Journal of Curatorial Studies - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018

Assembling a wide range of protest objects produced since the late 1970s, Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014–15) aimed to present the expansive material culture of social movements from a global perspective while charting a ‘people’s history of art and design from below’. This article examines the critical intentions behind the exhibition, compares it to other recent large-scale exhibitions on activist art and situates it within a broader field of museum activism, demonstrating how it displayed not only a collection of disobedient objects but also a model for disobedient curating by directing institutional resources towards ongoing movements and campaigns.

The 1972 exhibition Montréal plus ou moins, curated by the architect Melvin Charney, treated the city’s Museum of Fine Arts as a kind of urban laboratory. Displays created by activist groups as well as artists expressed critical views on Montreal’s urban planning, housing and architectural heritage, while the ambition to reclaim the everyday space of the city resonated with the contemporaneous urban theorizing of Henri Lefebvre. By also featuring performance, give-away artworks, the presentation of documents, and moments of institutional critique, Montréal plus ou moins successfully merged conceptual art strategies with countercultural urban activism.

This article considers the exhibition of the work of leftist Mexican printmaker Leopoldo Méndez at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1945. Showing Méndez’s work in a manner that illuminated the artist’s communist loyalties could have been controversial in the postwar milieu, but the exhibition did not generate negative publicity. The professionals of the Art Institute, most notably Katherine Kuh and Carl Schniewind, perpetuated the invented populist legacy of printmaker José Guadalupe Posada to provide a folkloric and regional context for the work of Méndez. They thereby provided a reading that encouraged audiences to overlook the contemporary leftist political importance of Méndez’s work, and made the prints palatable to an audience that might otherwise have reacted strongly to the work of a communist Mexican artist at a time when the Good Neighbor Policy had come to an end and the Cold War had begun. This case study, the dynamics of which were repeated at parallel exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, exemplifies the crucial challenge of the curatorial representations that have not problematized the context of the artistic narratives that they present.

Harald Szeemann’s 1967 exhibition Science Fiction is ripe for re-examination. Insights gained from unpublished handwritten notes reveal Szeemann’s endless listmaking as a connective curatorial methodology that sought to re-create an expansive science fiction ‘state of mind’. The resulting exhibition of over 3,000 diverse objects stands in contrast to the sterile space-age aesthetics of the white cube that was, at the same moment, becoming the pre-eminent form of contemporary art display. The popular response to Science Fiction stimulated Szeemann to conceptualize a ‘Museum of Today’ that would dynamically reflect its moment in time – a concept that resonates in Szeemann’s subsequent work and in contemporary curatorial practice.

This article examines curatorial strategies used to contextualize, dramatize and narrativize events that unfold over timescales far exceeding that of the individual human lifespan, sometimes involving life forms that are posthuman or other-than-human. Three exhibition projects from 2015 will be analysed – A Breathcrystal curated by Mihnea Mircan, Riddle of the Burial Grounds curated by Tessa Giblin, and Disappearing Acts curated by Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen – each of which explores situations of actual or potential disaster resulting from exposure to nonhuman organisms, nuclear waste or rising seas caused by climate change. Informed by T. J. Demos and Fredric Jameson’s theorizations of ‘negative utopianism’ in art theory and science fiction, I explore how these curatorial scenarios investigate the properties of human and nonhuman entities, whether encountered in the present or from vantage points of the distant past or future.

15th ISTANBUL BIENNIAL, A GOOD NEIGHBOUR Curated by Elmgreen & Dragset, Istanbul, various locations, 16 September – 12 November 2017

EXHIBITION, DESIGN, PARTICIPATION: ‘AN EXHIBIT’ 1957 AND RELATED PROJECTS, ELENA CRIPPA AND OTHERS London: Afterall Books (2016), 240 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-3-863-35897-6, £14.95

PUBLIC SERVANTS: ART AND THE CRISIS OF THE COMMON GOOD, JOHANNA BURTON, SHANNON JACKSON AND DOMINIC WILLSDON (EDS) Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press (2016), 518 pp., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-262-03481-4, US $44.95

TROUBLER LA FÊTE, RALLUMER NOTRE JOIE/TO SPOIL THE PARTY, TO SET OUR JOY ABLAZE Montreal: Journée sans culture (2016) 142 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-2-98163-06, CDN $30.00

SURVEY FOR CULTURAL WORKERS/QUESTIONNAIRE POUR TRAVAILLEURS CULTURELS, JO-ANNE BALCAEN (ED.) Montreal: self-published (2015) 76 pp., Paperback, ISBN: 978-0-994-72830-2, CDN $20.00

PUBLIC ART: NEW WAYS OF THINKING AND WORKING Organized by Ciara McKeown, Jenn E. Norton and Brandon Vickerd, York University and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 18 – 20 May 2017