THE CURATED ART FAIR AND THE ART FAIR CURATOR

Marc Bijl. Never Mind the Politics, 2005. poster Courtesy Upstream gallery, Amsterdam/The breeder, Athens

By Paco Barragan

Fairs, such as we know them today, have already existed for a few decades, but it wasn’t until relatively recent times that we witnessed the “category of the new” in the shape of the arrival of the curator in the world of art fairs, and the consequent promotion in the media of some of them as “curated fairs.” We shouldn’t be surprised that the curator’s presence at art fairs is more overwhelming each time given that it is becoming the differentiating element when the purpose is to make an art fair stand out in the big mass of fair proposals. In that type of “entente cordiale,” the fair is benefited from the prestige, know-how and contacts of the curator. The curator in exchange gains access to a new curatorial platform.

Transparency, pedagogy and interest are precisely the right terms to take into consideration when one, from his position and vision as a curator, works and gets involved with an art fair. However, the figure of the “art fair curator” (1) entails a series of tasks and practices directed at giving the fair a curatorial concept or converting it into a curatorial platform. Why not believe that we are facing a new development in some curatorial practices, which are expanding from a museum or institutional sphere towards a much more commercial sphere, where they seek to reformulate the art (market) system? Why insist on the idea that a fair must only give priority to economic matters and not to cultural and social ones?

We should expand the merely commercial objectives in order to promote an active curatorship which contributes to a personal and engaged vision of an “institutionalized” artistic format. After all, the selection committees of the majority of art fairs are composed of galleries which are neither sufficiently interested nor sufficiently transparent to use their power of inclusion or exclusion well.

NEW FAIRISM

New times demand new answers. Museums, art centers and biennials are going through radical changes, although not all of them are willing to “abandon -as Jonas Ekeberg states- the limited discourse of the art work as a mere object, neither the complete institutional framework which accompanies it, a framework which the ‘extended’ field of contemporary art had simply inherited from high modernism, along with its white cube, its top-down attitude of curators and directors, its link to certain (insider) audiences, and so on and so forth.” (2)

For some years now we have been witnessing a critical thought regarding the position and function of the artistic institution which has crystallized into the so-called “New Institutionalism”: a sociological perspective of the institutions and how they interact and affect society and the individual. This New Institutionalism simply reuses and renovates the strategies of institutional critique initiated by conceptual art.

This allows us to trace an analogy and launch the idea of a “New Fairism” (3) : a new way of understanding and reformulating the function of the fair as an institution and artistic structure. How can we make it so that the art fair will be part market, part meeting point, part laboratory, part pedagogical workshop and part curatorial platform? If the “New Institutionalism” -Ekeberg points out- denotes a “new belief in the importance of the institutions, combined with a wide definition of what an institution stands for and with a focus on institutional value,” then why not resort to the term “New Fairism” in a speculative as well as practical manner? Isn’t the art fair similar to the Malraux “Museum Without Walls” which allows large layers of society to access the latest art in a more democratic, less intimidating and more anonymous manner?

THE CURATOR’S WALL AND RELATIONAL CURATING

Current critique of art fairs is merely based -I’m afraid- on preconceived notions we all know too well. “Not only is there no leading style -Schjeldahl complains-, there is no noticeable friction between one style and another. These impressions might fade if you focused on any particular work, but fairs destroy focus.”(4) I share the idea that many fairs lack a certain “focus,” but it wasn’t until Szeemann’s Questioning Reality - Pictorial Worlds Today in 1972 that Documenta got a focus of “Weltanschauung”!

I have always been a firm believer that if one participates in certain international circuits -be they museums, biennials or art fairs- he/she should question the context and not take anything for granted. That’s why I took advantage of the invitation sent to me by the CIRCA PR organizers to curate a show, which I had already thought up some time ago, -”State(s) of Anxiety”- on the art fair grounds in 2005, inside what would become a permanent section, conceived by me and titled “In the Spot,”(5) which would be focused on working with the artworks exhibited at the fair.

If we take for granted that art fairs are places of “uncertainty” and “ambiguity,” at CIRCA we took that idea of the empty space to the extreme in 2007, when instead of selecting the artists before the opening of the art fair, we actually invited other curators to carry out “In the Spot,” as they say, “on the spot,” or in other words, a type of instant curating. And the funniest thing is that the assigned booths for that section, on the opening day of the fair remain absolutely empty as a sort of statement.

From that moment on, every day an invited curator passes through the fair and conceives a thematic exhibition using works hung in the booths of participating galleries. Which, in practical terms, means that each curator passes in the mornings through the fair galleries, gathers the information to create a concept, asks if he can borrow the works, in which case most galleries happily agree, and then hangs them in the predetermined booths, just as if it were a regular white cube exhibition. That same afternoon there is a presentation to the audience and the curator explains his concept in person, thus facilitating a discussion and even a criticism of his curatorial proposal. The following day, the exhibition is dismantled and the works are returned -after all, we are in an art fair and the mission of galleries there is to sell- and later the next curator carries out a new exhibition. In 2007 the invited curators were Amanda Coulson and Silvia Karman Cubiñá.(6)

Although curators are limited to working only with the art pieces on display, (7) which I actually believe to be something very positive, the art fair facilitates instant, riskier and more experimental feedback. In “In the Spot” the curator generates a narrative, thus resolving the Schjeldahlian lack of “focus” in a context where conceptualization, selection, production, exhibition, inauguration and social interaction -unlike what usually happens in a museum or biennial- are all compressed into only one day.

If the above sounds too optimistic, then the moment for a little self-criticism has arrived. We will have a different look at the fair and the Art Fair Art, named like that by Jack Bankowsky in Artforum magazine in 2005. Bankowsky writes among other things that “artists decry the constant pressure from the dealers for fresh work and with dealers bemoaning the drain on quality stock”; “the art fair artist penetrates commerce’s inner sanctum”; “Art Fair Art must make the fair -its mechanisms and machinations- into the central plotline of its play”; “The fair is simply the moment’s rawest, rudest manifestation of the art system.”(8)

Of course, we mustn’t omit the fact that fairs inevitably generate fast, sexy and touching art, but it is the mission of the art dealer himself to arrange a comprehensible and stimulating booth. On the other hand, theme exhibitions curated “in situ” by the art fair curator, which end up hung on the “curator’s wall” (9) have the advantage that the selected artworks are not subdued by the concept, something which group exhibitions are normally accused of; the artworks themselves bring about the concept in a less intimidating and canonized place.

We could call this curatorial practice of dealing, exchange and social correspondence -”relational curating,” given that it is the original and pre-Bourriaudian meaning that this adjective implies. However, we could also interpret it mutatis mutandis in terms of “relational aesthetics,” in the sense that it is about a criterion of artistic curatorship or a lecture about certain works, which facilitate an immediate and experimental exchange of ideas among the people who are present and involved. In that way, the art fair curator appeals in his thematic exhibition to concepts like “spectator’s participation” and “live experience.” “A great collective exhibition -says Ralph Rugoff-, on the other hand, asks from its audience to establish connections. Like an orgy, it makes groups from things thus creating stimulating and unpredictable combinations.”(10)

The art fair presents very hectic productions, distributions and scheduling which require a high level of concentration which we are not always able to reach. Undoubtedly there are still other exhibition contexts which are very necessary and capable of generating significance!

This is an excerpt from the Chapter “The Curated Art Fair and the Art Fair Curator” by Paco Barragán. The Art Fair Age/La era de las Ferias published by CHARTA and scheduled to appear June 2008 during Art Basel.

Notes

(1) For some years now I have been publicly discussing the term “art fair curator” and exchanging opinions with art critics like Sarah Douglas, Walter Robinson and Michele Robecchi. I must admit that if in the beginning this started off as an ironic joke, later the concept began to interest me as a ready made capable of delimiting and rationalizing a very concrete reality.

(2) Ekeberg, Jonas (Ed.) New Institutionalism, 2003, Verksted #1, Office for Contemporary Art (OCA), Oslo, p. 9.

(3) Although he doesn’t have the same point of view, Peter Schjeldahl uses in his article Temptations of the Fai: Miami virtue and vice, published in The New Yorker, 25^th December 2006, the term dryly, that is to say without the adjective “new”: “Fairism (if you will) is inexorable, given today’s proliferation of galleries (hundreds in New York’s Chelsea alone). Online version.

(4) Ibid

(5) I carried out “In the Spot: State(s) of Anxiety” with works by Susana Heller, MK Kaehne, Melvin Martínez, Darren Siwes and Vargas Suárez-Universal, whose galleries where participating at the fair. The concept was revolving around the anxiety reflected in personal relationships, the search for status, the architecture or recent history.

(6) Go to www.circapr.com to the CIRCA PR 07 section if you want to see the videos of Amanda Coulson’s and Silvia Karman Cubiñá’s interventions being presented to the audience. “Re-Imagining Identities” by Amanda included works by Rosario Fernández, Filipo Tirado, Josué Pellot, Beto Gutiérrez, Iván Girona, Fabián Vergara and Rafael Tufiño, which in turn reflected the Caribbean identity; “Conjugaciones” by Silvia showcased works by Antuán, Nikki Lee, and Aaron Salabarría revolving around concepts like transformation, simulation or flux.

(7) E-mail and the web can facilitate greatly the preparatory work of the curator, however virtual art fairs will never be successful because they go against the whole concept of the experience economy and networking, amen to the fact that no one buys important artworks without seeing them first (or at least that’s what I’d like to believe)…

(8) Bankowsky, Jan “Tent Community: On Art Fair Art”, Artforum, vol. 44, no. 2, October 2005 reproduced in The Uncertain States of America Reader”, Astrup Fearnly Museum of Modern Art/Serpentine Gallery, Sternberg Press, New York/Berlin, p. 60-66.

(9) I borrow Joel Weinstein’s phrase, an art critic residing in Puerto Rico and collaborator of Flash Art and Art Nexus among other publications, who in one of his reviews referred to my project “In the Spot” as “the curator’s wall.”

(10) Rugoff, Ralph “You Talking To Me? On Curating Group Shows that Give You a Chance to Join the Group” in What Makes a Great Exhibition, Paula Marincola (Ed.), Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, Philadelphia (2006), p. 44.

Paco Barragán is independent curator and artistic director of CIRCA Puerto Rico, and Head of the Selection Committee of PhotoMiami. He is also artistic director of Festival SOS 4.8 (Murcia), and curatorial advisor for the Artist Pension Trust (APT). He has also served as one of the co-curators for the International Biennale of Contemporary Art (IBCA) in the National Gallery, Prague (2005), and he has curated many exhibitions held in countries throughout the world, including the U.S., Colombia, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic. He is author of The Art to Come/El arte que viene.