A Brief Outline of the History of Exhibition Making

The purpose of this thesis is to define the concept of the curatorial, the artist-curator and to explore the various notions around these concepts. It is also to explore the various modes of exhibition display, the history of these modes, how they can be experimental, how the gallery space can be considered an artistic medium and how the exhibition space can be gendered in the masculine. I will do this by selecting various case studies throughout the history of exhibition-making and comparing and contrasting these to form a well-balanced hypothesis. I will do this by referencing the artist-curator Dorothy Cross’s exhibition Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the artist Janine Antoni’s project Loving Care, Lucy Lippard’s exhibition 557,087, Harald Szeeman’s landmark exhibition When Attitudes Become Form: Live In Your Head and the theorists Nicholas Bourriaud and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

How does one construct the history of exhibitions -forgotten, unwritten, disparate, often lacking in documentation? In what ways might it be a new kind of history, displacing the traditional focus on objects and related critical histories, yet irreducible to the term 'museum studies'? In what ways have exhibitions, more than simple displays and configurations of objects, helped change ideas about art, intersecting at particular junctions with technical innovations, discursive shifts and larger kinds of philosophical investigations, thus forming part of these larger histories? What does it mean to ask such questions in the era of fast-moving celebrity curators, biennials and fairs, digital ways and means, which have taken shape over the last twenty years?

It has become increasingly common to claim that the history of modern and contemporary art is best grasped as a history of exhibitions. While such an approach has obvious advantages, particularly for curators, its implications are less clear. How might it differ from accounts that privilege artists, movements, mediums, or contexts? What sort of critical, aesthetic, and analytical criteria should structure such an undertaking? How can a history of exhibitions avoid the pitfalls of canonization? And what relevance might pre-existing models of curating retain for contemporary practices? This seminar will investigate such questions by collectively analyzing a selection of test cases drawn from the history of exhibition-making. Our work will be directed by the following objectives: to trace important developments in the evolution of exhibition forms and curatorial practices; to register the ways in which these histories have conditioned recent artistic production and exhibition making; and to critically assess the rhetoric of the art exhibition as a form of public communication. The course is divided into three sections. The first of these, entitled “Models,” surveys important moments in the development of the exhibition in Western modernity, ranging from the private collection, the state museum, and the salon to the modernist musem, the travelling exhibition, and the international biennial; it also attends to avant-garde activities in Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The second section, “Countermodels,” seeks to trace some of the many ways in which experimental art and exhibition-making positioned itself against these historical precedents in the decades following 1945. While this section will cover such influential museum exhibitions as “Information” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” it will place equal emphasis on gallery shows, demonstrations, para-museal installations, and work in distributed media. It will further examine developments at the periphery of established North Atlantic centers. The last section, “Altermodels,” engages contemporary developments that mean to further reinvent the exhibition. Here we will look closely at the complex transformations grouped together under the term “globalization,” before examining recent tendencies in durational and social production, closing with an evaluation of the changing status of curatorial labor.

Contemporary art exhibits are complex operations that offer a considerable wealth of design knowhow. The many fragile, ephemeral forms concerning them, their importance and what they were to become had already encouraged reflections upon critiques and art theory during the final three decades of the 20th century. A number of useful debates were of great use to the rethinking and reassessment of outfitting areas in order to open up essential regions. These regions were to carefully construct the story of art and critiques; a story which is placed at the crossroads of many stories like an exchange and a dialogue or like the privileged junction of a scenario related to art and its context as well as to places and names, facts and dates.

in C. Ricci (ed.) Starting from Venice. Studies on the Biennale, Et. al. Edizioni, Milan, 2010

2015

Introduction Literary critics write book reviews about new novels. Art critics review works of art and the exhibitions they are presented in. Exhibition critiques, however, seem to be much less developed. 1 In most popular reviews, most attention is usually paid to the shape, architecture and function of the building, rather than to the actual contents of the exhibition (a notable example being the reviews on the new Dutch Military Museum 2 ). In other instances, reviews are echoes of the press releases of the organising institutions, or evaluations of the accompanying marketing message. If they do go beyond that, they tend rely on specific disciplines such as art history. One might expect academic reviews to provide some much needed in-depth criticism. However, museums and exhibitions rarely receive substantial coverage in academic journals. Although we do find theoretical reflection on museum exhibitions, especially in the case of ethnographic museums and exhibitions, it often sto...

Introductory essay for Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini. This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within a splendid environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery—the mainstay of museums—traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history—even the emergence of the modern category of fine art—was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2013

(AUP: Amsterdam, 2023)

Before the first purpose-designed exhibition spaces and painting exhibitions emerged, showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political commemorations, religious festivals, and marketing strategies. Palaces, cloisters, façades, squares, and shops became temporary and privileged venues for art display, where sociability was performed, and the idea of exhibition developed. What were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social, and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did displaying art shape a new vocabulary within these events, and conversely, how have these occasions conditioned exhibiting practices? This book traces the origins of the exhibition space by studying its visual and written imagery in the early modern period. It reconsiders events and habits that contributed to shaping the imagery of the exhibition space, and to defining exhibition-making practices, exploring micro-histories and long-term changes.