Curationism. David Balzer
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objects. Silver notes that some accounts suggest the excessive time Hooke spent in the Repository ruined his health, an example of the early-Enlightenment scholar whose entire being was given over to objects and their intellectual significance.
The Royal Society’s Repository will sound familiar to students of art history, who will recognize it as an example of the Cabinet of Curiosities or the German Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer. These are the main Western precursors to museums, their creator-custodians precursors to contemporary curators, eclectic mixes of amateur and professional, committed both to connoisseurship and to care of objects. (Curious and curator both have that same Latin root, cura; care in Latin connotes both custodianship and taking an interest in something.) Cabinets were rooms, typically belonging to royalty, aristocrats and wealthy merchants, which, like the Royal Society’s Repository, contained sundry objects of importance, from religious to geological. In many respects the cabinets were endemic of their time, which saw a fervent interest in colonial exploration as well as humanist-scientific research, and thus the desire to house and catalogue the objects of such endeavours. Some curators of the cabinets were also their owners, while some were hired by their owners. The cabinet of Irish physician and Royal Society secretary Hans Sloane, which contained a vast array of antiquities and natural-history objects, was bequeathed to the state and became the foundation for the British Museum. Many cabinet curators had a busy, idiosyncratic flamboyance in which contemporary curators like Obrist find their precedent. Athanasius Kircher, for example, a German Jesuit priest and intellectual eccentric of the seventeeth century, was a proponent of the magic lantern, an early form of cinema, and advised famous sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini on the construction of the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome, perhaps the first example of an artist-curator collaboration.
The Cabinet of Curiosities might look like an early period of freedom for the curator, although there was a marked subservience to objects and the person who owned them, reflected in the exclusive nature of the cabinets, which were not commonly open to the public. Nevertheless, the curator was positioned importantly within the cabinet, which for many owners was microcosmic, a mini-Eden over which they held exclusive domain, with their curator as a kind of Adam. The multidisciplinary quality of Renaissance and early-Enlightenment scholarship is also appealing to the contemporary curatorial mind, with the Cabinet of Curiosities becoming a renewed fixation in the mixed-media, grab-bag contemporary art world. (To say nothing of the internet, digital Wunderkammer extraordinaire.) A 2008 group exhibition at the MoMA in New York was called Wunderkammer and included such artists as Louise Bourgeois and Odilon Redon; Cabinet, an art magazine that has been around since 2000, seems directly inspired by the Wunderkammer, its mission statement to ‘encourage a new culture of curiosity.’
The Cabinet of Curiosity might also be allied with the concept of the readymade, still so popular in current artistic practices, and forged in the early twentieth century by Marcel Duchamp with his exhibition of mundane industrial objects, including shovels and, famously, an upturned urinal. (Duchamp would also Wunderkammer himself with a series of boîtes-en-valise, portable suitcaselike museums containing his own work.) Yet the presentation of objects as a creative and formal act, one conscious of onlookers, would not define the emergent museum of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which, like the Cabinets of Curiosity, was cluttered and not terribly accessible. Instead, it would be up to those like Duchamp – preceding and successive cohorts of avant-garde artists, from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries – to modernize concepts of both exhibition and curation.
By most accounts, the curator of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century museum was not much of a free agent. The late Edward F. Fry, associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, has described the nascent museum curator as a tool of the state, as many museum collections, notably that of the Louvre in Paris, developed because of political turmoil and imperialism. Like the Cabinet of Curiosities, the Louvre, opened in 1793, was inescapably symbolic, a literal piece of the body politic. Early in its existence, after the French Revolution, it became the flashpoint for the didactic aims of the emerging Republic, and later, with Napoleon, morphed into a propagandistic ‘universal museum’ housing spoils of war. Its emperor-appointed curator, the ex-pornographer Dominique Vivant Denon, presided, in the words of scholar and gallerist Karsten Schubert, ‘over the greatest museum collection that ever was’ (however thieved). Denon was unquestionably charismatic, yet his overarching task was to catalogue and care for this booty.
Shortly after Waterloo, the British adopted a similar model with the British Museum. Exhibition halls were chronologically ordered but unlabelled and cluttered. In Schubert’s words, ‘the curator simply envisaged visitors in his own image.’ This image was not dynamic, but pedantic, conservative and bureaucratic; the curator was akin to a librarian or academic. ‘The museums presented their political masters as custodians of world culture,’ writes Schubert. ‘In effect, the museum became the handmaiden of imperialism.’
At the same time, around the mid-nineteenth century, the salon reached its height. Salons and their ilk, including universal expositions and the annual exhibition of London’s Royal Academy, are early examples of the selection-based exhibitions that are now standard in the art world. Popularly attended, presided over by a jury and thoroughly academic – in deliberate reaction to the commercial art market, which was also developing healthily at the time – the annual or biannual Paris Salon originally exhibited only members of the state-sanctioned Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, but, after the revolution, opened up to non-members. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Paris Salon moved from the Louvre to the Palais de l’Industrie on the Champs-élysées, a trade-showlike venue presaging the locales of today’s art fairs. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Salon no longer turned up its nose at commercialism. Its catalogue, for instance, published contact information for artists so that buyers could get in touch.
The artist rebellion against the Salon is legendary and has been duly romanticized by art history. The story goes that the Salon was a stifling force against which the most innovative artists of the day fought, but this is misleading. The Salon juries were inconsistent, accepting some artists some years and rejecting them in others. Wholesale rejection of artists now known to us as important was rare, and market autonomy was as vital to the rebelling artists as aesthetic autonomy. In 1855, for instance, Gustave Courbet set up an out-of-pocket Pavilion of Realism near the Salon because, even though the jury had selected ten of his paintings, his The Artist’s Studio was deemed too large. (In a 2014 Mousse magazine supplement about artist-curators, curator and writer Elena Filipovic described this move as ‘an entrepreneurial one-man show.’) Eighteen sixty-three was pivotal, the year of the first Salon des Refusés, a.k.a. Exposition des Ouvrages non Admis. This was an exhibition at the opposite end of the juried show in the Palais de l’Industrie, one in which artists who had been rejected by that year’s capricious jurists, who had only admitted 30 percent of applicants, were given the chance to show. Napoleon III was the instigator, perhaps the curator: in a provision befitting a ruler in a fairy tale, he offered artists a chance to exhibit so the public could judge their worth. Many refused the Refusés – to be shown there was, after all, the art-career equivalent of being pilloried or stocked – but proto-modernists like James McNeill Whistler and édouard Manet did not. Famously, Manet’s groundbreaking painting Le déjeuner sur l’herbe was one of the pieces in the Salon des Refusés.
After the Salon des Refusés, artist-initiated exhibitions began to proliferate. There is no nominal curator here – artists themselves curate, a brave move for the time, complementing a newly personal, direct, collaborative and sometimes raw approach to making work, and in opposition to the academy-, studio- and patron-bound practices that had become standard. Paris exhibitions held by the Impressionists in the 1870s and 1880s, such as by the collective Societé Anonyme, ran concurrently with the Salon; the first, in 1874, was held at the studio of the photographer Nadar. The exhibitions might be seen as the forerunners of what we now call artist-run culture, but they were not divorced from the market. The emergent dealer played a role. Crucially, the Societé Anonyme, following the Royal Academy (and vociferous individuals like Courbet), rejected the Salon practice of ‘skying’ works: hanging paintings in a busy constellation on walls, with works deemed less important receiving obscure placement. Instead, the works were organized in two clean rows, standing out better and thereby easier both