It's a question 300 art experts gathered in Dublin to discuss. The results weren't always illuminating, writes Helen Meany
"Maybe too much attention is paid to curatorial practice." Douglas Fogle was on to something. Towards the end of the second day of Curating Now, a symposium on curating contemporary art, this panellist from the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, made a late attempt to change the emphasis of the discussion.
At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, in Dublin, last week 300 people had come to listen to a group of international curators from public museums and galleries discuss their role in the art world.
Visitors from visual-arts institutions in Britain and Europe mingled with young Irish administrators in galleries and museums. They were joined by postgraduate students of the burgeoning discipline of curatorial studies, who were well versed in the language of "museology", with its recently coined adjectives ("curational") and nouns ("gallerist").
Poststructuralist theory is still the currency in this field: the gallery is a "space" with its own "grammar", "discourse" and "problematics"; the museum is a medium, in which the methodology of making exhibitions has become the content. The few artists in the room might well have wondered what this had to do with them.
There was plenty of informal networking, with lots of lively exchanges between sessions and in the city-centre galleries that stayed open late for the occasion. Many of the delegates I spoke to found these opportunities more valuable than the symposium itself. Perhaps it was a result of the way they had been briefed by their hosts at IMMA, but some of the speakers simply presented profiles of their museums or institutions.
They highlighted recent achievements and exhibitions as if this were a marketing opportunity rather than addressing bigger questions about the increased power of the curator internationally and the relationship between public and private funding bodies, institutions, curators and artists. It was disappointing to have so much efficient organisation, planning and time invested in an event that seemed to have very little of substance to communicate and that concluded with the suggestion that it should be repeated next year. We all know that institutions love to have meetings about meetings, but, unless the event were to be thought through much more thoroughly, this seems a dubious proposition.
Had there been an Irish artist on the panel, the focus might have been different. Instead the people representing IMMA - its director, Enrique Juncosa, and senior curator, Rachael Thomas - seemed engaged in a public-relations exercise for the museum. Nobody would expect them to talk about internal problems or difficulties in detail, but there was a bland air of self-promotion that seemed antithetical to open debate.
When one of the panellists, Kevin Power, deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid, spoke frankly about the constraints and challenges of his job, referring to the real threat of political interference in the Reina Sofía, Juncosa, who was his predecessor in Madrid, chided him gently for his negative attitude and effectively sidestepped the question of political intervention in or influence on the programming of IMMA.
In the ensuing discussions Power made some of the most interesting contributions, highlighting the necessity for curators to break out of the Eurocentric bias that affects their selections of artists, both within public museums and at the international biennales, where curators wield enormous power. He warned against the same small group of artists being shown everywhere, with international freelance curators duplicating each other's work, creating a narrowly homogeneous view of what contemporary art is and could be.
He also emphasised the inappropriateness of some new museum buildings - "destination architecture" - criticising the lack of flexibility of French architect Jean Nouvel's new extension for the Reina Sofía, which was conceived as a landmark building to put Madrid on the cultural map. Questions about museum architecture recurred: whether it should be about "exteriority", as the Swiss curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist, termed it, citing the example of Frank Gehry's Guggenheim building in Bilbao, or whether it should defer to the art, becoming "a floating non-presence", as US art critic Linda Nochlin described the new extension to New York's Museum of Modern Art this week. Paolo Colombo, curator of Rome's new contemporary art museum, MAXXI, presented a virtual tour of its curvilinear architecture, a complex of old and new buildings designed by Zaha Hadid as "a homage to ancient Rome and the forum, reflecting the complex layering of the city".
For Obrist museums must be laboratories as well as repositories, and are "complex, dynamic learning systems". He emphasised the importance of flexibility, uncertainty, change and incompleteness, and just when there was a danger that this rather abstract notion would flourish on paper only, with eloquent descriptions of "exhibitions without objects", he remembered about the existence of artists, suggesting they could intervene and collaborate in the process of "destabilising the museum".
The inherent tension between the desire of the artist to create, experiment and take risks and that of the public art institution to contain and to mediate was brilliantly articulated by the curator and critic, Iwona Blazwick, director of Whitechapel Art Gallery, in London. She described the relationship between artist and institution as Oedipal. Although a work of art may be "difficult, aggressive, oblique and confrontational, there is a pressure on museums to make art very accessible through mediation and education", she said.
In a thought-provoking presentation she used the Whitechapel as a case study to illustrate the evolution of the public art gallery since the beginning of the 20th century, as ideas about its function and form have changed, informed by politics, economics, geography and subjectivity. From the improving, evangelical aims of the early philanthropic founders of this museum, in the East End of London, who wanted to create a temple providing beauty, instruction, solace and awe to the public, to current theoretical definitions of the gallery as a white cube and a laboratory, she emphasised that galleries are not, and have never been, neutral spaces.
For the future, she said, there are urgent questions to be addressed about art's role in society and whether artists have any political agency. On the subject of curating she asked: "How can artists use the support of an institution but still be experimental? Can we create institutional structures that are robust as well as transparent? Can there be continuity and flexibility?"
It was disappointing that so few of these substantial questions, which came towards the end of the symposium, were addressed directly by the other panellists or speakers from the floor. These could become the basis for another debate - along with issues of independence, funding, bureaucracy, censorship, policy and the rise of the mediator in all areas of the arts. So, same time next year? It's catching, this business of talks about talks.
