ARTISTS AS CURATORS
Artists acting as curators has become a theme in contemporary art and institutional strategy — how did this phenomenon come about? Are artists successful as curators? And what does it mean to have exhibition design as a medium, like painting or sculpture?
Theme 1: Artists as Entrepreneurs, in the 19th Century
This is a self-portrait of Charles Peale, titled “The Artist in His Museum” and painted in 1822. He is depicted opening the curtain to his own museum, which is a collection of both paintings but also natural history objects. In the 19th century, art museums were ideologically linked with natural sciences, knowledge, and education or learning.
Gustave Courbet (1819 - 1877) can be considered the first great artist-entrepreneur. Instead of relying on the state-run Salon system to establish himself as an artist, Courbet pioneered the solo retrospective as a private commercial venture — he used the exhibition space to market himself.
The Painter's Studio was rejected from the Salon. So Courbet decided, with the help of his patron (who is included in the above painting on the right-hand side), to set up his own Pavilion of Realism in 1855, right across from the Salon, where he could show his own works. At the time, artist solo shows were not commonplace; retrospectives were reserved for dead artists. The act of confidently setting up his own pavilion not only of rejected works, but also of all his own works, was very controversial and considered very flashy.
At the same time that artists challenged academic Salon standards for paintings themselves, they also challenged exhibition strategy. Historically, the break from the Academy is tied with the development of artists as curators and the emergence of new patronage models.
In the US, Frederic Edwin Church is another example of a 19th century artist-entrepreneur. Unlike in Europe, the US did not have an established academy or salon system. Instead, art was mostly shown inside patrons’ private homes. So, American artists in this period began to think about new ways to show their work. For example, in downtown New York, at the 10th Street Studio Building, a group of Hudson River School painters, including Church, set up their own studios for people to visit and view their work.
Heart of the Andes (1853) is a large-scale painting by Church, executed with an incredible level of detail and specificity. He had traveled to Ecuador and other places in South America with a natural realist to study different plants. However, the landscape was not painted from observation on-site but rather based on sketches Church brought back to his studio in New York. So although the work is based on real drawings, the overall image is an idealized composite.
Church exhibited Heart of the Andes as a form of entertainment — he would give visitors opera goggles at the entrance, they would pay to go in and see the picture, and he would tell the them where to stand. They even had to pay to check their coats — this was true entrepreneurship, and it demonstrates how artists were thinking about new exhibition strategies, which were often associated with showmanship and spectacle at this point.
Heart of the Andes also refers to the concept Manifest Destiny, the 19th century belief that American (and Western) settlers were destined and divinely entitled to expand across the continents. During this period, the United States had expanded its territory through the Louisiana Purchase and other land annexations. The old frame of the painting depicted the Founding Fathers, further emphasizing this idea that European Americans were entitled to the land, not only of North America but South America too.
Theme 2: Artists Staging Their Own Exhibitions
In the late 19th century, artist began to look for new spaces to show their work and often did in self-styled galleries. The Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers exhibited together in a studio in Paris in 1874 — this was the first Impressionist exhibition.
The movement’s name ‘Impressionism’ originated from a critic who referred to Monet's Impression, Sunrise(1872) as not a real painting but rather just an impression.
In Europe, artists began to come together and create their own exhibitions in groups, using curatorial strategies to market their works and to get exposure.
By the early 20th century, Marcel Duchamp made exhibition strategy a part of his aesthetic practice, and this is when the use of exhibition design as a true medium began to emerge.
Pictured above is Duchamp's 16 Miles of String at The First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York (1942). The string links the different artworks, but it is not clear whether the viewer’s eye is meant to follow the string from work to work, or if the string is meant to completely subvert the experience of the work and impede viewing. Curatorial strategies at this point start to become linked with early installation ideas — the way in which the artworks are laid out in the space starts to play with the meaning of the works themselves.
Other examples of Duchamp’s use of exhibition design include the International Surrealist exhibition in Paris from 1938, which featured 3 sections of works – paintings, objects and mannequins, and his Museums' Boîte en Valise project. In the 1930s and 40s, he arranged museums of miniature reproductions of his own work inside brown leather carrying cases, questioning the relative importance of the ‘original.’
At Warhol's Factory in the mid-20th century, the curatorial strategies start to blur the line between the exhibition/performance space and the place of the production. The place where things are made combined with the place where things are exhibited.
Theme 3: Institutional Critique
In the ‘institutional critique’ movement beginning in the 1960s and 70s, artists used strategies from within the museum in order to critique the museum. (Today, museums self-reflexively perform institutional critique, but at the time it was very controversial.)
In 1970 as part of Hans Haacke’s information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visitors were asked to respond to the question, “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?” Rockefeller was a trustee at MoMA at the time. For many years after, museums avoided showing Haacke out of fear of how he might challenge their funding sources.
In 1968-69, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the exterior of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, placing the focus on the conceptual and physical context of the museum. Also around this time, critic Brian O’Doherty published a group of essays questioning the idea and aesthetic construct of the ‘white cube.’ Can art exist outside of this framing?
Later, Damien Hirst and the YBAs followed the earlier same strategy of artists staging their own exhibitions. During the 1988 edition of Frieze London, he and his fellow students at Goldsmiths staged an exhibition mimicking Charles Saatchi’s first gallery, which drew the attention of the prominent collector. Hirst’s 1992 installation Pharmacy, also demonstrates that artists began to exhibition strategy not just artistic statements but also for promotion and market purposes.
In 1989, Martha Rosler used exhibition design as a medium as well as a tool to critique of social issues. She was invited by the DIA Foundation for a solo show, but instead she decided to stage a socially engaged project with 50+ artists. Over a 4 months, she set up 3 shows across Soho, set up as installations that acted as town hall meetings, exhibition spaces, and performance venues. She particularly highlighted issues such as urban housing, gentrification, and homelessness in light of real estate and art systems. In this way, curating can function as an artistic practice to retaliate against the lack of institutional support for artists.
In the 1990s, Fred Wilson used the curatorial medium in the service of art related to identity issues and institutional critique. At the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, he revealed racial and class prejudices through the institution’s collection holdings. Objects related to slavery were juxtaposed with luxury silverware and decorative objects of the same time period, commenting on the museum as a space that reinforces prejudices and inequalities.
Theme 4: Artists as Curators / Self-reflexive Institutional Critique
For the exhibition Artistic License: Six Takes on the Guggenheim Collection at the Guggenheim in New York, six artist-curators (each had already had solo shows at the museum) were each given one level of the rotunda, and they were allowed to select work from the permanent collection. They were only not allowed to select work made beyond the year of 1980. Many of these artists selected work that seemed personally relevant to them, a way of curating that mines from their own biographies. This approach is very different from the traditional one in which a curator takes an academic, clinical approach to an exhibition.
Cai Guo-Qiang: A Chinese artist now based in the US, he is famous for gunpowder pieces and public spectacle pieces (actually staging explosions, for example at the Tate Modern and over the Millennium Bridge in London in 2003). His work uses gunpowder as a symbol of China as it was invented there, and he is very interested in the association between ancient rituals and modern violence. Qiang suggests that the ancient and the modern are ultimately the same thing. He is also interested in the catharsis of destruction, or the idea of destruction as a creative element. Destruction is something that regenerates things at the same time that it destroys them.
At the Guggenheim show, he called his curated section “Non-Brand,” as his method was to select lesser-known works by “brand-name” artists. This relates to his interest in the similarities between the ancient/the old and the new/the modern. Looking back at these famous artists (Picasso, Kandinsky, Mondrian) and thinking about their early works, he emphasizes the artists themselves as a link between their old work and their newer work. The early works may not possess the same style that the artist ultimately became known for, but the artist is the sum of both, not just the final product. Guo-Qiang largely selected early figurative works by artists who became known for abstraction.
The way works are hung also resembles the ‘salon-style’ presentations in 19th century Paris. This is not a contemporary approach but rather a merging of the ancient, the old, and the new.
Paul Chan: Born in Hong Kong, he now lives and works in the US. His “non-projections” are installations in which he reimagines the concept of the moving image and the nature of representation. His work is inflatable, so he uses air and absence to create form and presence, often something that is organic like a figure. His work frequently includes sexual references.
Chan also works in public spaces as an artist-activist. In 2002, when the US had sanctions against Americans working in Iraq, he traveled there with the aid group Voices in the Wilderness, and in 2004, he created and distributed protestors’ map of the Republican National Convention.
At the Guggenheim, his curatorial section was titled “Sex, Water, Salvation or, What is a Bather?” He selected works from the collection that relate to the theme of water or bathing. His section also incorporated blue carpet as part of the installation, symbolizing water and visually linking all of the selected paintings.
The subject of “bathers” instantly recalls modern art, such as Cezanne's bathers. This trope in modern art emerged as a reaction against the reclining nude and the classical female figure. Often formally depicted more abstractly, or flattened, conceptually the bathers suggest gender issues, sexualized undertones, and the idea of pleasure relating to water.
In his curated section, Chan explores water as a broad and overarching theme, not just literally in terms of the sea or beach. For example, through Mondrian’s early painting Summer, Dune in Zeeland, he explores nature as the origin of abstraction. Lawrence Weiner’s text work ON THE SEA. FROM THE SEA. AT THE SEA. BORDERING THE SEA. is an evocation of water rather than a literal depiction.
Chan’s experience curating at the Guggenheim also filtered back to his concurrent solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, titled The Bather's Dilemma — his curatorial interests seemingly influenced his artistic projects.
Jenny Holzer: She well-known for using text in public space exploring social justice themes, plastering sentences and photographs to walls of buildings. She was the first woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 1990 (where she won the award for best pavilion), and her series ‘Truisms’ (1977-79) and Inflammatory Essays (1979-82) are particularly famous. In recent years, Holzer’s work has expanded to new media. She uses language to deconstruct how meaning is created in Western cultures, which are patriarchal and consumer-orientated societies.
At the Guggenheim, she titled her section “Good Artists.” She chose works made exclusively by female artists, to highlight gender disparity and the exclusion of women from the art historical canon. The title is matter of fact — the artists are good artists without any qualifiers, not “good women” artists or “good female” artists. They are simply and unequivocally good artists, and their gender is irrelevant to their artistic merit. Holzer’s curatorial approach is also a form of institutional critique. By inviting Holzer to curate the exhibition, the Guggenheim opens itself up to self-reflexive institutional critique.
One artist she selected was Louise Nevelson, whom she said inspired her as a child — this is someone who has a personal and biographic relevance to Holzer. Both of their works relate to the incorporation of public space. She also selected Adrian Piper and her 1973 project Mythic Being, in which the artist took on a male alter ego for performances and photographs. Like Holzer, Piper employs text as a medium and investigates identity as a theme.
Holzer also selected Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, two Abstract Expressionist painters who have been edged out of the history of the movement simply because of their gender.
Julie Mehretu: She is an Ethiopian artist explores the physical and social layering of places. A city, for example, is not just made up of the buildings that exist right now but also the social meanings behind it, what is built on top of it, what has been destroyed. In her works, Mehretu builds abstracted, architectural spaces through those different meanings. Her sources include archival photographs, urban planning grids, comics, and calligraphy in different languages, and she builds up physical layers with different materials like pens, pencils, paints and inks. She does not depict a specific space but instead a layering of many spaces.
This painting, Empirical Construction, Istanbul, is not a specific map or city plan of Istanbul, but rather the way in which Mehretu knows and comes to know Istanbul. It's more of an abstract connection that evokes a sense of exploding outward, of being formed.
At the Guggenheim, her section was titled “Cry Gold and See Black.” She was particularly interested in post-war works with themes of trauma, displacement, and anxiety across cultural boundaries. She selected several works that expressed a post-war sense of destruction that connect to her own work in terms of city spaces, and she also primarily selected abstract works, a clear connection to her abstract practice. Mehretu considers abstraction as a global vocabulary of destruction.
Some works also dealt with the body. Blythe Bohnen, one of the founding members of the feminist A.I.R. Gallery, was included in this section with her photographic self-portraits that capture the motions of her body, resulting in an eerie ghost-like effect. Two other works included in this section were Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion, a non-narrative triptych with distorted figures and carcasses, and David Hammons’s print Close Eyes and See Black, which uses his Black body as a gesture.
Richard Prince: Part of the Pictures Generation, Prince’s appropriative photo-based works blur the line between reality and artifice. In his famous Cowboy Series, in which he re-photographed images from Marlborough Man advertisements, Prince removed the text and any traces of branding on the original image, thus creating something new out of found objects.
His other well-known series Nurse Paintings is based on various covers of pulp romance novels. The titles each refer to thematic tropes from the books themselves — the graduate nurse, the naughty nurse, the millionaire nurse — and Prince paints over the original covers. Again, he creates something new out of found objects.
At the Guggenheim, Prince’s curatorial strategy hinged on finding patterns. As an appropriation artist, he constantly looks for new materials and new trends to mine. He ultimately focused on painting patterns between from the 1940s and 50s abstraction, looking at lesser-known Abstract Expressionist artists through formal comparisons. Artists included Philip Guston, Paul Jenkins, Claire Falkenstein, Yutaka Ohashi, Kenzo Okada, and more, so not only American artists but also French, Spanish, Japanese, etc.
The title of Prince’s section “Four Paintings Looking Right” comes from his own work, “Four Women Looking in the Same Direction” from 1977, an early re-photographed work. Here, ‘right’ does not mean a cardinal direction but acts as a qualitative statement (‘correct’).
Prince also loaned works from his own collection to this show, including an ‘unattributed’ (fake) Jackson Pollock—was he trying to give legitimacy to his own piece? How does the history of an artwork influence its meaning? The inclusion of this piece seems to make a joke or knowing comment.
Conclusion
Other recent artist-driven exhibitions demonstrate the pervasiveness of this theme. At the Hill Art Foundation, Charles Ray installed his work alongside Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. What does it mean for an artist to pair their work with historical works? While this lends a sense of legitimacy to the contemporary artist, it also brings the work into a greater art historical context.
In an exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation, Nicolas Party transformed the exhibition space into a suite of four Rococo-inspired murals that became a backdrop for a selection of pastels from the 18th century to the present, from Cassatt and Degas to Ofili and Hollowell. Pastel is a fragile medium with Golden Age connotations as well as an emphasis on the integration of decoration and design into art and life.
Finally, at the ‘new’ MoMA, there is a room curated by artist Amy Stillman. Within an entire overhaul and renovation undertaken by the museum to revisit their collection and how it represents art history, they specifically enlisted an artist to reevaluate and curate their holdings.
When did exhibitions become a medium? Why, and how, are institutions turning to artists to reevaluate their collections? Beginning in the 19th century, artists began to stage their own exhibitions as an artistic statement and as a way to take ownership of their careers. Now, as museums reevaluate their collections in the 21stcentury, artists-as-curators is a prevalent phenomenon.