Curating Live Arts: Critical Perspectives, Essays, and Conversations on Theory and Practice

Situated at the crossroads of performance practice, museology, and cultural studies, live arts curation has grown in recent years to become a vibrant interdisciplinary project and a genuine global phenomenon. Curating Live Arts brings together bold and innovative essays from an international group of theorist-practitioners to pose vital questions, propose future visions, and survey the landscape of this rapidly evolving discipline. Reflecting the field’s characteristic eclecticism, the writings assembled here offer practical and insightful investigations into the curation of theatre, dance, sound art, music, and other performance forms—not only in museums, but in community, site-specific, and time-based contexts, placing it at the forefront of contemporary dialogue and discourse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Nov 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785339646

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A NOTE ON CURATORIAL STATEMENTS

A Third Space:

Chasing the Intangible

MICHÈLE STEINWALD AND MICHAEL TRENT

We met at the Montréal symposium on performing arts curation in 2014 and shared our questions about the ways in which the term curation was applied in the performing arts. Our curiosity led to a cross-border writing exchange in which we challenged each other to name our curatorial experiences, assumptions, and ideals. As we reflected on how publics engaged with the art or artists’ realities, a third space began to take shape leading to an understanding of the often intangible nature of curatorial actions. Our process culminated in the idea of the curator as an overarching term for a practice rooted, with varying emphasis, in that of programmer, commissioner, animateur, dramaturge, and/or artist—with a side foray into the artist herself as curator.

A year into our project, the invitation arrived to curate a set of definitions from a broad spectrum of doers and thinkers. We asked contributors to reflect on what the field looks like now, how it got here, where they think it might be going, and/or how curation was embodied in their own practices. What emerged were fifteen statements, locating performing arts curation within practical, embodied, or ethical spaces. Interspersed between the chapters, the statements may be approached either as periodic variations in the rhythm of the book or sequentially: read in serial fashion by flipping through the pages and experienced as an immersive meditation in curatorial practices.

MICHAEL TRENT is a dance artist who makes things (happen) with people for others. His practice includes performance, choreography, teaching, facilitation, artistic direction, grantmaking and community activation. He lives in Toronto.

MICHÈLE STEINWALD is a Canadian, feminist, DIY, artist-centered, pseudo-forensic, embodied, community-driven, cultural organizer based in Minneapolis marked by four major influences: seeing Rosas at age fourteen, producing a post-punk show at age fifteen, studying with Deborah Hay at age twenty-one, and watching the American TV series Law & Order for decades.

PART I

Historical Framings

CHAPTER 1

From Content to Context

The Emergence of the Performance Curator

BERTIE FERDMAN

Figure 1.1.  Kenneth Dewey at The Theatre of the Future conference, Edinburgh Festival, 1963. Courtesy of the Scotsman Publications, 1963. Used with permission.

In 1963 at the Edinburgh Festival, a theater conference took place organized by director Jim Haynes, John Calder, and critic Kenneth Tynan at the brothel turned th eater club now known as the Traverse Theatre, one of the better-known venues for cutting-edge performance at the Fringe. During the last day of The Theatre of the Future, Calder invited artists Allan Kaprow and Ken Dewey to do performance pieces, unannounced, during the course of the discussions. Dewey’s Play of Happenings, which he created with collaborators Charles Lewsen and Mark Boyle as a reaction to the presentations they saw at the conference, caused an uproar (Malsbury 2013). Edinburgh model Anna Keseler was wheeled out in the nude; a sheep’s skeleton was hung from the ceiling; men stood from windows seventy feet above; a piper played; tape-recorded voices of the audience’s own skepticism were heard; and when American actress Carroll Baker jumped from the platform to pass over the audience to the exit, people stood up, craned, and shouted. An observer asked, Was this ‘theatre’ in any recognizable form? The Lord Provost of Edinburgh called it a pointless vulgarity (Calandra and Dabrowski 1973). After the general outrage at such a disruption of what, according to conference organizer Kenneth Tynan, should have remained a serious discussion of the shape of the future stage, Dewey had the following response when prompted by Tynan:

I am trained in the classical traditions of theatre, but my feeling about the pyramidal structure of the theatre—management, director, author, cast—is what I want to deal with. This kind of theatre is like jazz, at one level: It is held together not by law, not by control, but by the rapport between collaborators. We are trying to give back to you, the audience, the responsibility of theatre—performing your own thoughts, building your own aesthetics. Maybe you will get the most out of it by disliking it. (Calandra and Dabrowski 1973: 56)

Although Dewey’s Happening at Edinburgh went down in theater history as shocking the public mostly due to nudity, the structure of the event was unprecedented. The very conventions of the theater event—when it took place, where it took place, why it took place—were being challenged. There was no show to speak of, no box office, no typical venue, only a constellation of live events that infiltrated another, apparently, more important event titled The Theatre of the Future, but that itself did not provide enough of a framework for the audience to contextualize what was going on. Dewey’s performance stirred much anxiety precisely because it undermined the hierarchy of theatrical production and questioned the very politics of this art system. It would have been impossible to purchase this show and present it at the festival. It could not tour in the conventional way. By paying attention to the context of the theatrical event and rethinking the norms of participation in the realm of the live, prompting everyone to ask what is this?, Dewey and his collaborators had unwittingly upset the logic of the programming establishment, which, according to TDR’s 1973 article on the Edinburgh Festival, went something like this: The machinery for soliciting performance groups for the Official Festival consists of a theatre adviser, who presumably spends much of his time visiting theatres around the world and who then submits his recommendations for approval to a committee made up of artistic, business, and city representatives. There is no discernible policy aside from the excellence criterion (Calandra and Dabrowski 1973: 56).

Even though Dewey was reacting to the conventional play structure within theatrical practice, he was also reacting against the system that promoted such a lineup. In other words, the assumptions about where, when, and how theater should exist went unquestioned at the official venue. The excellence criterion lacked focus, intent, vision. Looking back, Dewey’s performance (as well as Kaprow’s No Exit) helped to foment the Traverse Theatre as an antidote to the official festival and developed the aim to promote the work of new playwrights and to expand the frontiers of theatre technique (Calandra and Dabrowski 1973: 58). Audiences would come to associate the Traverse with a certain kind of programming, as with any festival or venue, and come with a specific set of expectations. By essentially orchestrating a dramaturgy of liveness, which simultaneously operated as institutional critique, Dewey’s work generated the creation, assemblage, and distribution of meaning that in many ways would precede curatorial thinking in performance at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Given the changing lens of performance since the 1960s, as exemplified here with Dewey’s intervention, the role of the curator—programmer, festival director, producer—as one who generates connections and structures formats around new work is of growing concern, in particular to influence how a public interacts, understands, and receives such work. The role of the curator as a mediator between artists and audiences is becoming more visible, as both artists and audiences look for new ways to present, interpret, program, produce, finance, and experience work.

The rise of interdisciplinary performance festivals in the last decade has increased the visibility of the curator as a central and powerful figure in the changing landscape of the performing arts.¹ A growing number of artistic directors, festival programmers, creative producers, and artists not only are beginning to pay attention to what gets seen—either commissioning new work and/or selecting finished work—but are also conceptualizing how, where, when, why, and for whom such events are structured and presented. As more exhibitions in art galleries and museums continue to embrace theater and dance, and visual and conceptual art is presented in performing arts institutions and festivals, the act of curating performance is becoming vital to both its development and its reception. If the 1960s and 1970s were the heyday of experimental theater and rise of postmodern dance—in line with the historical avant-garde—the current moment, almost half a century later, is seeing a renewed interest not only in breaking with disciplinary models but also in providing new frameworks in which such work can exist. Presenters are now often faced with the challenge of producing work that does not necessarily fit into preconceived conventions of theater. What practices do they implement? What presentational forms do they create? Does a curatorial paradigm for such trends exist?

The term curator historically derives from the visual arts as one who cared for museum collections and objects. According to art historian and cultural critic Beatrice von Bismarck, the professional profile of the curator began to evolve in the late eighteenth century with the advent of museums and galleries. It crystallized as a job description after 1945 with the expansion of the art market and the cult status eventually granted to the curator, what Michael Brenson has called the curator’s moment (O’Neill 2012: 5), which according to von Bismarck degraded artists and scholars who now held a lower position in the art world (2010). Initially, the job and function of the curator as caretaker of collections expanded as art became more discursive and attuned to context, in particular in the 1960s with the rise of immaterial production such as installations, happenings, and performance art. As art critic and curator Paul O’Neill explains, Art and its primary experience became recentered around the temporality of the event of the exhibition rather than the artworks on display (2012: 2). He charts a genealogy of curatorial practice in the visual arts that exploded in the 1960s with the demystification of the exhibition (an object of critique in its own entity) and that grew to supervisibility in the late 1990s with the proliferation of curatorial anthologies, graduate programs, symposia, and journals devoted to the subject (2012: 27). With the rise of group exhibitions and biennials in the late 1980s, the independent curator became like an art star, whose role began to be understood as a constellation of creative activities, akin to artistic praxis (2012: 1). This transformation of what O’Neill calls the curator-as-auteur, exemplified by Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s concept of "the modern-day Großausstellung (great exhibition) in which artworks are tied to a central concept and are assembled into new and often surprising interrelationships (von Bismarck 2010: 51), was a significant shift in the development of curatorial models that continues to this day. As the curator’s role grew in importance, so did the discourse and awareness of its prominence in legitimizing and shaping our understanding of art.

Just as a need to question curatorial models in the visual arts grew once contemporary art began to expand beyond objecthood and traditional museum spaces, a similar need has developed in the performing arts, in terms of rethinking how such works get labeled, produced, and staged as part of a larger vision. Performing artists are increasingly employing site-based practices, infiltrating the public, private, and virtual worlds, challenging modes of spectatorship, and creating live encounters that blur the boundaries between what is real and what is staged. In site-based practices in particular, we have moved away from a concern with location—which reached its heyday in the 1980s—to a concern with interaction and mediating situations (Ferdman 2018). A diverse range of artists are increasingly questioning the form of performance just as much as content, using the live as the source for their work. As a direct response to such rapid changes, Lois Keidan, for example, who served as director of live arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London from 1992 to 1997, co-founded the Live Art Development Agency in 1999 to provide a curatorial platform for artists engaging in practices that were difficult to categorize.² She writes:

The term Live Art is not a description of an art form or discipline, but a cultural strategy to include experimental processes and experiential practices that might otherwise be excluded from established curatorial, cultural and critical frameworks. Live Art is a framing device for a catalogue of approaches to the possibilities of liveness by artists who chose to work across, in between, and at the edges of more traditional artistic forms. (Keidan 2013)

Given the fact that Keidan, prior to her tenure at ICA, was responsible for funding interdisciplinary artists at the Arts Council of Great Britain, she was well aware of the necessity of labeling work as the legitimizing process that would get it funded. Keidan’s legacy is an important one for performing arts curatorship, for she exemplifies how curating operates as both cultural and financial strategy. The curator is one who envisions an intention for the work and thus, as Leslie Hill writes, places the work in a specific historical and interdisciplinary context (206: 3–7). Keidan’s contribution to practices she has termed live art continues to expand the field and provide a curatorial frame for their reception. A similar example of curating as strategy, but one with a very different agenda, is RoseLee Goldberg’s Performa, which is dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of twentieth-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance (Performa 2014). Performa launched a curatorial fellowship program with the aim of providing training in organizing exhibitions about performance to directly address a need among the multiple performance departments being established in museums. While Keidan established live art as its own category of interdisciplinary work that embraced both performing and performance art, Goldberg is very particular about placing her curation within the visual arts establishment. This is an important distinction that enables a different kind of financial value on the work, as well as a different set of assumptions and expectations, particularly as more museums, galleries, and art biennales introduce performance into their collections. More than just precursors of taste, curators thus position work within a specific set of disciplinary and institutional frameworks that have lasting repercussions for its circulation and economies.

Whereas the function of the curator has been the subject of much discourse in the realm of the visual arts as a direct response to changing paradigms in art making,³ the conversation around curating in performing arts is only just beginning. In 2011, Wesleyan University created the Certificate Program in Curatorial Practice in Performance with a focus on the curation of live and time-based work that helps students and professionals develop tools to contextualize performance.⁴ The first program of its kind in the United States, its inception mirrors in significance the establishment of the Whitney Museum’s Curatorial Program and Critical Studies Program in 1987, headed by Hal Foster, which foregrounded the possibility to develop alternative curatorial forms and challenge the established conventions (O’Neill 2012: 2). O’Neill marks 1987 as a pivotal year that changed in how curating was conceived in the visual arts—from vocational work with collections in institutional contexts to a potentially independent, critically engaged and experimental form of exhibition-making practice (2012: 2)—that paralleled the shift, from a logistics of programming to a concept for programming, in curatorial models happening now in performing arts contexts. In January 2013, I attended the first ever panel on rethinking curating practices at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters in New York, which is essentially a shopping mall for performance, on rethinking curating practices. The panel was hosted by the Wesleyan curatorial faculty, among them Danspace Project curator Judy Hussie-Taylor and choreographer Ralph Lemon, and Philip Bither, senior curator of performing arts at Walker Art Center, who challenged the audience’s conceptions (mostly composed of presenters) regarding live programming—booking the season, fulfilling season subscriptions, filling seats, or selling tickets—as not necessarily the curator’s job. As a position that combines production demands with aesthetic goals, he provoked the audience to think beyond the box and conceive of performance as event, with tailor-made considerations for the audience, for producing partnerships, and for the space, duration, and time. Each event should constitute its own experience and its own individual production strategy. All the panelists emphasized the importance of accompanying a work, developing new work in alternative spaces, situations, and times. As the only scholar in the audience, I felt a clear divide between those who study and contextualize work (academics and dramaturges) and those who currently present performance—something that is historically different in museum and biennale curatorship, where discourse and research are an inherent part of the job. This separation, however, seems to be converging.

In April 2014, Dena Davida and Jane Gabriels, through the auspices of The Arts Curators Association of Quebec, organized an international symposium on performing arts curating, which led to the publication of this edited collection on curating practices in the live arts.⁵ For its hundredth issue, PAJ: The Journal of Performance and Art had a special section on Curating Contemporary Performance, featuring New York-based artists and curators on the needs of more exploration in such practices. The performing arts journal Frakcija devoted an entire issue to Curating Performing Arts in 2012 guest edited by artists Tea Tupajić and Petra Zanki (whose "Email to a Curator: An Introduction to The Curators’ Piece," is featured in this book), along with curator Florian Malzacher. Malzacher’s edited collection with Joanna Warsza, Empty Stages, Crowded Flats: Performativity as Curatorial Strategy (2017) introduces the notion of the performative to curating practices, highlighting case studies that adapt theatre-like strategies and techniques to enable ‘reality-making’ situations (2017: 4). Yale’s Theater Magazine has devoted two special issues to the topic: Performance Curators in 2014, co-edited by Tom Sellar and myself, where we interviewed professionals in the field who are bringing new frameworks in which to contextualize the live; and Curating Crisis edited by Sellar in 2017, which expands the conversation to more socially diverse curating methodologies.

Issue 55 of Frakcija in 2010 was part of a larger project, itself a performance that sought to merge the act of curating with discourse. Titled The Curators’ Piece (A Trial against Art) and conceived by Tupajić and Zanki, it consisted of six curators, chosen for their visibility and long-term presence on the scene as criteria for their selection, who are put on the stand to defend their programming choices and artistic ideals. The curators collaborate and perform in the piece as well as serve as its co-producers, presenting and co-commissioning the show. Each one takes a turn being on trial when the performance tours to their respective festival, where they account for their role, vision, choices, and decisions in front of the festival’s audience. As such, The Curators’ Piece is akin to what Seth Siegelaub in the 1960s termed demystification of the exhibition—a process in which [curators and artists] attempted to understand and be conscious of our actions—which O’Neill marks as a defining moment for those providing the mediating context. Like curators (and artists) at the time who sought to reveal and evaluate the more hidden curatorial components of an exhibition (O’Neill 2012: 19–22). The Curators’ Piece operates under a very similar pretext, which brings the curator’s role to the forefront and simultaneously seeks to unveil the conditions under which work is curated.

In 2005, the collective CiNE, with artist David Levine as the writer and project lead, created a portfolio titled Re-Public: CiNE Collective’s Portfolio for New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, which precedes The Curators’ Piece in terms of its desire to provide institutional critique while at the same time offering itself an alternative vision of leading such an institution. The piece, originally published in Theater (Levine 2005: 150–62), is an expanded version of a letter of application for the position of artistic director at New York City’s Joseph Papp Public Theater. A manifesto of sorts, where provocations about remaking a theater, a true public theater, come to the fore, CiNE proposes numerous initiatives—onsite and offsite—that outline this vision. Outreach initiatives include partnering with other companies, "to formally recognize and sponsor younger, edgier companies who already have their own theaters" (2005: 150); developing public art as theater, "to expand the public for theater by expanding the definition of theater (2005: 151, emphasis in original); and creating a repertory company with financially secure year-long equity contracts rather than bringing movie stars to the Public, the Public will make movie stars (2005: 152). CiNE calls for the theater expanding its civic presence, co-sponsoring a vigorous intersite program of lectures, panel discussions, and debates on matters that have nothing to do with drama (2005: 154). Instead of a sole artistic director functioning as curator, CiNE prescribes a European model where the dramaturge (akin to the art scholar/art curator) is responsible for programming the entire season (2005: 155). Most significantly, CiNE proposes to include a Commission X as part of its annual season, commissioned from the Public by a major corporation (2005: 157, emphasis in original), so as to make explicit that corporate relationships have always financed the nonprofit sector. Its aesthetic goals are aligned with its financial perspective and operating structure. Curating in this sense understands that new production models give rise to new aesthetic models. It means taking care of the institutional assumptions about what, where, why, and how work is produced, calling for theater to give up its reliance on staged dissent and become structurally radical" (2005: 162, emphasis in original).

The National Theatre Wales (NTW) exemplifies this form of curatorship that rethinks structural components in order to affect its aesthetic outcome. In 2009, the British Arts Council gave £3 million over three years to set up a new English-speaking theater in Wales. Instead of using the money to physically house productions, the team operated from an office in Cardiff and strategically set out to create a new model of generating performance that made Wales itself the stage. NTW launched the Theatre Map of Wales with one show a month, each in a different location, each using a different approach to theater-making.⁶ They have since staged over forty productions all over Wales (from beaches to village halls, from mountains to nightclubs). The ideas for the shows are generative and come from artists through the website. They engage local non–arts communities in their rehearsal process, and have developed a nonhierarchical method of including the community’s voice into the decision-making process. It established an online community for active feedback, proposals, and conversations, setting up an alternative space to house and foster an audience. Since its inception in 2010, it continues to reinvent its structures to accommodate and take care of both artists and audiences. Its programming is only one component of a much larger radical restructuring of a performing arts institution that is non-building based, digitally innovative, and community-centric (we make work, and always with—not just for—communities). Its curating practice questions all aspects of artistic production and reception. As with NTW, festival producers and artistic directors are increasingly reinventing alternative strategies to house and disseminate the performing arts, two important facets of performance curating.

Alternative models in curating performance are more collaborative, non-hierarchical, generative, and open. They seem to counter the star curator pattern that dominated the visual art world for decades (and still does) after its period of demystification in the 1960s and that still permeates some curator-as-auteur festivals and favor an artist-centered approach. The Malta Festival Poznan has invited acclaimed artists to curate a special section of the festival (Castellucci, Rodrigo Garcia, and Jan Lauwers, for example). At the high-profile and well-established Festival d’Avignon, a different group of associate artists shapes the festival’s program each year, which was the visionary proposal that got former co-directors Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller hired as curators of the festival in 2004. (Olivier Py serves as the current Artistic Director of Avignon, whose 2018 season will focus on trans and gender nonconforming identities). Danspace’s Platform series, devised by Judy Hussie-Taylor, also redirects programming decisions to dancers and choreographers as artist-led curatorial initiatives in dance.

Artists are also appropriating the curatorial process as part of their artistic practice. When the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London announced the closure of its Live Arts and Media Department in October 2008 with a statement by its director, Ekow Eshun, stating that the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency, artists Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton responded with a curatorial proposition titled True Riches (2009). Conceived as an imaginary season, they invited twenty-five artists and curators (including Lois Keidan, who ran the ICA program in the 1990s) to each propose a live art project idea. The resulting program reflects the variety of approaches—performances, exhibitions, lectures, actions, discussions, interactions, installations, and encounters—that together serve as a testament to the richness of this form, its history, and its future. Many of the artists dreamed up scenarios that responded directly to ICA’s closing, such as Geraldine Pilgrim’s Black Box, which would flood the ICA Theatre with water to symbolize the flood of ideas that have filled this black box space over the years, and Christine Peters’ The Living Archive, which for over a period of six months would transform ICA into a living organism called Slow Production, where over seventy artists produce and present at the same time in a fully committed—financially, infrastructurally and staff-wise institution. None of the proposed events will ever happen, but as Etchells and Hampton shrewdly explain in their program notes, The ICA Live Art Department, even though it does not exist, is alive and well and glad for your support (2009). More than a selection or compilation of artists’ work, True Riches is a manifesto for the viability of live arts as an established practice, as well as a form of institutional critique that challenges the hierarchical system of museums where live art is continuously relegated to the lower end, even as some visual art institutions supposedly embrace the live.

Another artist—Deborah Pearson—reacting against the commercialization and homogenization of the Edinburgh Fringe and an institution-dependent mentality widespread among performing artists, also decided to take matters into her own hands. In 2007, she created Forest Fringe, (Andy Field came on board in 2008 and Ira Brand in 2013 as co-directors) which, more than an alternative festival of experimental and innovative work, operates as an artist-run collective that engages in curatorial models that question conventional approaches to programming. The Forest Fringe offers a different kind of opportunity not only to present new work, but also to experiment with different ways of doing things and new contexts to accommodate even the most unusual experiences. As such, they are interested in both the work and the structural frameworks that distribute and make that work happen. After they lost their space in 2011, they have embraced their nomadic status, developing ways to bring their curating strategies to other places and forms. For example, they produced their festival in Paper Stages, a book coauthored by over twenty Forest Fringe artists, where each page consists of a different instruction-based performance for the reader to perform. These performances vary: some can be performed individually, others collectively, some indoors, some in the streets. The book is free, but to acquire it one has to volunteer one hour of time to the Forest Café or another Edinburgh-based charity.⁷ Another strategy they have implemented is what they call the Microfestivals, which for a number of years brought the artists, performances, and the spirit of Forest Fringe to cities across the world.

A traveling exhibition of sorts, this event marks a rising new phenomenon in recent performance curating models where concepts—as opposed to single performances or artists—tour. Ciudades Paralelas (Parallel Cities), conceived by artists Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, is also an itinerant festival whose main proposition is urban intervention. Kaegi and Arias invited eight artists to create performances for a city’s functional places like a court, a factory, a library, a hotel, a train station, which would be relocalized each time the festival toured. As Arias explained to me in an interview:

The pieces were genuinely portable, in the sense that the only thing we are transporting were concepts. The concept for each piece would be fully developed, and each piece would be restaged in the context of each city with different performers, different spaces, and so on. The only person traveling was the artist and his or her idea, recontextualized at every site. (Arias and Ferdman 2014: 34)

Although the main premise of their idea deals with the conflation of the real and staged in city space, the concept for Ciudades Paralelas emerges as an alternative model for live art touring, where money spent on refabricated sets is allocated to local labor at every site. Forest Fringe’s Microfestivals and Ciudades Paralelas are representative of a significant shift in curating performing arts, one that responds not only to new forms of theater and performance but also to the changing context in which these can be distributed and received, as well as to changing economies of labor, touring, and production.

Contemporary curators of the performing arts are programming interdisciplinary live encounters, rethinking questions of participation, often staging the audience, and bringing a heightened awareness to their practice, asking what it means to curate. Just as experimental performance explores new ways of doing theater, innovative curatorial models offer experimental structures and discourses in which a public can encounter the work. If the term derives from the visual arts, its transfer to the realm of performance has been vague at best. As such, the people who self-identify in this position are constantly redefining its role. The range of professionals involved in its engagement—artists, dramaturges, creative producers, artistic directors, festival programmers—reflects the diversity of this growing field and gives testament to a practice whose methodologies and approaches are as diverse as the artworks they present. The role of the performing arts curator now encompasses more than merely a programmer or presenter who travels the world to choose work and cobble it together. The performing arts curator is someone who questions preconceived assumptions that shape performance, as well as his or her own role in shaping that discourse. He/she works with an awareness of the institutional structures that house performance. The role of the performing arts curator thus emerges as a visionary who understands institutional models enough to warrant new ways of working within it, through it, and in constant opposition to it. Having come a long way since Ken Dewey’s public intervention, contemporary curating models are opting to rethink and level those long-standing pyramidal structures of theatrical performance and its presentation.

BERTIE FERDMAN is a contemporary performance scholar whose essays have appeared in TDR, PAJ, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Performance Research, HowlRound, and TCG. She co-edited Yale’s Theater Magazine special issue on Performance Curators. Her books include Off Sites: Contemporary Performance beyond Site-Specific (2018) and Critical Companion to Performance Art (2020). She is Associate Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA from Yale University; her MA from New York University; and her PhD, from The Graduate Center, CUNY.

NOTES

This chapter is an updated, revised version of a text that was previously published in a special topic issue Performance Curators in the May 2014 issue of the journal Theater 44(2): 4–19.

1.   In the United States, for example, the last decade has seen the inception of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival (Angela Mattox), Crossing the Line (Lili Chopra, Simon Dove, and Gideon Lester), Under the Radar (Mark Russell), Fusebox (Ron Berry), On the Boards (Lane Czaplinski), COIL (Vallejo Gantner), International Festival of Arts and Ideas (Cathy Edwards), Danspace’s Platform series (Judy Hussie-Taylor), and American Realness (Ben Pryor), among many others.

2.   Live Art Development Agency was co-founded with Catherine Ugwu. Lois Keidan has served as its director ever since.

3.   See in particular, O’Neill (2012); Terry Smith (2012); Hans Ulbrich Obrist (2011); Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgwick (2007); Carolee Thea (2009); and Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski (2012).

4.   For more information, see Wesleyan University, Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance Certificate Program, retrieved 2 September 2013 from www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/icpp/program/index.html.

5.   See Arts Curators Association of Quebec, retrieved 10 October 2014 from www.acaq.ca/.

6.   See National Theatre Wales, About, retrieved 9 September 2017 from nationaltheatrewales.org/about#ourstory.

7.   Forest Café is a vegetarian cooperative year-round café and artists’ collective in Edinburgh where Forest Fringe originally programmed work.

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Thea, C. 2009. On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators. New York: Distributed Art Publishers.

Ulbrich Obrist, H. 2011. A Brief History of Curating. Zurich: JRP/Ringier.

von Bismarck, B. 2010. Relations in Motion: The Curatorial Condition in Visual Art—And Its Possibilities for the Neighboring Disciplines. Frakcija 55: 50–57.

von Bismarck, B., J. Schafaff, and T. Weski, eds. 2012. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

PRACTICAL SPACE

Curiosity and Intuition

MARIE CLAIRE FORTÉ

I imagine curating as taking responsibility for the framework in which the public encounters an assemblage of artworks with transparency regarding values, preferences and desires for art, artists, audiences, organizations, and spaces. The assemblage can happen over time—single works presented one after the other—or at one specific time. The transparency could operate in a multitude of ways: through the works, autonomously, and in association with each other, their original contexts, and their current ones; through modes and degrees of invitation, mediation, and interaction; through partnerships between individuals, organizations, and localities; in the literature or documentation about and relating to the works; and any other factor that might influence how art is received. At best, curation isn’t didactic, though we will likely learn something from experiencing it. Curation helps us access our own curiosity and intuition and those of others involved in and with the art. Transparency in curation might also mean we don’t need to notice it if we don’t want to; we could simply be with the art.

MARIE CLAIRE FORTÉ values broadening perceptions, including and understanding more and finding more pleasure. Chorégraphe et danseuse, elle mène des projets et collabore avec des artistes et institutions, surtout à Montréal.

CHAPTER 2

Exhibiting Performances

Process and Valorization in When Attitudes Become Forms—Bern 1969 / Venice 2013

BEATRICE VON BISMARCK

It had been a fiercely contested opening event, operating with all the mechanisms of exclusion, hierarchization, spatial scarcity, and prohibition of touch, thus enhancing possible desires even further when in June 2013 parallel to the Venice Biennial, the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form—Bern 1969 / Venice 2013 opened its doors at the Fondazione Prada in Venice. The starring event, to which this particular attention was given, was a historical and now legendary show on view from 22 March to 27 April 1969 entitled When Attitudes Become Form: Work—Concepts—Processes—Situations—Information at the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland that had founded the reputation of its curator Harald Szeemann (1933–2005). Commissioned by Miuccia Prada, director of the Fondazione Prada, the Italian curator Germano Celant teamed up with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the German artist Thomas Demand and were responsible for this restaging of the 1969 exhibition in 2013 (Celant 2013a).

Despite the fact that there were a number of curatorial initiatives in the late 1960s that set up similar aesthetic parameters, the reception of this event has turned When Attitudes Become Form into the most prominent and celebrated representative of exhibitions dedicated to the so-called new art.¹ What was then considered new were artistic approaches focused on conceptualization, process, and ephemerality in relation to materiality, as well as to the modes of production and presentation. The works could accordingly be made of melting ice, electricity, or air. They might be developed specifically for the exhibition or over the course of it, and were not infrequently conceived in such a way that they ended at the same time as the show itself. The scandal over When Attitudes Become Form coincided with Szeemann’s decision to leave the Kunsthalle Bern where he had been director since 1961, and with his resignation, at least officially free of all institutional affiliations, he worked from that day on as a freelance curator.

If the Venetian event deserves a closer look in the context of the relation between curating and the performing arts it is because it raises central questions concerning the mediation of ephemeral cultural products in terms of both the curating of performing arts as well as curating as a performing art.

First, it is one of the essential characteristics of exhibitions that they generally bring together different temporalities. They accommodate within themselves the different medial and material dispositions of their elements, which in turn define their own stability, process, mobility, and ephemerality. Those works in When Attitudes Become Form that were performed live—by artists, actors, spectators, and even the ephemerality of their material—not only presented a particular challenge to the conventions of the exhibition format but also demonstrated the general character of exhibitions as live performances. Among them were: James Lee Byars’s live performance for two actors Two in a Hat (Fictions Doctor Degree) (1969) and Edward Kienholz’s reading of Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle / Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1962); an immaterial artwork by Yves Klein; Walter de Maria’s participatory work Art by Telephone (1962), in which exhibition visitors could call the artist from the exhibition site; Gilberto Zorio’s Per purificare le parole / In Order to Purify Words (1969), consisting of a tube of soft hemp with two open ends filled with alcohol, purifying the words of the visitors spoken into one of the ends; the site-specific interventions Splash by Richard Serra (1969); Lawrence Weiner’s A 36 Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall (1968), in which the artist’s physical involvement in the installation process was a central, well-documented aspect; and the only temporal appearance of Hidetoshi Nagasawa’s cube of Dry Ice (1969). The exhibition’s travel through time and space between 1969 and 2013 bears testimony to the modifications, alterations, estrangements, re- and de-valuation that activity and process-based art works undergo as they are restaged. It puts into focus the specific exhibitionary conditions and the effects of these changes, particularly, as will be argued, in view of the economics and politics of visibility. In analogy to the acts of (re)staging, re-enacting or in a wider context, critical and theoretical analysis, copying or appropriating, the act of exhibiting has to be understood as a mode of referencing that participates in the writing and rewriting of