough that they start keeping an eye out for future exhibitions that feature that artist’s art, setting in motion an ongoing aesthetic relationship with that artist’s oeuvre.

5.6 Collectivity In contrast to mythical lone authors, most artistic practices are rather collective, though not necessarily true collaborations, whose contributors share credit. Even when artists solicit input from potential contributors such as fabricators, studio assistants, gallerists, collectors, personal friends and nonart experts, most artists consider the ultimate outcome entirely theirs, rather than a collaborative effort that credits contributors equally. When working collectively, collective practices that involve some combination of artists, museum staff, experts and the public, can be further subdivided as either intra-disciplinary (artist + artist(s) or artist(s)+curator), participatory (artist(s) + audience), interdisciplinary (artist(s) + expert(s)) or community-oriented (artist(s) and non-expert(s)) (Spaid 2010b). In addition to working collectively, such strategies provide artists the opportunity to develop additional methods for working collaboratively across integrated fields (intra- and interdisciplinary work); working interactively with audiences desiring participatory experiences and working communally on nonart community projects. Given film’s Auteur Theory, one might imagine film directors dictating each actor or cinematographer’s every move, yet Dean Simonton’s study of 2,323 films proves how collaborative filmmaking really is (Simonton 2002). As we shall soon see, philosophers have been exploring ways to accommodate multiple authors (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010, Bacharach, Booth and Fjaerstad (eds) 2016). The relevance of filmmaking and classical-music arrangements to curatorial practice cannot be underestimated (Beaudoin and Moore 2010). As one can imagine, the prospects for Husserl’s ‘directed consciousness’ quickly multiply when one adds the contributions of exhibition team members who set the stage for such mediated aesthetic experiences.36 By sets the stage, I mean selects the ‘set’, arranges each artwork’s placement (including relational clusters), determines each artwork’s proximity to related artworks, choreographs the sequence of viewer activities and researches/prepares interpretative information, presented as object labels, didactic panels or teacher lessons. As

148

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Thea mentions above, curating is a lot like directing a play or a movie: only the artworks are the actors and the exhibition is the set in which ‘live action’ occurs. Art experiences, whether visual or theatrical, engender both reactions and commitments (honour/horror, awe/offence, wonder/dismay, care/burden and protection/neglect), responses that nonart may also elicit. While artworks prompt ongoing interpretations, both art and nonart belong to a community’s history and are kept alive by the repertoire of recollection. Over time, the public views particular monuments, artworks and buildings as local treasures (the community’s objects of care). In contrast to art collectives, exhibition collectives include the curator, exhibiting artists and particular staff members who create some environment, a temporal surrounding comprised of thematically arranged artworks in relationship to coloured walls, housed in some facility, which includes the physical surroundings, such as the gallery conditions, lighting and scale. While I’ve always sympathized with Husserl’s hunch that a community of perceivers, not some object, directs one’s art experience, the notion of relational objects developed here aims to accommodate not just an aggregate community, but multiple perspectives, giving rise to situated perspectives, what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel originally termed standpoint (Hegel 1807).37 If art experiences engender various perspectives, does this make every art experience ‘co-authored’, as if spectators author their experiences in concert with artists and curators? To answer this question, a better understanding of ‘co-authorship’ is needed. In ‘We Did It: From Mere Contributors to Coauthors’, Sondra Bacharach and Deborah Tollefsen discuss three views of co-authorship: Berys Gaut’s criticism of film’s Auteur Theory, Paisley Livingston and C. Paul Sellors’s notions of shared intentions and Margaret Gilbert’s ‘plural subject theory’ (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010: 23). Although Bacharach and Tollefsen agree with Gaut’s account that numerous people contribute ‘artistically significant properties’, they ultimately dismiss his conclusion as too permissive, since he fails to differentiate between authors and mere contributors, such as the film’s gaffer, stunt doubles or food caterer. I would counter that the artistic team includes only those who willingly take responsibility for the authorial roles they play.38 While the gaffer, stunt double and caterer facilitate the final product, such roles are professional rather than authorial, whose focus is content. Aiming to take things further by differentiating multiple authors working together from ‘co-authorship’, Bacharach and Tollefsen next consider shared intentions, whereby contributors either attribute credit (or blame) for intended outcomes or express ‘we-intentions’, strategies employed by Livingston and

Aesthetics

149

Sellors, respectively. ‘Livingston and Sellors both propose appealing to the notion of a shared intention to make sense of genuine co-authors – certainly a step in the right direction. But neither account succeeds’, mostly because Bacharach and Tollefsen consider Livingston and Sellors’s expressed commitment requirement too restrictive, since this would exclude spontaneous jam sessions and improvised poetry slams (2010: 28). Bacharach and Tollefsen thus limit co-authorship to membership in some artistic group, which doesn’t seem quite right, since an artistic group’s members need not be artists, as when scientists’ inputs are needed to complete tasks. Perhaps by artistic group, they mean whatever proper name some art-making collective uses to identify themselves. Groups like Gruppo 9999 (1968–72) and Gilbert & George (since 1967) hire nonmembers, yet group membership is fixed, while art collectives such as Société Anonyme, Inc. (1920–50), Fluxus (1960–78) or Ecole Mondiale (since 2013) function more like umbrella organizations with fluctuating members, though key members take responsibility for organizing group activities and likewise earn special credit in the public’s eye. Margaret Gilbert employs the notions of co-authorship and membership in terms of commitments to goals, which presumably artists voluntarily partaking in art-making collectives share. Since Gilbert’s model accommodates nonart members as co-authors, her approach proves more expansive than that of Bacharach and Tollefsen. Employing a saboteur (some harmful outsider) to determine whether Gilbert’s model can be defeated, Bacharach and Tollefsen conclude that the criterion of membership in an artistic group defeats the saboteur since members would dismiss nonmembers’ actions as inauthentic. Of course, this criterion works best for groups whose members are familiar with one another, something that is less possible for transient groups whose members fluctuate or large groups like film crews, where saboteur-identification would prove difficult. In terms of artworks, co-authorship is often credited only those official members of the collective designated as the artwork’s author, even though many more may have helped to make it. Unlike artwork co-authorship, exhibition co-authorship is hardly limited to membership in some designated collective. Thus, Gilbert’s model that offers temporary membership in some plural subject by virtue of its members’ sharing joint commitments works well for exhibition co-authorship. More specifically, she notes that ‘a necessary and sufficient condition for being a plural subject is the existence of a joint commitment: “A and B (and …) constitute a plural subject if and only if they are jointly committed to do something as a body … in a broad sense of do”’ (Gilbert 2006: 145). The criterion of ‘jointly committed to do something as a body’ refers to specific tasks members of the plural subject

150

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

have agreed to perform. Exhibition collectives perform these tasks on behalf of the artist(s) involved, the host venue and potential audience members. As with the earlier filmmaking example, the roles of paid professionals such as caterers, fabricators and graphic designers rarely garner co-authorship. Notions of co-authorship that depend on membership in an artistic group fail for visual art exhibitions, since the curator is rarely an artist (in his/her role as curator). Moreover, exhibiting artists rarely participate in those discussions that inspired the curator to propose the exhibition. Even if artists work with the curator to identify the best possible artwork given the exhibition’s context, they rarely specify its placement, let alone those of others. Despite these factors, I doubt that Bacharach and Tollefsen consider exhibitions ‘authorless’ like traffic jams, just because no artists were involved in their presentations. While only artists are the authors of their artworks, other types of authors play a role in the presentation of their artworks, as well as their commissions. Rather than limit co-authorship to membership in some artistic group, as Bacharach and Tollefsen do, I view exhibitions as co-authored by the exhibition collective, the plural subject whose members are jointly committed to carrying out the artists’ wishes for each artwork to be exhibited. Exhibition collectives working for museums have classic and collective duties: Museums’ Classic Duties. For all artworks a in museum m’s collection and artworks b borrowed either from other collections or artists, m is responsible for the proper storage, handling, installation, display, lighting, labelling, packing, crating, shipping and insurance of all a and b. Museum m is also responsible for lending, archiving and conserving all a. Museums’ Collective Duties. Museum m commissions artworks c on behalf of or in collaboration with the artist(s). For each artwork c that m produces, m is responsible for funding an agreed-upon proportion, carrying out agreed-upon tasks according to an agreed-upon schedule, which typically includes acquiring funds, materials, labour and equipment for the production of c, in addition to its classic duties regarding objects a and b. Should c also be participatory or experiential, m staff will assist visitors as they negotiate and experience c (Spaid 2010b).

Although I attribute collective duties to museums, these distinctions apply equally to any exhibition space whose employees work collectively to present exhibitions, which sometimes include commissions. Despite some museum’s massive contribution in terms of material resources and staff, as well as nonart experts’ inputs, the artists who initiated the project not only usually own the commissioned artwork, but they typically take and receive all of the credit,

Aesthetics

151

a point that lends support to Bacharach and Tollefsen’s notion of co-authorship as somehow linked to ‘membership in an artistic group’. Their view correctly describes co-authored artworks, though not co-authored exhibitions, which designate belongingness, yet lack ownership. For this reason, the curator is right to refer to an exhibition that he/she originated as his/her show, though it certainly belongs to many others as well. Given the wide range of tasks necessary to organize curated exhibitions, it hardly seems surprising that exhibitions are co-authored. What may come as a surprise, however, is the notion of ‘commissioned’ artworks, wherein neither the artist nor the artist’s studio has lifted a finger! Consider the example of the Contemporary Arts Center’s redesigning and fabricating the Harrison Studio’s Survival Series (1970–3/2012), a massive indoor farm, for ‘Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots’ (2012). Even though the Harrison Studio never saw the final outcome and contributed neither labour nor capital, the artists claimed this giant artwork as their own, since it was built according to their pre-approved redesign. Meanwhile, an unsuspecting public presumed that some California artists called the Harrison Studio built and shipped this sprawling indoor farm from their Santa Cruz studio to Cincinnati. Few museum visitors would suspect that the Harrison Studio agreed to exhibit their artwork sight-unseen, fully trusting the curator’s ability to carry out their wishes. Doing so required them to work collectively with museum staff, who hired a full-time gardener to grow the crops prior to the exhibition’s opening and then watered and harvested them during the exhibition’s run.39 Moreover, crediting exhibition authorship to everyone associated with the institution (employees, members and trustees) proves inaccurate, since only those who have agreed to carry out Museums’ Collective Duties are members of the exhibition collective. Gilbert notes that joint agreements can be tacit (‘falling in line’ to indicate understanding) or explicit (written agreements designating agreed-upon duties). Like my Museums’ Collective Duties, she notes that ‘in all cases, however, there is some awareness that the joint commitment is in place and some understanding of the obligations and entitlements that ensue because of it’ (Bacharach and Tollefsen 2010: 29). With this in mind, whatever duties an artist rejects as his/her responsibilities, including raising money, redesigning outmoded plans, purchasing materials, fabrication, installing the artworks and increasingly even producing the artwork to be displayed, must be assigned to some other member of the exhibition collective. To avoid catastrophes, the curator must discuss the complete list of all of the necessary duties with the exhibition collective’s members, including the artists or their representatives,

152

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

long in advance of the exhibition. Otherwise, one risks repeating MASS MoCA’s Christoph Büchel case, whereby the museum unwittingly veered from the artist’s expected outcome and was left in a pickle when the artist suddenly denied authorship altogether (Gover 2011). As one may have already noticed, my conceiving exhibition authorship as a collectivity is cast in far broader terms than most philosophers enumerate. Since so many competing authorial inputs are in play, I consider exhibition experiences dynamic engagements, a concurrence of relational objects, co-authored exhibitions and spectators’ attentions. My notion of the exhibition collective carrying out museums’ collective duties parallels that of Gilbert’s plural subject jointly ‘committed to doing something as a body’. Although no one would dispute the point that the Harrison Studio originated the Survival Series, one cannot ignore the roles played by the curator who persuaded the Contemporary Arts Center to exhibit this really heavy, waterladen, insect-attracting indoor farm in an architecturally significant, new building; the exhibition designer who beautifully reconceived a 1971 artwork to fit a different space, using today’s sustainable wood (originally red cedar) and LED grow lights; as well as the local artist-farmers who grew edible plants from seed and regularly cared for them throughout the exhibition’s duration. All played distinctive roles in the artwork’s existence, as well as its success. Each of these professionals might say, ‘Were it not for me, Survival Series would not exist’, though none would claim to have co-authored it. Similarly, the critic who writes the review that inspires another museum to host ‘Green Acres’ for another four months could make a similar claim, since once this exhibition stops travelling, Survival Series will be donated to a local school to be used as an urban farm and will no longer be an artwork, though it will endure as an institutional memory. And those who after experiencing such artworks get other artists interested to farm as art or to preserve similar artworks could make similar claims. Even when social exchanges revitalize an artwork’s significance, such enthusiastic advocates are not co-authors of the actual artwork, nor are they exhibition co-authors, yet their contribution resembles that of plural subjects, whose members belong to the exhibition collective. It seems that this process applies equally to other art experiences like theatre and musical performances that depend on audience members to keep them alive in the community’s memory. In the end, the same art exhibition elicits as many responses as there are visitors, just like people report different experiences when engaging the same park, book or opera. Each viewer effectively authors his/her narrative

Aesthetics

153

threads, but they join force with others to ensure that particular institutional memories stick. Even so, the viewer is hardly the author of his/her experiences, any more than some artist or curator authored that viewer’s experience. With this in mind, Marcel Duchamp’s oft-repeated quote, ‘the viewer completes the work’, seems overly simplistic, since it too presupposes an artwork authored by one and interpreted by another, neglecting artworks’ relational properties as shaped by some exhibition collective. In characterizing artworks as relational, I have characterized many variables operating in tandem, modifying the efforts of artists and spectators alike. As such, exhibitions prove far more complex than explanations posed by Barthes’s ‘writerly text’, which opposes his ‘readerly text’ (texts such as newspapers and journals that don’t require interpretation) (Barthes 1974). Even the artworks of dead artists (original producer) can play engaging roles in novel exhibitions that expose spectators to fresh contents made available by the exhibition. Since contexts offered by exhibitions tend to imply particularized readings of the artworks on view, rather than open-ended readings, curated exhibitions function provisionally like readerly texts, on par with that day’s news, while those exhibitions that prompt interpretations function more like writerly texts. Like the best of newspaper photos and illustrations, readerly exhibitions visually capture events with lasting consequences. While the narrative threads that each spectator weaves may differ from those that the curator intended, institutional memories reflect some consolidation of these threads, however splintered and fractured, into coherent historical accounts available art history. This is just one version of canon formation.

5.7 Dualisms In this section, I explore the way philosophers have presented dualist accounts involving artworks, artefacts, work and display. I have already identified artwork and work as two sides of the same coin, since the latter reflects a text-based account of the physical artwork’s significance. Art practices, whether performance art, experiential situations or conceptual art, engender lasting memories, offering yet another aspect of work, once they are folded into the artwork’s presentational history. As such, work is preserved as art history via exhibition ephemera, documentation and publications. Despite the disappearance of many of the artworks originally exhibited in ‘Live in Your Head – When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information’ (1969), Harald

154

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Szeemann’s influential exhibition presented at Kunsthalle Bern, people never stopped discussing this exhibition’s artworks.40 The same goes for most artworks featured in ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials’ (1969) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, ‘Spaces’ (1969–70) at the Museum of Modern Art and ‘Using Walls’ (1970) at the Jewish Museum.41 Even though many of these exhibited artworks disappeared long ago, they perdure as thought-things, the way scripts and scores survive their performances, creating what Whitehead termed eternal objects. Eager to make these thought-things concrete again, Germano Celant ‘dialogued’ with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas to present Szeemann’s exhibition anew at Fondazione Prada, calling their version ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013’ (2013). In reconstructing the 1969 exhibition as accurately as possible, the curators treated Szeemann’s exhibition as an exhibition, not as installation art worthy of reinterpretation. This distinction between the artwork that physically disappears and the work that endures has led some philosophers to consider an artwork and its work not identical. One could argue that an artwork is something that can be exhibited, whereas work reflects the artword’s consensus (third-person knowledge), whether ‘representationally characterized events’ (Danto) or some description that particularizes its significance for the artworld. This approach settles the dispute between Idealists, who view artworks as ‘imaginary’ activities taking place in ‘artists’ heads’ and non-Idealists whose focus is artistic products. Each of these descriptions includes some third-person summary of the artist’s efforts and ideas that have been tested, verified and vetted in repeat exhibitions. Thus, the relationship between visible artworks and mostly invisible work is on par with bodies and thoughts of bodies (Husserl’s directed consciousness), in the sense that thoughts of bodies are constitutive of particular bodies. Hence, artworks and work are linked, the way particular thoughts are tied to those objects to which thoughts are directed. This constitutive relationship between a subject’s thoughts and the objects of one’s thoughts has led philosophers such as Danto to consider meaning, even nonexhibited features, embodied. Danto has remarked how he was looking for an analogous pair along the lines of body and soul associated with persons, so he selected the ‘physical object in the case of works of art’ and ‘the interpretation of that part’ or ‘one can think of it as the meaning of that part’ (1993: 200). For him, an artwork’s meaning is no more divisible from its related part than a person’s soul is divisible from his/her body. Of course, several philosophers, notably Joseph Margolis, view Danto’s analogy between persons and artworks as paradoxical, since it neglects the cultural contributions to both personhood and

Aesthetics

155

artworks (Margolis 2009b) and ignores the contribution of relationality described throughout this text. For Danto, meaning is stable, rather than contingent as it is for relational objects. Danto thus treats contents, which typically vary with their context, like eternal objects. In my view, work survives as an eternal object as a result of the actual entity having perished. As mentioned earlier, Morris’s 1994 Soho Guggenheim survey required him to refabricate sculptures that had been dismantled.The actual matter is totally different, just as it is for humans whose trillions of cells regenerated over that same period, yet the work and the artwork bear a relationship analogous to personhood and a person’s body, because artworks are constitutive of their work. Unlike presentational history, work isn’t necessarily cumulative. It might seem that whatever thoughts were attributable to Morris’s 1977 sculptures ought to apply to his 1994 replacements. Just like a person whose beliefs change over time, the 1994 curator likely interpreted the artwork differently than before. Philosophers like John Dilworth view the artefact as representing the artwork, but I don’t see how this offers any added value, since artefacts that are artworks are linked in ways that representations need not be (Goodman’s ‘anything can be used to stand in for anything’). Each artefact that is also an artwork (whether some action, painting process or path of discovery) is associated with some particular work, but it hardly represents work, since work typically follows, rather than precedes visual art. In fact, it is the very possibility that the work, like a script, score or negative might be the real art that seems to have spawned such philosophical dualisms in the first place. It seems to me, however, that publicly presented artworks are rather performances of some sculpture, script, score or photograph. The notion of work described thus far conveys ‘the what we appreciate about the item’, such as an anecdote or invaluable backstory and seems to run counter to that of Dominic McIver Lopes, who considers the ‘work’ to be ‘the item that we appreciate’, such as the eventual print, transparency, projection or image display (what I consider the artwork), though not its work process, such as the ‘pattern of light refracted onto a light-sensitive surface or the developed film or a digital image file’ (2012: 4). Of course, Lopes uses work here as a synonym for artwork, rather than the particular process the photographer employed to produce the photograph. Rather than being the item that we appreciate, I consider ‘work’ what we appreciate about the item, leaving open the possibility that Lopes might agree that whatever one’s description of what one appreciates, such as the ‘pattern of light refracted onto a light sensitive surface or the developed film or a digital image file’ could count as the photograph’s work, carried out to generate some exhibitable artwork.

156

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

I think Lopes would also agree that irreal work is no less appreciated than the print itself, the point Sartre emphasized decades earlier. We routinely praise photographers in terms of their oeuvre’s work, for: ‘having co-existed with their subjects’ (Larry Clark or Nan Goldin), ‘having revealed codified roles’ (Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons or Louise Lawler) or ‘having honestly depicted their unusual subjects’ (Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Lisette Model or Weegee). But the question remains, which ‘what’ do we primarily appreciate as the work – the intriguing narrative behind each image or the straightforward image itself? Suffice it to say that artwork and work are entwined. Like the human body, the artwork may experience material changes (decay, replacement or conservation), but these changes need not alter the work, anymore than cell or limb replacement alters personhood. Should the context change, then people’s thoughts about it are likely to change, periodically altering its contents. While philosophers tend to view mental states as supervening either on neural states and/or physical properties, neither approach describes the relationship between artworks and their contents. Danto’s thought experiment, whereby each of nine indiscernible red squares has its own work, captures the supervenience problem for artworks by rendering the mental and physical autonomous.42 If one didn’t already know each red square’s work, there would be no other way to divine its content. That identical appearances reflect different contents, yet fail to prompt particular thoughts suggests that an artwork’s contents do not necessarily supervene on an artwork, despite Danto’s fervent claims to embodied meanings. For these reasons, Danto’s thought experiment demonstrates that embodiment and representation are mutually exclusive; thus embodiment need not entail representation. Because an artwork’s contents reflect its context, one could say that exhibitions temporarily supervene on artworks. Entirely counter-intuitive, perhaps, is the notion of exhibited artworks supervening on artists’ practices, rather than individual practices supervening on artworks. What I have in mind here is how working artists either concurrently or later figure out how to present their artistic activities. On this level, exhibited artworks are the outcome of prior activities, whether a public action, performance before the camera, studio practice, and so on. The tendency is to imagine that artists have artworks in mind and then figure out how to produce them, rather than imagining artists engaged in routine artistic activities trying to determine what to keep and/or how to present them. For example, Monet’s idea to exhibit fifteen haystack paintings likely occurred while painting twenty-nine paintings, each indicative of seasons and daylight, over three years. And this solves Danto’s

Aesthetics

157

problem too, since what he considers the painting’s contents is actually its work that arises as a result of public presentations in particular contexts. That Red Square, though not Nirvana, gets exhibited in ‘Moscow Memories’ modifies its work. Ironically, Dilworth’s agonizing over how artefacts (prints in this case) relate to their artworks first clued me into this bizarre philosophical dilemma. For him, each print is an artefact that depicts or represents some artwork, which left me wondering whether he considers the actual artwork to be some idea in the artist’s imagination (the Idealist position mentioned earlier) or the artist-originated printing plate. Dilworth is so convinced that Danto upholds the Non-Identity Thesis, whereby an artwork is an artefact plus an interpretation that he fails to recognize that any artefact that is received as art on Danto’s account is an artwork (Danto 1999; Spaid 2009a). Dilworth’s viewing Danto as splitting artefact and artwork is baseless, since as already noted, artworks and artefacts are no more divisible for Danto than artworks and their material counterparts are. In order to prove that multiple artefacts represent one artwork, Dilworth refutes the standard view that ‘to each artwork there corresponds, at a given time, exactly one actual artefact’ (2001: 354). Dilworth thus takes artefacts to be some reproducible object or performance, so that an artwork might have multiple iterations, as if an artist could unknowingly paint two identical versions of the same artwork. Implicit in Danto’s causal episodes (Table 2) is the view that each artwork corresponds, at all times, to only one event, a ‘representationally characterized event’ (Danto 1979). However, each artwork’s later presentations continue the event, which can include multiple iterations whether prints, staged performances or editions of a book. Dilworth’s splitting artefact and artwork, as his representational theory requires, engenders implausible situations. Imagining Leonardo to have unwittingly painted two identical Mona Lisas using different materials, he identifies both Mona Lisas as two artefacts of ‘the same painting’, but of course each painting initiates a separate event with distinct presentational histories indicative of separate artworks, as discussed in the prior section (Dilworth 2001: 355). And now we learn that Leonardo actually painted two distinct Mona Lisas.43 Dilworth next proposes to view an artwork as having multiple artefacts, such that the original was totally reworked, so that there are no parts in common. For him, this engenders two artefacts, even if the original has been replaced, rendering it no longer extant. When an artist (or conservator) repairs an existing artwork, he/she continues an earlier event, so there are not separate artefacts

158

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

of the same artwork as Dilworth claims, even if no matter is left at tn from the artwork at t0. Since Dilworth’s representational theory concerns copies, his notion of representation is nothing like that of Danto’s. Dilworth’s copies actually depict something, which further violates Danto’s tenet that an artwork’s embodied contents prompt thoughts in the spectator’s mind. Were Dilworth to characterize the members of each edition or multiple as elements of the same event, as Danto’s causal episodes do, he could treat both allographic and autographic artworks as events. When exhibited, identifiable contents engender particularized responses, which apply to all elements of the same event. Exemplary of this point is Marcel Duchamp’s replica Apolinère Enameled (1916-17/1964) discussed in Chapter 4. When each artistic edition is treated as an event, its method, plate and ensuing objects are part and parcel of the same artwork, letting its presentational history, which extends from its initial presentation to its most recent performance/ display, inform its work (Spaid 2009a). Each print made from the same printing plate or photographic negative is part of the same event, even if printed at different times. However, identically titled autographic artworks created from different plates are different entities since their presentational histories differ. By

Figure 18  Barry Le Va, Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act, 1967, Felt and glass, dimensions variable, ‘The New Sculpture 1965–75: Between Geometry and Gesture’, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1990. ©2020. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala.

Aesthetics

159

contrast, identical artworks whose works are different (Danto’s nine red squares) engender separate events, even if they were created using the same process.44 In fact, the tendency for critics to consider assessments of artworks’ earlier manifestations suggests that the event associated with an artwork comprises the whole of its exhibition/performance history. Successive perspectives enable spectators to revitalize their cognitive stock. In addition to artefact/artwork and artwork/work dualisms, philosophers have conjured up two other dualisms, that of work/display and artwork/ display. The third dualism, that of work/display is identical to the artwork/work dualism, since any variation of display rarely changes the work, since changes do not engender new artworks, so long as artworks share identical presentational histories. Regarding the fourth dualism, the view advanced here collapses the two, since an artwork’s numerous displays such as the varying configurations of Barry Le Va’s Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act (1967) (Figures 18 and 19) are part of the artwork’s presentational history. While I imagine that some displays comply better with Le Va’s wishes than others, an artwork’s display is its display all the same, whether it’s good or bad, sanctioned or not. One might say, ‘I hardly recognized Le Va’s artwork; you’d think it was a different work altogether.’ But one could not say, ‘It wasn’t the same artwork’, unless Le Va actually installed an artwork with a different presentational history;

Figure 19 Barry Le Va, Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act, 1967, Felt and glass, dimensions variable, ‘Full House: Views of the Whitney’s Collection at 75’, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006. ©2019. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art /Licensed by Scala.

160

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

opted to pull his artwork from the show, once he saw how bad it looked or purchased the piece from the Whitney, reworked it and sold it back as a different artwork with a new title, date and insurance value.

5.8 Belief As discussed throughout these pages, exhibitions foster institutional memories whose sticking power depends on their successfully shaping beliefs. Those beliefs that are widely shared eventually evolve into what David Lewis called ‘common knowledge’. According to Peter Vanderschraaf, Lewis later regretted the term ‘common knowledge’, since there is no way to guarantee that it is knowledge, let alone true. For our purposes, Lewis’s term proves especially relevant since exhibitions reinforce beliefs. In distinguishing reasons to believe from actual beliefs, Lewis interprets reasons to believe as ‘potential beliefs of agents, so that the infinite hierarchy of epistemic states becomes harmless, consisting in an infinity of potential belief states’ (Vanderscraaf and Sillari 2014). By ‘common knowledge’, Lewis meant the shared set of potential belief states. That New York Dada lasted from 1915 to 1923 is ‘common knowledge’, yet as I demonstrated in Chapter 4, 1911–21 proves more apt. Assessing an exhibition’s narrative threads exemplifies what Roderick Chisholm terms propositional perceiving. An exhibition’s narrative thread(s) can be articulated as first-order propositions, whereby one says ‘artworlder a believes b about artwork x’, thus b generates information about x given its current context. That is, artwork x’s presentation causes a to reflect upon x and to believe b. Art reviewers (critics) effectively summarize the narrative threads they perceive as first-order propositions, while viewers who notice narrative threads but don’t feel especially compelled to articulate them perform nonpropositional perceivings. As Kevin Melchionne’s research regarding aesthetic reliability indicates, nonpropositional perceivings tend to be less distorted (Melchionne 2011: 9). Nonpropositional perceivings, which generate zero-order propositions, resemble what José Bermúdez terms ‘thinking without words’. One has useable and applicable knowledge that one can work with, even though one has yet to express it. Such inexpressible thoughts include hunches, intuitions, working knowledge or past experiences. These zero-order propositions may be more accurate, but they cannot stick since they’re neither public nor shared. They do,

Aesthetics

161

however, influence first-order propositions whenever a recalls x-experiences, which he/she either discusses with others or uses to make sense of other artworks. For Dan Crawford, the difference between the propositional and nonpropositional senses of perceive is that ‘the former but not the latter includes the conditions that the proposition involved in the experience [be] both true and justifiably accepted and hence a suitable candidate for knowledge’ (Crawford 1974: 210). Since Crawford considers only propositional perceivings suitable candidates for knowledge, it looks like he and Melchionne, who worries about distortion, are at an impasse. Like most philosophers, Crawford views the wealth of written documents generated to accompany each exhibition, however distorted or inaccurate they might be, suitable candidates for knowledge. As I’ve stressed throughout these pages, exhibited artworks, not their accompanying documents, provide evidence for propositions. Although exhibition labels, brochures and books have the benefit of being public and shareable, their verification requires checking them against exhibited evidence. Exhibitions are mounted precisely to present first-hand experiences that capably challenge and/or affirm prior assertions. When viewers don’t find the curator’s claims, as conveyed via object labels, exhibition panels or catalogue essays, to accord with either the exhibition or their prior visual art experiences, they tend to privilege beliefs gleaned from personal experiences over a curator’s claims. If the exhibition presents good reasons to modify viewers’ prior beliefs, they will be moved to do so. But the good reasons reflect the way new evidence challenges prior beliefs, rather than claims that contradict prior beliefs. Just as ‘educational frames’ facilitate trained seeing, exhibitions provide evidence for holding particular beliefs, which remain nonpropositional until spectators are motivated to share them with others. Written documents rarely override viewers’ first-hand experiences, since one cannot force people to think a certain way when faced with physical evidence to the contrary. Curator/historian Ivan Gaskell concurs here: In all cases, viewers interpret artworks on their own terms without regard to the uses and interpretations of earlier users; or they discern familiar characteristics that they value and that they assume other, sometimes earlier, users also discerned and valued. They do this in spite of any attempts on the part of curators, art historians or critics to encourage them to learn such terms of use, interpretation and value of makers and original uses that may differ from their own. (Gaskell 2011: 5)

162

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

As I have claimed all along, the curator may have very precise ideas about what he/she believes and what he/she wants spectators to think. In order for exhibitions to do what they do, they must be pleasurable, prompt spectators to discover reasons and inspire viewers to draw inferences. Simultaneously, there must be plenty of room to allow viewers to form their own ideas, based on the presented artworks, otherwise they will not become committed stakeholders and ‘users’ keen to spread the word. Since people trust first-hand experiences more so than some curator’s written claims, they feel more comfortable conveying their own narrative threads, rather than parroting some curators’ hypotheses, no matter how clearly they are stated throughout the exhibition. Even if the ideas spread by spectators risk to be more distorted, such inaccuracies are diminished as a result of public airings. That the general public, who as Gaskell notes cannot be forced to learn, formulates their own view of the exhibited artworks and has values that differ from those of the curator makes it even more difficult to override trained seeing. The curator cannot predict how audiences have been trained. For these reasons, whatever narrative threads the spectators weave and take away ultimately transcend the exhibition’s initial proposal, as well as its exhibition documents. The long-term outcome of any successful exhibition is some set of beliefs about the artworks at hand. As a result of art experiences, not accompanying documents, spectators form beliefs about the exhibited artworks, which become candidates for knowledge, when said beliefs migrate into later exhibition documents and object labels.

6

Meaning-making

This chapter surveys multiple factors that belie essentialist views: (1) unfamiliar art’s initial incomprehensibility, (2) asymmetries between presentation and reception, (3) the failure of two-term systems (Frege/Danto/Derrida) versus three-term systems (Husserl/Wittgenstein/Scruton), (4) the role of generative symbols, inductive reasoning and ratiocination and (5) the plethora of references.

6.1 Anti-essentialism The idea of art as expression has held such sway over aestheticians for so long that experiential artworks, whose existence is motivated more by artistic curiosity than expression, defy most philosophical accounts of art. Philosophers who consider artworks and their meanings co-present upon completion must also presume that the explanatory object label attending each artwork hanging in a museum pinpoints each artwork’s meaning, or internal sense as Danto terms it, even though such labels are often transitory, sometimes penned by interns, precisely for the occasion of the exhibition. Noël Carroll’s term ‘other directed’, discussed in Chapter 5, proposes an alternative perspective, since it captures the way artworks prompt various thoughts, including those wholly unrelated to the artwork at hand. With the exception of Martin Heidegger’s metaphysical description of artworks passing from earth to world and Roger Scruton’s notion of artworks as generative symbols, philosophers of art tend to presume that an artwork’s meaning (its essence), or ‘aboutness’, is readily interpretable, even when its meaning eludes the artist as much as the public (Heidegger 1971). Exemplary of the anti-essentialist stance, art historian Griselda Pollock considers the ‘dreadful recurrent phrase “this work [emphasis mine] is about …”’ endemic of some iconographic pandemic, whereby a pre-given system ‘maintains its function as the support of the system’ (Pollock 2011). For those who reject my

164

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

delineating work as a description of some artwork’s significant features, whether its underlying process, form or motivation (its movement or genre), I find it relevant that philosophers like Arthur Danto, Scruton and Alva Noë, as well as artworlders Pollock and curator Anthony Huberman identify ‘aboutness’ as it relates to ‘work’, though not the artwork. This coheres with my view that the medium for work is words. Exemplary of the volatile nature of each artwork’s meaning, some artworks take as long as forty years to become meaningful, while others successively switch titles, contexts and significance, even after the artist has died. During the Renaissance, artisans crafted objects – whether altars, sculptures or frescoes for churches that eventually disappeared – inviting museums to adopt their stock. When historical artworks are preserved in museums, not only are their original contexts obliterated but their significance also becomes skewed. Today’s museum curators, steeped in art history, characterize religious artefacts differently than those priests and patrons who originally commissioned such artefacts for particular places, let alone the guild members (artisans) who actually produced these objects as their day job.1 Tying object labels to intentionality or meaning proves unhelpful, since artworks are bound to reappear in exhibitions with altered labels. Similarly, many historical artworks have been arbitrarily titled, often by dealers who titled artworks just to distinguish one from the other. Were the philosophy of art to treat artwork titles like proper names, titles would be considered ‘empty’ singular terms, rather than candidates for an artwork’s content, whether derived from its referent (the portrait’s sitter) or implied by its meaning (the portrait’s subject).2 For my purposes here, I use the term referent to indicate some concept, idea, image, event or narrative designated by the artist, prior to the artwork’s completion, while the term reference includes concepts, ideas and narratives evoked by the artwork, though not necessarily intended by the artist.

6.2  Inductive reasoning As discussed in Chapter 5, an artwork begins as an action whose presentational history chronicles its public presentations as a continuous event, beginning with its emergence in the studio, its recurrence in exhibitions and articles and its eventual accession, initially by one of those collectors whose acquisitions serve as the conduit for artworks entering museums. The assumption that artworks are fully conceptualized at the onset has led some philosophers of

Meaning-Making

165

art to underestimate how difficult it is to describe and understand unfamiliar artworks.3 So long as artworks’ meanings (and their related nonexhibited features) are viewed as posing no obstacles, then philosophers faced with bizarre, inexplicable artworks can rationalize the situation thusly: ‘I can’t understand why anyone finds this particular artwork interesting, but there must be at least one person who understands it, otherwise no one would exhibit it, so therefore, it is conceptualized for someone, somewhere.’ Philosophers rarely entertain the possibility that perhaps no one, not even the artist, fully grasps the art on view. That said, it’s not unusual for artists to later claim that they didn’t fully understand the relevance or import of said actions until much later, as with the ‘Hirst/Tate’ Case discussed in Chapter 2. In contrast to the view that artworks are fully conceptualized at the onset, I propose that artworks are typically conceptualized in hindsight, by people who appreciate the art for reasons the artist himself/herself doesn’t necessarily fathom. This view coheres with the following four sentences from artist Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Contemporary Art’ (1969), of which there are thirty-five sentences in total. 23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual. 24. Perception is subjective. 25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others. 26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own (LeWitt 1969).

Even though LeWitt employs perception here, he clearly means either interpretation or cognition, since I doubt his claims refer to physical disabilities or qualia (perceptual variations due to subjective differences). As noted in Chapter 4, interpretation is what Scruton calls ‘imaginative perception’, as compared to ‘ordinary perception’. Still, LeWitt’s four sentences cohere with my view that artworks rarely arrive already conceptualized. Aesthetical approaches are bound up with the idea that artworks have ready referents, inspiring philosophers to proffer strategies either for determining each artwork’s referent or evaluating whether an artwork effectively reflects some referent.4 When object labels are present, people tend to accept them as evidence for identified referents, yet the evidence for such claims are rather the exhibited artworks. Absent object labels, spectators employ deduction when they defer to common knowledge or glean relevant concepts and appropriate categories

166

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

from art historical texts. Those who infer useful tools for interpretation from the exhibition also use deduction. If the exhibition is successful, the significance of exhibited artworks often seems self-evident, yet artworks are rarely so readable, otherwise. As noted in Chapter 5, those who consider artworks singletons ignore the curator’s meaningful selections, placements and juxtapositions, and thus either overlook vital clues or unwittingly adopt them. To ease deduction curators exercise inductive reasoning to determine how best to present artworks in exhibitions or articles. Curated exhibitions thus prompt responses that would not occur were one to experience recently completed artworks, one at a time, in the studio. Following an artwork’s first presentation, artworlders enjoy every opportunity they can to weigh in, further inspiring inductive reasoning to generate the pool of potential concepts, categories and contents that transform unfamiliar objects into meaningful artworks. Regarding concept formation’s links to inductive reasoning, Jerry Fodor remarked: ‘But now we have an apparently respectable argument that [primitive concepts] must be learned inductively: nothing else appears likely to account for the content relation between the concept that’s acquired and the experience that mediates its acquisition’ (Fodor 1998: 129). There’s ample evidence to demonstrate that it took about twenty years for artworld insiders to be able to recognize landscapes emerging from surfaces comprised of pastel smudges and blotches (Impressionism) or to accept witty quotidian trinkets such as a hat rack or an iron with nails as art (Dada).5 When Paris Salon officials rejected thousands of artworks in 1863, Emperor Napoléon III authorized that the Salon des Refusés be organized in a nearby annex. This salon, which included about a dozen artists who exhibited together on and off for another two decades, accommodated rejected artworks. Exemplary of how difficult it was for the mainstream artworld to appreciate the impressionists even a decade later, they exhibited as a group of thirty or so artists eight times between 1874 and 1886. Moreover, they didn’t call themselves impressionists until 1877, fourteen years after they first exhibited together in the Salon de Refusés. Paul Cézanne, who exhibited in two of these impressionist exhibitions, continued to submit artworks annually to the official salon, but was not accepted until 1882 (with a painting from 1866).6 If one fasts forward forty years to ‘Salon Dada’ (1921), an exhibition organized by Tristan Tzara, one recalls Dadaists (who had been organizing riotous evenings since 1916) brawling during an Italian Futurist concert in a nearby concert hall. Their riot prompted Galerie Montaigne-manager Jacques Hébertot to close down Paris’ first-ever Dada exhibition just one day after it opened (Ribemont-

Meaning-Making

167

Dessaignes 1981: 117). Art movements rarely get off the ground so swiftly (and smoothly) as the cases of Impressionism and Dada illustrate.7 Even though philosophers since Socrates have been baffled by how illprepared artists are to say something about their art, it turns out that artists are no different than scientists in this respect.8 As Thomas Kuhns pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, doing science hardly requires ‘thoughts about doings’, let alone ‘knowledge about thoughts’. Kuhns observed that even scientists don’t begin to articulate a new paradigm’s particular rules until the normal paradigm begins to break down. Selected scientific paradigms enable scientists to proceed without necessarily knowing how to justify the legitimacy of their actions. That scientists do not usually ask or debate what makes a particular problem or solution legitimate tempts us to suppose that, at least intuitively, they know the answer. But it may only indicate that neither the question nor the answer is felt to be relevant to their research. Paradigms may be prior to, more binding and more complete than any set of rules for research that could be unequivocally abstracted from them. (Kuhn 1962: 46)

In light of Immanuel Kant’s similarly describing the genius’s actions as ‘unteachable’, it hardly seems surprising when influential artists lack a deep understanding of their actions. The notion of artists creating artworks that intentionally provoke particular audience responses, as popularized by neuroaestheticians, parallels Kant’s notion of the purposive nature of representation, but it ignores art’s particularly asymmetrical outcomes. Given artworks’ nonverbal status, dealers, curators and critics must work extra hard to transcribe the ineffable effects of artistic practices into language. ‘Problem [is], not much research material [can] be found for work that had been made in the past five or ten years, much less five or ten minutes’ (Tucker 2008: 87). No doubt, artists who provide artist statements initiate this conversation, but where it leads and their literary efforts’ ultimate impact is anyone’s guess. It’s difficult to prove whether common knowledge that arose to justify some artwork’s meaning is genuinely connected to some artist’s original intention, partly because it’s extremely difficult to convert artists’ actions into verbal intentions. Visual art thus poses a special problem for philosophers, who consider the world fully conceptualized, rather than as ‘sensibility’ in need of ‘intuitions’, to use Kant’s eighteenth-century parlance. Those who view the world as fully conceptualized, whether it is or not, see no reason to consider artworks in their naissance any less conceptualized than mature artworks already in

168

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

circulation. Either way, the trick is to link work to relevant concepts present in the world. Artworks rarely physically change enough to effect varying perceptions, even when installations vary site to site, yet viewers continuously notice new aspects that make artworks more meaningful over time. Even when objects, whether art or nonart, don’t physically change or remain in the same spot for several decades, one notices different aspects each time one revisits them, mostly because one gains access to more concepts over time that tease out more contents. Some of these noticings are mere ‘thoughts of x’, while others are ‘thoughts about x’. As viewers gain more information, they tend to grasp more of what they notice. The Identity Theory underlying Danto’s notion of art as embodied expression typifies a view of artworks as thoroughly conceptualized, since he claims that an artwork’s meaning is embodied in the artwork, as if it is co-present at the onset. This version of the Identity Theory poses several problems, including its inability to explain how meanings later associated with emergent artworks once eluded their creators as much as the artworld. By contrast, the Non-Identity Theory, which treats interpretations as transforming artefacts into artworks, is no more successful, since it fails to isolate which interpretations matter most, rendering every potential interpretation a possibility, which proves implausible in practice. Because meaning is rarely co-present at the onset, the artworld relies on exhibitions to publicize contents embodied in the artwork, thus ruling out the implausible Non-Identity Theory. As already mentioned, exhibitions invite the artworld to test, judge and select those tools for interpretation that enrich each artwork’s meaning(s).

6.3  Two-term systems Danto grounds his approach to art interpretation in Gottlob Frege’s Theory of Meaning, which Frege developed to explain reference in terms of culturally constructed, linguistic entities, not visual objects.9 Employing Frege’s twoterm systems of sinn (sense) and bedeutung (reference), Danto writes: ‘There is a sense and a reference for pictures and imitations, just as there is for terms and both of them have to be connected in the right way for successful communication’ (Danto 1981: 73). Seeking to explain how imitations such as artworks and characters represent something, Danto draws analogies between Frege’s sense and an imitation’s content and Frege’s notion of reference and Danto’s ‘representationally characterizable’ events (1981: 83). Danto considers the content of an imitation, picture or action to be its internal sense, while what

Meaning-Making

169

it denotes is its external sense. Danto adds, ‘The two senses [the denotation and its content] correspond to the spirit of Frege’s distinction between the sense (Sinn) and the reference (Bedeutung) of an expression. Imitations, too, have a sense and a reference, [they] have two ways of being characterized as representing something’ (71–2). As discussed in Chapter 3, Danto’s nine indiscernible red squares lack an obvious context, so he cast eight of the titles as the respective contents, the ‘representationally characterizable’ events that cause’ representationally characterizable’ events. In distinguishing a representation’s internal sense, which describes the contents of an imitation, action or picture, from its external sense, which concerns what something denotes (or conveys), Danto remarked that the latter is a relational concept, in the sense that ‘anything can be used to stand for anything’, as Goodman attests in Languages of Art (Danto 1981: 74). Anticipating the philosophical position known as Critical Monism, whereby each artwork has many interpretations, but only one actual meaning, Danto attributed only one internal sense to each artwork, though an array of external senses (a picture stands for anything) can be conveyed.10 Here Danto’s view diverges from that of Frege, who found it fascinating that one referent could have multiple senses, as in the case of the Morning Star and Evening Star that both refer to Venus, an opportunity Danto’s stressing internal sense avoids. No doubt, Danto recognized that two identical artworks could have the same referent (e.g. twin portraits of Madame Cézanne), yet each has a different internal sense, something Frege’s view does not require. For Danto, a representation’s internal sense is readily determined, ‘whereas there can be no telling [what] pictures represent in the relational sense unless we are specifically told’ (74). To my lights, Danto gets this backwards. There’s no telling what an artwork’s internal sense is, ‘unless we are told’, while one infers its external, or relational sense, from its presentation. Danto compares artworks to Aristotelian enthymemes, which spur the mind to ‘fill in’ some gap, yet his Expressive View glosses over the notion of artworks as the kinds of things that are particularly difficult to ‘fill in’ (Danto 1981: 169–70). For Danto, deriving contents strangely never posed a problem. Such meaning-finding schemes reflect some assumption that artworks’ contents are conceptualized at the onset, in accordance with extant artworld theories, as well as his fervent belief that artworks are representations that have an internal sense. In fact, he says so much: ‘To understand the artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is, I think, always there [italics mine]’ (Danto 1981: 172). Most artworld insiders have no problem admitting how difficult it is to grasp artworks, so Danto’s apparent ease at negotiating artworks seems out of

170

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

place. Consider curator Anthony Huberman’s observation: ‘In describing their process in the studio, artists often talk about reaching the exhilarating moment when they stop knowing what a work is about, or when their own explanation doesn’t exhaust a work they see before them. They feel it going elsewhere, taking flight, slipping out of their hands, as though they had made a solid into a liquid’ (Huberman 2009: 98). Fascinated by the artworld’s passion for ‘being in the dark’, Huberman notes how the curating team, Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, established their reputation with the art exhibition ‘Things We Don’t Understand’ (1999), which explored the difficulty of understanding artworks and led to their being invited to develop this project further for ‘documenta 12’ (2007). Both exhibitions were organized around the hypothesis that routine art experiences don’t necessarily enhance one’s ability to understand unfamiliar art. Rather than merely providing art lovers routine art experiences, art exhibitions furnish both tools for understanding and interpretation appropriate to the artworks at hand. When confronted with incomprehensible art, Huberman suggests that one turn to one’s own consciousness and start to reconsider one’s preconceived notions. This sounds counterproductive. Were the tools for interpretation already available (in one’s own consciousness), the art wouldn’t seem so incomprehensible. Noë, who also describes the transformations people undergo when confronted with art, suggests a different tack. Since he views the world, though not the artwork, as already conceptualized, no one needs to invent new categories or concepts to make sense of emerging artworks. His fully conceptualized view of the world requires that the relevant tools for understanding be available, though in the world. It’s just a matter of having the right approach for understanding. ‘Understanding enables us to perceive, factively, in the work, what we could not perceive before’ (Noë 2009). For Noë, who seems to use understanding and perception interchangeably, perception and understanding are co-present, since perception depends on the right tools for understanding, which are already present, even if one has yet to acquire them. As we shall see, Noë is partly right. The world, not our own consciousness as Huberman imagines, contains the categories and concepts needed to conceptualize unfamiliar artworks. Were the tools for understanding and interpretation always there, in the artwork, as Danto maintains, or in our own consciousness, as Huberman claims, no one would ever be ‘in the dark’. Moreover, conceptualization would be immediate, not productive, as is most often the case, even for historical paintings. As already mentioned, exhibitions typically furnish the necessary tools for understanding and interpreting contemporary art, making

Meaning-Making

171

such tools co-present with each presentation, though not the artwork’s arrival in the world, as Noë suggests. If we take Noë at his word, however, we realize that once we are prepared to discuss work, the interpretative process is underway.11 Suffice it to say, artworld insiders admit to ‘being in the dark’ (not understanding), especially since interesting artists unwittingly produce inscrutable artworks, whose ineffability reflects the fact that they are not yet conceptualized.12 As discussed in Chapter 2, the primary factor driving curators to organize exhibitions in the first place is some urge to interpret particular artworks in order to better understand them.

6.4  Generative symbols Like Danto, Scruton views representation and expression as having semantic properties. Scruton writes, ‘To see what a work of art represents or expresses might, therefore, be like seeing what a sentence refers to: it might involve learning to understand the work of art as one symbol among many, with a function that is primarily referential’ (1998: 188). Since symbols have particular referents, they are effectively stable ‘signs’. Scruton views art ‘as one symbol among many’, which seems different than Danto’s claim that ‘an artwork is a symbol’ or Goodman’s view that ‘artworks function like symbols’. Numerous symbols, such as the familiar octagonal red sign or signs indicating ‘Cuidado’ or ‘Pas Op!’, are used to stop people in their tracks. Not surprisingly ambiguous figures, which invoke multiple readings, fail as symbols, since symbols are typically the kind of sign that indicates one clear point. But this is not what Scruton has in mind when he describes art as one symbol among many. In contrast to Danto’s treating artworks as symbols with singular referents, Scruton treats artworks as multivalent symbols, whose multiple aspects evoke, rather than refer to, particular references. Scruton claims that the ‘aesthetic appreciation of a picture is directed towards its representational properties in this (intensional) [connotative] sense and not to the further property, that it may or may not have, of actually denoting, or corresponding to, an item in the world’ (1998: 192).13 One can already begin to see how Scruton’s project involves inductive reasoning, while Danto’s demands deduction. Despite their mutual interest in semantics and reference, Scruton and Danto’s views are vastly different. For Scruton, one’s appreciating pictures as ‘x-pictures’ (pictures of x or pictures of type x) requires one’s prior knowledge of x, whereas Danto’s view presumes that each artwork adequately exhibits its own content

172

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

x. In contrast to Danto’s emphasizing an artwork’s internal sense, Scruton concludes that paintings belong to the ‘scheme of symbols which are used to denote objects’. He adds, ‘Its place in the scheme is fixed not by its reference but by its sense.’ Of course, Frege makes the same claim, but Frege entwines sense and reference, fixing a one-to-one correspondence between each sense and its reference. A referent can have many senses, but a sense can have only one referent. For Scruton, sense and reference prove generative, since senses have numerous aspects, which individually give rise to as many references. Functioning more like generative symbols, artworks unambiguously symbolize many contents, not just some singular meaning. As we shall see, Scruton’s playing with sense to prompt the most apropos reference indicates that his method follows Husserl, while Danto’s approach admittedly follows Frege. Convinced of the ease of grasping metaphors, Danto opted instead to challenge the widely held assumption that there’s a connection between an object’s appearance and its content, which his Case of Nine Indiscernibles is designed to dispute. So long as philosophers of art uphold Danto’s version of the Identity Theory, whereby an artwork’s internal sense is present at the onset; meaning, content and referent remain interchangeable terms. With the Case of Nine Indiscernibles, Danto applies deductive reasoning to derive each canvas’ referent either from 1) each artwork’s title, which he presumes each artist designates, even though it is well known that curators, dealers and collectors sometimes attribute titles; or (2) an artist’s particular action, which distinguishes his/her artwork’s referent. Danto seems to imagine that each artwork has a particular content that influences either the artwork’s title or causes spectators to receive some object/action as art. The referent for one of two paintings bearing the title Red Square is a Moscow cityscape, while the referent for the other painting with the same title literally describes its features (a red square), which appears to countermand Danto’s goal to disassociate content and appearance. Danto uses deduction to discern each painting’s intended contents, yet his method’s accuracy depends on whether the artist actually titled his/her own artwork, the artwork’s title is relevant or sensible and some artist actually performed whatever action is said to distinguish one painting’s contents from that of an indiscernibly different artwork. In contrast to the ease with which philosophers navigate the artworld, artworld insiders expect understanding artworks to be difficult. They even admit that they gravitate towards artworks in need of interpretation, ignoring those for which one appeals to common knowledge. That artworks become conceptualized over time suggests that their contents are not so available, reliable or stable as

Meaning-Making

173

either Frege’s Theory of Meaning or Danto’s Expressive View suggests. For Noë, the concepts are already in the world. Still, one must identify the appropriate concepts. It seems misleading, however, to assume that the appropriate concepts and categories are always available in the artwork, let alone in the world. Sometimes, the curator/writer must devise some groundbreaking approach in order to figure out how to make sense of unfamiliar artworks. One can imagine that concepts and categories routinely employed to grasp earlier paintings by Cézanne or the Fauves proved inapplicable for Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) (Figure 14) by the time spectators finally glimpsed it in 1916. Lacking the appropriate tools for interpretation, I doubt that many viewers readily recognized the African masks as women’s faces. Here, I am using recognition the way Noë uses perceptual consciousness, whereby perception and understanding are co-present.14 Only five years after Les Demoiselles’s arrival, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger stated that ‘painting is not – or is no longer – the art of imitating an object by means of lines and colors’. Today, we recognize that Picasso and his cubist peers were shifting from a ‘traditional means of “seeing” to one based on idea’ (Karl 1985: 275). When useful terms are nonexistent and information is lacking, those eager to introduce unfamiliar artworks to the public employ induction to assemble some story about the artwork’s meaning that is amassed by analysing as many aspects as possible. Exemplary of Les Demoiselles’s confounding everyone over 100 years ago, historian Frederick Karl remarks, ‘Les Demoiselles was, in one sense, a laboratory for Picasso, a testing ground for ideas as yet inchoate, the canvas was itself the manifest of Picasso’s uncertainty and his determination to recreate objects in a different guise’ (Karl 1985: 276). Not only did Picasso not exhibit in Paris between 1910 and 1916, but it took thirty years for Les Demoiselles to enter MoMA (see Figure 20). During this period, its presentational history encompassed conceptualization (art critic André Salmon re-titled it < 1916), presentation (first exhibited in 1916), collection (Doucet acquired it in 1924), publication (in Breton’s La Révolution Surréaliste in 1925) and since entering MoMA’s collection in 1939, it has been displayed in perpetuity. + 1907 C0

 retitled by Salmon

+ 1916 publicly exhibited

+ + 1924 1925 bought published by Doucet by Breton

Figure 20  Timeline for Picasso’s ‘Brothel Painting’.

+ 1939 entered MoMA

174

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Using deduction to extricate a contemporary artwork’s referent is a bit like using a freezer to evaporate water. Ice cubes do eventually disappear and someone eventually discovers some meaning that the artwork appears to embody, but deduction only proves handy when the categories and concepts that render artworks meaningful have already been devised. As such, deduction works best for artworks that are already conceptualized, that is, artworks that engendered artworld theories or arose as a result of some theory, such as manifestos. Unfamiliar artworks nullify handy concepts and categories. One must find new ways to connect the work at hand to the world at large. Some may argue that the alternative method, inductive reasoning, problematically diverts meaning to the ‘relational path’, which Danto assiduously avoids. As the next section demonstrates, induction provisionally structures matter as work the way recipes structure foodstuff as dishes. Once the relevant tools for understanding are common knowledge, viewers employ deduction to access categories and concepts needed to make sense of earlier artworks. As discussed in Chapter 4, art historical lenses such as Minimal Art, PostMinimal Art and Conceptual Art evoke both concepts and historical events that enable viewers familiar with these movements to glean concepts that justify categorization. When categories break down, such as ‘Land Art’ birthing Earthworks, environmental art, eco-art and ecoventions, they can be finessed to avail concepts unavailable prior categories.15

6.5  Co-present references Each of the philosophy of art’s five most prevalent theories concerning art: (1) Mimesis, (2) Expressionism, (3) Representationalism, (4) Intentionalism and more recently (5) Conceptualism presumes some prior referent, whether (1) an object/character, (2) figure/landscape/narrative, (3) meaning, (4) purpose or (5) idea, respectively. If the painter knows nothing of grids, the actual referent for his/her black gingham canvas titled Lunchtime Graphs cannot be the grid, yet one could say its gridded checkerboard pattern references grids. In this manner, I follow Gareth Evans’s account: A common way in which audiences are enabled to know which object is the referent of an expression in a particular context is by virtue of the speaker’s exploitation of the object’s salience. The salience can be brought about by the speaker himself, as when he accompanies the utterance of a demonstrative expression by a pointing gesture, or by rendering an object salient in some other way, for example, by shaking it, wobbling it or causing a searchlight beam to fall upon it (1991: 311).

Meaning-Making

175

Exploitation of the object’s salience requires foreknowledge: it cannot be an extraperceptual content such as an after-thought, a subconscious thought, an accidental association or an unconsciously appropriated motif or gesture. So long as titles are ‘after-thoughts’, they fail the criterion of salience that Evans finds indicative of referents. So long as an artwork’s significance arrives via some contrived association, as with most artworks associated with Dada or Pop Art, its link to a particular movement or era cannot also be its referent, though of course it makes sense as a reference. One could say reference is co-present. By presuming some underlying referent, the five most prevalent philosophies of art parallel Frege’s sinn and bedeutung, whereby each artwork’s sinn, or sense, shows its meaning, and thus its referent, which is present from the beginning, if not before. Frege’s classic case concerns the way two terms, ‘Afla’ and ‘Ateb’, prove mutually interchangeable, since they refer to the same snow-capped mountain, whose divergent vantages from north and south engender alternative terms. For Frege, sinn supposedly shows or indicates bedeutung, yet sinn doesn’t necessarily convey the term. The sense indicates its correspondence to a particular reference via culturally contrived associations (a.k.a. Danto’s artworld theory).

6.6  Three-term systems In contrast to Frege’s moving from multiple sinn to singular bedeutung, Husserl shows how a singular object’s sinn engenders diverse bedeutung, as noesis (meaning-giving elements in the act) engenders particular noema (the meaninggiven element in an act) (Føllesdal 2006: 108). Frege’s project characterizes how multiple terms or descriptions reference one item, while Husserl’s approach captures each object’s capacity to indicate or evoke multiple references. The latter proves the more useful tool for grasping how curators draw attention to particular aspects of an artwork, making it possible for each artwork to be experienced in various, sometimes contradictory, contexts. When successful, each successive exhibition introduces new hypotheses, challenges accepted meanings and prompts spirited debates regarding each exhibited artwork’s significance in light of some novel frame, eventually altering the public’s understanding. Unlike Frege’s two-term system, his peer Charles Peirce proposed three twoterm relationships between an object, sign and its interpretant (object-sign, signinterpretant and interpretant-object). Since then, philosophers such as Husserl who drew a relationship between the physical object, noetic acts and noema have identified triadic systems. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing

176

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

effectively parallels Husserl’s notion of directed consciousness or ‘bracketing’, since Wittgenstein designates a relationship between an ambiguous figure (Jastrow’s duck–rabbit), some aspect (particular imagery) and each aspect’s reference (the duck or the rabbit). Wittgenstein termed the moment when one notices a different aspect the ‘dawning’ of an aspect, in contrast to the otherwise continuous seeing of an aspect. One could say that each dawning of an aspect entails a noetic act.16 When a term (or artwork in our case) depicts multiple aspects, one looks beyond its primary or secondary properties to notice the artwork’s multiple aspects. In contrast to Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing or Wollheim’s seeing as, Scruton terms this activity imaginative perception to differentiate it from ordinary perception, or seeing that.17 It is useful to distinguish Frege’s analysis of language and Wittgenstein’s focus on 2-D figures from Husserl’s and Peirce’s systems concerning 3-D objects. Despite their differences, the trios identified by Peirce, Husserl and Wittgenstein demonstrate how objects/figures, aspects (signs or noetic acts) and references (interpretants or noema) hang together in a triadic relationship. Since the dawning of an aspect gives viewers access to a particular aspect for the first time, the aspect’s reference cannot be considered prior, as Noë insists, even if it already exists in the world. For the reference to be prior, one must know inconclusively that the artist intended the aspect to represent the referent and that the artist had access to the referent. If it cannot be proven that the artist intended the aspect to represent the referent, then the aspect’s reference co-exists with both the recently dawned aspect and the circumstance, such as the art exhibition highlighting this aspect’s presence. When the aspect is inscrutable, one ratiocinates through multiple possible references, before settling on one that makes the aspect seem most sensible. Ratiocination is an act of the imagination. So, reference is prior in the sense that one can only try out those that one knows-about, is acquainted with or has experienced. However, the reference is not prior in the sense that it is hiding in the artwork, awaiting some diviner who spontaneously identifies whatever reference discloses the aspect’s meaning. If anything, it’s the other way around, whereby one’s noticing inexplicable aspects motivates the discovery of plausible references. For these reasons, one could not say that references lie dormant in artworks until someone names them. Rather, a reference exists in the world, but not in the artwork, until someone associates an artwork’s aspect with a particular reference in the world. To recognize some aspect as a rabbit-aspect is to see the rabbit-

Meaning-Making

177

aspect as a rabbit, which requires foreknowledge of some rabbit-reference. People may have noticed this rabbit-aspect shape, but failed to recognize it as a rabbit, since they didn’t think to ratiocinate rabbit-reference.18 Moreover, just because one connects some rabbit-aspect to the rabbitreference doesn’t mean that the rabbit-reference is also the duck/rabbit figure’s referent. Although aspect-seeing provides access to the aspect’s reference, the aspect’s reference is not necessarily the referent of the figure/object, however unambiguous; otherwise the whole enterprise of aspect-seeing would be redundant. One turns to aspect-seeing precisely because the figure is ambiguous. The rabbit-reference is the rabbit-aspect’s reference, not the ambiguous figure’s referent. Just as identical proper names that don’t individuate characters lack referents, ambiguous figures lack singular referents. The very act of seeing an aspect anew allows one to consider previously inaccessible references that are obviously in the world, though not yet in the work, unless one can prove salience. As already discussed, this doesn’t mean that the aspect’s reference has always been there, even if a particular such-aspect was noticed, but not identified before. Rather, this-reference doesn’t become relevant until the such-aspect induces such curiosity that it is in need of thisness. The same level of experience or knowledge that enables the dawning to be noticed is the same level of experience or knowledge that requires one to access the aspect’s reference.19 One’s knowledge of skyscrapers might lead one to recognize the way towers present in Renaissance townscapes exhibit skyscraper-aspects, but such aspects lack the salience to indicate ‘Renaissance skyscrapers’. Moreover, it is erroneous to associate ‘noticing an aspect’ with the artwork’s meaning, as if these are identical predicates. Although aspect-seeing aids meaning-making, the latter cannot be reduced to the former, though the former informs the latter. One reason the latter cannot be reduced to the former is that an ambiguous figure lacks a singular referent, since its many aspects have many references, making it impossible to know which aspect’s reference could also be the figure’s referent. It’s even more problematic to associate an aspect’s reference with the figure’s referent (or meaning), since this requires that the aspect’s reference be present at the onset. As already noted, an aspect’s reference is co-present with the aspect, not the figure, plus ambiguous figures/objects lack referents, altogether. Hence, aspects and their references remain independent from some figure and its referent. Peirce similarly emphasizes the interdependence of object, sign and interpretant, as each makes the other possible, so it’s impossible for any to be prior to the three two-term relationships entailed by the triadic system’s elements.

178

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

6.7  Frege’s legacy Exemplary of the way the presence of an aspect motivates our search for its reference, Jacques Derrida penned ‘the trace must be thought before [italics mine] the entity’ in Of Grammatology (1967) (1976: 47). For our purposes, I presume that his entity is some text, whether written or visually produced, while the trace is some reference whose very inscrutability gives the entity its sense of misplacement or its feeling of being lost on the world. In Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida clarified, ‘The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace. … In this way the metaphysical text is understood; it is still readable and remains read’ (1978: 403). Despite Derrida’s displaced trace’s lack of salience, its ‘simulacrum of a presence’ (some disfigured aspect) prompts interpreters to take notice/wonder (‘think of ’) or yearn for something whose identification (naming the reference) enriches one’s understanding of the entity. For Derrida, displaced traces are ‘still readable’, though ‘truth’ falls away, since Derridean traces sandwich sense and estranged reference as one. Rather than flat-out deny the specificity of reference as late-1960s analytic philosophers were wont to do (e.g. W. V. O. Quine’s ‘Indeterminacy of Reference’ or Donald Davidson’s ‘reference falls away’), Derrida diagnosed the trace as dislocated and displaced. In so doing, he continued Frege’s legacy in terms of philosophy’s commitment to the cognitive priority of reference. So long as reference is deemed identifiable, each aspect must also be in its place, eliminating the problem of some dislocated trace. For example, the existence of the planet Venus prompted people to coin both ‘Evening Sun’ and ‘Morning Sun’ to refer to Venus. The chronological order is the following: referent ➔ sense ➔ thoughts about r, where r is the referent. Whenever one notices Venus-sense, one thinks about Venus-referent, but when one notices aspect-sense (suchness), one can’t always access its precise reference (thisness). Derrida’s trace is an aspect that has lost its reference and its noticeability prompts one to wonder about r. Making sense of an entity requires one to make sense of its many aspects, so the more displaced traces there are, the more estranged the entity is from the world. When new senses (aspects) arise, as with contemporary art, one rarely knows exactly what they refer to, so one might sense more displaced references, aspects that could refer to anything. Despite Derrida’s identifying sense’s estrangement from reference, he still considers displaced traces to prompt thoughts, though such thoughts are more ‘thoughts of x’ than ‘thoughts about x’. I suggest replacing

Meaning-Making

179

the notion of ‘thought’ present in his dictum ‘the trace must be thought before the entity’ with either ‘noticed’ or ‘experienced’, though some philosophers consider acts of noticing or experiencing as also requiring ‘thoughts about x’. In this case, however, sense’s apparent severance from reference makes this notion of thought extremely weak, since it’s nonpropositional. Although some actions like parallel parking entail nonpropositional thinking (thinking without words), the kind of thoughts associated with sense or aspects must be propositional to be thoughts at all (Bermudez 2003). In contrast to Derrida’s project, which attempts to juggle philosophy’s faith in a fully conceptualized world (the priority of reference) with that of dislocated traces (unnamed concepts or unidentified references), one could argue that unfamiliar artworks are effectively ambiguous objects that have myriad aspects. One’s noticing aspects in need of identification inaugurates the relationship between the artwork, its aspects and their plausible references, rather than depends upon some determinate relationship between an artwork and its supposedly prior referents.

6.8 Ratiocination The question remains, how does this noticing an aspect in need of identification, which invites one to ratiocinate through possible references, compare to Derrida’s view that ‘the trace must be thought before the entity’? When one notices an inscrutable aspect, one notices traces in need of identification, so one considers (‘thinks about’) plausible references that render traces no longer displaced. Ordinary traces require one to ratiocinate references in order to identify the most plausible references, so one cannot say that the trace precedes ‘thoughts about’ it since ‘thoughts about r’, where r is reference, first require r to be identified. Traces exist precisely because something is blocking readers from thinking ‘of ’ or ‘about’ r. The urge to identify r gives rise to thoughts of r. Once aspect and reference are connected, traces and ‘thoughts about’ traces are co-present. Derrida’s main focus, however, concerns ‘thoughts of ’ traces that remain displaced. When one experiences or notices displaced traces, sense’s estrangement from reference makes ‘thoughts about’ traces rather difficult. Without knowing what the reference is, it’s impossible to prompt ‘thoughts about r’. The ‘displaced’ trace is basically a squiggle or a blob in need of a predicate. Traces therefore precede chronologically, though not cognitively, since traces prompt cognition.

180

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Like Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing, the trace is already present, but thinking about it requires more than picking it out: one must identify its reference in order to name it. Finally, the act of identifying an aspect’s possible references provides evidence that this aspect was noticed, but it doesn’t prove that any of the identified references were intended, let alone considered by the author prior to the interpreter’s having noticed some aspect in need of a reference. Rather than considering the relationship between the object and some aspect (or trace) pre-existent as Derrida suspects most do, one could view the act of noticing a figure’s ambiguity as requiring one to select those aspects that shed light on possible references, whose relevance and plausibility depend upon (1) who identifies the aspect when and (2) how the aspect is named, so aspect-naming and reference-identification are co-present. In the absence of salient referents, each interpreter, not the author, sheds light on vague aspects that prompt one to guess possible references. The whole problem of meaning seems like a chicken-and-egg-scenario, whereby the existence of unidentifiable aspects prompts one to guess useful categories and concepts (references) to make sense of traces (dislocated or not) that engender a dependence on said categories and concepts to make sense of those traces (and so forth). Do we need the reference to see the aspect or do we notice the aspect and wonder what it refers to? This ‘guessing-game’, however, is motivated less by the presence of traces in need of cover terms and more by the need to understand the artwork as a whole. Rather than arguing that traces precede thought (Derrida’s claim), aspects prompt noticings (‘thoughts of ’) or thinking provokes references (‘thoughts about’), one could admit that thought makes reference possible (rather than hopeless as Derrida worries) and makes traces seem self-evident. In this one sense, Derrida’s claim that ‘the trace must be thought before the entity’ is correct, but he unfortunately leaves out the most important steps, the ratiocination of reference. Unlike Frege, who connects sense to reference, Derrida’s dyadic system (trace and entity) excludes reference. Recall the triadic systems of Peirce, Husserl and Wittgenstein that link aspect, reference and entity. Without reference (the categories and terms invented to grasp the object’s aspects), one lacks access to the content of each trace, which offers evidence for the effectiveness of the guessed reference. The fact that the proposed reference works (or fits) suggests that it is deemed most appropriate in relationship to the misplaced trace. Derrida’s commitment to a two-term system led him to neglect reference, rather than improve upon Frege’s limited notion of reference, which allows only

Meaning-Making

181

one reference per sense. Derrida’s moving from trace to entity via thought not only reverses Frege’s order, which goes from entity to reference via thought, but his failure to implement a triadic system that toggles around reference leaves him with a system that problematically links an entity (object/figure) to its dislocated traces (inscrutable references). The triadic systems of Peirce, Husserl and Wittgenstein avoid this problem by making each internal relationship independent. Although Danto’s Case of Nine Indiscernibles, whereby nine identical canvases convey singular contents, appears exemplary of Husserl’s system, where one red square evokes multiple meanings (reference), it is rather a direct descendent of Frege’s methodology (Danto 1981: 1–3). Danto circumvents Husserl’s slant in two ways: he attributes different authors, each with his own intent, which individuates each square’s work. Had each painter made only one red square with nine possible meanings, Danto’s Case of Nine Indiscernibles would converge with Husserl’s system. Instead, a correspondence exists between each painting’s internal sense and its singular referent, a tactic Danto admitted was Frege-inspired.

6.9  Guitar lessons Given the tendency for philosophers to ascribe singular meanings derived from artists’ intentions to artworks, a particularly well-received exhibition, whose theme is identifiable and easily articulated, risks to displace each artwork’s individuated contents, guiding viewers to believe that the artists’ intentions and the curator’s hypotheses converge. In truth, four factors – artists’ intentions, curator’s hypotheses, narrative threads and artwork contents (work) – operate quite independently, though they appear to cohere when exhibitions succeed. As noted in Chapter 4, Krista Lawlor might contend that exhibitions cohere, so long as whatever reasons spectators dream up to explain the exhibition’s organizing principles prove sufficient (satisfying). It is only when reasons remain out of reach (or out of line) does the exhibition unravel, leaving one to notice some disconnect between its attendant intentions, hypotheses, themes and contents. One begins to recognize how artworks, presented in exhibitions, function as relational objects and thus gain their contents relationally. The curator who includes Danto’s fictional red square, the one titled Nirvana (1981), in ‘Elated, Exalted and Ascendant: Spiritual Painting from the Eighties’, defends its inclusion by pointing out features that lend credence to his/her view that this painting

182

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

inspires feelings of elation and exultance. This notably contradicts Danto’s claim that Nirvana refers to ‘Red Dust’, since ‘it is a metaphysical painting based on the artist’s knowledge that the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical and that the Samsara world is fondly called Red Dust by its deprecators’ (Danto 1981: 1). Even if this Samsara/Red Dust story caused the artist to paint Nirvana, this point proves irrelevant for this curator’s purpose. One could imagine Nirvana gaining its art historical significance from exhibitional contexts that stress ascendance, rather than the artist’s intention that eludes the public. Again, this demonstrates inductive reasoning at work. Like Danto’s literal Red Square, whose referent matches its description, Picasso’s cardboard guitar, Still Life with Guitar (created from paperboard, paper, string and painted wire, presented in a cut cardboard box), references only itself, as do his sixty-nine other guitar pictures.20 No one, save Danto, would worry that such charming collages lack metaphorical content. The artworld rather focuses on each artwork’s innovative technique, as underscored by ‘Picasso: Guitars, 1912-1914’ (2011), MoMA’s melodious exhibition of seventy guitar pictures (collages, constructions, drawings, mixed-media paintings and photographs) convened to announce Picasso’s inventiveness. The artworks were selected and positioned to tease out the curator’s hypotheses, which in this case is bizarrely also each artwork’s referent. Even if thousands of artists are known to have painted guitars, only Picasso is especially appreciated for his prolific guitar-art era between 1912 and 1914. This exhibition suggested that Picasso had very little to say about guitars, leaving each artwork’s meaning notably ‘banal’ or ‘empty’ as Danto might describe them. Even if all seventy guitar pictures were titled Untitled, they would both retain their historical status and still have ‘guitar’ as their referent. Danto’s Expressive View, which depends upon each artwork’s capacity to convey its content, hardly explains why Picasso’s guitars are considered ‘great’ art. Under Danto’s view, Picasso’s guitar pictures lack aboutness, though I imagine him remarking how Picasso’s particular fascination with guitars concerns their sexiness (how much guitars resemble curvy females), making Picasso’s guitar pictures on par with his many portraits of women. Strangely, Picasso’s guitar pictures fail to convey anything particularly interesting about guitars, or anything else, save how many ways there are to render guitars. But this point is gleaned more from the show’s juxtaposition of seventy artworks, bookended by two 3-D guitar pictures, than some singular experience with a mute guitar picture. Like Frank Stella’s evocative stripe paintings that prompted his famous utterance ‘what you see is what you see’, Picasso’s guitar pictures

Meaning-Making

183

point only to themselves and the myriad ways guitar-ness is depicted. I imagine Danto countering that saddling stripe paintings with such provocative titles as Die Fahne Hoch, Bethlehem’s Hospital or The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II betrayed Stella’s formalist aspirations. If Picasso’s guitar imagery fails to prompt spectators to think of anything special about guitars, then his guitars seem more like Guitar Centre advertisements, which are representational, yet fail to elicit representations. In contrast to Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres (1924) and Danto’s square red paintings, whose contents trigger thoughts, Picasso’s guitar pictures capture him ‘playing’ the guitar, manipulating imagery in dozens of ways to produce increasingly less recognizable pictures that resonate guitar-ness, however obliquely. One imagines Picasso’s guitar pictures functioning as exercises in learning how to render more abstractly. Simultaneously, he showed viewers how to recognize imagery floating in otherwise abstract scenes. Picasso’s guitar pictures provide lessons in what Wollheim termed seeing-in, which is effectively a tool for understanding. After regarding several abstract squiggles, patterns forming imagery resembling a guitar suddenly emerge from the morass. In Picasso’s case, the guitar is not a sign, but a singular referent indicated by multiple senses, in the form of guitar renderings. He used this or that technique to fashion guitars from different sinn. Picasso’s guitar pictures anticipated Frege’s 1914 letter to British logician Philip Jourdain, in which he explains how ‘Afla’ and ‘Ateb’ refer to the same ‘snow-capped mountain’. To show how ‘Afla’ relates to ‘Ateb’, Frege noted that two sinn could share the same bedeutung (one particular snow-capped mountain). Picasso’s guitar pictures also demonstrate how one well-known bedeutung (guitar) could inspire so much sinn. In contrast to Danto’s Expressive View, Picasso’s guitar-indications are neither metaphors nor empty signs, but concrete imagery that demonstrate how many imaginative ways there are to depict the same thing. Frege too seemed fascinated by the numerous ways people convey particular referents, but his project is more concerned with determining which bedeutung some sense indicates, as multiple entities can mean the same thing. Husserl’s project was just the opposite, since he demonstrated that similar signs (guitar-indications) point to various references (sexiness, female figures, curviness, fragility, music, etc.). It thus seems that Husserl’s brand of phenomenology offers the best description of how meaningacts fulfil their objects, rather than the other way around, whereby Frege’s sense (‘Afla’ or ‘Ateb’) indicates its referent (same mountain peaks). On this level, exhibitions are what Husserl terms ‘fulfilling acts’ or ‘act-complexes’ that lend artworks their meanings, however temporarily.

184

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

6.10  Husserl’s role Up to now, I have contrasted two tacks: (1) Team Frege/Danto/Derrida whose privileging of reference requires that the sense indicate its referent in order for deduction to succeed versus (2) Team Husserl/Wittgenstein/Scruton whose privileging of sense requires an interpreter’s knowledge of some reference in order for induction to proceed. As we have seen, the latter tack proves most useful for curators, who effectively perform eidetic reductions whenever they juxtapose conceptually similar artworks. Whether their focus is historical artworks, for which a worldly consensus already exists regarding meaning, history and material conditions or emergent art, the curator attributes reference to sense and locates numerous artworks that share that reference, in order to visualize it. Dagfinn Føllesdal differentiates Husserl’s three reductions: (1) eidetic reduction, (2) transcendental reduction and (3) phenomenological reduction as processes that occur chronologically, beginning with the eidetic reduction. For Føllesdal, Husserl’s notion of ‘reduction’ concerns the passage from ‘the experience of a particular concrete object to the experience of an eidos’ or essence (some concept that many objects share)(Føllesdal 2006: 109). Føllesdal remarks that ‘when we turn from observing a concrete physical object to studying one of these general features, we perform what [Husserl] called the eidetic reduction’ (Føllesdal 2006: 106). Similarly, curators, trying to make sense of particular objects, sometimes unwittingly perform an eidetic reduction to discover potential ideas that connect multiple artworks, thus helping to make sense of each. Each curator brings to the artworks certain expectations and anticipations that effectively constrain his/her capacity to experience the object as fully as possible. When the curator allows the artwork to go far beyond his/her anticipations, the artwork can be said to be transcendent. In this case, the curator has performed a transcendental reduction, which is similar to contextualism, as discussed in Chapter 4, since it’s not dependent on the visible, as schematism is. In summarizing Husserl, Føllesdal remarks that the object is not exhausted by our anticipations and it never will be. As we go on examining the object, walk around it, turn it around, explore it with our various senses[,] or with scientific instruments, our anticipations always go beyond what ‘meets the eye’ or our other senses. The object, in turn, goes beyond anything that we ever anticipate. (2006: 107)

Meaning-Making

185

The transcendental reduction concerns the transcendental structuring of particulars, some sense’s physical, perceptible qualities to discover its nonexhibited features. Having briefly differentiated noema as the meaning given in an act that is determined by noesis, which structures experience as the meaning-giving act, I now show how Husserl’s third reduction, the phenomenological reduction, aids the interpretation of artworks that are not conceptualized at the onset. Early on, Husserl employed the notion of hyle, which is effectively nonconceptualized content which noesis structures as noema (Rabanaque 2003). Føllesdal observes that ‘the hyle and the noesis have to fit in with one another: the hyle should be filling components of the noesis and correspondingly of the noema’. According to Føllesdal, those features of the object not filled by the hyle just point to further features of the object and may become filled when we go on exploring the object. These unfilled anticipations may conflict with the hyletic experience we get when we explore the object, in that case, an ‘explosion’ of the noema takes place, we have to revise our conception of what we perceive, we have to come up with another noema that fits in with our hyletic experiences. The hyle therefore constrains the noesis we can have in a given situation and thereby what noema we can have. (2006: 108)

This iterative revision, which Føllesdal ascribes to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, recalls the ratiocinate processes described earlier. The big question here concerns whether there’s ever some remaining hyle that doesn’t get filled.21 Those who believe that artworks are conceptualized at the onset or that work and world are eventually matched, so long as one repeats the phenomenological reduction until all of the hyle gets conceptualized, avoid dealing with this pesky question that concerns some ghostly remainder. Those like the painter Jean Dubuffet, who describe an artwork’s meaning like an unlimited bottle of wine, likely consider hyle infinite.

7

Artistic directors

This chapter analyses four phases (exploration, interpretation, presentation and reception) that artistic directors (conductors, curators, dancers, filmmakers, showrunners, theatre directors, etc.) cycle through when performing artworks, each of which requires a different aesthetic attitude.

7.1  The compleat cycle In the opening pages of The Compleat Conductor, conductor/composer/ musician Gunther Schuller, who claimed that each score offers its compleat interpretation, summed up the conductor’s quintessential skills thusly: Ranging from the somewhat philosophical to the specifically technical, the requisite talents and skills needed to be a fine, perhaps even great, conductor are: an unquenchable curiosity about the miracle of the creative process and about how works of art are created; a profound reverence and respect for the document – the (printed) score – that embodies and reflects that creation; the intellectual capacity to analyse a score in all its myriad internal details and relationships; a lively musical, aural imagination that can translate the abstract musical notations of a score into an inspired, vibrant performance; and on a more practical level, a keen, discerning ear and mind; a versatile, disciplined, expressive baton technique; an efficient rehearsal technique; a precise and thorough knowledge of the specific technical limitations and capacities of orchestral instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, harp, etc.) not only as functioning today but in different historical periods; and finally but not least, a basic respect for the role the musicians – artists in their own right – play in the creation of the sounds that are ultimately transmitted to the audience, artists without whose vital contributions (as many conductors in their self-glorification tend to forget) their own talents and efforts would not be expressible [italics mine]. (1997: 6–7)

188

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

So far, this text has developed an anti-essentialist view of artworks, which means that individual artworks can be presented in myriad ways. The antiessentialist curator admits that even different exhibitions with varying objects could prompt similar narrative threads. Likewise, the same object could be included in numerous exhibitions, designed to test multiple hypotheses. With too many substitutions and changes, however, exhibitions fall apart and spectators are left unable to weave narrative threads. There is never a one-to-one correspondence between a checklist, the floor plan and related narrative threads. The exact same exhibition presented in the same facility thirty years later would likely inspire audiences to weave different narrative threads, simply because the second audience’s cognitive stock differs from that of the first. Juxtaposing an exhibition with an artwork’s variability in terms of its appearance and context, former Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d’Harnoncourt told HansUlrich Obrist that she was convinced that the same work of art can have any number of different appearances. Every pair of eyes that sees it has a different experience, a different background, a different visual connection, let alone a different spiritual or mental or emotional connection. … Secondly, you can put the same work of art in rather different galleries, in different contexts; the same exhibition in one museum or in one gallery or in one place is very different from the same exhibition in another. The Brancusi exhibition, for example, to go into the past, at the Centre Pompidou and in Philadelphia, was completely different. They were both very beautiful, but they were very different. It is even more true for a contemporary artist, I think. (Obrist 2008: 180)

By contrast, Schuller, a self-avowed essentialist, views the relationship between the performance and the musical score as unchanging across ages, since whatever is essential to the score must be heard in every performance.1 He writes, ‘We must know (or at least try very hard to know) essentially why every note and every verbal annotation in that score is there, what their meanings and their functions are in the over-all work of art. In that sense the art of conducting ought to be the art of collaboration – between conductor and composer – even dead composers’ (1997: 10). Despite Schuller’s essentialist stance that scores should be conducted come é scritto (as written), his massive analysis of recordings in The Compleat Conductor demonstrates that conductors rarely do, so most conductors are rather anti-essentialist in practice. Schuller’s requirements for fine (or perhaps even great) conductors are vast, practically verging on the superhuman, yet it’s uncanny how particular points

Artistic Directors

189

from his description of the conductor (in italics above) parallel curatorial practice’s four cardinal rules introduced in the opening paragraph of Chapter 2: (1) an investment in the enduring significance of the artworks being presented, (2) a respect for the preferences of artists, living or dead, (3) the appropriate conveyance of ideas to diverse audiences and (4) empathy for various spectators’ approaches to art. Schuller’s ‘compleat cycle’ effectively cycles through the cardinal rules’ four phases, beginning with exploration (his ‘unquenchable curiosity’ and ‘respect for the document’ vs. my ‘investment in the enduring significance of the artworks being presented’), interpretation (‘analyse a score in all its myriad internal details and relationships’ versus ‘a respect for the preferences of artists, living or dead’), presentation (his ‘inspired, vibrant performance’ vs. my ‘appropriate conveyance of ideas to diverse audiences’) and reception (his ‘thorough knowledge of the specific technical limitations and capacities of orchestral instruments’ vs. my ‘empathy for various spectators’ approaches to art’), all of which facilitate curating/conducting’s being a collective art form (his ‘basic respect for the role the musicians play’ vs. my emphasizing the relational properties of curated artworks). The curator who originates the exhibition’s hypotheses, identifies the appropriate checklist and decides each artwork’s placement has a function on par with that of conductors performing their interpretation of some score, though in this case the curator performs his/her interpretation of a single artwork in concert with some set, such as each relational cluster. When functioning like a conductor, the curator strives to structure the exhibition as accurately as possible. Today’s collaborative atmosphere presents numerous opportunities for curators to act more like conductors, commissioning new scores or rearrangements of extant scores, as discussed in Chapter 5. As one can see, Schuller’s conductor’s four phases parallel those the curator undergoes as he/she imagines experiencing exhibitions from particularized perspectives. Most likely, these roles apply to all artistic directors (whether music, visual arts, theatre or film), who cycle through these phases at some point during artistic production. During the exploration phase, the curator and conductor are immersed in the world of aesthetic experiences, trying to make sense of novel, strange and even familiar artworks. During interpretation, they take on roles familiar to art historians and musicologists who develop themes/ study scores in preparation for exhibitions/performances. During presentation, they become critics/conductors who select and sequence artworks/conduct orchestras (authentically) to demonstrate the validity of their interpretation. During reception, they anticipate how art/music lovers will experience each

190

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

exhibition/performance and even devise strategies intended to help audiences overcome potential prejudices and misinformation. Some philosophers might argue that these phases are exemplary of the implied author moving from (1) researcher to (2) author, (3) presenter and finally (4) spectator, as theories bent on ‘creation’ claim.2 What I have in mind is real, not implied, since curators who cannot imaginatively transition between these roles in space and time are severely disadvantaged.

7.2 Space-time In addition to the parallels I’ve discussed between conducting and curating, curatorial practice shares several features with theatre directing and filmmaking.3 Just as particular actors inspire characters and scripts, artworks tend to influence curators’ exhibition hypotheses. Not all exhibitions convey particular stories, yet all exhibitions have a structure that unfolds in space and time, like theatre. Just as some filmmakers elect to tell true stories, while others feign novel fictions, curators too present in the range between ‘as true’ as possible and barely ‘plausible’. Like documentary films, historical exhibitions and career surveys tend to aim for truthfulness and accuracy, while contemporary thematic exhibitions can seem rather fantastical when the categories for how best to grasp and frame particular artworks are still being debated, worked out and tested. In general, the curator/artistic director analogy works well, since curatorial duties include performing or overseeing all or most of the following tasks: selecting appropriate artworks (deciding which artwork, script, score or screenplay to perform), managing commissions (commissioning new artworks or directing new performances), designing audience experiences (working with set/lighting/sound designers), writing grants or meeting with patrons (finding producers) and writing essays, didactic panels and object labels (adapting play/ opera for stage). Paul Foss, former artUS editor/publisher, remarked in his memoir The &-Files that the artistic director–collaborator model also extends to magazine publishing, where the editor/publisher functions as the line producer, responsible for managing schedules, budgets and precious egos (Foss 2009). The primary difference between the fields of curating, theatre directing, conducting, magazine publishing and filmmaking is that temporary exhibitions are entirely ephemeral. All that remains are memories, some of which become institutionalized as art history. Plays and concerts can be staged and restaged (rearranged and reperformed), so long as original scripts/

Artistic Directors

191

scores don’t vanish. Magazines come and go, though their matter can be boxed, recorded on microfilm or stored as .pdf files. Movies persist as long as master copies are stored on film, magnetic tape or laser discs. Meant more as particularized experiences, art exhibitions are rarely ‘restaged’, though museums sometimes revisit earlier exhibitions, giving audiences access to yesteryear’s polemics.4 Even when exhibitions travel to multiple venues, they bear little resemblance, as d’Harnoncourt earlier remarked, since new sites require modified checklists. Typically produced in advance of the exhibition, catalogues rarely include images of new artworks, whether commissions or last-minute additions to the show. With contemporary art exhibitions, commissions often play key roles, so their absence from public records can distort institutional memories. Of course, video documentation, dedicated exhibition websites and social media (like Instagram and Pinterest) grant exhibitions heretofore unavailable distribution and archive possibilities, but such documents barely capture each exhibition’s presentational qualities. When curators representing the different venues where the exhibition will travel compete against one another to demonstrate the most appropriate layout and context for particular artworks, including new commissions, exhibition records become even more complicated.5 Whose photo-documentations best represent the exhibition? The way curators employ similar checklists to produce competing exhibitions is like filmmakers using the same film footage to produce different or even better stories. As I have written elsewhere, ‘the hallmark of a great work of art is that it inspires several curators to organize rival exhibitions with competing themes and different participants. I say “rival”, because exhibitions unlike published essays are entirely ephemeral, so they must draw audiences and secure reviews to be remembered’ (Spaid 2010a).6 Whether restaging an entire exhibition or exhibiting components from prior exhibitions, curators sometimes claim that their version is most effective, accurate and/or profound, so as to score points for their additional efforts. The proof of such claims awaits audience reception.

7.3 Attention In Table 5, I cash out the four phases of the compleat cycle by combining aesthetic attitudes. Inspired by Kantian aesthethics, I employ the notions of interested and disinterested attention (IA and DA, respectively) when approaching and later engaging artworks to create a matrix that distinguishes four roles (attitudes/

192

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

dispositions) particular to each phase of the artistic director’s compleat cycle. According to Immanuel Kant, DA is the necessary and sufficient condition for a pure aesthetic judgement, which requires that aesthetic experience be purposive without a purpose. Table 5 thus explains why curators in the midst of working out the presentation are committed to a particular set of artworks, yet they remain open to exploring the numerous ways the artworks can be arranged to prompt the desired effects. They effectively approach the artworks with IA, which they later shake off in order to position and integrate the artworks as precisely as possible. Similarly, the artistic director anticipating spectator reception imagines visitors traipsing about the exhibition with an open mind, but eventually latching on to relational clusters that lead them to leave with evidence for particular beliefs and interested dispositions concerning the hypotheses under review. After discussing this matrix in relationship to the DA/IA debates introduced in Chapter 5, I explore how the compleat cycle’s four phases relate to this matrix. As mentioned in Chapter 5, philosophers such as Peg Brand and Ted Gracyk, perhaps in reaction to views such as Jerome Stolnitz’s formalist approach, not only recognize the difficulty of setting aside preconceived interests, but have found ways to incorporate DA into their philosophical positions (Stolnitz 1961). Brand’s brand of contextual interpretation justifies DA, so long as one toggles between IA and DA, whereas Gracyk’s Instrumental Autonomism recommends suspending personal interests, prejudices and objections long Table 5  Aesthetic Attitudes Befitting the Compleat Cycle Interested Attention – Aware Disinterested Attention – Aesthetic Attitudes of Particular Preferences Unaware of Preferences Interested 2. Interpretation After 4. Reception The curator Attention – prior selecting particular anticipates and imagines reasons, purpose artworks, the curator spectators as predisposed or motivations generates tools to help to enjoying and/or others link work and rejecting the proposed world. hypotheses. Disinterested 3. Presentation Given 1. Exploration Reluctant Attention the hypotheses that the to evaluate artworks, the – neutral, exhibition is meant to test, curator lingers as long as impartial, open the curator uses organizing possible, postponing the principles to order each moment of judgement for artwork’s placement. as long as possible.

Artistic Directors

193

enough to experience something one might reject outright. One could say that Stolnitz’s spectator who attends to an artwork disinterestedly and sympathetically, with ‘no purpose beyond that of attending to it’, sustains the exploration phase indefinitely (Shelley 2012). While in this phase, the spectator lives a purposeless existence. Once the artistic director enters the interpretation phase, every move proves purposive, as he/she generates tools for interpretation and understanding. In light of Table 5, Brand’s shifting from IA to DA parallels the presentation phase, while Gracyk’s shifting from DA to IA parallels reception. This should not be surprising, since Brand’s spectator resembles the artistic director going through the presentation phase, who must remain open, while distancing himself/ herself from artworks that especially interest him/her. Like the artistic director anticipating viewers’ responses to the future exhibition, Gracyk’s Instrumental Autonomism explains how spectators/listeners routinely overcome biases and prejudices long enough to appreciate something they wouldn’t ordinarily appreciate, something artistic directors must do both to select artworks and to anticipate how audiences might react to artworks that they admire or not!

7.4  Exploration (prolonged DA) As Table 5 indicates, artistic directors are most at home in the exploration phase. It’s not only extremely pleasurable to float in and out of this phase, but the exploration phase enables artistic directors to remain open to novel exhibitional opportunities and interpretative possibilities as long as possible, long past the moment when others expect them to have solidified their judgements. In fact, curators learn early on to keep looking, as long as possible. Marcia Tucker summed up exploration: ‘Real curiosity, I now know, doesn’t leave much room for judgement’ (2008: 58). Rather than committing to particular artworks, some curators continue debating the merits of their options, while others refrain from bearing their hand, so as not to risk aesthetic unreliability, for fear they’ll change their minds. Not only did Tucker consider it imperative that curators suspend their judgement, but she addressed how doing so leads them to discover the ‘work’s terms’, which stretches ‘understanding to meet them’. It takes a while to get the hang of it, to learn to listen carefully to what an artist is saying, to suspend judgement, to avoid thinking about whether or not you can use the art you’re looking at. When I first started going to studios, I was looking

194

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

for work that met my own terms, even if I couldn’t quite define them. But after a while, I realized that I was approaching the whole enterprise from the wrong end. I needed to find out what the work’s terms were and then see if I could stretch my own understanding to meet them. (2008: 2)

D’Harnoncourt similarly praised curators’ reluctance to evaluate, enabling them to suspend reflective judgement for as long as possible. I think the main thing is first of all to realize you never stop learning, and what you hope is that you will have a long run before you can’t see anymore, before you can only see the things that you already knew and that you were already excited about. I also think one of the great opportunities in a curator’s life is to change one’s mind [italics mine] and to see an artist’s work which one didn’t understand or one didn’t like or one couldn’t connect with 20 years ago or ten years ago and suddenly to walk around a corner and see maybe the same thing, maybe something different by the same artist and say, ‘Wow! This is something that is important to look at’. (Obrist 2008: 180)

D’Harnoncourt’s characterizing the curator as hoping for ‘a long run before [he/ she] can’t see anymore, before [he/she] can only see the things that [he/she] already knew’ recalls the notion of lingering that accompanies Kant’s reflective judgements of taste (what I’ve previously termed aesthetical judgements). Kant wrote, ‘We linger over the contemplation of the beautiful because this contemplation strengthens and reproduces itself, which is analogous to (though not of the same kind) that lingering which takes place when a [physical] charm in the representation of the object repeatedly attracts attention, the mind is passive’ (1951: 58). Tucker recalled her earliest encounter with Bruce Nauman’s 1968 video during which he repeatedly draws a bow across four violin strings tuned to the notes D, E, A and D, despite his not knowing how to play violin. Even though she initially found it tedious to watch this boring performance, she later realized that she really didn’t mind ‘being bored for twenty minutes if it [gave her] something to think about for twenty years’ (2008: 102–3). These days numerous brain scientists are researching art lovers’ brains to discover the connection between ‘lingering’ over art and activating their ‘default mode networks’ (Vessel et al. 2019). ‘These are the regions of the brain that work together when we are in a resting state – self-reflection, mind-wandering, remembering, imagination – and then they decrease in activity, for the most part, when we perform external tasks’.7 G. Gabrielle Starr, who has studied the relationship between varying lengths of exposure (really just seconds) to images and its impact on default mode networks, summarizes her results thusly.

Artistic Directors

195

What we found with the longer exposures to the images that you don’t care about, was that you get the dip with the default mode network and it lasts a while. And then you have a rebound in the default mode network which we interpreted as, ‘Wow, I’m so bored with looking at this thing that you’re making me look at and I don’t care about, oooh let me think about what’s for dinner …’ so the mind starts to wander and the default mode network comes back up. If you don’t care about the photo/image, there’s a longer latency period before the rebound of the default mode. (Vessel et al. 2019)

It’s no wonder artistic directors take their time when evaluating artworks. This process, which sustains the pleasure, risks to delay the curator’s understanding of the artwork’s contents for decades, frustrating exhibition visitors whose very first question is always, ‘What does it mean?’ The curator in reverie can only reply ‘I don’t know (yet).’ Fascinated by unfamiliar artworks, but totally unable to explain their allure, the curator lingers over them, which eventually inspires him/ her to either exhibit or write about them, which requires the curator to invent novel interpretation strategies. Awkward first-hand dalliances with particular artworks that arouse curators’ attentions, but elude understanding, tend to give rise to exhibitions.8 Once the curator has identified the hypotheses that he/she aims to test, the curator makes determinant judgements in order to select and place the constitutive artworks, which provide evidence for theories to be debated in the artworld. Determinant judgements consider particulars exemplary of some prior universal, while reflective judgement employs the imagination to invent universals in light of particulars. Exhibitions expose contents that have been overlooked, are considered imperceptible or have yet to be articulated. That curators have the capacity to suspend judgement may explain why curators tend to appreciate other curators’ exhibitions, even those that incorporate identical artworks and/or demonstrate competing narratives.9 Given Kevin Melchionne’s findings that articulated reasons alter people’s preferences, which are ultimately tied to pleasure, if not perceived pleasure, it’s not surprising that reading other writers’ assessments of artworks or exhibitions one has already written about is comparatively less pleasurable than experiencing artworks in other curators’ exhibitions. Once the curator, like the art writer, is engaged in the processes of interpretation and presentation, associated judgements impair impartiality. The curator who never stops looking delays the moment of closure, familiar to Kant’s reflective judgements, for as long as possible and prolongs, even deepens, the pleasure associated with aesthetic experiences. This not only complies with

196

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

the psychological research, which Melchionne terms aesthetic unreliability, whereby articulated reasons distort aesthetic preferences, but it explains why the interpretation process, which requires one to justify one’s selections, can seem so unpleasant. Unlike aesthetical judgements, which require ‘a more sustained mental state’ and can be never-ending, determinant judgements garner less pleasure, even when they occur spontaneously and require negligible attention (Zinkin 2012). Faced with organizing exhibitions, the curator eventually abandons his/ her reverie to make determinant judgements that guide his/her selection and placement of particular artworks to prompt the appropriate inferences. Since pleasure is maximized when one employs the aesthetic attitude to sustain the activity of aesthetic judgement, the Kantian demand for an aesthetic attitude proves plausible. As philosophers like Richard Wollheim, Brand and Gracyk have noted, difficulties arise when spectators are expected to maintain the aesthetic attitude, while carrying out those reflective judgements that aid their understanding.

7.5  Interpretation (temporary IA) In contrast to artistic directors who in their role as art lovers experience as much art as possible, critics and art historians who consider their spare time too valuable are less likely to check out emerging artists’ ‘first’ exhibitions or artists for whom there is insufficient critical material. Given the risk and speculation involved with emerging artists and the dearth of suitable artworks to evaluate, critics and historians tend to focus their attention on more established artists, whose museum surveys are framed as art historical exegesis.10 As discussed in Chapter 4, museum exhibitions either aim to override or reiterate contents established by prior art historical parameters. Paradoxically, those critics and historians who stand to benefit most from having experienced an artwork’s original context often arrive too late to experience it, requiring them to rely on presentational histories (or exhibition records) to fill in gaps. All art practices are actions (thought alone is insufficient), though not all artistic activities produce tangible items, such as installation art, videos, paintings and online art. For those who consider thinking an action, consider Hannah Arendt’s view: ‘Thinking aims at ends in contemplation and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest’ (Arendt 1981: 6). As discussed in Chapters 4 and 6, the interpretation process is not only the most taxing activity, but also the most vital. This process, which employs schematization (discussed in Chapter 4) to determine exhibited features

Artistic Directors

197

and contextualism (described in Chapters 4 and 6) to ascertain nonexhibited features, enables the curator to identify relevant themes and then select the most appropriate artworks to convey those hypotheses he/she aims to test. The burgeoning field of emergence, which explains how trends and movements get noticed, as patterns of human activity emerge and then are fed back into the artworld (via exhibitions, articles and panel discussions), clarifies how artworld reception reinforces patterns over time. When the curator suddenly appears to have moved from making reflective judgements of taste to performing determinant judgements to select artworks, he/she is often just taking advantage of the fact that exhibitions function as ‘pattern-amplifying machines’, coercing the curator to discover the underlying concepts that structure patterns (Johnson 2001: 40). As noted in Chapter 4, curators sometimes mount exhibitions whose members’ status as art (schmart) is in doubt, yet its public reception enables contents to be derived from either cognitive processes or events triggering emergent patterns. Sometimes, presented themes are so controversial that they must be mounted time and again to gain advocates. Recall the slew of exhibitions organized since 1992 to illustrate the rivalry between Matisse and Picasso, described in Chapter 4. Historians and critics have been weaving, unweaving and reweaving narrative threads ever since, facilitating the emergence of institutional memories that override earlier paradigms. When faced with alien artworks that simply defy categorization, spectators often protest, ‘This does nothing for me.’ Either they don’t find the artwork meaningful or the necessary tools for interpretation have not been provided. Even seasoned curators can feel this sense of helplessness when they experience artworks devoid of context. This mostly happens when artworks are so new that there are no helpful descriptive categories to particularize and differentiate artists’ activities, such as yesteryear’s ‘action painting’, ‘happenings’, ‘ABC art’, ‘stripe paintings’, ‘the layered look’, ‘Feminist Art’ or even ‘video art’. Furthermore, younger artists rarely admit to having great insight into their practice and there are probably only a handful of articles concerning their art, especially for those with so few exhibitions under their belts. There are even times when the artist’s statement is so obvious that it reveals little or is so vague that it begs further questions, which seem unanswerable. From the vantage of only ten years, considering the artistic activities of a decade ago makes art history suddenly seem self-evident, even though everything seemed like disordered chaos back then. This could be called the ‘Whitney Biennial effect’. Of course, the very parameters that enable one to neatly order ten years of artistic practices inevitably exclude the vast majority

198

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

of artistic activities that fail to fit the limited number of categories that arose to make sense of myriad approaches to art making. When one lives through such periods either as a gallerist eager to identify the next important artist, a critic trying to make heads or tails of the current scene, a curator keen to produce a timely exhibition or a collector treating avant-garde art like penny stocks, art history seems totally chaotic, as each player simultaneously adopts the most appropriate framing tools for himself/herself since they’re not so universally available, as they will be one day.

7.6  Presentation (IA followed by DA) Kant scholar Melissa Zinkin first pointed out how presentation, which Table 5 characterizes as exhibiting an interested approach followed by a disinterested engagement, is analogous to Kant’s purposeless representation whose form is purposive. In order to engage spectators, the exhibition’s form is no less purposive than that of an artwork’s representation. Zinkin juxtaposes the purposive form of the representation associated with the pleasure of taste against the forms of the representations associated with sensation and the morally good as follows: ‘The representation to which the pleasure of taste is related is a purposive [emphasis mine] form, whereas that of a sensation is a sensible object and that of the good is an end in which we have an interest’ (Zinkin 2012). Although philosophers tend to associate art experiences with aesthetic experiences such as contemplating, beholding or attending to, Melchionne concludes that a better theory of taste shows that taste is rather disconnected from ‘moment-to-moment aesthetic experience’ and that ‘inference from theory (both folk and academic theory) probably play[s] a considerable role in attribution, leaving us heavily reliant on the quality of these theories’ (Melchionne 2011: 11). His emphasizing ‘inference from theory’ parallels my notion of spectators weaving narrative threads inferred from exhibitions. This also dovetails with the view of artworld theories proposed by Danto ages ago, yet he strangely never indicated how artworld theories originate. As this text aims to demonstrate, exhibitions typically furnish the artworld its theories, which I revisit in Chapter 8.

7.7 Reception (DA followed by IA) Marcel Duchamp once characterized art lovers as ‘victims of an esthetic echo … comparable to that of a man in love or a believer … when touched by esthetic

Artistic Directors

199

revelation, the same man is in an almost ecstatic mood, becomes receptive and humble’. He credited persons ‘capable of hearing the esthetic echo [with playing] an essential role in the creative process’ as decoders or broadcasters (Tompkins 1996: 368–9). Unlike curators in the exploration phase, who are free to muse as long as they like until they must interpret in order to present, the curator anticipating audience reception must empathize with the process of identifying favourites and offenders, as if he/she is an art lover whose only concern is IA. In fact, explicit preferences grant art lovers admission into the community of lovers focused on shared beloveds (Irigaray 1993: 20–33). The spectators’ reception, as embodied in the exhibition experience, transcends the curator’s hypotheses, as well as supplementary exhibition documents – press releases, marketing strategies, brochures, catalogues, didactic panels and/or object labels. Having inferred the curator’s hypotheses from the artworks on view, visitors have good reasons for either affirming old beliefs or adopting new ones. In fact, Melchionne attributes ‘reason shopping’, or the quest for interesting reasons, as a primary motivation behind contemporary creativity. He notes that ‘reasons have their own beauty, which is easily confused with the works themselves. At times, what art world insiders are unwittingly experiencing are the reasons rather than the works themselves’ (Melchionne 2011: 10).11 Franz Meyer, former director of both Kunsthalle Bern and Kunstmuseum Basel, once remarked: ‘If the context of an artwork’s presentation has always mattered, the second part of the 20th century has shown that artworks are so systematically associated with their first exhibition [emphasis mine] that a lack of documentation of the latter puts the artists’ original intentions at risk of being misunderstood’ (Obrist 2008: 8). If Meyer’s observation that an artwork’s first exhibition often establishes its context is correct, then one could say that first exhibitions prove to be art historical exegesis, while later exhibitions are more curatorial exercises, meant more to propose alternative contexts than to depose history, as revisionist versions do. Even as curatorial exercises, exhibitions are driven more by a commitment to the veracity of the proposed thematic experience than to some definitive interpretation of individual artworks, what I have previously demarcated the anti-essentialist perspective. What matters most is that selected artworks are displayed in a way that demonstrates their purposeful relationship to whatever hypotheses the exhibition has been exacted to test.

8

The Übercurator

This chapter surveys the ‘curatorial crisis’, the tendency of curators to act more like artists, who not only organize exhibitions of their own invention, but commission artists to produce artworks in response to their ideas.

8.1  Artworld theories/scientific hypotheses In 1964, Arthur Danto’s essay ‘The Artworld’ identified the process whereby the artworld (comprised of multiple players, whether dealers, writers, artists, curators or collectors) proffers theories that characterize what’s au courant in the artworld, enabling spectators to discern art from nonart. Danto writes, ‘And part of the reason for this lies in the fact [that] that terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that one use of theories, in addition to discriminating art from all the rest, consists in making art possible’ (1964: 572). Danto’s notion of ‘artistic theories’ also extends to whatever categories, concepts, beliefs, hypotheses, reasons or justifications (relevant, original, risky, inventive, impressive, grandiose, monumental, underwhelming, etc.) artworlders devise in order to identify artistic activities worthy of greater attention. As noted in Chapter 3, such theories are necessary, though rarely sufficient to ensure that artworks will remain candidates for reception, especially when the art is too new to have inspired a persuasive theory, leaving curators, critics and gallerists to improvise. Despite the plethora of written material each exhibition generates, neither artworks nor their exhibitions are propositions, as theorists and curators commonly describe them, inspired perhaps by their misunderstanding Monroe Beardsley’s discussion of his Proposition Theory (PT) in Aesthetics. For the PT to be true, artworks need both an indexical part, which references what is being talked about (a subject), and a characterizing part, the what is being said about it

202

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

(the predicate) that expresses the proposition. As Beardsley points out, whatever artworks are said to propose can never be authenticated or proven, so PT can never be true. An artwork’s truth remains mere speculation. One can often determine what the painting depicts, but not what it portrays, because depiction and portrayal are not synonymous. He offers the example of a painting of a blue horse, which clearly depicts a blue horse, but there’s no evidence the painting portrays the view, ‘“Some horses are blue”, any more than “All blue things are horses”’ (Beardsley 1958: 373). If one accepts Beardsley’s argument that singular artworks are not propositions, it stands to reason that curated sets are no more propositions than their members. Although exhibitions are no more propositions than their underlying artworks, exhibitions do function as proposals designed to test which of the exhibition’s implicit hypotheses will survive as the best possible explanation(s) for the artworks on view. Related texts such as introductory panels, didactic panels, object labels, brochures and exhibition catalogues make those implicit claims rather explicit, but this hardly means that every viewer comes away with the same ideas, especially since only 7 per cent of viewers read written materials in art exhibitions. Moreover, Beardsley’s point that artists’ claims about their artworks are only acceptable when evidence for their claims can be found in their art is no less true of exhibitions. As suggested at the onset of Chapter 5, the relationship between the scientist’s lab experiment (nonpropositional) and the resulting research paper (propositional) comparing actual results to those predicted by some hypothesis offers a better analogy. One could say that the curator establishes an experiment in the form of an exhibition, which enables his/her hypotheses to be publicly demonstrated. Moreover, the exhibition is judged by a peer-review panel of sorts comprised of artists, art historians, critics, collectors, fellow curators and everybody else. If no one bothers to weigh in, the exhibition is likely to be a failure. After testing and contrasting dozens of competing hypotheses (each artist’s résumé lists groups shows perpetuating potential themes/tools for interpretation), the artworld assesses the reliability of each exhibition’s narrative thread(s) and adopts the theory that is best supported by the evidence, but this takes time, since there are always competing theories regarding various artworks, as they reappear in different exhibitions. When Danto coined the compound noun the artworld, he envisioned a subset of the real world that also posed a contrast to the philosophy world. The artworld was meant to characterize those who generate artistic theories that enable other artworlders to evaluate artefacts as artworks (Danto 1964: 580). As briefly noted, Danto never explained how

The Übercurator

203

artworld theories originate in the first place, let alone how they get distributed and dispersed across the globe. Such theories seem to be a given for him, perhaps because he views each theory as co-present with the artwork upon its arrival, as if the artworks were produced in light of some theory, rather than as exemplary of the urgent need to devise some relevant theory. The version of theory construction advanced here is a version of the Identity Theory, since the relevant theory is co-present with the artwork’s presentation, making the relevant theory present in the world that the artist inhabits, though not necessarily recognizable in the artwork, let alone known to the artist. Since theories are rarely so self-evident upon arrival, they are neither easily identifiable in the artwork nor readily applicable. With Danto’s version, however, theories get repackaged in new artistic forms, which makes them seem unrecognizable. I have in mind the consecutive arrival of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1955 Bed, Jasper Johns’ 1960 bronze Savarin can filled with paintbrushes and Andy Warhol’s 1964 plywood Brillo Boxes. Clustered together, they evoke some artworld theory concerning the way objects from everyday life double as artworks. Some theorists even justify these artworks by appeal to some artworld theory that considers readymades art, yet none is a readymade. Were it not for Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, they might not have been identifiable as art, which loops back to their association with readymades. One artworld theory that does unite them is ‘pop artists appreciated the way American design (quilts, coffee cans and Brillo boxes) hastened consumption’. Artists, who aim to create artworks whose meanings are open and are likely to change over time, should not be expected to identify those theories that their artworks purportedly endorse. Even singer-songwriters routinely notice that their songs come to mean different things over their lives. In ‘The Creative Act’, Duchamp pointed out that the artist’s ‘struggle towards the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious [emphasis mine], at least on the esthetic plane’ (1973: 139). As discussed in Chapter 4, most artworld theories that are associated with artworks originated with either exhibitions that included them or reviews, catalogue essays and/or discussions prompted by exhibitions. The very process of exhibiting artworks makes previously unknown ‘theories’ self-evident. French art critic Louis Leroy’s using the moniker ‘impressionist’ in 1874 made it possible for other Société Anonyme members to self-identify as ‘impressionists’. He hardly employed an artworld theory to justify or judge Monet’s painting as ‘impressionist’, let alone good art. Since he actually employed ‘impressionist’ to ridicule Monet’s painting, whatever artworld theories existed

204

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

proved insufficient to prompt that era’s salon juries to appreciate their paintings. Even so, the more historical the artwork or the more an artwork resembles some recent trend, the more likely an artworld theory abounds that enables people to apply it to see whether this artwork is exemplary of that theory. Some theories are less the kind of tools that help one see random paint daubs as a beloved’s portrait and more the kind that explain why people treat some events, but not others as art. The very notion of an artworld minimally requires artworks, mentors and/or documents that convey some canon (past theories) for later artists to finesse, revise, tweak or overturn. Although most philosophers consider the idea of an artworld a recent phenomenon, even ancient artisans and artists belonged to guilds or schools that emphasized appropriate attitudes, skills, narratives and values (Spaid 2010c). Whether craft or art, established conventions and patron preferences/needs/expectations constrain and/or motivate production. The process that determines whether an exhibition’s narrative threads matter (are worth taking seriously) requires that they gain credence among artworlders. With exhibitions, there should be less of a gap between what exhibitions depict (relational clusters) and what they portray (narrative threads) than is the case for artworks, since exhibitions aim to ferret out, rather than spawn empirical concepts. Unlike the artist, the curator is typically available to explain what he/she expects spectators to take away. As I have tried to show, spectators may identify what the exhibition portrays, but that doesn’t meant they will believe that this particular frame merits consideration at all. Exhibitions whose themes, motives or agenda are pure whimsy, obvious or self-serving can be appreciated as good fun, but their narrative threads are rarely considered potential candidates for theories with sticking power, let alone contenders for future paradigms.1 In light of Danto’s calling nonart received as art ‘flukes’, exhibitions mounted for fun, yet still taken seriously, must also be flukes (Danto 2008a).

8.2  The curator as ‘meta-artist’ Although I am familiar with the decades-long debate concerning ‘rock-star’ curators wielding greater power than artists and critics alike, the model of curatorial practice presented thus far eschews such a view, since its claims neither validate nor sustain this approach, whose only purpose is to frame artists and curators as rivals, rather than as partners with shared goals and aspirations.2 It’s worth noting, however, that few resist calling canonical filmmakers, as well as

The Übercurator

205

cameramen, costume designers or filmscore composers ‘artists’, perhaps because they produce something out of whole cloth, rather than mould the efforts of others, as score arrangers, theatre directors and conductors do. In the artworld, the honorific ‘artist’ is traditionally reserved for visual artists and not the curator or slew of behind-the-scene collaborators, though perhaps exceptional exhibition designers and lighting designers could be called artists.3 As mentioned in Chapter 2, the curator’s purview is primarily mental, unlike the cameraman, costume designer and score composer, whose contributions are comparatively physical. Like scientists, detectives and philosophers, curators aim to establish some truth that is ordinarily out of reach. Of course, people also accord this role to visionary artists like Paul Klee who famously said, ‘Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.’ Although curators and artists are both in the process of shedding light on otherwise imperceptible features of our world, they pursue different time frames. As noted in Chapter 3, curating’s time frame addresses the past, even when artworks to be included in the exhibition are not yet produced. Unlike artists, who direct their gaze far into the future, curators probe what has already happened, is still happening or happens precisely because something else happened first. Despite their time frame’s opposing directions (forward vision versus backward glance), both artistic and curatorial practices require extremely well-developed imaginations in order to accomplish their respective missions. In Chapter 5, I characterized artworks as relational objects, rather than autonomous objects produced by lone authors; and characterized exhibitions as collective, rather than produced by some auteur. In fact, lone-author theories that accredit reception to authors’ efforts prove far stricter than film’s Auteur Theory, whose primary purpose is to single out each filmmaker’s particular style as a feature of his/her film, which also relates to curatorial practice. So, why is Swiss curator Harald Szeemann regularly hailed as an auteur?4 Is it his inimitable style or something else? Szeemann initially gained fame for setting a precedent for the curator as artist-collaborator, whose input as a participant influences the artist’s output. Consider curator/artist Paul O’Neill’s assessment of his influence: While Hans-Dieter Huber suggests that the ‘shift in or confiscation of significance’ from curatorial practice towards meta-artistic behaviour, from Harald Szeemann onwards, has been responded to by artists in their own work as they ‘attempt a leap to this meta-level of the curator’, using curatorial selection and gallery arrangements to ‘produce their unmistakable, artistic and societal style on this meta-level’. … Justin Hoffmann counters that the dominance of

206

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

a ‘curator as meta-artist’ has been replaced by three newer models: curators who realize exhibitions without artists; curators who do not curate anything [emphasis mine], but instead initiate projects and gather participants together; and curators who initiate projects with artists but without art, where the primary aim is to set art-producing processes in motion, rather than present finished products. (2005a: 35)

Huber’s remark suggests that artists only started curating exhibitions after Szeemann, though of course artists have been presenting curated exhibitions since the 1800s. Not only did Claude Monet present fifteen haystack paintings at his 1891 exhibition but Duchamp curated several exhibitions between 1917 and 1953 and arranged for his artworks, including Étant donnés, to be exhibited en masse at the PMA. And Justin Hoffmann’s three approaches to curating rather recall professional tastemakers, as discussed in Chapter 2. In The Culture of Curating and Curating Culture(s), O’Neill not only calls curators artists but also specifically identifies Lucy Lippard, Brian O’Doherty, Seth Siegelaub and Szeemann as exemplars. Such a view seems far-fetched, especially since these curators are revered for having respected and acted on artists’ behalfs. That Siegelaub considered his role to ‘find new structures and conditions to be able to show their work’ (O’Neill 2012: 25) belies O’Neill’s assessment. Despite Lippard’s innovative exhibitions and catalogues, she too built her reputation working alongside artists. O’Neill views curators as artists, but only because he built this assessment on four premises that have been repeatedly disputed throughout these pages: (1) ‘independent exhibition makers’ arose in the 1960s (2012: 16), (2) the thematic group show is a relatively recent phenomenon (since the 1980s) (2), (3) curators increasingly occupy centralized positions and are less caretakers of art (2–3) and (4) ‘art as material practice became inseparable from art as discursive practice’ (18 and 23). Problem is that O’Neill considers ideas the ‘primary medium of artistic production’, so apparently anyone ‘involved in producing and employing ideas as their medium’ is an artist (18). As this text has repeatedly shown, exhibitions are collective affairs, so Szeemann’s role as a collaborating curator hardly qualifies him as an auteur, who exhibits ‘meta-artistic behaviour’ as his fans and critics alike assert.5 Barry Barker, who saw ‘Attitudes’ at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art fifty years ago, confirms the view presented here. He noted how ‘this exhibition was and still is a prime example of a curator responding to the work of contemporary artists, letting the artists provide the initiative rather than the curator imposing their personal theories or worldview, as often happens today’ (Barker 2010).

The Übercurator

207

Despite Szeemann’s reputation for exhibiting ‘meta-artistic behaviour’, ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ was hardly the first exhibition where the curator worked directly with artists to present artworks especially commissioned for some site, as opposed to presentations of extant artworks, shipped from their current location.6 In fact, it was that era’s ninth exhibition (out of fourteen presented 1967–9) to feature in situ artworks; that is, artworks produced on site, rather than transported from elsewhere (Spaid 2017: 69). Two months after Szeemann’s show opened, the Whitney Museum of American Art premiered the similarly themed ‘Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials’ (curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte) and within a year, two more American exhibitions highlighted in situ artworks. ‘Spaces’ (1969–70) at MoMA, curated by Jennifer Licht, featured six room-size artworks, and Kynaston McShine invited artists to work directly on the walls of the Jewish Museum for ‘Using Walls’ (1970), yet no one calls these curators ‘auteurs’. No doubt, Szeemann had a fabulous imagination and produced wonderfully popular and innovative exhibitions. Even so, he was hardly some auteur orchestrating artists to do his bidding, let alone exhibiting the kind of gesamtkunstwerks for which Christian Leigh gained notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s.7 Like Tucker, Licht and McShine, Szeemann presented artworks that enhanced the agency of artists, whose visibility spurred future opportunities, while audiences appreciated his playful interventions, thus facilitating the goals of artists and sponsors alike. Prior to Szeemann’s organizing ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, he had already curated twenty-one solo exhibitions, ten group exhibitions and four thematic exhibitions, so he was already a seasoned curator. What distinguishes curators from curators as ‘meta-artists’ is that the former sometimes fabricate or install artworks on behalf of artists, whereas the latter actually initiate exhibition themes independent of available artworks and commission/reorient artworks to illustrate their themes, treating exhibitions as their personal artworks. As I have stressed all along, the curatorial is not the personal. In short, the curator as ‘meta-artist’ violates at least two of the four cardinal rules for curatorial practice: (1) an investment in the enduring significance of the artworks being presented and (2) a respect for the preferences of artists, living or dead. Even though most of the artworks in ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ were commissioned, each artist initiated his/her own project, perhaps to accommodate some spot assigned by the curator, though not to further the curator’s personal artistic aspirations. Being the ninth such exhibition, it wasn’t particularly original as an exhibition, let alone an artwork.

208

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Only curators who refuse or fail to work on behalf of artists can be said to exhibit ‘meta-artistic’ behaviour. I worry that those who attribute this ‘meta-artist’ approach to Szeemann misunderstand curatorial practice, given its dependence on collaborative processes. No doubt, Szeemann probably didn’t discuss every last detail regarding his all-encompassing exhibitions with every artist whose artworks he aimed to feature. Still, he would never have had access to those artworks he sought, had he abandoned the four cardinal rules of curatorial practice, discussed in Chapter 7, or failed to exercise a heightened sense of care. On 12 May 1972, this point became patently clear when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a letter signed by ten artists whom he had invited for ‘documenta 5’ condemning Szeemann for ‘misusing’ their artworks in order to ‘illustrate misguided sociological principles and categories of art history’.8 Four out of ten signatories abstained from ‘documenta 5’ altogether. No doubt he heard their protest loud and clear and thought twice the next time he envisioned forcing a square peg in a round hole absent the artist’s consent. As noted in Chapter 4, exhibitions are the medium in which artworks are presented. In 1996, Szeemann wrote, ‘My life is in the service of a medium and this medium isn’t the image, which is itself reality, but the exhibition that presents reality [translation mine]’. The curated exhibition permits the visualization of reality, which is no longer a set of mysterious signs and objects. Szeemann continued: In the life of all that is human, there exists a point where each sign becomes immediately intersubjective – and is no longer opposed at the time to the accumulation of signs and objects, but is also intense. … This is the adventure of each exhibition, that of the meeting with the work and the artist, of the relationship to place, of the visualization according to conviction, which is equally the hope that the gradual profanities (which are always later sanctioned as existing prior to the art) will occupy the changing of minds over time. (Baudson 2005: 12–13)

Although Szeemann doesn’t address any of the Chapter 2 features indicative of curated exhibitions, such as set membership, organizing principles, constituency, inferential properties, floor plans, exacted exhibitions, beliefs and common knowledge, he clearly recognized each artwork’s relational properties (entangled as they are in the ‘meeting’ of work, artist, place and visualization). For him, the curator’s visualizing ‘according to conviction’ capably transforms intense accumulations of inscrutable signs and objects into meaningful experiences that eventually influence spectators’ beliefs regarding exhibited artworks.

The Übercurator

209

Despite Szeemann’s reputation as an auteur, regularly concocting ever more fantastical themes and implausible exhibition schemes, he hardly worked alone. In fact, he ran his curatorial practice the way many artists run their studios. His office, purposely situated in the remote Swiss town of Ticino, employed numerous staff members who helped him to carry out his regular commissions. Between 1957 and 2004, he originated between two and three exhibitions each year. The sheer number of exhibition collaborators, which has been discussed throughout this text, not least the living artists or artwork lenders, should make anyone suspicious of the auteur model’s relevance to Szeemann’s success. My own view is that Szeemann was an inventive curator whose exhibitions played a key role in conceptualizing artworks produced by scores of artists, who gained prominence between 1960 and 2000. Had his curating behaviour really been that of a ‘meta-artist’, his exhibitions would have been deemed writerly texts, incapable of providing viewers the requisite tools for interpretation and understanding necessary for grasping that era’s rapidly changing developments in contemporary art. His projects (hundreds of exhibitions in Europe, including ‘documenta 5’ (1972) and two Venice Biennials (1999 and 2001), where he co-launched the ‘Aperto’ section in 1980) helped to shape the way several generations of art collectors, museum curators and art historians the world around approached the art of their times. Were Szeemann a ‘meta-artist’, we would still be in the dark regarding the artworks presented in his exhibitions. He rather created exhibitions that enabled people to witness otherwise unexhibited features and even machines that were otherwise imaginary. As mentioned in Chapter 2, curated exhibitions aim to narrow the gap between what the curator proposes and what spectators infer, something that is not true of uncurated exhibitions, let alone auteur’s exhibitions received as artworks. When the curator doubles as ‘meta-artist’, we glean little from the exhibited artworks, which remain inscrutable signs, a set of objects awaiting interpretations, further disrupting/disguising whatever theme or methodology the curator qua artist expects its spectators to explore. This runs counter to Szeemann’s notion of exhibitions, whereby ‘signs become immediately intersubjective’, as they are no longer opposed to the accumulation of signs and objects.

8.3  A curatorial crisis Given Hoffmann’s perspective, as described by O’Neill above, one can see why Dave Hickey and others dismiss curators as mere herders. However,

210

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

as demonstrated in Chapter 4, curatorial practice is hardly analogous with corralling, assembling or herding desired objects and situations into the same arena. Such misconceptions recall earlier attempts to draw an analogy between curators and collectors filling and/or rearranging curiosity cabinets/home galleries, an analogy that fails precisely because it neglects methods used by curators to select and position artworks, so as to structure experiences on behalf of artists and spectators alike. Given Hickey’s criticism of curators and especially any expectation that curators contribute anything that remotely resembles the particularized notion of curatorial practice presented thus far (devising specific ways to conceptualize artworks, posing relational clusters, presenting thematic displays and organizing exhibitions to meet the imagined interests of diverse publics), I suspect that he would happily reject my characterization of curated exhibitions. I imagine that many more readers will reject my thesis as being far too restrictive, a criticism I am prepared to accept, especially if this text inaugurates a long-overdue discussion about what curatorial practice entails and what curated exhibitions do and do not do. Even if Hickey and his ilk agree that exhibitions do what I claim they do, they would surely baulk at the notion of curators employing some organizing principle to exact exhibitions, let alone actually adhering to the four cardinal rules introduced in Chapter 2’s opening paragraph.9 Were Hickey to outright dismiss my characterization of curated exhibitions, one could admonish him for being disingenuous, partly because he has produced several curated exhibitions, notably the 2001 Santa Fe Biennial, which did exactly what this text has been describing all along. I imagine, however, that his primary worry concerns curators exerting their authority over artists and especially spectators, two worries that my approach aims to mitigate. His secondary criticism of curatorial practice concerns the presumed symmetry between presentation and reception, which my thesis denies. By constructing a vision of exhibitions such that reception subsumes presentation, I rely on the public to hold sway as meaning umpires, who accept, reject or counter the curator’s proposed tools for interpretation and understanding, as well as the curator’s selected set of artworks. Unlike investors, collectors and even some art critics, who respond according to their passions and interests, curated exhibitions require curators to act on behalf of some principle that goes beyond his/her personal taste. Unlike the model proposed by Hickey, who believes that exhibition makers are hired to select artworks based on their preferences, not some contrived theme, the model described herein captures curators employing rules derivable from selected artworks.10 For Hickey, the curator’s claim to rule-following or organizing

The Übercurator

211

principles makes overtures to objectivity that exerting one’s preferences doesn’t disguise. Still, what makes rule-following objective is not rule-following, per se, but that the exhibition’s organization prompts a public debate concerning whether the curator’s proposed hypotheses and accompanying tools for interpretation and understanding work well or not – a criticism that exhibition makers exerting their preferences easily avoid, since sheer taste trumps criticism. As philosophers since David Hume have known, there is no accounting for taste, so one cannot be held accountable for one’s preferences. Public scorn/art criticism can neither reform nor amend poor taste, as it might poor judgement. However transparent the exhibition maker’s decisions, his/her taste remains immune. Not so the curator who is beholden to some organizing principle, whose formulation is embedded in the identification process itself, long before most selections get made. Hardly an arbiter of taste, the curator both judges and explicates what makes an object, action or situation worthy of being included. Like the artist who exhibits his/her artworks, and thus risks having his/her artworks rejected as candidates for reception, the curator is held accountable for the validity of the hypotheses inferred from the exhibition. Perhaps the absence of tools for distinguishing uncurated exhibitions, as well as the rise of post-millennium curators who outright reject restrictions associated with curated exhibitions, has inspired additional anxieties. As briefly mentioned, depending on how people view Szeemann’s practice, he is villified or lionized for having eroded the boundaries between curator and artist. No doubt, his daringly titled ‘In Search of a Total Work of Art’ (1983), which travelled to four public institutions and later inspired several localities and nations to commission him to orchestrate massive thematic exhibitions to explore every aspect of their cultural identities, sure sounds like the work of a megalomaniac meta-artist.11 Curator J. J. Charlesworth claims that today’s crisis of ‘the übercurator as “author”’ ‘stems from the lack of definition regarding the limits of curating. The reverse of this, the artist as curator similarly emerges from the collapse of any useful distinction between the work of artists and the work of curators’ (2006: 3). Here, she is not addressing the sticky issue of European ‘author’s rights’, which I briefly mentioned in the Preface. She rather worries that the work of curators and artists lacks delineation, which I don’t view as a problem, since making art is totally different than presenting it. The artist curating his/her exhibition is an exhibition curator, while exhibition makers whose exhibitions lack organizing principles are exhibiting either an uncurated exhibition or installation art, which the spectators adjudicate. Charlesworth’s philosophical paradox resembles the

212

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

medieval philosopher’s problem of matter (Szeemann’s ‘accumulation of signs and objects’) and form (Szeemann’s ‘visualization according to conviction’), whereby form structures matter, so both remain distinct, not interchangeable as contemporary art theorists worry. Artists provide matter and curators procure form (curating structures artworks), although the forms need not be so tightly moulded as my model suggests. So long as the three types of curators Hoffman envisions grant matter form, they too are curating. In re-examining his concerns, one might ask how is it that ‘curators … realize exhibitions without artists; curators … do not curate anything, but instead initiate projects and gather participants together; and curators … initiate projects with artists but without art?’ I imagine this situation has little to do with some ‘curatorial crisis’ and more to do with artists’ reluctance to create or propose artworks until projects requiring them to devote brain power and material resources are confirmed. Since it is impossible for curators to realize exhibitions without artists, perhaps he means that the opportunity/concept precedes the prepared list of invitees. This worry seems unfounded, since once the curator starts involving artists, the curator’s project will change drastically. Perhaps it is the very formlessness of so many recent exhibitions that has engendered the crisis of the übercurator, whose exhibitions tend to verge on unformed matter. One controversial exhibition that comes to mind is Peter Eeley’s ‘September 11’ (2011), which one online critic lampooned as the curator’s ‘personal-art-exhibition-cum-think-piece about post 9/11 America’.12 Presented at MoMA PS1 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center assault, loads of people criticized the curator’s decision to include several artworks created long before 9/11, something that seemed ‘wrong’ for an exhibition organized to reflect upon a later event. What the inclusion of older artworks rather revealed were the underlying tensions and unease numerous New York artists were feeling, long before the City was actually struck, as if artists were already imagining and preparing for impending doom. With its dramatic soundtrack (John William’s score for The Patriot) bleeding through every gallery, Eeley’s exhibition emanated an overwhelming sense of eeriness that invited one to experience this set of more than seventy artworks by forty-one artists from a vantage one would probably not consider otherwise. Despite its unusually theatrical presentation, it hardly seemed the work of some ‘meta-artist’, as his critics claimed. He followed the three principles for curated exhibitions, posted at this chapter’s end, to a tee. Despite the theatricality of Eeley’s exhibition, ‘September 11’ presented a collection that offered far more than the sum total of its members, as each artwork

The Übercurator

213

played off another to evoke dread and melancholy. Eeley’s exhibition was hardly an artist’s collection, like those mentioned in Chapter 2, whose accumulation as an aggregate adds both intrinsic and extrinsic value to set members. This spectator gained insight both into the artworks’ alternative readings and into the historical conditions that made rebounding from this tragedy an inevitable feature of the New York state of mind. ‘September 11’ was hardly an example of installation art, since no one felt compunction to interpret it as a whole, some complete entity comprised of individual objects. Charlesworth’s worries regarding the übercurator as ‘author’ vaguely recall the anxiety that spurred George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art, whereby one imagines him hastily accrediting ‘status-conferrers’ with deciding what passes for art, since he himself could offer no alternative explanation for artworlders’ bizarre selections. One also wonders whether the roles of artists and curators were ever so clearly delineated as we imagine they once were. Perhaps the curator’s initial relative obscurity minimized any anxiety regarding the curator’s infringing on the artist’s territory. Until the late 1960s, only a handful of curated exhibitions, such as the three Surrealism exhibitions (1939, 1942 and 1947) that Duchamp curated, were particularly experimental in terms of either the curator’s choice of artworks or the exhibition’s manner of display. Only a handful of curators have taken such risks by presenting not-yet deemed art objects as art (recall MoMA’s ‘Machine Art’ (1934) and ‘Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism’ (1936–7), discussed in Chapter 4). Some exhibition makers do risk becoming meta-artists, who produce exhibitions that are effectively artworks in need of an interpretation. I next discuss how some artists attempt curating, yet rather produce their own artworks, and thus encounter this ‘curatorial crisis’ in reverse.

8.4  Überartists As emphasized throughout these pages, artists fulfil curatorial roles whenever they organize exhibitions of their own art, generational peers or artworks by colleagues, whose practices provide a context for their own. In this spirit, Damien Hirst is still lauded for having curated ‘Freeze’ (1988), which introduced the world to Young British Artists (YBAs) and included artworks by his many now-famous, though then-unknown peers.13 Former museum curators Terry R. Myers, Julien Robson and Robert Storr were all initially trained as artists, rather than as art historians, which no doubt influences how they engage artworks and organize exhibitions. And many more artists like Robert Gero, Theresa

214

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

Hackett and Mark Harris routinely don curatorial hats so as to explicate their peers’ practices, while gaining insight into their own oeuvre along the way. Artists taking an interest in one another’s artworks and organizing exhibitions to contribute to their artworks’ interpretative schemes is exemplary of artists’ magnanimous acts. Artists have also been known to create exhibitions using other artists’ artworks that play with the notions of mash-ups, DJs or call-and-response, thus presenting exhibitions that offer unexpected presentations, rather than providing particularized interpretative schemes. I recall three such exhibitions, where artists employed artistic principles as their organizing themes, yet the exhibitions still showed respect for the enduring significance of artworks, as well as artists’ preferences. In 1993, John Cage curated ‘Rollywhollover A Circus’, for which the exhibition was rehung daily, using chance operations to select each day’s checklist, as well as each artwork’s location, from a predetermined subset of Los Angeles MOCA’s collection. In 1999, artists working like DJs, who sample others’ music to create their own compositions, created ‘Re-Mix’, weekly exhibitions at Popular Mechanics, a Los Angeles exhibition space inside a car garage by presenting either a mix of fresh artworks (or just one artwork) or a mix of existing artworks surrounded by replacements. For ‘Answer Yes, No, or don’t Know,’ nearly a dozen artists worked over eight weeks to create the 1999 group exhibition for New York’s Andrew Kreps Gallery. After numerous artists installed their art cumulatively as ‘Quadrants’ (occupying the corners), Layers’ (occupying horizontal levels) and ‘Transparency’ (innocuously installed) for two weeks each, Ricci Albenda, the final artist-curator, reinstalled everyone’s artworks.14 Hardly artist-curated group exhibitions, these charming exhibitions were effectively artists’ projects, organized around principles of display/design or sheer whimsy, eschewing the typical curator’s approach. In each of these cases, one wouldn’t be surprised to hear the exhibition organizer refer to it as his/her exhibition, the way artists do, which holds for curators working collectively. The überartist, by contrast, engages artworks in a manner closer to that of artist-curators or artists creating novel presentations comprised from numerous artists’ artworks. The überartist claims to be curating an exhibition on behalf of other artists, but incidentally produces an artwork culled from other artists’ artworks awaiting interpretations, no differently than the example of installation art, discussed in Chapter 2. Whether such outcomes are intentional or accidental is indeterminable. Even if an überartist’s exhibition fails as a curated exhibition, it could fly as a fabulous new artwork, as spectators scramble to interpret it. The

The Übercurator

215

judgement of its success as an artwork is subject to totally different criteria than its success as an exhibition. By contrast, the curated exhibition’s capacity to demonstrate its ideas, meet expectations and facilitate observation reinforces its having been modelled on scientific argument, as discussed in Chapter 5 and its adherence to the three principles developed in Chapter 2. I. Designed to test the curator’s hypotheses, a curated exhibition presents particular artworks in a manner that makes the organizing principle(s) visible. II. To aid spectators’ capacity to link artworks to the world, curators create relational clusters that illuminate adjacent artworks’ shared references. III. Exacted exhibitions enable audiences to experience artworks in a particular way. If there is a curatorial crisis, it concerns the way curators forego these three principles, while violating all or some of curatorial practice’s four cardinal rules, and then wonder why no one appreciates their efforts or wants to work with them.

8.5 Agency Widespread fears that the curator–artist divide has disappeared forever continue to fan the flames of institutional critique. In light of these concerns, as well as the more legitimate worry that curators routinely step on artists’ toes, I offer artist Andrea Fraser’s modest proposal. In 2005, she published ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ in Artforum. Rather than accredit institutional authority to some anonymous agent or notorious gatekeeper, Fraser, as an artist, suggests that everyone take full responsibility for whatever decisions and practices institutions champion. Fraser admonishes: Every time we speak of the institution as other than ‘us’, we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. … It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. (2005)

Implicit in her remarks is the view that everybody is responsible, both as artworld collaborators and as members of the public. Despite artworld criticism

216

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

that Fraser’s vantage is too privileged to warrant accepting her position as one that grants everyone a role in the artworld’s destiny, I consider her position as bridging Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential ethics, whereby each person must carry out only those actions that he/she wants to preserve as models for others to follow with Hannah Arendt’s notion that freedom arises where the ‘I will’ and ‘I can’ coincide. Artworld institutions are a matter of choice, not default. And as I noted in the Preface, this was precisely the Fergersons’s view when they curated ‘African American Representations of Masculinity’ (1995) for three Los Angeles venues as their alternative to ‘Black Male’ (1995), curated by Thelma Golden, on view at the Hammer Museum. Giving credence to Fraser’s concerns about this institution of critique, or rather institutionalized critique, Iris Marion Young defined political responsibility as ‘a responsibility for what we have not done’, a view she borrowed from Arendt’s having distinguished political responsibility from the liability model that assigns blame (2004: 377). Taking responsibility for what we have not done means also attempting to do what we should do (or should have done), rather than critiquing the system as a matter of course. Young noted that political responsibility is ‘more forward-looking than backward-looking’, since it ‘seeks not to reckon debts, but aims rather to bring about results; and thus depends on the actions of everyone who is in a position to contribute to the results’ (378). She concluded that political responsibility, unlike collective responsibility, is a shared responsibility since the ‘former is a distributed responsibility whereas the latter is not’. Here Young departed from Arendt who viewed collective responsibility as sufficient to protect political responsibility from being insoluble to self-conscious collective actions of individuals. In light of Young’s view, every artworld stakeholder, as opposed to its collectives and communities, is responsible for what they have not done.15 She observes: A collective of persons, such as a corporation, might be said to be responsible for a state of affairs without any of its constituent individuals being responsible as such. Shared responsibility [emphasis mine], on the other hand, is a personal responsibility for outcomes or the risks of harmful outcomes, produced by a group of persons. Each is personally responsible for the outcome in a partial way, since he or she alone does not produce the outcomes; the specific part that each plays in producing the outcome cannot be isolated and identified, however and thus the responsibility is essentially shared. (2004: 380)

Since responsibility cannot be distributed across artworld collectives or communities, it falls on the shoulders of every artworlder to responsibly

The Übercurator

217

guide the artworld’s future actions. According to Young, partaking in shared responsibilities requires each stakeholder to bear a partial responsibility for the ‘outcomes or the risk of harmful outcomes, produced by a group of persons’ (2004: 380).16 I made a similar claim with my 2010 paper ‘Amending Museums’ Biases Against Working Collectively and Exhibiting Collectives’, which noted that responsibility held by a particular collective’s members cannot be distributed. Values and property can be owned or distributed communally, whereas collective action is neither owned nor distributable. One feels responsible for the poor performance of a member of his/her community, while one picks up the slack for the poorly performing member of his/her collective. Collectives are temporal groups, formed with the goal of carrying out a particular project, while communities strive to last until the community’s needs change. (Spaid 2010b)

In that same paper, I distinguished the ‘collective’ as ‘made by a number of individuals taken or acting as a group’ from the ‘communal’, which means ‘of, relating to, or belonging to the people of the community’. (Spaid 2010b)17 As a result, every artworlder bears political responsibility not as members of some exhibition collective (the team assembled to organize an exhibition) or as community members (exhibition visitors), but as actual stakeholders who freely take a stake in what matters in light of their values, commitments and goals. Similarly, museums are owned by their communities (museum members and localities, etc.). Thus, Fraser’s appeal to the responsibility of individual artworlders, who are occasionally members of the very same institutional collectives drawing fire from the ‘institution of critique’, totally aligns with Young’s notion of political responsibility. But one can also see how it risks smacking of insider-behaviour, since the vast majority of artists feel totally excluded from exhibition collectives, though probably not museum communities. Weary of Fraser’s suggestion that everyone take responsible action, Charlesworth responds, ‘In the sense that [Fraser] makes a claim for criticality as a form of insider self-consciousness about the limitations of art practice, with a liberal helping of guilt thrown in, her defence of institutional critique reflects a broader state of discontented self-awareness of the limits and potentials of art and its presentation, among those who make up its personnel’ (2006: 3). What I rather sense from Fraser’s modest proposal is that all artworlders have agency as participants in the artworld, which is not necessarily the case for members of institutional collectives that ‘act as a group’. Rather than criticize, complain or bemoan the institutions themselves, artworld stakeholders are free to outright

218

The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice

boycott or reject those institutions that fail to serve their goals and values. Doing so effectively resigns oneself from the institution, requiring existing/new stakeholders to pick up the slack. When this happens in spades, the institution will eventually get the picture, if not collapse altogether. Instead of boycotting/ protesting institutions or practicing callout/cancel culture, it’s even cleverer and more productive to organize alternative exhibitions that reflect one’s goals and aspirations. Finally, all artworlders, even those who don’t exhibit in museums, participate as members of the viewing public, even if they are not official members of the museum’s community, which includes some combination of staff, dues-paying members, trustees, corporate sponsors and those strawmen gatekeepers who ensure/mandate business as usual. Duchamp launched this approach dozens of times during the twentieth century: when he exhibited Fountain to test the Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition rules, when he published ‘boxed sets’ that explored his references and source material, when he created replicas of lost artworks, when he curated exhibitions of peers’ artworks, when he designed exhibition catalogues and when he ensured that his artworks would remain on view in perpetuity. One outcropping of the Occupy Movement is the view that constructing alternatives requires resources unavailable today’s cash-strapped, emerging artists who leave art school burdened by student-loan debt. Others argue that organizing exhibitions requires access to spaces, the press, artists and possibly patrons, factors that remain far from the realm of possibility for most young artists. Still, the model of artists organizing their own exhibitions, long before either curators come on the scene or critics and patrons notice their art, is a time-honoured model. Even if organizing a DIY exhibition is unlikely to land one’s artwork in the next Whitney Biennial, it’s a tried and true format for artworld participation. Even so, such exhibitions teach emerging artists about the power of public exhibitions, collaboration and especially spectatorship, experiences that will no doubt influence their artistic production and prepare them to collaborate with curators in a manner that enhances their agency.

Notes Preface 1 In the sixteenth century, Montaigne remarked, ‘There is more work in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things; and more books about books than on any other subject; we do nothing but write glosses on one another’ (Foucault 1994: 39). 2 Although Mieke Bal criticizes ‘linguistic imperialism’, she considers exhibitions ‘expository discourse’ (112 and 128) and regularly uses literary terms such as ‘text’ (111), ‘reading walls’ (118), ‘working like words’ (112), ‘sentences’ (115) and ‘the utterance of exposing’ (128). For Bal, the curator is an expository agent engaged in discourse via the exhibition, which serves as the curator’s voice (1996).

Acknowledgements 1 Spaid (2016) and Ventzislavov (2016).

Chapter 1 1 As will become clear, artwork titles are proper names. By contrast, Titleism grants meaning to titles. 2 There could be an analogy here with the way some readers prefer reading fiction more than philosophy, since literature preserves their autonomy, as they freely entertain unfamiliar ideas and scenarios without giving up their beliefs, whereas philosophy persuades them to adopt positions they might otherwise be reluctant to consider, let alone uphold. 3 Philip Alperson’s ‘Instrumentality and Music’ (2008) makes a similar claim, since he points out the combined influence of the composer, score, work, performers’ bodies, musical instruments, performers’ connections to instruments, conductor, concert hall and listening audience. 4 The ‘Library of Curatorial Discourse’ includes L’exposition Imaginaire (1989), De kunst van het tentoonstellen (1991), Meta 2: The New Spirit in Curating (1992), The Art of Showing Art (1992), The Museum Experience (1992), Thinking About

220

Notes

Exhibitions (1996), Double Exposure (1996), Exhibiting Contradiction (1998), Stopping the Process (1998), Curating Degree Zero (1999), Curating in the 21st Century (2000), The Producers: Contemporary Curators in Conversation (2000–2002), Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility (2001), Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum (2001), The Edge of Everything: Reflections on Curatorial Practice (2002), Men in Black: Handbook of Curatorial Practice (2004), What Makes a Great Exhibition? (2006), Curating Subjects (2007), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (2007), Art Power (2008), Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2012), Texte zur Kunst (2012), The Curatorial (2013), Curating Context Beyond the Gallery and into Other Fields (2017), Philosophy and Museums (2017), The Perfect Spectator (2017), Conceptual Art in a Curatorial Perspective (2019) and The Personalization of the Art Museum: Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors (2019).

Chapter 2 1 Carolee Thea reminds readers that during medieval times, the curare was the guardian of an unfit person, either a minor or a lunatic (Thea 2009: 60). While no one considers artists lunatics, one imagines deceased artists and mute artworks requiring guardians who must act on their behalf. 2 Given the number of private museums/collections and artist-initiated studio exhibitions, the reader may baulk at my emphasizing the public’s significance, yet public acknowledgement advances private value. 3 By contrast, The Art Institute of Chicago’s new wing no longer presents Joseph Cornell’s boxes in a room painted a deep midnight blue, which simulated ‘Winter Night Skies’ (1955) at the Stable Gallery. 4 There is no shortage of cases where artists were dropped from exhibitions because the curator couldn’t convince the host venue of the merit of expending resources to ship/install said artists’ artworks. 5 The notion of a curator exerting his/her own ‘authorial intentions’ or representing someone else’s suits George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art (1974). Hickey’s description of the exhibition’s meaning as emergent and self-organizing recalls Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (1929) and current philosophers of science and philosophers of mind’s fascination with emergent systems (Deacon 2007: 273–308). Paul O’Neill discusses Hickey’s referencing emergence in relationship to meaning in ‘Emergence’ (O’Neill and Wilson 2008). 6 Curator Paul O’Neill notes: ‘If we consider how much curatorial practice has been collaborative over the last decade, we still have more of an understanding of who

Notes

7

8

9

10

11

12

221

certain curators are than what they actually do, which may also be the result of celebrity culture and the popularization of art as part of the global entertainment industry. This is in spite of what I would call “the Obrist paradox” whereby the most visible curator of the last decade, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, has curated almost all of his projects in collaboration with others’. O’Neill wonders whether ‘this interest in the collective is merely a fleeting attraction or a more genuine falling out with the cult of the individual producer’ (2007b: 10). I borrow the notion of experience from John Dewey, whose work addresses direct experience, rather than experiences via photographic representations, forgeries or copies. Second-hand experiences offer their own kinds of experience, related by appearance to first-hand versions. I once moderated a debate concerning whether sight dominates architectural experiences and sight lost. Buildings and monuments also have contexts, that of the site and users, for whom they’re designed. Ever since W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946), philosophers have been debating how viewers infer intentions from authored experiences. This approach coheres with ‘Intentionality’, which Joseph Margolis capitalizes in order to distinguish its dynamism from acultural, ahistorical or solipsistic versions. ‘Intentional properties: a) designate meanings assignable to certain structures or meaningful structures, b) as a result of the various forms of culturally informed activity (speech, deeds, manufacture, artistic creation), such that c) suitably informed persons may claim to discern such properties and interpret them objectively’ (1997: 10–11). When MoMA presented Richard Serra’s 2007 survey, the curator was primarily concerned with the second floor’s weight capacity. By contrast, the curator who oversaw the re-fabrication of the Harrison Studio’s Survival Series (1970–3) for ‘Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots’ (2012) had to imagine nonexistent artworks, replete with nonexistent cucumber-, tomato- and green-bean vines, horizontal lettuce, kale and cabbage patches, vertical strawberry vines, potatoes and fruit trees (all objects that can be tasted, touched, smelled and seen). The curator also had to imagine strategies for presenting this indoor farm so that living matter neither entered the building’s air ducts nor exceeded the floor’s weight limits. In 1974, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum curator used ‘weight limits’ as an excuse to cancel the Harrison Studio’s exhibition there. Robert Storr compares curators to film directors, who work ‘collaboratively with everyone else involved in the process of making a movie, but who is assured, in spite of all contrary pressures, of final cut’. These analogous fields are discussed in greater detail in Chapters 5, 7 and 8. In 1998, I curated ‘Comestible Compost’, a twelve-hour exhibition in a Los Angeles Pavilion’s grocery store that was reinstalled in a gallery. The eleven installations

222

13 14

15

16

17 18

19

20 21

Notes inserted into the grocery store (three remained for a few weeks) were temporarily also members of the set comprising the grocery store. Collections stored in freeports (Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg or Harlem) are invisible. By multiple publics, I have in mind the way museums simultaneously address varying audiences whether wealthy patrons, school children or minority communities. Being 501(c)3s, US museums are public trusts meant to benefit diverse audiences in exchange for affording patrons tax write-offs. Elmgreen and Dragset’s Drama Queens (2007) animates the perspectives of sculptures made by Jean Arp, Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Ulrich Rückreim and Andy Warhol. A book that revealed collectors’ reasons/motivations for acquiring particular artworks would be very interesting indeed. One might discover that some artworks were accidental purchases, since the dealer said that the collector could acquire x only if she also bought y, which she didn’t originally want. Similarly, the happenstance meeting of artist A at some dinner led to the acquisition of a, making what looks like great insight an accidental bargain (with an added discount since the artist liked the collector). If the collector grows to love a and y, his/her least conscious choices, he/she might tell other collectors to buy artworks by A and Y. And so it goes. Even low-level purchases (