C110 article

Curating Now

Regina Gleeson reports on the recent conference on contemporary curatorial practice at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, November 2004.

At Curating Now, left to right: Douglas Fogle, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Paolo Colombo, MAXXI, Rome, and Kevin Power, Reina Sofía, Madrid; photo / courtesy the author

Curating Now was an international symposium that sought to discuss issues relevant to the curation of contemporary art practice. Enrique Juncosa, the director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), said that the time is ripe for an event such as this that looks at cultural policies from different countries, because of the increasing importance of museums in our present-day societies. The participants included Rachael Thomas and Enrique Juncosa from IMMA, Iwona Blazwick form The Whitechapel, London, Kevin Power from the Reina Sofía, Madrid, Ivo Mesquita from Pinacoteca, São Paolo, James Rondeau from the Art Institute of Chicago, Paolo Colombo from MAXXI in Rome, Douglas Fogle from the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Hans Ulrich Obrist from Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Fumio Nanjo from the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Hans Ulrich Obrist kick-started the event, detailing his curatorial projects that weaves historical roots with contemporary interdisciplinary tangents. His idea of the relationship between the museum and the city being open for renegotiation was reinforced by the other curators and, even though Obrist is heavily involved in transitional artwork and practice, he was definite about his view that collections are the backbone of the museum, which he in turn sees as a valuable point of reference for our societies' location in time and place. In response to location-specificity, the discussions followed the line of the contemporary style of curation, whereby the circumstance of the exhibition is fundamental to the exhibition itself.

This renegotiation of curator-artist terrain became a strong theme throughout the symposium. It came to a point where the adulation for the artist could have been interpreted as being centred on collecting and exhibiting the work of trophy-artists, a situation removed from the experiences of many of the artists in the audience. Iwona Blazwick aptly noted that it can appear that there is a curatorial conspiracy in operation when everyone is focusing on the same artists but cautioned against refraining from engaging with an artist simply because they have exhibited widely. Paolo Colombo interjected that he wants to engage in the dialogue between curator, artist, institute and the city, and invited artists to "ask him to dance" so that the creative process can be negotiated together.

All participants discussed the function of a museum in reflecting contemporary heterogeneous cultural climate, in being a repository for the documentation and cataloguing of the past on which our present circumstance is built, and in being a safe place for the artist. Also, the issue of education was questioned, regarding the level at which art-education programmes should be pitched. With the exception of Kevin Power, who is Juncosa's successor at the Reina Sofía, there was an unwillingness to acknowledge curatorial failures in the same context as their successes, which would seem to inhibit the openness to incompleteness and transparency of the critical process alluded to during the symposium.

The curators discussed the fact that there is more value and relevance in curating and collecting through conceptual links as opposed to strict chronological order. It was therefore surprising that the majority of speakers failed to apply this valuable idea to their presentations and spent much time detailing the chronological history of their institutes.

This conference tempted the audience with elements of the raw energy of curation today but didn't deliver any challenge. However, Curating Now offered a wonderful insight into models of curation around the globe and succeeded in creating a strong starting point for further debate on curation that, Rachael Thomas suggests, can be developed in the future. Finally, the IMMA staff was commendable in its first-class organisation of this event and organisers of similar symposia will hopefully take a lead from IMMA's professionalism.

Regina Gleeson is a writer on art and technology.

Curating Now, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 10 - 12 November 2004

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp. 36–37
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