The Exhibitionist was established in 2009 as a journal by curators, for curators, in which the most pertinent questions on exhibition making today would be considered and assessed. Currently released three times a year and modeled after the iconic French film journalCahiers du cinéma, the journal is meant to serve a critical role in understanding current curatorial practices through a number of editorial formats focused specifically on the critical and historical importance of exhibitions.

Jens Hoffmann (JH): For the prior seven issues of The Exhibitionist, we have very consciously stayed away from interviews and conversations in favor of essays. This came from a desire to reconsider writing as an essential part of the practice of a curator. It is incredibly important, I think, for us to articulate our thoughts about art and exhibition making in written form.

In addition, I’ve always felt that the format of the conversation can be uninspired—or, at worst, lazy and thrown together over email, rather than a carefully edited, well-considered group effort. Yet conversations are essential to any scholarly or creative professional field, and it is our wish, at this point in the evolution of the journal, to acknowledge that and offer ourselves up as a venue for valuable, productive conversations. With this, the eighth issue, we are reevaluating a number of things about the journal, and it felt right to do an entire issue of conversations that would, in addition to exploring important questions in the field, examine the format of the conversation as a tool for the exchange of thoughts and ideas.

I want to emphasize, as well, the distinction between interviews and conversations. I find most published interviews, at least in the art world, to be blind affirmations of their subjects. And of course nobody wants to burn any bridges. Whereas the conversation can be a much more fruitful format for substantive intellectual exchange, and, yes, the occasional difference of opinion. It is interesting that curators—those supposedly hyper-connected, superarticulate communicators and producers of knowledge— are not always the best at conducting true conversations, as opposed to interviews. Hans Ulrich Obrist’s ongoing interview series is a good example of what I mean. It is very much about getting the material out to the public, and not necessarily about undertaking a careful, sophisticated dialogue.

At the end of the day, I suppose we all already talk too much, to too many people. In particular, conversations as public programs in museums, biennials, and art fairs are proliferating at a greater rate than ever, but very rarely are they productive disagreements or real discussions of actual problems. Rather, they are all about mutual celebration. I have participated in my fair share of these talks and roundtables, yet I always take part with the hope of reaching a different level of exchange. I personally wish there was less recapping and more disagreement in the world. We’d have a far more dynamic discourse.

Chelsea Haines (CH): I agree that much of the conversation around curating—or what has often been called “curatorial discourse” in recent years—has been for the sake of conversation itself. I do not want to get into a detailed discussion about this literature or the figures shaping it. The trend is selfevident for those who are up to date on developments in contemporary curating, and I’d rather think about possibilities for other types of conversations we could develop.

I do feel it’s important, however, to acknowledge that much of the public programming you just described is coming from a small number of curators working in well-funded Western European countries who are essentially free to produce conferences and publications with little accountability to a public or a scholarly community.

In contrast, curators in the United States, for example, are often dependent on a hodgepodge of private and public funding, which sets the tone for developing curatorial practices in very different ways. And for curators working far outside the established Western art centers, of course there is an entirely other set of parameters and practical considerations. For me, the practice of curating is one that is embodied, meaning that its most basic mandate is to create a critical set of relations between an artwork or object, a space, and an audience, three integral elements that are always shifting and entirely dependent on context and circumstances.

I feel like much of the current literature on curating overemphasizes certain areas and decontextualizes others, producing a cumulative body of knowledge that often appears nebulous and ill defined. I think all of us need to start thinking more precisely about how the literature we produce reflects our own practices, and vice versa. The original structure of The Exhibitionist was meant to bypass many of these problems by focusing only on single-author texts, and to a certain extent it has succeeded, though the strict editorial format it developed produced its own set of challenges. I wonder, however, if the real question to grapple with is not whether to be in conversation or not, but who to be in conversation with?

Lumi Tan (LT): As the number of curators, exhibitions, and general attention around the industry of curating has exploded in the last few years, it has become more and more necessary for curators to qualify themselves as individuals with distinct voices and opinions, which has for better or worse resulted in this overabundance of publications and conferences. Curators are now expected to excel at public relations, for themselves and the institutions where they’re employed, and have a presence in both the mainstream press and institutionally generated materials such as a blog posts and video tours. This often results in a repetition of the same old pull quotes rather than critical conversation. The language around contemporary curating is contracting and becoming more insular.

So, the overall intention around this issue of La Critique—and, indeed, around the future of The Exhibitionist—is to involve a wider breadth of curators (contemporary and non-contemporary, Western and non-Western) and pull them out of the comfort zone that has been created by having the same conversations over and over. Looking further into the field is especially important today, when the publications and conversations around curating seem to willfully ignore the concerns of curators working in historical fields. They are treated not just as if they are working with the past, but as if they are actually living in the past. As contemporary exhibitions gain attention and praise for integrating non-art objects or outsider art in order to bring greater context to newly produced works (Massimiliano Gioni’s The Encyclopedic Palace exhibition at the 2013 Venice Biennale is a good recent example), why has this same integration not been applied to institutions or curators who are entirely devoted to thoughtfully exhibiting and recontextualizing older objects for contemporary audiences?

The diverse museums and institutions represented in this issue—from the Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent, whose mission is to provide an “emancipating” experience around the history of mental health care, to the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, which often uses the framework of popular culture to present its collection of artifacts from Africa and Asia, to museums more frequently present in the journal such as Tate Modern—demonstrate our own recognition that we need to expand the boundaries of both the journal and our ability to look critically upon ourselves as curators. The all-conversation format of the issue is definitely an attempt to get out of various comfort zones: those of the speakers, of us as editors, and of our readers.

JH: To me this La Critique issue also represents a shift away from our focus on curating (contemporary or modern) art toward understanding exhibition making as an innovative practice that is not bound to one area of art and culture alone but can encompass all areas of cultural production. How can we translate some of the innovations that have taken place in the field of curating contemporary art to the making of art historical exhibitions? Or shows dealing with aspects of cultural and political history?

My hope is that some of these conversations will encourage curators to think about how they could provoke, through exhibitions, considerations of historical, social, and political significance that art alone might not be able to address. And to try to engage their exhibition visitors in thinking about issues they’ve never heard discussed in the context of the visual arts.

The issue begins with a focus on two primary “strains” of exhibition making: collections (in the Response 1 section) and temporary exhibitions (Response 2). Each of the six discussions is a dynamic pairing of curators who we thought related to each other in ways both obvious and subtle. In the collections section, for example, we paired Frances Morris of Tate, London, with Manuel Borja-Villel of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. They have both been at the forefront of reinventing the traditional structure of the national collection, but in very different ways.

Julieta Gonzalez of the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City and Suhanya Raffel of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, expound upon the opportunities and challenges of collection building in institutions at the geographic margins of the art world. Pieranna Calvachini from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and Judith Dolkart from the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia both work in institutions in which the entire museum, not just the collection, is dictated by the taste and personality of a long-since-dead founding patron. All three conversations explore different sets of institutional structures and restraints as well as the quite free and creative curatorial practices that can develop in relation to them.

CH: Our pairings for temporary exhibitions are perhaps a little more unorthodox. We really tried to make unexpected connections between curatorial innovation in the realm of contemporary art and other forms of curating. Maurice Berger, who works at the Center for Art Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Bice Curiger, who spent the last two decades at Kunsthaus Zürich, both bridge the contemporary and the historical in their exhibitions through a variety of means and methods. Stephanie Barron, who organizes exhibitions of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is joined in conversation with Nanette Jacomijn Snoep from the Musée du quai Branly in Paris. And we paired Patrick Allegaert from the Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent, with Anselm Franke, whose recent traveling exhibitionAnimism (2010–12) explored animism in modern and contemporary art and culture writ large. As each conversation unfolds, it becomes more and more apparent, to me, why speaking across geographies and subfields is so necessary to curating today.

LT: Then, in the next section, rather than having curators critique specific essays from the past three issues as we did in the last La Critique, we broadened the topic so that two groups of three curators from extremely different institutions and regions could speak openly regarding key aspects of The Exhibitionist’s mission. Some, such as 8th Berlin Biennale curator Juan A. Gaitán, are coming back to the journal for the second time. His conversation partners, Sarah E. Cook, codirector of the new media initiative CRUMB at the University of Sunderland, and Lia Gangitano, founder and director of Participant Inc., one of the only “alternative” spaces to open in New York in the past 15 years, are both new to the journal. They are all currently working outside traditional museum structures, and their conversation assesses the model of the curatorial auteur that has been championed by the journal from its start. In a separate but convergent conversation, Adam Lerner, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Weng Choy Lee, a critic and curator from Singapore, and Khwezi Gule, a curator and critic based in Johannesburg, discuss the benefits and necessity of bringing the “outside” world into the exhibition space. It is a topic, as Jens has made clear, that points toward The Exhibitionist’s future.

CH: Finally, we as the editors added an extra layer to the conversations by providing extended footnotes for each one. These contain further relevant information and resources inspired by the each contributor’s responses. We also chose to repeat the illustrated bibliography first seen in the last La Critique. It overviews all of the publications cited in the last four issues. The desire for both is to reveal the diverse range of source material that inspires and informs curatorial thinking, and to spark further research and conversation on the part of our readers.

All in all, this issue of The Exhibitionist signals both a moment of reflection and a turning point in the direction of the journal. It is a collection of thoughts as we embark on a new path. While we will always continue to be a journal by curators and for curators, we are experimenting with new ideas, formats, topics, and questions that we hope will spur relevant and ongoing debates within and beyond these pages.

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