Brenson Michael the Curator's Moment

!"#$%&'()*'+,$-*.#/)0&)"*'1,23$-45"(#6$7'#/,*/8*&'5#3$0')$9*&'/(6:$;*6:$?*

In August 1997 fifteen curators from Africa, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States met at the Rockefeller Foundation's Conference and Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, to consider the rapidly developing field of international contemporary art exhibitions. Conceived by Noreen Tomassi, director of Arts International, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, associate director of Arts & Humanities at the Rockefeller Foundation, the conference was designed to enable curators struggling with the extraordinary and in some ways unpre- cedented challenges posed by international contemporary art exhibitions to share their ideas and concerns. The moderator was Kinshasha Holman Conwill, director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who helped shape the program. Each curator made a presentation, as did Betye Saar, representing the artists' per- spective, and Saskia Sassen, professor of urban planning at the University of Chicago and an expert on globalism. Tomassi asked if I would be interested in attending the conference and then writing a report that would be made available that fall to the participants, as well as to other curators and funders.

Michael Brenson

The Curator's Moment

Tomassi knew of my interest in international exhibitions when I worked for the New York Times (1982-91). In Barcelona in 1993 I had attended Crossing Cultures, one of several international conferences Arts International has organized to consider pressing issues in art and culture. I had written on the issue of art and community

and had worked as a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation, which financed the Bellagio conference, an event that was remarkable in its thoughtfulness, intensity, and candor.

Introduction After listening to heads of international biennials and triennials speak with one another for three days about their hopes and concerns, it was clear to me that the era of the curator has begun. The organizers of these exhibitions, as well as other curators around the world who work across cultures and are able to think imaginatively about the points of compatibility and conflict among them, must be at once aestheticians, diplomats, economists, critics, historians, politicians, audience developers, and promoters. They must be able to communicate not only with artists but also with community leaders, business executives, and heads of state. They must be comfortable with people who have devoted their lives to art and culture, with people who neither like nor trust art, and with

people who may be willing, if they are convinced that art serves their interests or is sufficiently connected to their lives, to be won over by an artist or an exhibition. As much as any artist, critic, or museum director, the new curator understands, and is able to articulate, the ability of art to touch and mobilize

people and encourage debates about spirituality, creativity, identity, and the nation. The texture and tone of the curator's voice, the voices it welcomes or excludes, and the shape of the conversation it sets in motion are essential to the texture and perception of contemporary art. The focus on Catherine David

throughout the one hundred days of her 1997 Documenta X was not an aberra- tion. For the foreseeable future, the ambitions, methodologies, and personal styles of the curators responsible for major international contemporary art exhibitions will be as essential to their content as any artist's work. Throughout the

16 WINTER 1998

three days of meetings in Bellagio, Germano Celant, curator of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the commissioner of the 1997 Venice Biennale, insisted that the language and identity of the curator be considered with a new kind of seriousness. He was right.

In the midst of the recent chapter in the history of museums that was largely defined by the ethnic- and identity-based exhibition, Mari Carmen Ramirez, curator of Latin American art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and another participant in the Bellagio meetings, recognized the importance of curators working across and between cultures. In her 1994 essay "Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Representation," an analysis of the history of Latin American and Latino exhibitions in the United States, she noted the "transformation of the curator of contemporary art from behind-the-scenes aesthetic arbiter to central player in the broader stage of global cultural politics." If this transformation was evident to her in 1994, how much more complete it must have been in

1997, the year of five international biennials-Cairo, Havana, Venice, Istanbul, and Johannesburg-as well as Documenta. Look at the issues embedded in these exhibitions: nationalism versus internationalism or transnation- alism; indigenous cultures versus global media; handmade traditions versus technological networks; respect for the intimate experience of art versus a belief in curatorial interventions that can make the artistic message, and sometimes even that intimacy itself, broadly accessible; belief in the intrinsic value of art versus an obligation to put art in the service of extraordinary social and political needs. The urgency of these issues underlines the challenges facing the curatorial profession to think deeply about multiple audiences and to allow individual curatorial perspectives to be invigorated by radically, even shock- ingly, different experiences of space and time, memory and history. These unframable high stakes biennial projects do not reward curatorial business as usual. Like the independent curator Mary Jane Jacob, whose public art projects outside galleries and museums propose reimagin- ing the site, the audience for, and perhaps even the nature of the art experience, the biennial curator cannot succeed without a hands-on involvement in every aspect of his or her program. For the new curator, the clear-cut division of responsibilities between the curatorial, administrative, education, marketing, and public information departments that has been a reality in large museums in the United

States for well over a decade-a division that has tended to detach many curators from their audiences and blind them to the nonaesthetic interests their museums are serving-is inconceivable. If this division exists, meeting their responsibilities is impossible.

While large international contemporary art exhibitions are helping to expand the roles and responsibilities of the curator, many artists find themselves having to develop in aesthetic and political climates of increasing suspicion and constraint. Throughout the United States the political right is ridiculing artists, and even the idea of the artist; within the art community, there is widespread con- tempt for any tendency to romanticize the individuality, personality, hand, and heroism of the artist. Monograph and biography are now the most disparaged forms of art history. Not surprisingly, much of the most respected new art in Europe and the United States is defined by a noticeable degree of self-effacement. It is intended to draw attention to ideas, processes, and situations-not to itself as an object (if that is what it is) or to its makers. In October 1997 I heard Kristaps Gelzis, a young sculptor in Riga, Latvia, say that he liked Documenta X because "it was not concerned with the artist but with process," and Andy Goldsworthy, an English landscape sculptor, remark, while constructing one of his delicate, undulating walls of unattached stones, at the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, that he wanted to make work that "would take credit for itself." In other words, as the curator becomes a more and more visible player in the world of contemporary art, more artists are concealing their egos to prove to the art community, to the general public, and to themselves that they are worthy of respect.

At the same time, the presentation of art is more dependent on the curator than ever. There seems to be a consensus that when art from one culture is shown in another, it cannot speak for itself. Because of the inevitably loaded nature of the responses of a museum-goer in New York, let's say, or Washington, D.C., to contemporary art from Zaire, Colombia, or Cambodia, the idea of a museum's presenting an object from one culture in such a way that it would offer an intensely private object-to- visitor encounter to someone from another culture, in which no one or nothing else is welcome and viewers are free to respond as they please, is increasingly unacceptable in the United States. Sufficient clues must be given to enable viewers to orient themselves to the work and to provide viewers unfamiliar with the conditions in which it was created at least some sense of what it means

17 art journal

to appreciate it on its own terms. Hand in hand with an awareness of the challenges of presenting art from one culture in a very different cultural context is a growing awareness within museums that art exhibited in any museum is seen by many people who feel they have little or no access to it and that they need to be encouraged to feel that the aesthetic experience belongs to them as much as to anyone else. The perplexing combination of curiosity and distrust, respect and exploitation, that defines many institutional approaches to audience cannot be explored here. What needs to be stated is that the increasing institutional awareness of the importance of the audience has made curators more visible as mediators between art and its publics.

The increasing centrality of the curator has also been reinforced by the emergence of installation as the stan- dard form in which contemporary artists around the world are working. Installations involve selecting and arranging in a space often shared by visitors. They may also involve writing and educating. Installations were designed, in part, to contextualize and therefore empower themselves by inscribing within them an awareness and even the look of a gallery or museum. By so doing, however, they implicitly acknowledge the curator's in-

escapable authority. Blurring the line between artist and curator builds into the experience of art a heightened awareness of the curator's reality.

I would not be emphasizing the importance of the curator if I did not believe that in a decade that has blurred the distinction between artists and curators, curators have become more like artists. What gives biennials their emotional and intellectual pressure is the sense of curatorial mission. The candor with which many curators are willing to reveal their doubts as well as their certain- ties gives these spectacles some possibility of a human scale. The ability of curators to see these doubts as sources of creative energy gives their exhibitions some-

thing of their hopefulness and freedom. Their concerns for the wounds of countries trying to use culture to rebuild and reinvent themselves gives some biennials

poignancy. And the inevitable solitude of curators throughout the development of their exhibitions, despite the teams they assemble, suggests to me that their situations are not unlike those of many of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, whose abilities to bring something necessary into the world required not only vision but also an inexhaustible supply of belief, focus, resiliance, and nerve.

I am not saying curators are identical to artists. Because of the fragile institutional machinery most biennial curators must work within, which prevents them from taking anything for granted, and the nationalistic needs to which every major international exhibition, even Documenta, must respond, these curators cannot be as independent as artists, some of whom are free to make work that can support or offend anyone or anything. It goes without saying that curators cannot create an exhibition experience that offers the intimacy and intensity of a painting, sculpture, or photograph. However, they can bring into their projects, and to the issues that drive them, many, if not all, of the emotional and intellectual components of the artistic process. The curatorial and the artistic imaginations may not be identical, but the border between them has become harder to define.

Yet I have so many questions. How did we reach the point where we expect art to respond to the needs and aspirations of peoples and nations? Are there limits to what art can be asked to do? Why have the expectations for art increased at a time when the individual artist is feared, not only in the United States but in many other countries as well, and the artist's voice is being systemati- cally deconstructed? What are the political implications of approaching art as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself, or both a means and an end? What is the

responsibility of the curator to ensure respect for the integrity of a work of art, which can survive, miracul-

ously, even if the art points everywhere but toward itself and all the walls between it and the world around it seem dissolved? At what point does approaching a work of art in terms of what it can do, rather than in terms of what makes it unlike any other work, or indeed anything else, bring to mind nightmares of instrumental thinking? Several times in the last couple of years, after listening to people speak about the profound representational and national needs art is expected to meet, I have found my- self yearning to curate an exhibition about an eccentric visionary tradition in U.S. art that includes loners like Forrest Bess and Albert York, whose small paintings are obsessive, hypnotic, intensely personal worlds. I have also dreamed of an exhibition in which materials are approached, not as things to be used, but as realities in themselves that allow artists to physically enter the per- ceptual process and to introduce themselves and their audiences to the intimacy and otherness of matter. I am profoundly committed to the effort to reintegrate art with life, or, in cultures where they have always been

18 WINTER 1998

integrated, to continue to articulate and expand their connectedness, but I believe the particularity of art must be respected. Sustained attention to the life of an object is no less of a moral act to me than sustained attention to situations and communities artists enable me to enter. Biennials cannot succeed unless they engage their communities and make enough sense within them that the communities infuse the exhibitions with a vibrant and almost palpable sense of place; but respecting artists who are determined to retain their independence from audiences and categories, and being able to argue for the

importance of this resistance, are also essential to a biennial's potential for growth.

I believe the best way to write concretely about the issues that affected me with the most immediacy in the

Bellagio meetings is by responding to the curators' for- mulations, to their anxieties and insights, to their eager- ness for exchange. Since I am a writer, this commentary was shaped by my response to language, in particular to words the curators used that continue to occupy a great deal of space in my head. The intensity with which I have lived with these words since leaving Bellagio located

my personal struggle with the meanings of the conference. I am aware of the mistakes that can result from

basing a commentary on discussions of some of these exhibitions rather than on firsthand experience of the

Johannesburg, Havana, Istanbul, or Dakar biennials. I realize that the curators' understanding of some of the issues I discuss may be very different from or far more

developed than mine. I also realize that the primary concerns of some or many of the curators may be only peripherally related to those addressed here. Even when this is the case, I hope this commentary will make it easier for those who read it to respond better to their own situations, to our situations, to the situations of so many people trying to come to terms with the meanings and

possibilities of art and culture in a post-Cold War, postcolonial, fin-de-siecle moment, in which I am surely not the only one who feels he is continually picking up and

losing the threads of the conversation, absorbing and los-

ing its voices, believing it is my conversation while won- dering whose conversation I'm in.

Transparency The discussions in Bellagio underlined the importance of several related constellations of words. The constellation that includes impurity, partiality, and incompleteness suggests the rejection of any assumption of absolute

authority, conclusive knowledge, or human or cultural essence. Another constellation includes words like

hybridity, reciprocity, negotiation, and reconciliation, suggesting the pressing need many people feel to listen to one another and to acknowledge and communicate with realities different from their own. These constellations are familiar and, among many cultural communities in the United States, widely accepted. Their usefulness in

helping people to consider themselves and their relation-

ships to others in an increasingly decentralized yet inter- connected world is, to me, incontestable. These constellations of words clarify not only the attitudes of curators but also the complexity and the general goals of many of the big international contemporary art exhibitions. It was

apparent from the meetings that all the biennials are

hybrids, shaped by different interests, some of them

competing. Many are conceived within a nationalistic framework intended to develop national confidence and

pride, yet the art they present may argue against nationalism and even against the idea of a nation. It was also

apparent that if it were possible to produce a cross sec- tion of the structure of any of these exhibitions, it would show layer upon layer of negotiation and reconciliation. And many of the curators want the actual exhibitions to

inspire both local dialogues and dialogues with other biennials and nations.

What concerns me here is a third constellation. It includes words like self-consciousness, openness, and

transparency and phrases such as "declaring yourself." Several of the curators emphasized the importance of self-consciousness, which implies a sophisticated awareness of the histories and implications of the ideas they are working with and of the economic and political sys- tems they are working within, as well as an ability to build this awareness into their curatorial presentations. Vishakha N. Desai, director of the galleries at the Asia

Society in New York, asserted that curators must "own

up to taste," define their positions, and explain where

they are coming from and what they cannot yet understand. She spoke about "recognizing our own fallibility" and sharing that recognition with audiences. "We are as much products as creators," she said. For Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of the i997 Johannesburg Biennale, "part of the responsibility of the curators is to say, This is what I am doing, and it is not the final word." In a private conversation, Enwezor spoke about "creating a space of vulnerability." This wonderful phrase reflects the wish of many of these curators to conceive an

19 art journal

ANN

.... ... ... rol ~seN A.; .. . .. . . ................ ....... .... .... ... ... ......... .

.. . .. . 15A.i

. . . . . . . . -I ~ III~rr ~ I ~. . . . . . . . . . . .~ ~ . . ..... li t

Alexis Rodriguez Duarte. Untitled, 1997. Color photograph from the forthcoming book May 1997. Taken in Havana in May 1997, this photograph shows the city during the Bienal.The capitol building is to the left and a billboard advertising the Bienal is to the right of center.

20 WINTER 1998

exhibition experience in which intimacy, accessibility, and self-disclosure are welcomed, and audiences are

encouraged to express their ideas and feelings by partici- pating in the collective production of meaning. The

importance of participation and interactivity in Docu- menta X helped convince some of the curators in Bellagio that, in the words of Virginia Perez-Ratton, the director of the Museo de Arte y Disefio Contemporineo in San Jose, Costa Rica, "Documenta was coming into another

century with this show." This constellation of words indicates how much the generation of curators now com-

ing into power believes in responsibility and generosity. It also reveals how essential hospitality and trust have become to the success of most ambitious cross-cultural curatorial endeavors.

The issue for me is not the spirit of these words or their importance to this artistic moment. The issue is

ensuring that the difficulty of being self-conscious, of

making oneself transparent, of declaring oneself, is understood. When I recently heard U.S. politicians at an economic conference talk about the need to be more

"open and transparent," it was clear to me how easily these words can become conventions. One of the problems is that words or phrases calling for greater openness and transparency tend to be understood politically, eco- nomically, sociologically, or aesthetically. Rarely are they understood to be meaningful within all of these frame- works. Even more important, rarely are they understood psychologically. The confidence with which the words are now being used in the field suggests less an unending process in which any sense of control is ultimately illuso-

ry than finality, as if it is possible to declare oneself once and for all in that moment, or as if it is enough to be able to declare oneself in such a way as to get what one desires from a specific situation. As a result, these words tend to promise the relinquishing of authority without delivering it. If the difficulty of the words is not acknowledged, then their use can become pat and manipulative. When this is the case, they do not become a way of sharing power-or, in the words of the Brazilian artist Mauricio Dias, of "exchanging territories"-but rather simply of reinforcing power at the curatorial, institutional, or political end.

The currency of words like openness and transparency leads me to ask, How much can we reveal and how much must we hide, and how does the line between revealing and concealing structure the tone and conversation curators are trying to create? How much does being

open and transparent challenge power and how much does it reinforce it? What is the relation between trans-

parency and mastery? What kind of sharing of power is

really desirable, or possible, within an exhibition that must communicate authority to be credible? Which artists, curators, and peoples are likely to support these words, and which are not? Is a curator trying to put a biennial on the map in a part of the world largely re- moved from the immediate possibility of economic and

political power more or less likely to argue for these words than a curator in a country where such power is taken for granted?

What does it mean to "declare yourself'? Does it mean being up front about the goals of a show? And is that possible when the goals of these exhibitions may be manifold, from supporting art and artists in one place, to providing an overview of the contemporary art situation, to putting an entire culture, country, or even part of the world on the international art map? Does "declaring yourself" mean defining taste when an exhibition driven by both transnational awareness and national needs will always go beyond individual taste? Does it mean sharing with audiences the ideological premises and aims of an exhibition likely to overflow any ideological framework in which anyone tries to put it? Arguing for a particular kind of art and for thinking about it? Situating the exhibition within the history of exhibition approaches and curatorial methodologies? Historicizing the exhibition and its place within the tradition of that biennial and of the city itself, as Paulo Herkenhoff did in Bellagio in his cogent overview of the 1998 Sdo Paulo Bienal, of which he is chief curator? Discussing funding sources and defining the problems and compromises that are inevitable in biennials, and how these compromises end up shaping the show?

What about the personal implications of openness and transparency? Do these words mean defining oneself in race, class, and gender terms-terms that are evolving all the time? Do they mean defining oneself in terms of geography, of family history, of the psychological and social formation of one's style? What about individual ambition? How is that talked about? And the kind of obsessiveness and narcissism that, as Herkenhoff indicated, are inextricable and indeed necessary components of most meaningful curatorial ventures?

In short, while words and phrases like "declaring yourself" and "making yourself transparent" can help establish a climate of exchange and engagement, they do

21 art journal

not, in themselves, lead to what I think most of the curators want to encourage but are also somewhat wary of encouraging: risk. In addition, they do not, by themselves, acknowledge that the candor and honesty many of the curators were calling for depend not only on intro- spection and goodwill but on performance and style. In the best memoirs, which have become one of the domi- nant literary forms of this time, candor is always both exposure and creation. Openness and transparency must have a form to inspire people to believe in them, and when they have that form they are already both an un- masking and a transformation. Just as important as the will to be open, then, is the form in which a curator is able to be open. This form, in turn, will affect the tone and texture of the exhibition. The ability to be open and transparent in ways that inspire trust and risk is one of the talents that can link curatorial and artistic creation. The ultimate test of the form may be whether, and in what ways, it allows itself to be open to question.

As Desai recognized, these words lead directly into the identity issue. "Making transparent and self-conscious brings identity to the fore," she said. At the same time, the words expose the immense complexity of the concept of identity. Anyone using this constellation of words is, in effect, acknowledging this complexity. He or she is also suggesting that words like negotiation, reconciliation, and hybridity apply not just to people's relations to others and to the world around them but to the processes of everyone's inner life. These words and phrases -openness, transparency, self-consciousness, declaring yourself-therefore have the potential to restore the radi- cality that has been largely lost from the other two constellations of words. When the difficulties of these words emerge, the meanings of hybridity, negotiation, reciprocity, and partialness become dramatic. Self-consciousness, openness, and transparency call attention to an instability and danger that seems so much of the moment and yet so basic to the human condition that it is both topical and primal. At the same time, these words pose a question many artists and curators are struggling with: How can awareness and acceptance of instability and uncer- tainty become a source of community, knowledge, won- der, and revelation?

Heroic/Nonheroic Although the constellations of words that shaped the discussions of curatorial identity in Bellagio are insistently, even adamantly, nonheroic, the exhibitions discussed are,

with the exception of the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International, both of which have been around since the nineteenth century, heroic at their cores. In the biennials that have emerged since the Havana Bienal was inaugurated in 1984, art is a means that enables curators to work toward breaking the isolation of their peoples and regions and redefining national and international relationships. In most of these exhibitions, art is also seen as a means of improving society and making the world better. Enwezor expressed his hope that the Second Johannesburg Biennale would be "a celebration of South African independence" that worked toward the "recon- nection of South Africa to the world." Remi Sagna, the secretary general of the 1998 Dakar Biennial, defined one aim of his show as making Dakar a pan-African center. Herkenhoff said the goals of his 1998 Bienal included "the formation of the gaze of young Brazilians" and re- forming Sdo Paulo's institutions. "It's not for art's sake," he said. "It's for the sake of the education of society." Caroline Turner, the director of the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993, in Brisbane, spoke of the importance of educating Australians about the changing identity of Australia, "which is no longer a Western outpost," and, by so doing, to "change the way Australians see the region through the art." For Llilian Llanes Godoy, the director of the Centro Wifredo Lam in Havana and the organizer of all five Havana biennials, "art is very important for the survival of humanity." She is convinced her biennial and other exhibitions of this genre can contribute to "the construction of a more balanced world."

For the curators in Bellagio, as a group, a more balanced world is not possible without more equal representation in the corridors of cultural power. Margaret Archuleta, curator of fine arts at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, made clear that her responsibility at the meetings, "and it's a heavy responsibility," was to speak for Native Americans who are almost always excluded from the most prominent international artistic events. "How do they get to participate in this arena?" she asked. This was a question, she said, that she had to answer to her people. Ramirez, too, like several others, raised the issue of representation. Part of her job as a curator and scholar, she said, is to understand why artists from Brazil, let's say, are often included in these shows while artists from Bolivia are left out. For her, it is imperative to render visible the dynamics of those international circuits that give artists in some countries, and from certain ethnic

22 WINTER 1998

backgrounds, a greater chance of being recognized inter-

nationally than others. Curators did communicate their passion for art and

the importance of standards. Llanes: "Our aim is to show the best art in our country." Perez-Ratton: "I have been

traveling for years, and I am sick of all the bad Central American art I saw. . . . We have to try and get the qual-

ity people into these shows." Enwezor: "We have to deal with issues of art." His responsibilities in Johannesburg, Enwezor said, included making distinctions in quality and

clarifying the different ways in which "artist" is defined.

Being an artist is not the same in Africa as it is in the United States, he said, and not the same in Nigeria, where he was born, as it is in South Africa, which he described as "a divided country, horribly wounded," where the "situation of the artist is a life-and-death matter." Enwezor indicated his discomfort with any curatorial or critical language that does not allow for the possibility of using passionate words, like love and beauty, to describe the encounter with art.

One of the reasons that the Havana Bienal is so

widely respected among biennial curators is that the aesthetic and the political were inseparable and equal in it from its inception. Llanes believed in Cuban and other Latin American artists. She wanted to provide a space for artists "who do not have space in the world." She wanted to enable countries and regions that were strangers to understand one another better. In biennials that emerged in the nineties, however, the relationship between aesthetic and political needs has been less seamless. The need to

empower and connect regions and peoples can seem so

great, in fact, that the first message sent out by recent biennials as a group is not: see what the art in them and in their countries or regions has achieved and has to say to the world, but rather: consider what the art in them is intended to do. The issue here is tricky. The same political needs and circumstances that define the urgency of these exhibitions-if they were just surveys of good art, few people in other countries, and perhaps even in the countries where the exhibitions were held, would feel a desire to visit them-can also make them seem contrived and manipulative. The same needs that convince some people to take these exhibitions seriously make others uneasy with them.

The conflict between a commitment to art and a commitment to using art to serve other agendas is not just a biennial issue. In the fiercely contested yet unfor- gettable "Magiciens de la terre," in Paris in 1989, its

curator, Jean-Hubert Martin, in his effort to reveal to the West the continuing vitality of artistic traditions in non- Western cultures, installed almost all the non-Western works in an exhibition context that had little or nothing to do with the intentions of the artists who created the works and the traditions they served. In many of the multicultural, identity-based exhibitions of the early nineties, there were layers of disjunctiveness: between the art (non-Western in origin) and the site (often de-

signed for modernism), between the art and many of its audiences, between the personal nature of some of the art and the representational or liberation causes the curators were asking the exhibition to serve.

While the new biennials grow out of the climate that

produced exhibitions like these, they also reflect the conflict between the commitment to and the use of art in museums whose narrowness helped make multicultural exhibitions necessary. In New York, hardly anyone in- formed about art institutions is under the illusion that

any of the city's big museums cares first and foremost for art, no matter how brilliant and sustaining their exhibitions may be or how exemplary they may be in caring for the art entrusted to them. Curatorial programs serve institutional and board interests and agendas that are economic, social, and political as much as they are aesthetic. These interests, more than the needs of artists, or of

contemporary art, are at the forefront of exhibition programming in powerhouse museums in the United States.

Using art in the service of causes that may not be its own is a complicitly accepted part of U.S. museum life. The news media not only refuse to question the ideological structures of big museums, but hold up some of them as models of aesthetic responsibility. The more blatant conflict that can exist in biennials between commitment to art and commitment to using art should be considered with this recent exhibition history and with museums in mind.

The first biennial issue is legitimation. "The entire debate about legitimation is at the center of what international biennials are trying to do," Enwezor said. What is being legitimated? Art? Artists? Curators? Institutions? Traditions? Cultures? Communities? Cities? Regions? Nations? What is the process of legitimation? It certainly involves giving exhibition space to local and national artists and showing the people who live in those loca- tions what the artists can do. It involves showing people from different parts of a continent and from other conti- nents what the artists, cultures, and inhabitants of a

23 art journal

region are capable of. By becoming a recognized event, covered by newspapers and art magazines and attended by people from the region and perhaps from all over the world, the local is validated in a way in which a few local cultures anywhere-not even in urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, or Tokyo--can now validate themselves. While perceiving the local's desire and claim for international recognition, international and transnational communities are not only pressured into focusing attention on the local but they are also given evidence of their own authority by recognizing the power of their legitimizing machinery in the local's eyes. In this aston- ishingly complex and frequently collusive game that demands as much self-consciousness as possible, the local, the regional, and the international can legitimate one another.

What legitimates most? Is it that art from a region appears in an international exhibition? Is it that a region that may have been previously unidentified in technologi- cally advanced nations with contemporary art, and, as a result, with modernity, mounts such an exhibition and therefore takes its place in its own eyes, and in the eyes of the world, as a nation with a rightful claim to the present? Is it critical acceptance and appreciation? By whom? Is it market interest that enables local and regional artists unknown before a biennial to enter major collections and participate in other international exhibitions? Is it the effect of the exhibition two, five, and ten years later on the artistic life of the region? If the Dakar Biennial, as Sagna defined it, has multiple goals-including making known the art in Africa without ghettoizing Africans, providing a place where African artists can meet and debate with one another, and generating interest in African art outside Africa-what most determines success or failure? If the Havana Bienal is, in Perez-Ratton's words, a "legiti- mator of Latin American art"-an exhibition many artists from Africa and Latin America attend to understand what other artists from these regions are doing-with minimal attention from the mainstream Western news and art media, is the biennial nevertheless enough of a legitimat- ing force that it should require, in its own eyes and in the eyes of all those who depend on it, no other form of legitimation? What does the value still placed on the machinery of recognition in Western Europe and the United States mean in postcolonial exhibitions born from liberation struggles?

"What is it we are making?" Madeleine Grynsztein, curator of twentieth-century art at the Carnegie Museum

of Art and the director of the i999 Carnegie International, a triennial exhibition, asked. "Why? For whom?"

While the burden of legitimation is enough by itself to suggest the heroic nature of the new biennials, just putting these shows together is heroic as well. The leg- work, tenacity, tact, forbearance, flexibility, assertiveness, and cunning demanded of a biennial curator are startling. Many must negotiate with unreliable funders and fight for their artists and ideas within chronically unstable political conditions. "Every day the government changes," N. Fulya Erdmeci, director of the International Istanbul Biennial, said. In every city that is the site of a developing biennial, the art infrastructure is limited at best. Erdmeci spoke about asking for help from everyone, including her brother and other family members. Her photographer was her best friend. She herself helped to pack the art "like babies." Llanes spoke about the absence of a budget from the Cuban ministry of culture in the last two Havana biennials and "solving problems day by day." She got help from the mayor, institutions, the army. After listening to her talk about the physical and mental exhaustion she has felt after her biennials ended, describing her effort as heroic seems like an understatement.

While trying to understand the nature of biennials, it is important to consider the contrast between the heroic nature of most of these exhibitions and the language of modesty and humility curators use to define an appropriate curatorial style. It is also important to consider the contrast between a profound suspicion of religious responses to art in some of the curatorial presentations- and of the kind of theological language that was com- monplace not too long ago to describe the encounter with a painting or sculpture-and the widespread faith in the transformative, even healing power of biennials. Herken- hoff, who was incredulous when he cited an example of the eucharistic language with which the encounter with modernist art has sometimes been described, nevertheless asserted that the Sdo Paulo Bienal has the ability to give its city a "soul." Many of the curators would be extremely wary of any messianic view within an artist's work, yet many biennials have a messianic dimension. While the art many of the curators in Bellagio support is conscious of itself as art and limited in its spiritual claims, the causes the art are intended to serve may be as idealistic and grand as those served by early and mid-twentieth-century paintings and sculptures inspired by spiritual or utopian beliefs.

Is the conflict between faith and knowledge still appropriate in an age in which the nearly irresistible ap-

24 WINTER 1998

peal of the new technology seems to be its combination of information and magic? Any large overview of con-

temporary art is likely to swing between faith and consciousness, balancing either toward skepticism or belief but never entirely eliminating the other side. Certainly no biennial can afford to dismiss the spiritual and hope to

appeal to multiple audiences. Soon after the Bellagio conference, I visited a sculpture park near Vilnius built after Lithuania's independence in i991 called the Sculpture Museum of the Centre of Europe. On a Saturday after- noon, two couples came to the park directly after their

weddings. They wanted to touch the sculptures and be

photographed around them. Clearly they believed the

sculpture and the park blessed them. I asked its founding director, thirty-year-old Gintaras Karosas, how often this occurred. He answered, "All the time." Whether it is in the art shown or in the belief in what art can accomplish, the biennial curator, however strong his or her insistence on self-consciousness and context, takes the human faith in artistic magic seriously.

The contrasts, or tensions, within the languages of the curators, or between their words and their exhibitions, lead me to what I see as one of the major unre- solved issues in the new biennials: modernism. In the three days of meetings at Bellagio, modernism was a purely negative presence. It was acknowledged as the driving cultural force when the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, the Sdo Paulo Bienal, and Docu- menta were founded. Once this acknowledgment was made, declaring the need for a new biennial model inevitably followed. The kind of faith that characterized the responses to a great deal of modernist art by many people devoted to it was assumed to be antithetical to the kind of engaged, questioning response many of the biennial curators are after. Modernist exhibitions like "Qu'est-ce que la sculpture moderne?" in Paris in 1986 were cited as examples of the kinds of narrow and exclu- sionary museum surveys unacceptable now. For these curators as a group, modernism, with its essentialism and its totalizing, unifying impulses, was so objectionable in today's postmodern world that it had to be either ostra- cized or singled out as an enemy to be overcome.

But I can't imagine these shows without modernism. Only in modernism do I find a comparable concentration of belief in progress, education, healing, and transformation. Only in modernism do I consistently find that acute awareness of vulnerability and limits combined with heroic ambition and will that is shaping the identities of

a number of the biennial curators. This combination has been a decisive feature in some of the best European and U.S. art from Paul Cezanne and Jackson Pollock through Bruce Nauman and Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Thinking about the identity of the biennial curator, I can't help feeling the presence of Joseph Beuys, even though the consensus among curators is that he is no longer relevant. This may well be true for younger artists, and in an exhibition like Documenta X that was relatively free of nationalistic aspirations and of any responsibility to represent the struggles of peoples and nations, Beuys can, perhaps, be relegated to the past. In her conversation with Robert Storr, curator of contem-

porary art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published in the May 1997 Artforum, Catherine David compared Beuys with Marcel Broodthaers, the highly self-conscious artist/curator, or curator/artist, who was one of the signposts of her show, and made it clear that Broodthaers, not Beuys, was an artist of this moment. "I think it's very difficult these days not to privilege Broodthaers' vision," David said. "I think Broodthaers was not romantic, but radical and sometimes cynical. He was very attentive to superstructures, to the limitations of aesthetic practice. . . . [T]hese days it's harder to show

Beuys." She may be right-for the purposes of her show. In some of the biennials outside the West, however, it is Beuys-with his concept of social sculpture, concern for education and political activism, commitment to total societal change, and awareness of the wounds that result from fragmented perspectives and depersonalized behav- ior-who seems to me the more irrefutable figure.

By raising the issue of modernism, I mean to be neither provocative nor accusatory. My aim here is to try and make it easier for curators at the end of the century to use whatever art and ideas are available to help them develop and clarify their positions. I don't think it is possible to understand the level of hope and faith in these shows-to understand how curators reached the point where they believe art can meet such overwhelming needs-without being open to the many sides of modernism. The curators of these extraordinarily hybrid shows cross many worlds. Any attitude or position that prevents them from using any of the art in this century to clarify their aims and develop their ideas, and to make sure this hybridity can be rendered visible and approached as a source of knowledge and strength, particu- larly in countries where modernism has never been seen in depth, is not helpful.

25 art journal

The Future Despite all the crucial questions they raise, and also because of these crucial questions, biennials born from deep cultural and political needs will make a difference. They will be festivals for art in which all those who attend will find something that pleases or moves them.

They will create new audiences and new bases of information. They will introduce different regions to unfamiliar approaches to art and people in art-world centers to unfamiliar regions. They will foster debate about the

meanings of national and international and about what it means to be an artist at the end and at the beginning of a millennium. They will encourage other cities and countries to consider building artistic and cultural infra- structures. They will make clear that many cities and countries are capable of being seats of cultural power.

These exhibitions will also help build respect for art and culture throughout the world. Perhaps the most

important message of the biennials as a phenomenon is that the curators who organize them and the organiza- tions that sponsor them believe in the future. The newer biennials argue implicitly that the places and countries that house them have a future, that the future is there to be built collectively by people of goodwill everywhere who want to join in, and that in the process of concep- tualizing the future, art matters.

If this message is so moving to me, it is partly because my country does not seem to believe either in art or in the future. In the United States, only a relatively small number of people believe that art can have an

impact on the world. The assault against the National Endowment for the Arts, the government agency that has

given a limited but decisive amount of funding to the arts since 1965, has been relentless for nine years. The United States Information Agency, which for years sent U.S. artists abroad and enabled them to establish connec- tions with other artists and bring the lessons they learned from their contacts back home, now provides almost no money for cultural programming and largely defines U.S. culture in terms of Hollywood and the entertainment industry. The assault on art and artists in the U.S. media, and the exploitation of the anxieties about artists by conservative political interests, has made it impossible for the United States, as a nation, to view art with confidence. It will be a long time before the United States is remotely comfortable with artists, contemporary art, and the artistic imagination.

In short, at the moment when many other countries

with little or no immediate possibility of economic and political power have set out to realize dreams of gaining power through art, the government and mass media of the United States have been trying to evict art and artists from the American Dream. One of the telling ironies of this discomfort with art and artists is that it is helping to level the playing field internationally. By inhibiting the ability of U.S. art to function as an aesthetic, economic, and political force, the government and media have ended up serving postcolonial cultural aspirations outside the United States. As a citizen of this country who believes in the artists here, who has spent years fighting for them, and who will always fight for them, I find this situation painful on many levels. But it must be

acknowledged. And curators in other countries must know that while there is an extraordinary breadth of

knowledge and experience among art professionals in the United States, and while art and artists here will continue to be essential players on the world's artistic and cultural stages, the art system in the United States can no

longer dominate as it did. The eruption of biennials is evidence of a historic change.

Three interrelated issues must continue to be debat- ed if the new biennials are going to be clear about what

they are and what they want to achieve. The first issue is

legitimation. To what degree are the sources of legitimation for the biennials that have emerged since 1984 determined by geopolitical conditions? By practical necessity? By emotional and psychological needs? If exhibitions do not depend at all on Western goodwill and

support, like the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which looks toward Asia, do they become more or less necessary and desirable in other parts of the world? Where? To whom? Can biennials with shared histories and goals help legitimate one another? What legitimates most? What needs most to be legitimated?

The second issue is audience. It came up constantly in Bellagio without ever being engaged. It inspired some fertile remarks. Llanes's statement-"a lot of artists I detest, but I respect the audience"-made sense on

many levels. It reminded me of all the artists I now value whose work I did not like or respond to for years, but whom I kept in the back of my mind because of my respect for their supporters. It reminded me that art cannot gain a real foothold anywhere unless it is engaged by the communities who live with and around it, regardless of whether the curators are sympathetic with the tastes and aesthetic assumptions of community mem-

26 WINTER 1998

bers. Is it possible for curators to have candid, even con- tentious discussions with colleagues about the many audiences they are trying to reach, which ones they feel most and least responsible to and why, how to build last- ing relationships with them, and how these relationships shape the understanding and possibilities of art within an exhibition or museum?

The final issue is the one that will not go away: quality. The language in which art from non-Western cultures is being defended is still often one of representation. The focus of attention is not on what a work has to offer-poetically, thematically, psychologically, philo- sophically, and politically-but the cause the artist serves and the political struggle with which he or she is identi- fied. Biennials offer an opportunity to transform the chasm between the language of representation and the language of quality into a space in which many of the people demoralized by this split can make a place for themselves. We have to begin to talk about art in ways in which everyone has something to lose. People have to write and lecture about art in ways that leave them exposed. If a critic were asked to argue for an artist in a public event in an unfamiliar country, it would all but oblige him or her to think in terms of issues and words that could cross cultures. Both the positive and negative responses to the presentation and to the artist would be

revealing. If cross-cultural debates about art and artists continue to be part of the programs of biennials, and if these debates are published, perhaps in some collective biennial publication, they could help locate the words and the approaches to language that now carry maximum feeling and thought. The biennials can help develop a poetics for contemporary art that has not been recognized or that does not yet exist.

Michael Brenson is a critic and curator. Recent publications to which he has contributed include Maya Lin: Topologies and Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art. He is also contributing a major essay to a forthcoming book on the history of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Program.

Participants in the Bellagio Conference Margaret Archuleta, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, The Heard Museum, Phoenix; Rene Block, Director, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel; Michael Brenson, New York; Germano Celant, Curator of Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Director, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Vishakha N. Desai, Director of the Galleries, Asia Society, New York; Okwui Enwezor, Artistic Director, Second Johannesburg Biennale; N. Fulya Erdemci, Director, International Istanbul Biennial; Lillian Llanes Godoy, Director, Centro Wifredo Lam; Madeleine Grynsztejn, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Paulo Herkenhoff, Chief Curator, FundaCgo Bienal de Sdo Paulo; Virginia Perez-Ratton, Director, Museo de Arte y Disefo Contempor- aneo, San Jose, Costa Rica; Apinan Poshyananda, Associate Director, Centers of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok; Mari Carmen Ramirez, Curator of Latin American Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Remi Sagna, Secretaire General, Dakar Biennale; Caroline Turner, Deputy Director, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

27 art journal

Article Contentsp. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27

Issue Table of ContentsArt Journal, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 1-112Front Matter [pp. 1-1]The Story Is Always Partial: A Conversation with Vera Frenkel [pp. 2-15]The Curator's Moment [pp. 16-27]Liminalities: Discussions on the Global and the Local [pp. 28-49]Work Avoidance: The Everyday Life of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades [pp. 50-61]International DispatchesA Tree from Many Shores: Cuban Art in Movement [pp. 62-73]Neurotic Imperatives: Contemporary Art from Puerto Rico [pp. 74-85]

ConversationRing of Fire: Interview with Joe Lewis and Yong Soon Min [pp. 86-89]

Working NotesCulture/Cultivation: Thoughts on Painting the Landscape [pp. 90-95]

ReviewsReview: Is She Famous Yet? [pp. 96-97]Review: Katzorama [pp. 97-99]Review: Us and Them; Or, I'd Never Belong to a Club That Would Have Me as a Member [pp. 99-101]Review: Modernist Art and Its Market [pp. 102-105]Review: One-Dimensional Man [pp. 105-109]Review: Critical Differences [pp. 110-112]

Back Matter

Brenson Michael the Curator's Moment

Documents

Transcript of Brenson Michael the Curator's Moment