Curatorial Studies

Walter Hopps entered the art world during one of the most historic sociopolitical  periods in America: President Truman, without the approval of Congress, committed American troops to battle; the Vietnam War was prolonged; Senator Joseph McCarthy began his communist witch hunt; the abstract expressionist movement was in full swing; President Truman ordered the construction of hydrogen bomb; Truman signed a Peace Treaty with Japan, which officially ended WWII; Joseph Stalin died; the Iron curtain went up; segregation was ruled illegal in the U.S., Disneyland opened, Abstract Expressionism faded, Pop-art became huge, civil rights activist, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus and Water Hopps painted the art world with broad strokes--from Los Angeles to Washington and onward to Houston, Texas.
This paper is about Hopps, the artist-curator, whose contributions indispensably elevated the appreciation of modern art in America.  With insightful commentary by his widow, Caroline Huber, my objective is to shed light on the legendary Hopps who redefined the way the art world examined art and embraced his genius.

Dalla fine del XX secolo, i tentativi di rileggere le collezioni museali sono stati declinati in alcuni casi attraverso narrazioni non lineari che non rispettano le tradizionali categorie della storia dell'arte. L'articolo intende indagare le cause di questa tendenza globale dal punto di vista culturale, sociopolitico e teorico. Queste pratiche si sono avvicinate alle collezioni museali come ad una forma di archivio e sono state sviluppate negli ultimi trent'anni in particolare da diverse istituzioni dedicate all'arte contemporanea, rimodellando gli allestimenti e il loro ruolo istituzionale. Attraverso l'analisi di tre casi studio, il Centre Pompidou di Parigi con la mostra Modernités plurielles (2013-2015), il Van Abbemuseum di Eindhoven con The Making of Modern Art (2017-2021) e il Museo Sztuki di Łódź con Atlas of Modernity (2014-oggi), l'articolo analizza la necessità istituzionale dei musei contemporanei di rileggere e riscrivere la storia della "modernità" e delle loro collezioni nel XXI secolo attraverso l'uso di narrazioni dialettiche. Il rapporto tra l'istituzione, le collezioni e la loro narrazione sarà analizzato come carattere distintivo dell'identità e della missione del museo.

A barrage of criticism has been levelled against the Venice Biennale’s national pavilion structure in recent decades, chiefly accusing it of anachronism on account of its western biases. Yet the tide has begun to turn, making much of this criticism sound a little worn-out. As this event increasingly attracts debuting ‘non-western’ national exhibitors each year, its pavilion structure event is beginning to be reassessed. Haiti was one such debutant at the 54th edition of La Biennale di Venezia held in 2011. This article will explore in detail the debates raised by Haiti’s national pavilion, particularly as they related to the central exhibition theme of ILLUMInations selected by the International Art Exhibition Director for 2011, Bice Curiger. In doing so this piece will consider both: how the national pavilion structure at the Venice Biennale was challenged, and our wider understanding of it deepened, by Haiti’s participation; and what Venice’s national pavilion structure might be able to offer a post-colonial, ‘third-world’ nation like Haiti.

Un espacio no puede borrar a otro, pero puede arrinconarlo. También los espacios ocupan un lugar, En otra dimensión que es más que espacio.

Hay espacios con una sola voz, Espacios con muchas voces Y hasta espacios sin ninguna, Pero todo espacio está solo, Más solo que aquello que contiene.

Aunque todo espacio Se confunda al fin con todo espacio. Aunque todo espacio sea un juego imposible, porque nada cabe en nada.
(Roberto Juarroz)

Two exhibitions concurrently held at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), Quilty and Margaret Olley: A Generous Life, encouraged a dialogue, highlighting the mythologised lineage connecting the two artists. Though the intuitive pairing encouraged a thoughtful retrospective of Olley’s oeuvre, the disparate curatorial agendas produced an unfavourable comparison. As this review elucidates, the thematic anchor of A Generous Life (Olley’s generosity) made Quilty’s focus on the individual—of Quilty himself, as a celebrity artist, and of his subjects whom he disentangles from the broader context and politics of war—all the more pronounced.

A resenha percorre os argumentos centrais de Histórias das exposições. Casos exemplares, livro organizado por Fabio Cypriano e Mirtes Marins de Oliveira e aponta algumas articulações entre o emergente campo de estudos da História das Exposições e outras áreas de conhecimento.

Installed as an artist’s project for Melbourne Now (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 23 October 2013 – 23 March 2014), The gallery of air was a room filled with hundreds of things, each of which variously held an idea of air: from a draft excluder to an asthma inhaler; from a battery-powered ‘breathing’ dog to an old bicycle pump; from a Jacobean air stem glass to a Salvador Dalí ashtray made for Air India; from a John Constable cloud study to a Goya print of a farting figure. The gallery of air was a diorama of gallery things and my things.
Ninety-two things from the vast array of objects in the NGV’s collection were mixed with 287 of my things – with all objects selected specifically because they held some idea of air. Here a Wedgwood vase decorated with flute players found itself alongside a record by Curved Air; there a blown glass orb with a single air bubble, the breath of its maker, caught forever inside, found itself next to a blow dryer. I simply wanted to put the collection to work in a different way. By selecting these things according to an apparently arbitrary and poetic category, the way we read them was temporarily reset. I was worried that the Gallery’s things might not be as interesting as mine, but luckily they seemed to hold their own.
After giving a talk to the NGV Women’s Association about the upcoming installation of The gallery of air, I was flattered to be asked to write this article, expanding on that address. Having said this, I must also say that agreeing to do so was a bit like telling someone that you’re a comedian, then immediately being asked if you know any jokes. At the risk of explaining my jokes, here I intend to simply unpack The gallery of air and the ideas running through it as frankly as I can.

Концепция выставки «Застёжка на века: Шнуровка» является результатом коллективной работы студентов в рамках курса "Кураторское дело в области моды".
Представленный кейс описывает третий раздел выставки , который призван познакомить посетителей с историей шнуровки в одежде вообще и со шнуровкой в современной одежде в частности.

This study takes as its object the reception of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. By examining exhibitions and publications, it retraces the evolution of the critical discourse. The latter is considered for its deficiencies with regards to the polemical context of the Culture Wars – a latent conflict characterized by a series of ideological disputes between conservatives and liberals in the United States. In the first part, we work to de-contextualize the reception of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, showing that censorship, often seen as a consequence of the controversy with which the artist has been involved, must be understood, as of the 1970s, to have been a central theme of his work. We notably demonstrate that the content of his art and exhibitions has been shaped by multiple constraints during the entirety of his career. In the second part, we offer an opportunity to study the lesser-known of his works, revealing key principals that have been neglected in studies conducted with a formalist approach. After having criticized this conventional approach (understood here to be the main problem in the reception of his oeuvre), we propose, in a third part, novel arguments that make it possible to focus on the works’ content. More generally, our transdisciplinary method makes it possible to value the artist’s personal archives, which have been largely underexplored in existing research.

„Notes From the Future of Art. Selected Writings of Jerzy Ludwiński“ will be of interest to curators, art students and general readers interested in the development of art since 1960s and the crucial contribution of artists and thinkers from Eastern and Central Europe.
This book is the first collection of texts by Jerzy Ludwiński (1930-2000) published in English. Ludwiński was an art historian, critic, curator, founder of the Mona Lisa Gallery and professor in the Academy of Fine Arts. He fulfilled those functions on the peripheries of the state system of his time, activating, in turn, the cultural circles in Lublin, Wrocław, Toruń and Poznań. Within the frames of artistic life established by the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland, he marked out his own ‘playing field’, where such notions as ‘critic’, ‘curator’, ‘gallery’ and ‘museum’ underwent significant transformation. The models of cultural institutions, created by Ludwiński at the end of the 1960s – Museum of Current Art, Mona Lisa Gallery and Centre for Artistic Research – became not only the places of a particular reflection on art, but also an institutional shelter for the first manifestations of conceptual art in Poland.

design: Dejan Krsic

"Inquiry into reality – visual worlds today" opened in Kassel in 1972, as the main headline of documenta’s fifth installment (d5).  The exhibition proposed a revolutionary change for documenta and in exhibition making as a whole: d5 would be curated thematically, instead of the style or trend based exhibition making of previous documenta installments. The main auteur behind documenta 5’s radical change was Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. Szeemann’s appointment as the Secretary General of documenta 5 granted him an unprecedented curatorial agency which lead him to experiment with new curatorial standards within the German institution and canon of contemporary art history. By introducing new forms, movements, and diverse modes of artistic representation during the 70s into a biennial format, Szeemann necessarily opened opportunities and validation for performance and conceptual art. In this chapter, I am to define and demonstrate Harald Szeemann’s curatorial agency in documenta 5: Institutionalized Chaos. It is through Institutionalized Chaos that documenta 5 would be canonized as a groundbreaking exhibition in the history of documenta and contemporary art exhibitions. Szeemann’s authorship over a structured chaotic model—which he would never define but apply in his exhibitions— signaled the beginning of curating radical imagery, performances, and art within its contemporary context.

Every curator is a storyteller. He or she tells big stories-metanarratives-and small stories-micronarratives. Curating is a metanarrative as it embodies a narrative about narrative dealing with the nature, structure and signification of curatorial narratives. Every curator selects and orders artworks, and her or his perspective adds to the subjectivity of the narrative. And, as such, the curatorial constructs a text that refers to the generation and accumulation of meaning across texts.

The Curatorial Communication Process (CCP) explains the communication process from idea to spectator.

Introduction to the book When Attitudes Become the Norm
The Contemporary Curator and Institutional Art
Some sentences from the cover by Mary Anne Staniszewski:
"Beti Žerovc has not only written an insightful and provocative book, but an especially timely one.
In this book devoted to the field of curating and “institutional art”, Žerovc raises questions about the character and limitations of the “exhibition-maker as artist” and the “exhibition as a work of art”, asking whether the socio-political objectives for the latter actually manifest contradictory or even opposite effects given the inescapable conditions of capitalism.
The book culminates with Žerovc’s queries about the ritualistic function of contemporary art exhibitions, and this is evocatively expressed in her introduction: “There was once great discussion about how removing artworks from their original context and installing them in the museum meant their certain death. Today, it seems, we need to be thinking about different questions. Does the institution of visual art bring something to life … what, in fact, are we summoning to life?”

Interview with art historian and sociologist Peter Bengtsen for Inchiesta about the exhibition “Street Art – Banksy & Co. L’arte allo stato urbano” in Bologna and the resultant removal by the Italian artist Blu of all his remaining artworks in the city.

This paper discusses the processual ontological transitions of the curatorial after Paul O’Neill’s “curatorial turn”. Studying the curatorial from its discursive conception to a new materialist approach, it explores what can change when the curatorial is considered both a discourse and a practice, with no hierarchical distinctions or separations between them. To envisage the curatorial as a materia-ldiscursive practice is to admit that matter and meaning emerge together and one does not exist in the same way in the absence of the other. In this epistemology, the question changes from what the curatorial is to what the curatorial does, considering it as a mode of production of different kinds of knowledges.

This paper considers Beneath the Surface: The Archives of Arthur Nestor, a parafictional exhibition that I curated in 2014 with 16 undergraduate students at Western University, Canada. The exhibition depicted the life of Dr. Arthur Nestor, a professor of Biology who had disappeared from London (ON) in 1975, seemingly without trace. Over the summer of 2014, some of Nestor’s files and artefacts had been discovered during university renovations, and this archive was given to students in Museum Studies to organize and catalogue. As we sorted through the files, it became clear that Dr. Nestor was something of a controversial figure, a man who became an environmental activist in Southwestern Ontario because of his belief that cryptids (lake monsters) lived in Lakes Huron and Erie, and were in need of protection from human-made pollution. As the documents in his file overlapped with our research in the wider sphere, the evidence seemed to suggest that Nestor had left London to join Dr. Roy Mackal, a University of Chicago professor of cryptozoology searching for the Loch Ness Monster. This paper weaves together the tale of Arthur Nestor and the curating of Beneath the Surface with a history of the relationship between natural history museums and cryptozoology, ultimately questioning what parafiction can do in both art galleries and museums.

呂佩怡，計劃主持與主編，《台灣當代藝術策展二十年 Contemporary Art Curating in Taiwan 1992-2012》，台北：典藏，2015.

書評：
二十年終得一磚，《台灣當代藝術策展二十年》──專訪策展人呂佩怡
https://okapi.books.com.tw/article/3733

黃郁捷，評[呂佩怡主編]《臺灣當代藝術策展二十年》，《博物館與文化》 Issue 9（2015.06），頁93-101
http://www.cam.org.tw/activity/jmc/download/9-5.pdf

議藝份子 第二十七期
http://art.ncu.edu.tw/artConf/main/public/27/[1.8]書評－《台灣當代藝術策展二十年》.pdf

An essay on artist Goshka Macuga's 'Picture Room' at Gasworks in London in 2003, an exhibition of contemporary art that rethought the display space and strategies designed by John Soane for his home-museum in 1824.

A contribution to the series on 'The Artist as Curator', edited by Elena Filipovic for 'Mousse' magazine, it appeared in issue 48 (April 2015) and was then republished in the ensuing book (and also in Goshka Macuga's monograph: 'Before the Beginning and After the End', Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2016).

This paper proposes a reflection about the Artist's Book as a space for curatorial experiments, resulting on an innovative authorial practice. For such, it is intended to raise questions about the Digital Art and the Artist's book potential on the field of cyberculture, expanding the physical limits of paper. We analize also some Artist's Book created in Brazil and abroad in the last years, by the artist Hellen Douglas e by the art curators Joanna Zylinska, Celina Lage e Jade Liz.

Propomos uma reflexão sobre o Livro de Artista como espaço de experimentos curatoriais, resultando em uma prática autoral inovadora. Para tal, levantamos questões sobre a arte digital e o potencial do Livro de Artista no âmbito da cibercultura, expandindo os limites físicos do livro de papel. São analisados casos de Livros de Artista produzidos no Brasil e no Exterior nos últimos anos, produzidos pela artista Hellen Douglas e pelos curadores Joanna Zylinska, Celina Lage e Jade
Liz.

Published in the book 'Ebrahim Alkazi: Directing Art | The Making of a Modern Indian Art World' (2016), this essay is part of my ongoing research on exhibition histories of South Asia 'Around Exhibitions: Circles of Engagement'.

The essay pursues the curatorial imaginary of Ebrahim Alkazi, theatre practitioner and patron of art, through exhibitions that were actualised, while also looking at other meta-exhibitions and their recurrences in varied forms, as much their missing versions. It reads exhibitions in their tentativeness, in their potential to fall out from the historical narrative or get easily lost without trace, and in their entanglements with their own time that gives them the currency for determining that is yet to come. This essay is, then, a poetic descant to histories of exhibitions. The first section focuses on an exhibition that barely took place, setting up cues for the trajectory taken by Alkazi. In the second section, I highlight parallel exhibitions from the 1970s in New Delhi involving the Lalit Kala Akademi and several artist groups that offer us a broad context to understand Alkazi's curatorial initiatives. And the last section discusses the exhibition history of the Art Heritage gallery, and examines the theatrical aspects of exhibition space in concert with its inherent potential for restaging certain acts.

This article focus on the curatorial work involved in the construction of places of memory like a photobiography or an artistic foundation. Despite being iniciatives of different nature and scope, both examples aim to keep alive the memory of those who built them. The article explores the production of the photobiography that occupied Júlio Resende for several years and that would be edited posthumously, and addresses the life and work of an artist (1917-2011) who wanted to shape how he would be remembered, a self-curating artist.

Since 2011, the Museum of Everyday Life in Glover, Vermont, has existed as a 'utopian homemade museum' housed in a century-old barn. Guided by its curator, the museum draws from collectors, artists and friends to present exhibitions dedicated to ordinary massproduced objects, often transformed in vernacular fashion. This article contextualizes and analyzes the museum's affective staging of everyday materiality. Drawing on affect theory and object-oriented thought, it examines three aspects of the museum's practice: the everyday objects it presents and transforms, its playful strategies of display, and the wider networks that link it to pressing political and aesthetic concerns.

Most curatorial examinations of weapons are dry and give little detail as to their origins or development. What follows examines the origins and development of the broadsword along with some of the issues which have accompanied this weapon through history to this era. This examination is a close look at the broadsword to demonstrate that previous methods of classification need to be corrected and that the history of a weapon is important as is its development. Only through the assembly of all the data about a weapon can a person have any idea about how the weapon would handle.

This chapter looks at curating web-based exhibitions on or-bits.com and examine them in the context of translating between online and offline sites of display and distribution. For the whole thesis, please email me.

This dissertation investigates the theory and praxis of curating web-based exhibitions from the perspective of a practitioner (the author Marialaura Ghidini). Specifically, it investigates how the web as a medium of production, display, distribution and critique has had an impact on the work and research of independent curators and the way in which they configure their exhibition projects.
With a focus on the last decade, curatorial work of production and commission is considered in relation to technological developments, previous theoretical work into the mapping of exhibitions online and the analysis of case studies which are paralleled with the author’s own exhibition projects. What has emerged from this combination of theory, practice and comparison of approaches is the rise of a tendency in contemporary curatorial practices online: the creation of exhibitions that migrate across sites—online and offline—and integrate different components—formats of display and distribution—giving life to exhibition models which this study names as those of the 'extended' and 'expanded'. The figure of the curator as mediating ‘node’ is another characteristic emerging in relation to this tendency. Its features are identified through the observation of six case studies, which include Beam Me Up, CuratingYouTube and eBayaday, and interviews with their curators, and three projects that the author organised with the web curatorial platform or-bits-dot- com, 128kbps objects (2012), (On) Accordance (2012) and On the Upgrade WYSIWG (2013), which experiment with modes of integrating web-based exhibition with other exhibition formats, such as the gallery show and print publishing.
Through combining contextual review and curatorial practice, this study names the tensions existing between online and offline sites of display and modes of production and commission, offering critical and practical ground work to discuss the tendency of migrating exhibitions and integrating formats within the larger context of curating contemporary art.

文件大展成立於戰後的1955年，每五年於德國卡塞爾舉辦，是當代國際藝壇極具分量的大型展覽。第七屆文件大展(1982)是台灣第一次有系統性的報導介紹，此後每屆文件大展皆在台灣藝術圈掀起熱潮，藝術媒體多以「藝術界的奧林匹亞」、「當代藝術朝聖地」，或「視覺藝術界的奧斯卡」等形容文件大展。透過專門藝術雜誌之報導，文件大展地位在台灣當代藝術圈屹立不搖。此現象成為本研究的問題意識：專業藝術雜誌呈現甚麼樣貌的文件大展？這些持續被再現的文件大展意味著什麼？對台灣當代策展產生什麼樣可能的影響？本文聚焦於第七屆至第十二屆文件大展於三個紙本藝術雜誌：《雄師美術》、《藝術家》、《典藏今藝術》之報導，分析「再現文件大展」之方法與形象。本文認為「再現文件大展」不僅是當代策展概念與實踐的新知新訊傳達，更重要的是一種儀式性傳播—專業藝術雜誌根據台灣在地需求出發，將「文件大展」作為一種外部推力，用以面對台灣藝術圈的詢問：「我們藝術的位置何在？」。換句話說，「再現文件大展」可視為台灣當代藝術的文化政治事件。

關鍵詞:文件大展、雜誌報導、展覽史、再現、文化政治事件

Founded in 1955, documenta, which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany, has been an important and long-standing international exhibition in the post WWII period. In Taiwan, the first introduction to, and report on, this exhibition was documenta 7. Afterwards, each documenta has triggered extensive discussions and debates over the years. The significance of documenta is reflected in descriptions and praise in the media, where phases such as such as“the Art Olympics”“, Pilgrimage of Contemporary Art”and“Visual Art Oscar Awards”have been used. This phenomenon raises the questions addressed in this research: What is the image of documenta reflected in these media reports? What are the peculiar implications behind these representations of documenta? What has been the impact on Taiwan contemporary art curating? This essay focuses on the representation of documenta 7-12 in three professional art magazines – Lion Art, Artist and ARTCO – and analyzes the methods and images presented of documenta. It is argued that“the representation of documenta”as an event in these magazines implies more than just the transmission of new information and stories about curatorial concepts and practices. It is also a response to Taiwanese local needs, raising the question“What is the present situation of Taiwanese art?”. That is to say“the representation of documenta”should be considered as a Taiwanese cultural political event.

Keywords: documenta, Media Reports, Exhibition Histories, Representation, Cultural Politics Event.