Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 2, Issue 3, 2013

Despite the recent resurgence of interest in Artist Placement Group (APG) – founded in 1966 by Barbara Steveni and a number of progressive artists to negotiate remunerated placements on behalf of artists in industrial and governmental contexts – the Group’s history has attracted criticism for a perceived lack of ideological sophistication. These attacks are hardly new: they greeted APG’s exhibitions in 1971 in Düsseldorf and London. This article returns to these two exhibitions, and their central discursive element titled The Sculpture, to argue that APG’s ideological awareness was in fact acute. By turning to curatorial stagecraft, APG successfully exacerbated, and thereby questioned, the entrenched oppositions between ‘right’ vs. ‘left’ and ‘studio based’ vs. ‘socially engaged’ artist.

Exhibitions mounted during the Cold War frequently advanced ideological messages, yet the cultural initiatives of the divided Germany have received little attention. The first major postwar surveys of German modernism held in English-speaking countries – A Hundred Years of German Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (1956) and German Art of the Twentieth Century at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1957) – offered West German curators opportunities to convey important cultural and political messages to foreign audiences. Both exhibitions concentrated on Expressionism, but also included a sampling of postwar abstraction from West Germany. Politically engaged examples of German modernism, however, were almost entirely excluded. Positioning these exhibitions within the context of West Germany’s postwar cultural reconstruction, this article considers the curatorial motivations for these artistic choices and examines the exhibitions’ critical reception. Basing this study on documents from both museums’ archives, I contend that these exhibitions, which were sponsored by the West German government, functioned as mediums for cultural diplomacy.

This article examines the curatorial program of Sculture nella città, an outdoor sculpture exhibition in Spoleto, Italy during the summer of 1962. Aided by the patronage of the national steel conglomerate Italsider, the curator of the exhibition, Giovanni Carandente, made explicit connections between emergent postwar industry and the new materials, growing scale, and unconventional display embraced by contemporary sculptors. Crucial to achieving this goal was a calculated public relations campaign, bolstered by thousands of photographs by Ugo Mulas that substantiated Carandente’s curatorial decisions. The photographs show how Sculture nella città institutionalized sculpture as something activated, not completed, through its installation.

While much has been written on the media coverage of the Armory Show in its opening year, to date there has been no comprehensive study of how the exhibition was discussed in the popular press in the following decades. Drawing on new archival research, this article explores how the exhibition was portrayed in the American media after 1913. Looking closely at the many articles on the Armory Show published in periodicals such as Life, Time and Vogue from the 1930s through to the 1970s, this historiographical study compares the varied ways the exhibition was represented in the popular press, demonstrating the key role the media played in mythologizing and canonizing the Armory Show, along with shaping its legacy as a controversial, watershed event in the history of modern art.

KOCHI-MUZIRIS BIENNALE Curated by Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, Fort Cochin, Kerala, India, 12 December 2012–17 March 2013

MAKING ART GLOBAL (PART 2): ‘MAGICIENS DE LA TERRE’ 1989, LUCY STEEDS ET AL. London: Walther Koenig and Afterall Books (2013), 304 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-86335-258-5, $27.50

CHANNELING THE PAST: POLITICIZING HISTORY IN POSTWAR AMERICA, ERIK CHRISTIANSEN Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (2013), 318 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-29928-904-1, $29.95

EXHIBITING PATRIOTISM: CREATING AND CONTESTING INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORIC SITES, TERESA BERGMAN Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press (2013), 256 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-59874-597-9, $29.95

HOW WE FORGOT THE COLD WAR: A HISTORICAL JOURNEY ACROSS AMERICA, JON WIENER Berkeley: University of California Press (2012), 384 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-52027-141-8, $34.95

INTERPRETING ART IN MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES, CHRISTOPHER WHITEHEAD London and New York: Routledge (2012), 196 pp., Paperback, ISBN 978-0-41541-922-2, $38.95

DEFINING THE MODERN MUSEUM: A CASE STUDY OF THE CHALLENGES OF EXCHANGE, LIANNE McTAVISH Toronto: University of Toronto Press (2013), 226 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-44264-443-4, $50.00

COLLECTING AS MODERNIST PRACTICE, JEREMY BRADDOCK Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (2012), 322 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-42140-364-9, $39.95

HE NAMED HER AMBER, IRIS HÄUSSLER Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario (2011), 176 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-1-89424-368-1, $40.00

EXHIBITION AS MEDIUM Organized by Claire Grace and Kevin Lotery, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 8–9 March 2013