REVIEWS BOOKS
WHAT MAKES A
GREAT EXHIBITION?
Edited by Paula Marincola
Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, £10.95/$16.95 (paperback)
If there’s a great deal more art being shown almost
everywhere, then it has consequences for people
in the business of presenting it. The activity of
the curator has become a serious preoccupation
in recent years – mostly, it has to be said, among
curators – but there are more of them than matters’. Similarly Lynne Cooke supports the
ever, and while their ranks may be growing, so clear distinction of functions, concluding that ‘the
too is an awareness that curating is a less easily curator should no more flirt with the notion of
defined activity than before. What Makes a Great becoming an artist than fancy herself in the shoes
Exhibition? contributes to the current debate on of the patron’.
the nature of exhibition-making as something There’s a lot of good sense in this
distinct from art-making, emphasising a pragmatic conservative approach, but these are defensive
and informed can-do approach over the more responses to the blurring of institutional and
radical fads of the latest curatorial theorising. creative boundaries that the art’s mercurial
As editor Paula Marincola suggests, the book’s history gives rise to. Carlos Basualdo’s excellent
‘originating impulse is not… a theory-driven or and provocative essay ‘The Unstable Institution’
academic enquiry into the nature of exhibitions’, is alone worth the cover price, exploring the
but neither is it ‘a mere practicum’. Realising ideological ambivalences of ‘biennialisation’: a
an exhibition isn’t ‘a simple matter of following product of Western-driven globalisation, the
instructions in a “how-to” manual’. It makes for an biennial nevertheless erodes the stable authority
engaging, if uneven read. of the (Western) museum, throwing the big-show
Venice Biennale curator Robert Storr curator into the limelight of the ensuing tensions
opens with ‘Show and Tell’, a careworn and lengthy that emerge between global and local.
case for the proper responsibilities of the curator, Similar intuitions of the dynamic instability
or ‘exhibition-maker’, as his no-nonsense style of both art and exhibition practice are probed
has it. Storr makes a headmasterly case for the in Detlef Mertins’s luminous essay on the
rights and duties of exhibition-maker, a sobering, extraordinary architectural space of Mies van
serious vision of competence and clear separation der Rohe’s 1968 New National Gallery, in Berlin,
of authority in the service of bringing art and a structure so unconventionally and dramatically
audiences closer. ‘Show and Tell’ is, however, oddly empty that it might ‘provoke the emergence
insightful, for all its dos and don’ts. of new ways of displaying and experiencing
Ralph Rugoff takes the curator’s art, perhaps even new ways of making it’. The
responsibility just as seriously, but with a more tension, then, throughout What Makes… is of the
cheerful touch, extolling the virtues of the group responsible custodian faced with the exciting
show, which ‘like an orgy… brings things together possibility of becoming a participant in art’s
in stimulating and unpredictable ways’. Rugoff is evolution, while at the same time needing to tend
enthused by exhibitions that allow the audience to the enlightened and democratic dissemination
to ‘join the group’, and could also do with ‘a of what already exists. While there are some duds
less high-faluting discourse around curatorial in here, What Makes a Great Exhibition? does
some useful – and accessible – thinking about
the conceptual problems and practical pitfalls that
exhibition-making, old and new, must grapple with.
J.J. Charlesworth
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