Curatorial teams enjoy, like any other organization of professionals, their own codes, credos and sacred cows. On the whole they operate incognito, rarely ever obscuring the art on display with their own expertise. In the history of the art exhibition, Leonardo is thought to be the first artist ever to mount a public display of artwork, a study for an unfinished painting to which many came, as Vasari wrote, " to flock for a sight of it to the room where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels."
Today the bare modicum of what we expect in our experience as art viewers is neither a dumbing-down nor a lofty pedestal-placing event. Balance and well-presented restraint is key to all interventions, but there has come a moment in the frenzied, over-saturated museum and gallery practices of the world when the organizer--a dealer, collector, curator, or even the artist--can often upstage the art. All too often that is a false moniker acting as a guarantee of the art's success.
Proof of the field's evolution comes in a pointed remark by Robert Storr, a contributor to the newly published book entitled What makes a great exhibition?: "...exhibition-makers are not artists, and deference, mixed with envy, is an unhealthy inclination in any dealings based on shared information and passion." This collection of essays covers a broad range of approaches from the pros and cons of thematic displays to the creative benefits of the artist's intervention in the process of selection and mounting. Bland discussions on the etiquette of display read not unlike the laying of knives on a table (one author asserts that wall text must be placed so that we can first read the picture then the text, from left to right), only here we are concerned with visual feasts, which take many forms on and off the table. The architecture of the museum, the relation of text to object, the role of design in the museum context, the spectre of institutional critique, the group show, the festering purposes of the culturally specific exhibition - these are all part of the debate, a disheartening amount of which is difficult to summarize.
Nevertheless what is bound together in this book are sound judgements based on years of experience in the museum world. The first to bat is super-curator Robert Storr, the current commissioner of this year's highly anticipated Venice Biennale. For a number of years now, the Biennale has been under-financed and mismanaged by a disparate pack of curators culled from among the nation's pavilions. With a sure-footed sagacity, Storr fills all twenty pages of his essay with the myriad challenges faced by curators. If anyone is in doubt of Storr's capabilities as chief commissioner, his essay, written with a philosophical candour, should silence detractors, especially as they line up this June to experience what promises to be a great show at the Giardini in Venice. The brilliance of Storr's advice lies in its openness and honed intelligence, both of which are evident in the crux of his argument: "The primary means for 'explaining' an artist's work is to let it reveal itself. Showing is telling."
Easy to say, yet the complications presented by the remainder of the book remind us that such a task is not easy to pull off. On the cult of the contemporary Storr cautions, "Enthusiasm for young or paradigm-breaking artists does not mean passive acquiescence to poorly thought-out schemes." On the harmony of work within that space, Storr the pragmatist says, "Unstated expectations in any quarter, compounded by unspecified lines of authority, are a recipe for misery in doing a show and all but guarantee a bad outcome."
Elsewhere in the book, which is sure to become a classic text on the art of exhibition-making, some blunt-force adages weigh down Storr's argument. His thoughts on 'too much of a good thing' - "a surfeit of show-stopping art stops the show" - will surely fall on many deafened ears. And on catalogue curb-your-enthusiasm styles of writing he asserts, "Art and artists are not well served by books that no one reads," a fear that should not doom this volume to obscurity. Storr's essay is illustrated with photographs by Louise Lawler, in itself a fitting piece of curatorial judgement - Lawler, like Storr, in her pictures of empty exhibition spaces reveals the possibilities, power struggles and peacock-parading that is the 'white-cube' of art's 21st-century stage set.
What makes a great exhibition? was organized and published by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a group that has sponsored an admirable diversity of exhibitions from Pontormo to Jorge Pardo. Praise should also extend to the editor's use of varying opinions and methods of response, from essays and open letters to an interview with an artist. In exhibition-making we are celebrating a multiplicity of styles that for better or worse colour all of what we look at. What we take away from this fray is that curators are in need of a set of narrative ethics and a better understanding of the openness necessary to make decisions about the challenges inherent to the art's reception. The conclusion of the entire discussion is pre-empted in the very first essay in the book, by Robert Storr, who knows full well that "The job of the exhibition-maker is to do all that can be done so that those decisions will be well informed, rooted in perception and, in a positive sense, inconclusive."
Steven Pulimood
What makes a great exhibition? (Paula Marincola, Editor) is available for $16.95 through Reaktion Books, London and University of Chicago Press. If you would like to order a copy of the book click here.
With contributions by Glenn Adamson | Paola Antonelli with Bennett Simpson | Carlos Basualdo | Iwona Blazwick | Lynne Cooke | Thelma Golden with Glenn Ligon | Mary Jane Jacob | Jeffrey Kipnis | Paula Marincola | Detlef Mertins | Mark Nash | Ralph Rugoff | Ingrid Schaffner | Robert Storr
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is currently a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic.
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