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Exhibitionists
Hal Foster
WaysofCurating by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Penguin, 192pp, 9.99, March, ISBN9780241950968

HalFoster is a fellow
at the Cullman Center
for Scholars and
Writers at the New
York Public Library.

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Curationism:HowCuratingTookOvertheArtWorldAndEverything
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BUY

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The Surrealists liked to proclaim that everyone who dreams is a poet, and Joseph Beuys
that everyone who creates is an artist. So much for the utopian days of aesthetic
egalitarianism; maybe the best we can say today is that everyone who compiles is a
curator. We curate our favourite photographs, songs and restaurants, or use numerous
websites and applications to do it for us. Although curating promises a new kind of
agency, it might deliver little more than a heightened level of administration, as
cultural interests are packaged as curated consumption. Often enough this packaging
is algorithmically automatic: If you like that, youll love this. Such curating suits a
postindustrial economy in which our main task, when it is not to serve, is to consume.
And when we curate songs or restaurants, or Spotify or Eater do it for us, what do we
actually produce? As cognitive labourers, we manipulate information, which is to say
we curate the given, and this compiling often presumes a good amount of compliance.
Who among us considers what is signed over when we click I agree?
This problem is not taken up by the Swiss art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in his brief
account of his formation as an Ausstellungsmacher, and it is no more than touched on
by the Canadian art critic David Balzer in his breezy book about how curating took
over the art world and everything else. But both do point out how far we have come
from the original avatars of the term (whose root is cura or care): the curatores, the
civil servants who oversaw public works like the aqueducts in ancient Rome, and the
curatus, the priest who attended to private matters like the soul in the medieval period.
They also include, as any potted history of curating must, the arrangers of Renaissance
Wunderkammern (the cabinets of curiosities whose objects pertain more to natural
history than to art history), the keepers of royal collections of art, the dcorateurs of
paintings in the salons of the 18th century, and the organisers of such museums as the
Louvre after the royal collections were nationalised.
Several of the scholars who founded the modern discipline of art history, such as Alois
Riegl, were also important curators (Riegl oversaw the textile collections at the
Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna in the late 19th century). Closer to our time,
however, a divide opened up between the university and the museum, as some
academics were attracted to theory while most curators stuck to connoisseurship. This
divide was less marked between academics and curators who worked on premodern
periods the Renaissance expert Michael Baxandall, for example, was greatly
respected in both worlds and some curators of 20th-century art are much admired in
the academy (the Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures,
from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling
split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate
1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum
than between scholarly curators and flashy exhibition-makers. This split first
developed as the modern art museum was penetrated by the culture industry, and then
deepened as the contemporary art world expanded into the global business of biennials
and fairs; with the first phenomenon came a demand for on-site entertainment, with
the second a need for far-flung attractions. Little wonder that spectacle came to rule the
day.
Obrist evinces this split between curator and impresario in his account of his own
lineage. He picks out Henry Cole, the entrepreneur of the Great Exhibition in 1851, who
erected the iron and glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park not far from where Obrist
currently works in the Serpentine Galleries. He also cites Sergei Diaghilev, the
animator of the Ballets Russes, as a pioneer of the modern form of Gesamtkunstwerk.
Of course leaders of early 20th-century movements like Futurism and Dada were
showmen too: Marinetti published his Founding Manifesto of Futurism on the front

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Curating

Hal Foster reviews Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Curationism by David Balzer LRB 4 June 2015

page of LeFigaro in 1909, and Tristan Tzara was a relentless promoter of Dada events.
The avant-garde, mass media and scandal have often gone together; the difference
today is that the proportions are way out of whack.
At the same time Obrist pays homage to serious curators who were not primarily
provocateurs: the German Alexander Dorner, who directed the Hanover Museum from
1925 until he was ousted by the Nazis in 1937, commissioned avant-garde artists to
design radical exhibition schemes; the Dutch Willem Sandberg, a member of the
Resistance, who as curator and director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
between 1945 and 1962, championed experimental artists as they groped for a way
forward after the Second World War; and the American Walter Hopps, who, with his
staging of a landmark Duchamp retrospective in Pasadena in 1963, sparked a
rethinking of Dada for an entire generation of Pop, Minimalist and conceptual artists in
the United States. Obrist reserves his highest praise, though, for his immediate
godfathers: the Swede Pontus Hultn, who, as head of the Moderna Museet in
Stockholm, organised the first Warhol retrospective in 1968 and went on to be the
founding director of both the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Swiss Harald Szeemann, who advanced PostMinimalist art involving unexpected materials and methods with his legendary
exhibition LiveinYourHead:WhenAttitudesBecomeForm in Berne in 1969; and the
German Kasper Knig, who pioneered the display of site-specific sculpture with an
exhibition in Mnster in 1977 (he has restaged this SkulpturProjekte every decade
since). That Obrist singles out these three is telling, for they can be seen as transitional
figures between the old school of modernist curators like Dorner and Sandberg and the
new breed of spectacular exhibition-makers today. Szeemann actually preferred the
label Ausstellungsmacher, and Obrist calls Knig a cultural impresario as if there
were nothing problematic about the job description.
In our time this line of exhibition-makers has split in two. Curators like Okwui
Enwezor, who heads the Venice Biennale this year, and Lynne Cooke, senior curator at
the National Gallery in Washington, continue to produce ambitious theme shows la
Szeemann and Knig. But a problem had already emerged in the 1990s: as some artists
began to act as curators, rooting in storage rooms and exposing objects that museums
would prefer not to exhibit, some curators began to behave like artists, juxtaposing
works as if they were just so much aesthetic material to manipulate. Obrist shies away
from this tendency: I dont believe in the creativity of the curator, he writes. Yet
whatever his critics say, Obrist doesnt fit the category of flashy exhibition-makers
either. The standout figure here is Klaus Biesenbach, chief curator at large at MoMA,
who is more likely to appear in the celebrity pages than in art magazines (he has
arranged mostly vacuous retrospectives for crossover stars like Marina Abramovi and
Bjrk). Life-styling of this sort is depressing: such curationism has little relation to
scholarship, let alone to criticism (both are decidedly uncool), and little of the sense of
service to patrimony or public that still motivates some curators in Europe. At the
beginning of the practice known as institutional critique, Robert Smithson insisted
that the artist must understand the apparatus he or she is threaded through in order
to challenge, if not to change, its operations. Today many artists are only too happy to
be so threaded, and many curators only too eager to do the threading. Szeemann and
Knig came up against a rigid system that they worked to free up; the new breed of
exhibition-makers appears content not only to inhabit that loosened system, but to be
the agents (as they like to say) of its exploitation by the fashion, music and
entertainment industries.
Obrist is earnest in his commitment to his artists; he describes his first encounters with
the Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the French Christian Boltanski and the
German Gerhard Richter as conversion experiences. And though he looks all of his 47
years, his energy has not flagged: a recent profile in the NewYorker counted roughly
two thousand trips, 2400 hours of taped conversations and two hundred catalogues
over the last twenty years (he has assistants, but still). Obrist arranged his first
exhibition in a tiny kitchen while he was a student at St Gallen, and apparently he
hasnt cooked, or slept, much ever since; most of his life is spent on the road, seeking
out collaborators and dreaming up exhibitions as if there were no tomorrow. Indeed
the present the sense of presence is foremost in his sights. Obrist reports an
epiphanic conversation with Matthew Barney in January 2000 about a new hunger
among artists for live experience, and like his curatorial colleagues in relational
aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud, head of the cole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and Daniel
Birnbaum, director of the Moderna Museet, he is devoted to time-based art, especially
performances and installations staged by artists of his generation like Rirkrit
Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
apparently more formal work is too slow. 1
For Obrist curating involves not only extensive collaboration but also infinite
conversation. In 2006, with another mentor, Rem Koolhaas, he launched the
Serpentine Marathon, a 24-hour polyphonic knowledge festival where all kinds of
disciplines meet, and he has adapted this strategy of accumulation to other forms too,
with compilations of manifestos for the 21st century, instructions for artworks to be
made by others, as well as hundreds of interviews. This is not for everyone (for Sartre
hell is other people; for me other people talking non-stop is a worse place), and

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Hal Foster reviews Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Curationism by David Balzer LRB 4 June 2015

certainly not enough attention is given to the quality of the discourse, or of the
community effected. For Obrist the doing is all.
These books by Obrist and Balzer, along with other volumes by Terry Smith and Paul
ONeill, help us to pick out three preconditions for the recent shift in exhibitionmaking, which should be grasped dialectically. 2 The first was the conceptual art of
the 1960s, especially as it prompted the post-studio and post-medium practices of
the 1970s and 1980s. As Obrist says, conceptualism challenged the idea of art as the
production of material objects, permitting almost anything a statement, a snapshot,
the slightest gesture to qualify. On the one hand, this opened up the field of art, as is
evident in the interdisciplinary terms that Obrist sees as essential to contemporary
production the Gesamtkunstwerk, the library, the archive, the collection, the
laboratory. On the other hand, this interdisciplinarity has often come at the cost of
disciplinary rigour, and the expansion of art has also meant an extension of its
administration in the sense of its market management as well as its academic study.
Moreover, what art is a better match for an economy of cognitive labour than one
given over to immaterial knowledge? Obrist champions the creative self, which is the
very term used by Luc Boltanski in his analysis of the new spirit of capitalism, and the
Obristian motto Dont Stop perfectly suits the work regime that Jonathan Crary called,
in a recent polemic, 24/7. 3
Second, the shift in exhibition-making with Szeemann and Knig has had ambiguous
consequences, which might be captured by way of a statement made by Jean-Franois
Lyotard the exhibition is a postmodern dramaturgy on the occasion of his 1985
show at the Centre Pompidou, LesImmatriaux, which Obrist regards as another
landmark. (The press release suggests the flavour of the event: A whirlwind of stopped
paths where you will draw your own. Sites of biogenetics and visual arts, architecture
and astrophysics, of music and food, of physics and clothing, a maze of linguistical
machines, of habitats and photography, industry and law. Miles of invisible wiring. And
our questions: reality, material, equipment, matrix of meaning, and who is the
author?) On the one hand, this postmodern dramaturgy suggests a way in which the
theme show, opened up to philosophers like Lyotard, can stage key questions of the
time, as LesImmatriaux did in relation to his theses about the end of master
narratives and the rise of new knowledge protocols. On the other hand, such staging
can easily slip from inquiry into showmanship. There is a further twist with Obrist, who
in the end is more networker than impresario, for if we are to believe Luc Boltanski,
networking is more conducive to the new spirit of capitalism than spectacle is. In a
sense Obrist is a human aggregator, almost a social-media-in-person or a hive-mind of
one. This is implicit not only in his hectic meeting and greeting but also in his semianonymous prose, which calls to mind the language of a collective Wiki-brain. For a
Bildungsroman of a kind, WaysofCurating doesnt display much personality; Obrist is
rather like Warhol in this regard (certainly they share a compulsion to record), a cipher
who is at once iconic and spectral. 4
Third, 1989 is a hinge moment for this generation of curators. Born in 1968, Obrist
pins his hopes on the transformative years when he came of age, and in many ways he
is a product of the cultural interchange facilitated by the new Europe. Inspired by the
Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, Obrist is also taken by notions of artistic
creolisation and archipelic thought. Yet what Glissant and Obrist call a new
mondialit that allows for cultural alterity others might see as a globalisation that
homogenises such differences. It is both, of course, and that is what must be
understood. At times Obrist is almost Panglossian about our neoliberal age; I suppose
it would be hard to move as fast as he does if he werent powered by positive thinking.
And what about all those shows, conversations and books, with the prospect of many
more to come? Obrist is exemplary but not singular in this respect, and it prompts one
to wonder for what present, let alone what future, such archives are compiled. What
viewer-reader, now or later, will be able to process it all? (Could it be that all this
curating needs a curator?) Obrist presents his project, especially the conversation
marathons, as a protest against forgetting (a phrase borrowed from Eric Hobsbawm,
one of his many interviewees), but his avant-gardism also commits him to ceaseless
innovation. One of his guiding principles is that an exhibition should always invent a
new rule of the game, or at least a new display feature. And Obrist thinks in terms not
of specific histories of forms, genres, mediums or even exhibitions, but of one big
history of the format; the last lines in his credo concern how digital curating will
develop new formats for our future. All this flying around, inventing rules and
reformatting might indeed be a protest against forgetting; it could also be a fast track to
oblivion.

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Letters
Vol. 37 No. 13 2 July 2015

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Hal Foster reviews Ways of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Curationism by David Balzer LRB 4 June 2015
In his article entitled Exhibitionists, Hal Foster makes welcome mention of Henry Cole in
relation to curatorial practice (LRB, 4 June). Cole, as far as I can tell, was not quite an
exhibitionist but certainly a man of some flamboyance, as hinted at by James Tissots cartoon
of him in VanityFair in 1871, with flowing locks of white hair, chequered trousers and his
loyal dog, on its hind legs, behind him. But he wasnt entirely an entrepreneur either, in the
sense we have of someone operating in the sphere of free-market economics. He worked in
the nascent Victorian world of public subvention and publicly funded arts activity, which took
in the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the Design
Schools, and the Science and Art Department, which led to the formation of what is now the
V&A. In this he was aided by the artist Richard Redgrave, who was instrumental in obtaining
the Sheepshanks and Ellison collections. Redgrave also designed some of the objects that went
into industrial production under Coles pseudonym, Felix Summerly. These were a precursor
to the idea for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the curatorial debate that followed about the
status of objects designed for mass consumption and the relationship between the fine arts
and design.
MarkGoodwin
Glenhinnisdal, Isle of Skye

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