Curatorial Studies Research Articles

„Eine Sprache ausstellen“

Abstract In their attempt to reposition Germany in an international context after World War II, actors from both the fine arts and the literary scene turned to the idea of art as a universal language. Two major projects that shaped the West German cultural sphere in the 1950 s and 1960s – the contemporary art exhibition documenta 2 and Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s anthology Museum der modernen Poesie – placed this idea at their conceptual core. The debates surrounding these projects show, however, that the notion of art as a universal language was as contested as it was compelling. In close readings of paratexts, including previously overlooked archival material, it becomes evident that very different conceptualizations of monolingualism and community are attached to the idea in each context. Evaluating these differences through the lens of translation studies, curatorial studies, and political theory enables a more nuanced discussion of the concept’s post-war renaissance and its ideological implications.

Klimata

Abstract This article explores the notion of “curatorial research” within the realm of the live arts through the case study of the perfor mance exhibition Klimata (2019) curated by Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Dániel Kovács, and Jasna Layes Vinovršky, at the Berliner Flutgraben. In the article, I accentuate the transdisciplinarity of the project, which constitutes a paradigmatic example of curatorial research in exhibition settings. I argue that the project underscores the transformative potential of integrating the live arts with time-based media, or installation art, while foregrounding the embodied knowledge of the vulnerable body. Additionally, these forms are combined with non-art/scientific forms, enriching the transdisciplinary dialogue and expanding the boundaries of curatorial knowledge production. This investigation contributes to the progress of curatorial studies by providing insights into the dynamic intersection between curation and research.

Re/visiting

It is an honor to receive an invitation from Tawny Andersen and Dena Davida to republish the curatorial essay for our exhibition-event, CounterPoses: Reimagining Tableaux Vivants, that was presented by the gallery Oboro in Montreal in 1998. The opportunity to revisit the project and share it with a larger audience reignites the joy, generosity, and openness we experienced within the Montreal art community. During those years, we were engaged in interdisciplinary graduate studies that illuminated our interests in sensory aesthetics, affect theory, and experiential art, while our editorial positions at Parachute magazine located us at the nexus of the critical art apparatus, where we sought to expand upon art-historical discourse by nurturing writers working in cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies. Now full-time academics, we continue to be involved in these fields of inquiry as founding editors of the Journal of Curatorial Studies, as well as through independent curatorial projects.1

Displaying your diploma: The professionalization of curators in Israel

AbstractThis study examines the history of legislation on the subject of curation in Israel and the state of the country's training programs for curators. Israel serves as a representative case study: While many museum activities and curatorial studies programs worldwide were initiated in order to ensure a trained museum staff, today, the scope of those who meet this criterion far exceeds the demand. Furthermore, as happened frequently in other countries, Israeli legislators in the 1980s did not understand that contemporary curation and museology are two very different fields, and a system to train the staff of museums was built together with the flourishing of contemporary curation. Hence, in legislation, these two fields are today bound together. This article builds on the Israeli case study to ask if separating these two fields will create more up‐to‐date programs.

When Melancholia Turns Black

The term Black melancholia - when melancholia turns black - speaks to a profound collective gloom born of insistent socio-historical violence. With it, Dr Nana Adusei-Poku takes the concept of melancholy and extracts it from a highly racialized discourse in which notions of loss are pathologized and reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. Adusei-Poku subverts the idea of melancholy to describe a particularly Black experience of sadness, one borne of fatigue and the certainty of loss in the future. Her reading of sadness takes into consideration colonial legacies of pain and grief, as well as the aesthetic practices that utilize this emotional space as a creative force. Curated by Adusei-Poku, the exhibition ‘Black Melancholia', which took place at the Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 25 June 2022-16 October 2022, brought together works by twenty-eight artists of African descent that expand and complicate the notion of melancholy in art historical discourse. While the show included powerful visual artworks, this interview with Alhena Katsof focuses on the performative aspects of the exhibition to explore the ways Adusei-Poku activated the space. Katsof, a scholar of performance studies and exhibition histories, is also a friend and interlocutor of Adusei-Poku. In ‘When Melancholia Turns Black’, they pick up their ongoing conversations about exhibitions and performance, transforming their long-distance phone calls into words on a page.

Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985

As recent studies have shown,1 the history of exhibitions expands far beyond a disciplinary perspective of architectural, design, or cultural history. While scholarship on the history of international exhibitions between the 1850s and 1980s in the West is flourishing, the network of agents and institutions that has generated the consolidation of the global communication system still needs to be examined.2 This edited volume, entitled Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985, edited by Harriet Atkinson, Verity Clarkson, and Sarah A. Lichtman, is a major contribution to a research field that has remained on the margins of mainstream scholarship. In his important foreword, Jonathan M. Woodham highlights this essential book as a disciplinary turn within the historiography of exhibitions. Scholars have long recognized the possibilities and problems which lie in globalizing design history. Almost two decades ago, Christopher Bailey argued that ‘the need to develop a genuinely global field of enquiry has moved beyond being a challenge to becoming a duty’.3 Daniel Huppatz continues this trend, proposing design historians both ‘globalize history and historicize globalization,’ arguing that ‘there needs to be an understanding of the multi-directional nature of global flows - may require developing both new terms and new structures for analysis’.4 Applying the interdisciplinary approaches of design, art, and architectural history, but also social, economic, and political history, as well as cultural studies and curatorial studies, the book focuses on the ‘soft power’ of particular types of persuasion mediatized by exhibitions.

Remixing a Cultural Festival - FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture Decomposed, An-Arranged and Reproduced by Chimurenga; Misdirections in Music by Ntone Edjabe Edited by Chimurenga with Ntone Edjabe, Graeme Arendse, Ziphozenkosi Dayile, Duduetsang Lamola, Stacy Hardy, Bongani Kona, Ben Verghese, Moses März, Akin Adesokan, Mamadou Diallo, Dominique Malaquais, Terry Ayugi, Andrea Meeson,

Remixing a Cultural Festival - FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture Decomposed, An-Arranged and Reproduced by Chimurenga; Misdirections in Music by Ntone Edjabe Edited by Chimurenga with Ntone Edjabe, Graeme Arendse, Ziphozenkosi Dayile, Duduetsang Lamola, Stacy Hardy, Bongani Kona, Ben Verghese, Moses März, Akin Adesokan, Mamadou Diallo, Dominique Malaquais, Terry Ayugi, Andrea Meeson, and Eva Munyiri. Cape Town: Chimurenga; London: Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and RAW Material Company, 2019. Pp. 445. $32.09, paperback (ISBN: 9781846382123). - Volume 64 Issue 1

Contributors

HEATHER BELNAP is an associate professor of art history & curatorial studies and directs the European Studies program at Brigham Young University. She has presented and published widely on women in art from 1750 to the present. Her latest book, Marianne Meets the Mormons: Representations of Mormonism in Nineteenth-Century France (co-authored with Corry Cropper and Daryl Lee), will appear with the University of Illinois Press this fall.EMILY LARSEN is a Utah based curator, arts administrator, researcher, and collage artist. She currently works as the Associate Director at the Springville Museum of Art. She is passionate about Utah's art history and loves working with local Utah artists. She has an M.A. in U.S. History from the University of Utah. Her research and writing focuses on Utah artists and the Utah art scene from about 1880 to 1950.BRENDA CASE SCHEER, FAICP, FAIA, is professor emeritus and former dean of the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on the theory of urban form and urban design. She was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has served on multiple community boards, including her current appointment to the Salt Lake City Planning Commission.JAMES R. SWENSEN is an associate professor of art history and the history of photography at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Picturing Migrants: The Grapes of Wrath and New Deal Documentary Photography and In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange's Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, winner of the Juanita Brooks Best Book in Utah History from the Utah State Historical Society in 2019, and co-author (with Farina King and Michael Taylor) of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School.LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH retired from Harvard University in 2018 and now lives in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. She received the 2017 Evans Biography Award for A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870.

Winner of the 2022 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award Miao Ying, Field Guide to Ideology

Preview this article: Winner of the 2022 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award Miao Ying, Field Guide to Ideology, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/jcs/11/1/jcs.11.1.93_Cronsberry-1.gif

Winner of the 2021 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award and My Body Holds Its Shape

Review of: Winner Of The 2021 Journal Of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award My Body Holds Its Shape Curated by Xue Tan, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 25 May–27 September 2020

HeART space: Curating community grief from overdose

This article details the transformation of an empty store into a gallery honouring youth and others who have passed away from overdoses, and the creation of extensive harm reduction and grief support programming that accompanied the display of artwork. The outpouring of community interest, participation, and emotion that surfaced around heART space clearly shows how art, exhibitions and creative programming can help foster communities of care during times of crisis. Drawing from research into practices of care from harm reduction work, grief studies and participatory arts and curatorial studies, the authors explore how heART space comforted youth and others with direct experiences with overdose and disenfranchised grief while creating dialogues with visitors about the stigma of drug use and homelessness. The authors argue curating heART space produced an opportunity for community healing while nuancing and humanizing the way we see people who use drugs. As such, this youth-driven community project created a safe space to share stories, collaborate, honour trauma and transform grief into action.

Winner of the 2020 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award

Abstract Winner of the 2020 Journal of Curatorial Studies Emerging Writer Award Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums, Kirsty Robertson Toronto/Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press (2019), 432 pp., ISBN 978-0-77355-701-7, p/bk, CAD $39.95

Contributors

Contributors

Asserting the Vernacular: Contested Musealities and Contemporary Art in Lima, Peru

This essay examines three museums of contemporary art in Lima, Peru: MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art), MALI (Lima Art Museum), and MASM (San Marcos Art Museum). As framed through curatorial studies and cultural politics, we argue that the curatorial practices of these institutions are embedded with tensions linked to the negotiation of regional, national, and international identities, coloniality, and alternate modernities between Western paradigms of contemporary art and contemporary vernacular art in Peru. Peruvian national institutions have not engaged in the collection of contemporary art, leaving these practices to private entities such as the MAC, MALI, and MASM. However, these three institutions have not, until recently, actively collected contemporary vernacular Peruvian art and its by-products, thus inscribing this work as “non-Western” through curatorial practices and creating competing conceptions of the contemporary. The curatorial practices of the MAC, MALI, and MASM reflect the complex and contested musealities and conceptions of the contemporary that co-exist in Lima. This essay will address this environment and the emergence of alternative forms of museality, curatorial practices, and indigenous artist’s strategies that continually construct and disrupt different modernities and create spaces for questioning constructs of contemporary art and Peruvian cultural identities.

How Far Apart Are L and M? The Institutional and Publishing Disconnects between LIS and Museum Studies

This article explores two considerations in the push toward joint “LAM” (Library, Archive, and Museum) programs of education and research: the organizational proximity of departments and schools of library and information studies (LIS) and museum studies (MS); and the degree to which individual scholars of LIS and MS share publishing outlets, as an indicator of current levels of scholarly interaction. An environmental scan of LIS and MS programs in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand was conducted to investigate the extent to which the two sets of programs were based in different universities and disciplinary units. A bibliometric survey was also carried out to gauge the extent to which LIS and MS scholars based in Australia publish in common journals, conference proceedings, and books. Findings show that the extent to which LIS and MS programs are offered by the same universities and colleges varies widely across countries, even within the English-speaking world. Further, the results suggest that while museum and curatorial studies tend to be located with arts and humanities disciplines, LIS programs are more likely to be located, particularly in North America, with the social sciences and ICT, although the disciplinary location of LIS programs is relatively diffuse. The bibliometric analysis confirmed the authors’ hypothesis that Australian LIS and MS academics publish in different outlets, with academics from the two groups presenting at only one conference in common and publishing in no common journal in the period studied.

Produção cultural indígena e história da arte no Brasil

Apresenta-se neste texto o primeiro movimento de uma reflexão que objetiva articular revisão historiográfica, pesquisa documental e análise de diferentes concepções sobre as artes indígenas no Brasil, tendo como objeto de investigação exposições brasileiras dedicadas ao tema. De modo a recortar o problema proposto, optou-se neste momento (parte I) por considerar um estudo de caso em sua singularidade: a mostra Alegria de Viver, Alegria de Criar (1977-1978), idealizada por Mário Pedrosa, mas não concretizada. Pretende-se considerar as abordagens teórico-metodológicas referentes à concepção e ao planejamento da proposição, averiguando-se de que modo o universo conceitual da mostra permite observar a relação direta entre o pensamento curatorial e/ou institucional e indícios da persistência de certa visão histórica sobre a produção cultural dos povos indígenas no país. Este ensaio objetiva igualmente articular a relação entre “objetos” de (investigação em) arte, teorias da arte e antropologia, a partir dos estudos curatoriais.

Curating on the Web: The Evolution of Platforms as Spaces for Producing and Disseminating Web-Based Art

By analysing a series of exhibition projects responding to central changes in web technology since its public unveiling (1991), this study identifies a historical trajectory for discussing the evolution of curating on the web. Such evolution highlights how curators have devised exhibition models that operate as platforms for not only displaying art specific to the web, but also for producing and disseminating it in a way that responds to the developments of web technology—and its socio-cultural and economic impact. With the massification of web tools, in fact, these platforms have generated distributed systems of artistic production free from the physical and conceptual limitations of the gallery and museum space. They have not only become spaces for displaying art, but also platforms that nurture its production, different modes of audience engagement and critique the canons of the institutionalised art world. Originating from the desire to reduce the historical fragmentation of this field of work and its partial mapping, this study follows a periodisation that starts from the early internet, with its BBS-enabled platforms such as ARTEX (1980), to introduce the 1990s experimentations with the web browser and the developments of projects like äda’web (1995). It then dives into the Web 2.0 when, with the platformisation of the technology, curators developed an array of approaches for adopting existing web services, as in the instances of CuratingYouTube (2007–present) and #exstrange (2017). Lastly, it outlines the trends of today’s web, which saw the birth of projects like the blockchain-enabled cointemporary (2014), to then draw conclusions about the relevance of this historical trajectory in the field of curatorial studies and the production of web-based and digital art.

Living Statuary in American Physical Education: Greek Revivalism at Springfield College

Abstract This article studies living statuary, a Greek revivalism form of tableau vivant that was performed at Springfield College and other physical education programmes from the 1930s. American physical education curated ‘ancient’ Greece through living statuary, yet rarely reflected on the socio-historical context of their preference for ‘antiquity’. The article argues that living statuary serve as normative discourses for the institutions to which they are attached and concludes by suggesting that living statuary rituals be reinvigorated to represent innovative inclusive understandings of ‘fitness’ and ‘beauty’. Cultural interpretive theory and historical-archival methodology ground the research; the work contributes to curatorial studies, physical education history, and reception studies.

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Tupitsyn, Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Morris, David Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84 (review)

REVIEWS 565 increases in relation to the number of locales that they inhabit (p. 7). He further helpfully cites Alexei Yurchak’s explanation of the Russian concept of vnye, which Yurchak interprets as being simultaneously inside and outside a given setting (p. 18). In chapter two, Bidgood asserts that ‘Czech bluegrass, while part of a globalized discourse on bluegrass music, is nevertheless uniquely Czech’ (p. 21). He traces the development of bluegrass from the tramping tradition to the present day, and points out that music has been a key part of Czech Americanism.Hiscommentsonnormalization,cottagingandaccommodation elucidate the context in which Americanism (including bluegrass as one of its principal manifestations) operated and developed during late Communism — ‘a space between dissent and complicity’ (p. 41). Bidgood’s account of the negotiation of musical, cultural, geographical and temporal boundaries, in the context of bluegrass, is accompanied by Notes on language (pp. 125–30) and Recommended media (pp. 153–60). While these may not be of relevance or interest to everyone, they provide useful supplementary information, which will assist the uninitiated. There will be comparatively few readers who will find all aspects of Bidgood’s study equally illuminating and stimulating,notleastbecausethereishardlyanyonewhoshareshisexperiential and knowledge base, but many will be able to take at least something from this well-considered publication. University of Wolverhampton Tom Dickins Tupitsyn, Margarita; Tupitsyn, Victor and Morris, David (eds). Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84. Exhibition Histories, 8. Afterall Books, London, in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, 2017. 256 pp. Illustrations. Selected bibliography. Notes. Index.£14.95: €16.80 (paperback). Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84, edited by Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn and David Morris, is a new addition to Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series. The book is the first comprehensive publication devoted solely to APTART, an artist-run gallery located in a private apartment of the conceptual artist, Nikita Alekseev. Alongside opening essays by the editors, the volume features rare photographic documentation of each of the APTART events and critical texts produced by APTART artists throughout the 1980s. The book has a twofold aim. First, it offers a new insight into what exhibition-making of the late-Soviet period might have looked like. Second, it contributes to the broader discussion of the influential, albeit understudied, phenomenon of the artistcurator , setting a Soviet case-study in an international context. SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 566 Tupitsyn traces the tradition of apartment exhibitions back to the early 1960s, considering APTART as a high point in that tradition. Emphasis is placed on the Bulldozer show, 1974, as the first attempt by alternative artists to organize a public display on a piece of waste land in the Moscow suburbs. This gesture and its consequences led to a split in the artistic community between those who were willing to negotiate the conditions imposed by the authorities in order to exhibit in public venues, and those who preferred to avoid such compromises at all costs. While the activities of the former were characterized by growing disputes and antagonistic relations, the practices of the latter were becoming excessively esoteric and exclusive. APTART was conceived as both a means of escape from the redundant elitism and seriousness of Moscow Conceptualism and as an alternative to the ‘blatant control’ of official venues. Through detailed descriptions and photographs of APTART events, the volume conveys their experimental, often sarcastic and humorous nature. However, can these events be defined as exhibitions? As contributors highlight, participating artists purposefully avoided this term, referring instead to ‘working expositions’, ‘anti-shows’ or ‘exhibition-nonexhibitions’. One of the major achievements of APTART was its ability to challenge understandings of what constitutes an exhibition. AnotherimportantcontributionofAPTARTwasitsattempttorethinkmodels of relations between artists and viewers and develop new ways of creating and addressing the public since the Western dichotomy between public and private spheres can hardly be applied in Soviet Russia. As the book illustrates, the APTART artists distinguished themselves from the previous generations of Moscow Conceptualism with ‘their anti-isolationist inclinations and projects concerned with social issues’. Their exhibitions required ‘less gazing and more reading and touching’ and attempted to ‘emancipate the viewer and provoke a new way of thinking’. The book raises a lot of important...