2015 Isobel Harbison ; The Art of Curating (Frieze 171)

8/18/2019 2015 Isobel Harbison ; The Art of Curating (Frieze 171)

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Issue 171 May 2015

The Art of Curating

EXHIBITIONS

The personal process of exhibition-making

Ydessa Hendeles, From her wooden sleep ... (detail), 2015; Courtesy ICA, London; photograph:Mark Blower

A series of recent group exhibitions in London has employed artists in their curatorial

capacities, while another has bucked the trend, showing a curator at her artistic best. What

they collectively reveal are outdated hierarchies across curatorial practices.

The Hayward Gallery recently invited seven artists to respond to the slippery notion of

‘Britishness’ in ‘History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain’. Approacheswere mixed.

Richard Wentworth considered the country’s maritime preoccupation and the particular

importance of the coastline to British modernism with an installation that included

paintings, sculpture and Eduardo Paolozzi’s experimental short film, The History of

Nothing(1963). Hannah Starkey created startling juxtapositions between works from the

Arts Council’s photography collection, placing Paul Graham’s Baby, DHSS Office,

Birmingham (1984) alongside John Benton-Harris’s Eton Parents Day, June 1976 (1976):

Britain’s unforgiving class divide was rendered more repugnant for being shown through

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the lives of children. Subtle curatorial intelligence ensured that these varied installations

hung together effectively.

Simon Fujiwara and Roger Hiorns went further, making whole works from curatorial form.

Hiorns’s cluttered and claustrophobic installation reflected on the nation’s past obsession

with the BSE virus, or Mad Cow Disease, which severely curtailed beef exports between

1996 and 2006. His installation of spot-lit news reportage, scientific documentation and

tangentially related artworks, hung irrespective of taxonomy, created the foreboding effect

of a forensic investigation unit. Fujiwara’s contribution considered the abstraction of

labour from industrial to affective forms, questioning the impact this process has on the

human body through a suggestive grouping of objects displayed on a grid of evenly spaced

plinths. A Damien Hirst spot painting, laid horizontally, sat next to a number of empty

supermarket herb bags. Between these – and other sterile items – sat a long, body-length

freezer. Fujiwara and Hiorns’s object-constellations are full of suggestive ellipses and

risqué syntheses.

The Barbican’s ‘Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector’, plumbed the personal

collections of 14 artists. The show included Jim Shaw’s selection of found ‘thrift store’

paintings – famously gathered as part of an ongoing project – and Pae White’s collection of

more than 3,000 Vera Neumann fabrics, which were artfully hung on diagonal washing

lines as a colourful, billowing installation. Hanne Darboven’s knick -knack-laden studio

and living room were reconstructed, complete with original furniture, before an

installation of her photographic series, ‘Mitarbeiter und Freunde’ (Co-workers and

Friends, 1988). Padded out with old rugs, worn tables, antique vitrines, cupboards and

excess haulage cases, the exhibition proposed these artists as inspired hoarders and

implied their curatorial arrangements were inherently meaningful.

A recent exhibition by London- and Hamburg- based artist Than Hussein Clark, ‘The Violet

Crab’, at David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) reinvented the space as the setting for a

cabaret club. The gallery was configured into a series of rooms – from cloakroom, bar and

VIP room to shadow theatre and front- and back-stage areas. Clark’s sculptures, influenced

by aspects of Kabuki theatre and surrealist aesthetics, functioned as furniture and, along

with a selection of more than 60 artworks from DRAF’s own collection, set up the mise en

scène for cabaret evenings, which took place over the course of exhibition. This indecorous

mix raised the question: why aren’t more curatorial endeavours this entertainingly

cavalier? Given that DRAF has an extensive collection and resources, does it really need to

invite guest artist-curators to justify taking curatorial liberties?


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Simon Fujiwara curated section of ‘History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain’, 2015; Courtesy

Hayward Gallery, photograph: Linda Nylind

The press materials for each of these exhibitions headlined the artist and sidelined the in-

house curators. Why are artists celebrated for making instinctive choices about what

unusual company artworks can keep, while curators are expected to adhere to accepted

taxonomies? The difference is, perhaps, one of legitimacy, where daredevil subjective

choices attest to artistic genius, while informed decisions prove the curator’s wisdom. But

why, I wonder? How can we still presume that most exhibitions are, and should be,

underpinned by objective logic when curators, as much as any of us, are guided by their

own deeply personal responses to work?

Ydessa Hendeles – whose latest exhibition, ‘From Her Wooden Sleep …’, is at London’s

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) until 17 May – represents something of a curatorial

iconoclast. Since the early 1990s, she has consistently displayed her art collection amid

consumer objects, historical artefacts, found photographs and diverse ephemera,

accumulated with the unerring obsession of an artist and the financial indulgence of a

serious collector. These elements play off one another in highly considered trajectories,

creating suggestive narratives of personal loss and political displacement. In ‘Partners’, her

exhibition at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2003, her ‘Teddy Bear Project’ comprised

thousands of old, anonymous black and white photographs of teddies, often accompanying

and comforting their owners – young or otherwise. Hung salon style, this sentimental

arrangement teed viewers up for the clout of their subsequent encounter: in an adjacent


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room sat Maurizio Cattalan’s Him (2001), a diminutive, child-like figure from behind,

which is revealed to be a wax Adolf Hitler when viewed from the front.

Hendeles publicly denounces the concept of curatorial objectivity, instead calling her

exhibitions ‘imaginative works’. The only daughter of German Holocaust survivors, she

uses her subjective experience to political effect. Her compositions undermine an inherited

taxonomy of things, while simultaneously challenging reductive notions of fixed identity

and cultural authenticity. They have been imported whole into public institutions,

commercial galleries and art collections, and immortalized in Agnès Varda’s short

film Ydessa, the Bears and etc. (2004). At the ica, 150 wooden mannequins (collected by

Hendeles over a period of two decades) are gathered on ecclesiastical furniture around an

anatomical model that stands on a central raised platform. It is as though we fleshy

outsiders have stumbled upon a mysterious transformation ceremony. Dimly lit and

accompanied by a recording of Debussy’s ‘Golliwogg’s Cakewalk’ (1908), the encounter is

haunting and purposeful in equal measure. Significantly, the ICA and Hendeles elected to

employ a guest curator here, Philip Larratt-Smith: further evidence, seemingly, that when

one curator gets audacious, another figure of wisdom must step in to oversee proceedings.

Hendeles is a great antidote to the ‘artist-as-collector’ or ‘artist-as-curator’ model precisely

because her practice dissolves these reductive binaries: she is both of those and the

reverse, and more besides. She is motivated by affect and has spoken of being ‘captured by

the object’, trusting her instincts to create physical narratives that resound far beyond her

own personal experience, like the brilliant, evocative, liberty-taking arrangements of

Fujiwara, Hiorns, Clark and so many ‘curating’ artists before them.

In a political economy in which so much creative labour is affective, it seems remiss that

subjective responses should be muted when it comes to the professional practice of

presenting artworks. What Hendeles proposes is not a form of curating that is less

intelligent – or intelligible – than that of her peers, but an option available to anyone with

a capacity for the partial, indulgent, multi-rational interpretation of materials, and the

wherewithal to apply this imaginatively. And, what’s more, it’s important. As viewers and

consumers, communicating our responses to stuff, or images of stuff, connects us to one

another and, in a world where ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are being increasingly monetized, the

exhibition might be one place where our acute reactions to affective material can be put to

work more critically. To employ one’s subjectivit y as a curator should no longer overstep

any ethical boundary or professional code – to reflect on why, how and for whom we ‘like’

stuff is a political choice and, I would argue, a critical necessity.


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Isobel Harbison

is a curator and writer based in London, UK.

Documents

2015 Isobel Harbison ; The Art of Curating (Frieze 171)