Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance

The Curatorial Turn: Form Practice to Discourse (Paul O'Neill) [P.13 - 28]

• P.13 During the 1960s the primary discourse around art-in-exhibition began to turn away from forms of critique of the artwork as autonomous objects of study/critique towards a form of curatorial criticism, in which the space of exhibition was given critical precedence over that of the objects of art.
  
• The ascendancy (優勢) of the curatorial gesture in the 1990s also began to establish curating as a potential nexus (核心) for discussion, critique and debate, where the evacuated role of the critic in parallel cultural discourse was usurped (奪取) by the neo-critical space of curating.
• P.15 This new verb, 'to curate... may also suggest a shift in the conception of what curators do, from a person who works at some remove from the processes of artistic production, to one actively "in the thick of it". (Farquharson 2003) [Farquharson, A., 'I curate, you curate, we curate' in Art Monthly 269 (London, 2003), P. 7 - 10]
  

Biennial culture and the culture of curation

• P.16 One of the most evident developments in contemporary curatorial practice since the late 1980s has been occurring on an increasingly inter-national, trans-national and multinational scale, where the 'local' and the 'global' are in constant dialogue. ... Biennials are temporary spaces of mediation, usually allocated to invited curators with support from a local socio-cultural network. They are interfaces between art and larger publics - publics which are at once local and global, resident and nomadic, non-specialist and art-worldly.
  

Cuartor as meta / artist, artist as meta / curator

• P.21 Since the late 1980s, the shift away from curating as an administrative, caring, mediating activity towards that of curating as a creative activity more akin (近似的) to a form of artisitic practice was insicated by Jonathan Watkin's polemic on curating written for Art Monthly in 1987.
• P.22 The idea of the curator as some type of meta-artist became prominent in the 1990s, where, according to Sigrid Schade, 'curators [now] sell their curatorial concepts as the artistic product and sell themselves as the artists, so the curators "swallow up" the works of the artists, as it were. In such cases, the curator claim for themselves the status of genius traditional in art history.' (Schade 1999:11) [Schade, S., 'Preface' in Drabble, B. and Richter, D. (eds) Curating Degree Zero, An International Curating Symposium (Nuremburg, Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst, 1999).]
• In 1972, the artist Daniel Buren wrote 'Exhibition of an Exhibition', where he claimed that: 'More and more, the subject of an exhibition tends not to be the display of artworks, but the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of art.' (See Buren 2004: 26) [Buren, D., 'Where are the Artists?' in Hoffmann, J. (ed.) The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by an Artist (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2004)]
  

Paul O'Neill (2007) "The Curatorial Turn: Form Practice to Discourse" Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. Rugg, Judith and Sedgwick, Michele, Ed. Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA: Intellect Ltd, 2007.