Erik Stattin

Kuraterande gubbar (via Obrist)

Hans-Ulrich Obrist gör i sin Ways of Curating en liten katalog över konstutställningspionjärer. Här är några utdrag om figurer jag inte kände till sedan tidigare (förutom Pontus Hultén):

[Harry Graf]Kessler also kept a journal for fifty-six years. Nine volumes of his diaries were published: with them Kessler has become a lens through which the first half of the twentieth century comes into focus. Like a seismograph, his diaries recorded the growing social and political crisis that led to the First World War, as well as the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements in Paris. At the core of the diaries lie his dialogues with the world’s leading artists, poets, writers and intellectuals–according to Laird Easton, the editor of the latest published volume, more than ten thousand names figure in them. Kessler lived and wrote the memoirs of his times. He developed a major aspect of the curator’s practice–to bring together different worlds–and applied it to fields beyond.

[Alexander] Dorner had rethought the museum as an institution in a state of permanent transformation. He advocated a concept of art history that allowed for gaps, reversals and strange collisions–as the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey wrote in the foreword to Dorner’s book, in his museum we are ‘amidst a dynamic centre of profound transformations’.

Where older epochs in European painting had developed the art of depicting three-dimensional space through a two-dimensional picture-plane perspective, the Impressionists and post-Impressionists were investigating the relationship between three-dimensional space and the mostly flat plane of canvas on which paint produced this illusion. [Hugo von] Tschudi was perhaps the earliest curator to focus on this aspect of artistic innovation, and the institutions for which he worked ended up with vastly more valuable and influential collections because of his instinctive eye.

During the war, [Willem] Sandberg worked on his graphic design, producing the Experimenta typographia, a collection of eighteen handmade books composed poetically of asymmetrical, multicoloured typesetting on pages with torn edges. He also used his graphic-design skills to forge identity papers for fellow members of the Resistance.

[Walter] Hopps believed that curating required obsessive knowledge of an artist’s oeuvre, comparing the task to a conductor who must know a composer’s entire body of work intimately in order to conduct a particular symphony. His obsessiveness came with a mercurial nature and a deep eccentricity about working hours: he often arrived at the office in the evening and worked through the night. He was not punctual and would sometimes go missing for days on end. In Washington, where he went from Pasadena to become director of the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967 and then the Corcoran Gallery in 1970, bemused employees had badges made saying ‘Walter Hopps will be here in 20 Minutes’.

In the early ‘laboratory years’ of the Museum of Modern Art, [René] d’Harnoncourt pioneered a new style of exhibiting artworks based around their common affinities, rather than their particular place in history. This modern idea lay behind his seminal show, Timeless Aspects of Modern Art, held in 1948–9. D’Harnoncourt included works ranging from prehistoric carvings to Sung dynasty paintings to Picasso; he began the exhibition with a timeline of the last 75,000 years and a map of the world on which the artworks’ places of provenance were marked. However, he displayed the works from across human history spotlit in darkened galleries, emphasizing their individual character even as he showed how art from all periods used very modern techniques, such as exaggeration, distortion and abstraction. Where previous museum directors had expanded the appreciation of art across Western national boundaries, d’Harnoncourt emphasized its influence across the entire globe and throughout its history. His career, however, was cut short when he was killed by a drunk driver in 1968.

Looking at the program of exhibitions that [Pontus] Hultén undertook during the 1950s and 1960s, it is very clear that his curating, even at the beginning of his practice, takes up the standard of Alexander Dorner’s battle cry earlier in the century, namely to dynamize the museum; the strange collisions and reversals that Dorner’s vision of art history advocated are sharply evident throughout Hultén’s trajectory. Dorner’s notion that the museum should aspire to be a Kraftwerk, or power station, is echoed in Hultén’s view that the museum should be an open and elastic space; one that does not limit itself solely to the display of paintings and sculptures, but provides a site for a myriad of public activities: film series, lectures, concerts and debates.