Subject and object
What I’d like to do on this occasion is to focus on exhibitions, and more specifically on feminist, curatorial practices as a research object. Feminist art history and theory has largely concerned itself with artworks and texts, overlooking this site, which has its own specificities, contingencies and even, in some instances, poetics.
To speak of feminist curatorial practice is clearly to speak of something new, something which has arisen in our lifetime. Yet it is an activity through which we can already trace 30 years of feminist engagement with art, with history, with theory, museology, communities of knowledge and much more.
I want to understand curating as both a practice and an object. It is, in the first instance a practice that - among the many ways we might conceive the concept of ‘practice’ - produces specific cultural texts. And many of these productions are, directly or indirectly, engaged with feminism’s own recent histories. Thus feminist curatorial practice - its processes and its outcomes - needs to be understood as itself an object for historiography (something that’s only just beginning to happen).
‘Space apart’
We don’t have much of a purchase on feminist curatorial activity as such because of the relative paucity of feminist exhibitions, especially those which command broad attention by virtue of scale, institution, prestige or related factors.
However, vis a vis this more relative absence within the field at large, I think we need to recognise its indirect presence: that is, the extent to which feminist research, issues and methodologies may be folded into other curatorial projects, rather than existing in a designated space apart (where, of course, it is more readily identified as such.)
Unlike the labours of artists, theorists and art historians, I’m acquainted with few, if any, curators who are able to pursue feminist projects as the singular focus of their research and exhibitions projects. Yet if curatorial work is understood as a site of feminist practice, we are enabled to identify ways in which feminist issues, theoretical understandings and scholarship may wholly, importantly - or even just partially - inform or underpin quite a wide sphere of curatorial investigation, be it:-
In any of these instances, we may find the impact of feminism as something folded in or partnered, rather than singular or a space apart. Further, vis a vis the term ‘strategy’ in the topic of this panel, we might consider the ways that the ‘folding in’ of feminism itself returns as a kind of ‘stretching out’.
Models
I do, however, want to turn to some models of feminist exhibitions. And here I’d have to say, we don’t have very many models - we don’t have enough models.
In the l970s, public institutions everywhere faced unprecedented challenges to their exhibitions and collection policies for their paltry representation of women’s art. (We might want to remember here the revealing statistic that, in the 1969 Whitney Annual - a watershed year in terms of focusing this state of affairs - of the 143 artists in the exhibition, 8 were women.) A corollary move centred on the need to frame and present work by women artists, and this often took the form of survey exhibitions, often mounted as collective projects, sometimes by museums, sometimes with guest curators. Today, with presentational histories we can build upon, there is far less critical viability for an exhibition whose curatorial thesis is exhausted once the commonality of gender has been identified.
An approach related to the survey is one in which an additional element has been incorporated - e.g. women and video. In such survey shows - as also often is the case of solo exhibitions - the specifically curatorial initiative may be occluded behind a kind of curatorial ‘transparency’: that is; the viewer is invited to see ‘through’ to the art itself, eliding the exhibition itself as a text.
A further model (following the lines of feminist art history) has been the recuperation of women’s practices, particularly within art movements from which women’s contributions have been diminished. This approach may proceed as an ‘adding on’ to the canon (women and minimalism, surrealism, etc.) but might, more rigorously, interrogate the very processes of canon formation. In a development more dominant in recent years, there has been a shift away from gender exclusivity through a foregrounding of politics of gender representation. And we can also note a curatorial attention to feminist work not conceived in the ‘generic’ but through very specific topics of investigation. In short, we can see how developments in feminist theory and in feminist art historical models find their way into exhibition practices.
But less often do we see exhibition practices as themselves theoretical enactments, or that might be understood in terms of a poetics, an act of re-vision and re-making , a making anew.
Exhibition poetics
In this light, I’d like to spend a moment discussing a specific exhibition, Catherine de Zegher’s Inside the Visible, which I think is of interest and importance both for things that it does, and doesn’t, do’, of which I’m able here to cite only a few:
Potential site
In concluding, I’d like to try to think feminist curatorial practice as a potential site, a space for speculation, for local contingencies, for new structures of knowledge and pleasure, and, more largely, for poetics. There aren’t many models of such a practice around, within feminism or elsewhere, so I would like to give the last word to de Zegher, in appreciation for her conception of the possibilities, and realisation, of the curatorial process as “a space of amazement”
Copyright © : Renée Baert, March 2000
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 12, 2000