Archaeologies of the Present
"Archaeologies of the Present" by Jens Hoffmann, Spring 2008, pp. 69-71
The proliferation and expansion that characterize the post-millennium art world have produced a range of disorienting effects. These include the fragmentation of intellectual and artistic discourses and the disintegration and breakup of what was, until just a few decades ago, a relatively homogeneous artistic environment. The art world owes its present condition to a number of interrelated events that have occurred over the last decade or two—rapid cultural and economic globalization being the most significant.
Globalization in the art world began, albeit at a relatively stately pace, more than three decades ago, yet during the 1980s it was still possible to frame a comprehensive overview of most of the various trajectories in art. At the time, the art world had only a limited number of centres, such as New York and Cologne, and many of today’s art hubs—such as London, São Paulo, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Shanghai and Berlin—played only a marginal role. Until the discourses of post-colonial theory and identity politics arrived in the curatorial offices of museums, it was unusual to see work made by artists from outside Western Europe or North America. While a few significant museum exhibitions marked a change in this situation—most famously the Centre Pompidou’s 1989 “Les Magicians de la terre”—it was the major biennials and other large-scale international group exhibitions, such as the 1997 and 2002 editions of documenta, that most effectively began to offer an overview of art from around the world on a significant scale. Over the past two decades a number of biennials (Sydney, Gwangju, Istanbul and Johannesburg, to mention only a few) have specifically taken the issues of globalization and postcolonial discourse on board. This new, global-overview format for the biennial (based on the Venice Biennale, with its national pavilions) was immediately copied all over the world, but simultaneously questioned; it is only now beginning to see serious re-examination.
A closely related development has been the emergence of the so-called independent curator, whose stock in trade is organizing exhibitions around the globe, biennials in particular. Names such as Hou Hanru, Okwui Enwezor, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rosa Martínez come to mind. (Martínez alone has been involved with more than ten biennials in the last ten years!) It is a position still idealized by many. However, as much as the idea of an independent curator may appeal in terms of the supposed freedom and flexibility associated with this way of working, many of the so-called independent curators of the 1990s—such as Maria Lind, Barbara Vanderlinden, Dan Cameron, Maria Hlavajova, Robert Fleck, Ute Meta Bauer, Mary Jane Jacob, Vasif Kortun, Charles Esche, Francesco Bonami and Yuko Hasegawa—were in fact never really independent. Most worked in museums in junior positions or as adjunct curators, ran small art centres or taught at art schools. If they were truly independent, it was often not because they wanted to be unattached but simply because they could not find work in an institution. The economic reality of being an independent curator, unaffiliated with a school or museum, never allowed more than a small number of individuals to actually make a living this way.
Yet for many curators from the so-called periphery of the art world (Asia, Africa and South America), it became possible to work in an independent or semi-affiliated manner in the “central” (i.e., non-peripheral) regions, curating shows in a largely Western-dominated context, but also drawing on their specific knowledge of their native regions’ art. Success of this kind was often accompanied by restrictions; many professionals who began to operate in this way during the 1990s became branded as the Asian curator, the African curator or the South American curator, with their skills deployed accordingly and perhaps unimaginatively.
This period also saw the emergence of a number of curatorial innovations. In the 1990s we began to see a diversification of exhibition models, informed by an expanded array of theoretical models and discourses as well as a more creative understanding of what an exhibition could be. These curatorial initiatives and changes arguably resulted in the proliferation of academic curatorial programs over the last ten years. The curator, at least temporarily, was suddenly in the spotlight.
While the 1990s may have been the decade of the independent curator, the new millennium saw many of these figures moving into institutions and bringing along their often-unorthodox ways of working. This development, which I call the New Institutionalism, was exemplified in art centres such as Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul (run by Vasif Kortun); Rooseum in Malmö, Sweden (run by Charles Esche); the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (run by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans); Kunstverein Munich (run by Maria Lind); Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt (run by Nicolaus Schafhausen); BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht, the Netherlands (run by Maria Hlavajova) and Witte de With in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (run by Catherine David), to mention only a few. All of these art centres began to move away from traditional institutional practices and embraced curatorial strategies that were less exhibition-based and more process- and discourse-oriented. Most of the aforementioned institutions are no longer run by these directors, but their penchant for change remains the backbone of these spaces and has established new forms of institutional programming in Europe. Esche once described the Rooseum (which closed its doors in early 2006) as a “space to create possibility,” a hybrid structure that was part art school, part community centre and part artistic laboratory. In a more recent development, a number of prominent curators have moved away from working in art institutions entirely, instead making educational institutions their new home—Okwui Enwezor is the Dean of Academic Affairs at San Francisco Art Institute, Russell Ferguson is the Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles, Ute Meta Bauer is the Director of the Visual Arts Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Maria Lind is the Director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Saskia Bos is the Dean of the School of Art at Cooper Union in New York and Daniel Birnbaum has for a number of years been the Director of the Städel Schule Art Academy in Frankfurt.
One of the many regions opened to the art world during this period of expansion and transformation was the former Eastern Bloc, a region that has contributed to another seismic change in the art world. One biennial that specifically looked towards the integration of Eastern European art into a Western context was Manifesta, first held in 1996. Manifesta capitalized on the spirit of its time and declared itself a nomadic biennial that would take place in a different European city with each incarnation. Over its ten-year history it has involved numerous curators from all corners of Europe and introduced art from a number of previously marginal contexts to wider audiences, thus creating its very own contextual debate.
On the museum front, over the past decade a number of major museums have begun to focus on global expansion and/or the building of new facilities and extensions meant to make art more of a mass-cultural event—in the meantime fundraising through loaning curatorial expertise and their collections to museums in other cities. While in the 1990s the biennial emerged as a powerful tool for putting cities and regions from the margins on the cultural map, the new millennium has been about building new museums and extensions designed by international star architects. The so-called “Bilbao effect”—whereby an obscure city in northern Spain became internationally known thanks to an outpost of the Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry—is still a desirable model for many cities seeking to revitalize their communities. And the impact that the 2000 opening of Tate Modern has had on the global art world cannot be overestimated. By attracting five million visitors per year and endless coverage in the mainstream newspapers, Tate Modern has opened the door to a totally new experience of encountering art. While Tate struggles uncomfortably with its new-found popularity and the way it exposes art to the public, it is a success story that most museums only dream of matching. Yet it is interesting to note that in this same period, art institutions have lost a great deal of their power and influence. The institutional scene is dominated by just a handful of sites; only a few institutions can really have a meaningful impact on an artist’s career. Most museums are now in the position of having to compete with biennials and even with commercial galleries in order to secure the attention of artists.
The internationally connected, truly global art world that developed during the late 1990s and the early years of the new millennium has been accompanied by the emergence of a global art market, one that is without precedent. This has had and continues to have a number of significant consequences. Large-scale international contemporary-art fairs are starting to replace museums as the typical site for seeing art; more and more people experience art only in this commercial context. Auctions, fairs and commercial galleries are supplanting museums, art institutions and even biennials. The borders are further blurred when commercial galleries hire museum curators and, with seemingly limitless resources at hand, stage museum-quality exhibitions and produce publications. Auction houses have also lately come to the fore, jostling with the galleries to be the primary dealers of contemporary art. One wonders if the competition posed by auction houses and art fairs might signal the beginning of the end for traditional gallery operations. In addition, many so-called centres of contemporary art are merely centres for galleries and the art market as opposed to hubs for art and artists working beyond market considerations. Paradoxically, sites at the periphery of the art market have emerged as the true centres of the art world; such localities are characterized by a concentration of artists and the absence of a dominating (and prescriptive) market influence.
Looking at the visual-art context today, it seems harder than ever to form a coherent argument about it or a position in relation to it. Most participants in the art world are simply trying to handle the enormous amount of information they receive on a daily basis and, partly as a result of the enormous task of digesting this proliferation of data, remain locked within their own niche discourses. The key question is whether innovation is still possible. Can art still have an impact, or is it robbed of its innovative qualities before they can evolve sufficiently? Is innovation silenced by the process through which visual art identifies otherness as an essential part of what feeds its continuation? We can but hope that true innovation will always find its way to the surface, no matter how complex or difficult the conditions of today’s art world.
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