Curatorial Style and Art Historical Thinking: Exhibitions as Objects of Knowledge

Abstract

The paper explores methodological conditions for the recasting of exhibitions as objects of knowledge. Martin Kemp's curatorial projects and exhibitions are examined in this light and in the context of Ken Arnold's formulation of ‘ideas-laid curating’. Arnold's notion sets a number of parameters, which are explored in this paper in the example of Martin Kemp's curatorial projects. Curatorial practices are not contingent almost exclusively on questions of display, or museological theory, but as the paper shows on considerations of ‘art historical style’. In the example of Martin Kemp's curatorial projects, ‘ideas- laid’ curating, and indeed theorizations about curatorial style, emerge as questions contingent on art historical style. The centrality of historical thinking, as a consistent theme underlying the narratives which Kemp's exhibition projects but also art historical writing undertake, is evidence to the above. While Arnold describes Kemp's curatorial style as interdisciplinary, interdisciplinarity and Kemp's ‘ideas-laid’ curating describes an object, rather than simply a form of practice and museological practice, of art history; given Kemp's strong reliance on art historical tropes of thinking characteristic of his own methodology applied in his writing and teaching. The paper explores connections between art historical styles of thinking and curatorial style proposing that in order to reconsider exhibitions as objects of knowledge we have to take into consideration in attempts to theorize about them ‘local’ aspects of knowledge; here the perspectives in the writing of art history which have influenced Kemp's curatorial work.