04-Being Curated | Frieze

Being Curated | Frieze 06/05/2024, 16:45
Being Curated
Dan Fox invited eight artists and artist groups to
reflect on their relationships to curators and
curatorial discourse
https://www.frieze.com/article/being-curated Page 1 of 26
Daniel Buren, Les cabanes éclatées imbriquées, travail in situ (Exploded Overlapping Cabins, Work in Situ),
2011, installation view at Centre Pompidou-Metz
Dan Fox
Second only, perhaps, to the white-hot temperatures of the art market,

the rise of the curator has been one of the most discussed developments
in art over the past 15 years. The growth of the profession has wrought
profound changes on how we think about exhibitions and what institutions
can be. It has helped networks of artists to grow, and has shone a light on
the overlooked and underappreciated. It has also assumed ministerial
power in art-industry war games, and has – in Europe and the US, at least
– taken over from television production as the sensible option for nice
middle-class youngsters wanting a career in the arts. No other word or
phrase from the professional lexicon of contemporary art has leaked so
quickly into widespread popular usage as ‘curating’. When it’s not
celebrities ‘curating’ your lunchtime sushi box or clothes shops ‘curating’
your summer sock collection, curating is the motor of power and
discourse in exhibition-making. For the most part, the conversation about
curating has largely been dominated by curators. (The many who
freelance as critics have also altered the nature of such basic staples of
art writing as exhibition reviews. But that’s another story.)
This does not strike me as the healthiest situation. (Then again, junior
curators at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s probably
thought the same about the omnipotent critics of their day.) Yes, there are
exceptions, and yes, I am generalizing. Of course, I’m not the first to have
wondered what the implications of the growth of curatorial power are for
artists. Curators – like critics – are nothing without art, no matter what the
most meta-inclined of curatorial theorists might argue. In 1972, Daniel
Buren published a short statement titled ‘Exposition d’une exposition’
(Exhibiting Exhibitions) in the catalogue for Documenta V, in which he
complained that: ‘The subject of exhibitions tends more and more to be
not so much the exhibition of works of art, as the exhibition of the
exhibition as a work of art.’ Buren’s text (in its 1992 English translation)
prefaces this survey, for which we asked a small selection of artists to
respond to the following questions: how do they feel about their role in the
discourses of curating? What do they think about their work being placed
in themed exhibitions or biennials, or in the context of new exhibition
formats and experiments in display? Are they happy to engage in dialogue
with curators when shaping exhibitions, or do they feel instrumentalized,
their work put at the service of someone else’s interests? And how do
artists who curate – and there are many – feel about their position in
relation to professional curators?
Reflecting today on his original statement, Buren still argues passionately

against the grandiose excesses of auteur curating and ‘the exhibition of
the exhibition as a work of art’. Other responses speak about firm but
productive negotiations, or liken their experiences with curators to finely
nuanced social encounters, both parties making discoveries about the art
work and the porousness of their respective roles. Together, these
reflections provide a snapshot of an ever-changing field of relations, one
in which, as the saying goes, ‘It’s complicated.’
DANIEL BUREN: EXHIBITING EXHIBITIONS
Daniel Buren, Exhibition of an Exhibition, A work in 7 pieces, Work in Situ, exhibition view at Documenta V,
Kassel, 1972, (standing next to a Flag by Jasper Johns)
The subject of exhibitions tends more and more to be not so much the
exhibition of works of art, as the exhibition of the exhibition as a work of
art.
Here, it is unmistakably the ( ———————— ), headed by (
———————— ),* that exhibits [expose] (the works) and lays itself
open [s’expose] (to the critics). The works presented are strokes of
colours painstakingly selected – of the picture that makes up each
section (room) in its totality. There is even an order in these colours, for
they are enclosed and composed in relation to the design of the section
(selection) in which they are displayed/presented. These sections
(castrations) – themselves ‘strokes of colours’ painstakingly selected – of
the picture that makes up the exhibition in its totality and in its very
principle, only make their appearance under the aegis of the organizer,
the person who re-unifies art by making it all the same in the
casket/screen he prepares for it. It is the organizer who deals with – and
screens – all contradictions.
So it is true that the exhibition weighs in as its own subject, and its own
subject as a work of art.
The exhibition is clearly the ‘enhancing receptacle’1 [receptacle

valorisant] where art not only plays out its part but is also engulfed. For if,
even yesterday, works were revealed thanks to the Museum, nowadays
they are no more than so much decorative gadgetry helping the Museum
to survive as a picture or tableau, the author of which is none other than
the very organizer of the exhibition. And the artist hurls himself and his
work into this trap, because the artist and his work are powerless, by dint
of artistic practice, and can do no more than let someone else – the
organizer – do the exhibiting. Whence the exhibition as art tableau, and
as the limit of art exhibitions.2
In this way, the limits created by art itself, to act as a bolt-hole, turn
against it by imitating it, and art’s refuge, once formed by its limits, turns
out to be the justification, the reality, and the grave.
September 1992
* New edition of a text with the same title published on the occasion of Documenta V in 1972.
Always topical, the exhibition and organizer of your choice can be placed in this spot.
1 Postface, Michel Claura, 18 Paris lV 70, Marcel Broodthaers, Michel Claura and Robert Barry,
International General, 1970
2 ‘Rahmen’ in Position Proposition, Museum of Mönchengladbach, 1971
41 years later! After accepting ‘Exhibiting Exhibitions’ for the Documenta

V catalogue in 1972, Harald Szeemann told me that my text was
‘intelligent but having very little to do with the reality’! However, even if he
was then correct (which I don’t believe, because if I identified the problem
it’s because it already existed or was just emerging), it sooner or later
became an obvious reality, proving that my analysis was not just a theory
stemming from my imagination. That said, few organizers since
Szeemann – not least the ones who consider themselves ‘artists’ – are
anywhere near as talented as he was. Szeemann was absolutely the
inventor of this new tendency in the art world; the organizer as the real
artist in the show or, at least, the one above all the other participating
artists.
Since that time, in terms of group exhibitions, to my eyes everything has

come adrift. It’s almost grotesque to see how exhibitions are increasingly
becoming opportunities for an organizer or a curator or whoever to write
an essay which usually has nothing to do with the artists invited, but
concerns only his or her philosophy about art and society, politics or
aesthetics. Exhibitions focus increasingly univocally on who makes the
show, and we can see that the artists chosen to ‘illustrate’ his/her theory
are mainly the same from one exhibition to the next. So the very same
works are, show after show, illustrating extremely different themes or
theories, without any problem. In fact, and this is quite reassuring, no one
cares – starting with the artists themselves – about the discourse
produced by these exhibition organizers. The only ones who pay attention
to and speak about the organizers are the organizers themselves, or art
critics who don’t speak about the artists in the exhibition so much as
about the organizer, perhaps dreaming secretly to be an organizer of
exhibitions themselves.
Many artists are content to be invited to take part in a show, without

criticizing either whoever invited them or the farcical situation in which
they have become mere objects. On the one hand, it’s because their
concern is to be invited regardless of the conditions, making sure that this
is primarily important for themselves and not realizing that, little by little,
their works are melting into a vague soup that is becoming more and more
indigestible. I still dream (if I didn’t, then I would be completely depressed)
of a general uprising!
Daniel Buren is an artist living in France. Recent exhibitions include

‘Excentrique(s), work in situ’, in Monumenta 2012, Grand Palais, Paris,
France (May 2012); and ‘Electricity Paper Vinyl… works in situ’, Bortolami
Gallery / Petzel Gallery, New York, USA (January 2013). In September, he
will have an exhibition at Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico.
Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Jean Cocteau, (detail), 2003–12, installation view as part of ‘A Bigger Splash:
Painting After Performance’, Tate Modern
MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ
Dear Dan,
A time was such when curators preferred the inanimate … They were more
at ease with objects, things, art works … than they were with people.
Artists were just as suspicious … and, more at ease with a drink, were
often aggressive. At once both patronising yet over reverent … the
curator’s positioning towards artists has long been one of ambivalence …
in their turn artists felt misunderstood – were often arrogant or paranoid …
or both. Small wonder then, that there was a common mistrust …
Performance went some way to redressing this … of necessity – we were,

after all, working in real time – and there was nowhere to hide … it may
indeed have precipitated a climate change … because some form of
dialogue between artists and curators, generally with some urgency, had
now become a necessity. Of course, artists still drank too much, but now
as often than not in the company of the curators … and so began the
realization that we might yet, after all, be sharing a common agenda … So
it is no mere coincidence that this key word, ‘performance’, should
now feature in both the titles of two current Tate exhibitions in which my
work is included: ‘A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance’ at Tate
Modern, London, and ‘Glam! The Performance of Style’, at Tate Liverpool.
Is it not curious that the showing of my more anarchic installation

Celebration? Realife Revisited (1972–2000), in Liverpool, should have
arisen from the more traditional route of a simple loan request …? My
contributions to the Tate Modern show – Jean Cocteau (2003–12), J&J
and After Image (both 2012) – were, however, the result of a protracted
yet focused dialogue with the curators which, in turn, shaped my
contribution and procured work thematically specific to the exhibition. So,
whilst the axis of the curator curating work from the artist remained this
was nonetheless symptomatic of a new sensibility which now took
one from awkward imbalance to greater parity …
You may recall a brief exchange we had recently in London. Well, I am now
writing from Paris where I am preparing for the exhibition we spoke about,
to be held at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC this
autumn. I have been invited to be artistic director for DECORUM and I
shall be working principally with the curator Anne Dressen and architect
Christine Ilex on the staging of more than 100 carpets, rugs and tapestries
by modern and contemporary artists …
Ranging from the ‘Primitive’ to the ‘Conceptual’, these are to be displayed

in a variety of ways … I elaborate as the resultant show will emerge from a
uniquely close collaboration between curator, artist and architect … I shall
be dealing with issues – once deemed outside of an artist’s remit – as
diverse as the means of display, patternation and the use of wallpapers,
the designing of motifs for Axminster, décor as back-drop, the mapping of
a floor plan and so on. And, given that much of the work to be shown
oscillates between fine and applied arts, between high and low culture, a
degree of slippage will surely mirror emerging shifts of museological
emphasis?
… Initially somewhat tentatively, we are now, with greater aplomb,

developing a shared language by which to elaborate on a possible
scenography, and it seems that as we move from the mechanistic to the
complicit, so we may be heading towards … possible Baudelairean
harmonies … I hope this goes some way to meeting your request, and
meanwhile look forward to seeing you soon,
Amicably yours,
Marc Camille
Marc Camille Chaimowicz was born in postwar Paris, France, and lives and
works between London, UK, and Burgundy, France. His installation
Celebration? Realife Revisited (1972–2000) is currently included in ‘Glam!
The Performance of Style’ at Tate Liverpool, UK. Forthcoming exhibitions
include ‘En Suspension…’, curated by the artist, at FRAC des Pays de la
Loire, Carquefou, France (April 2013). In February, Madame Bovary by
Gustave Flaubert, a work by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, was published by
Four Corners Books.
Ed Atkins, Us Dead Talk Love, 2012, emulsion, Indian ink, photocopy and archival tape on board, 20 panels in 5
suites, 2.4 × 1.2 m
ED ATKINS
My experience, which is conspicuously limited, is that there can be a great

element of collusion in working directly with a good curator: something a
little giddy and excited and very much in secretive, esoteric accord. The
chance for lots of thrilled affirming and urgent exchanges that, publicly,
probably manifest as a kind of obscure fraternity – an expression of faith
in the work and in the possibilities of the relationship and in the wider
contexts and discourses that it might induct or contribute to.
Curating, it seems to me, might best be understood as a kind of

relationship – a friendship – that is both committed and somehow
capricious enough to be, in any product of the relation, altruistic. There’s a
very real possibility that artists and curators are the same and the other to
one another.
A scene of hospitality maybe warrants analogy here, where the host and
guest are productively confused. Here, I suppose that the curator begins
in the role of the host, and the artist in the role of the guest – though I
wouldn’t say that with any certainty. The institution or gallery, or wherever
the work is housed, is the curator-host’s home. As the artist-guest, I don’t
know whether I need to take my shoes off or use coasters under drinks –
or whether I can ask for a hard drink – or avoid conversations about
politics or what. The curator-host, however, doesn’t really know the ‘my’
(such as it is authoritative) of my work, which is paradoxically a
precondition of their hosting, so it’s more than likely that the two roles
switch and continue to do so in the process of making the show. In lieu of
the third party: the audience.
So this relationship and its slippages might, in this idealized mode, do

something pretty much occult to the identities of both the curator and me,
however temporarily – insofar as they are confused, they are the same
and they are so very different to one another as to be profoundly
incoherent.
In working directly with an artist – rather than at a remove with simply the
work of an artist – the curator, I think, might confront a conspicuously
alien aspect of their own identity and, at least partially, actually be the
artist – no doubt in all their banality and anxiety.
For myself, the confusion between a curator and me can be hugely

productive. And while my vanity is certainly well served in the situation, I
would say that it’s as close as I get to the mysteries of collaboration –
which is to say, in this context, that it doesn’t feel like collaboration,
because there’s not really a consistent division.
I should say that I’m predominantly thinking of my gallerists when I talk

about this kind of curatorial encounter. Certainly the relative long-termism
of that relationship presents a marked difference to a comparable
institutional contact.
Still, there have been several other experiences of wonderful equi-

valence, in my brief time as an artist, that makes me think that, despite
any quixotic sensation about the above, it’s not actually as rare as a more
cynical, antipathetic telling might have you believe. Some of my very best
friends are curators.
Ed Atkins lives in London, UK. Recent solo projects include those at

MoMA PS1, New York, USA, and Chisenhale Gallery, London. In August,
he will present a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland.
Nick Mauss, Concern, Crush, Desire, 2011, cotton appliqué on velvet, brass doorknobs and door stoppers,
installation view as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, 3.3 × 2.4 × 2.9 m
NICK MAUSS
Nobody likes the curator as functionary or octopus, pushing artists’

profiles through the various templates of the art system. But the
emergence of this figure cannot have taken place without the consent of
artists, their dealers, apparent critics, collectors, etc. and by an abdication
of responsibility, a loss of glamour, even, on behalf of all these parties –

while promoting an illusion of increased sparkle. The question now is how
willingly all of us answer to and over-emphasize the demands of an
attention economy.
Or, we could work slowly, deliberately, giving licence to indulgence or

dissolution, and allow things to come together. What if the frame of an
exhibition could be a passageway, a transitional, jarring, erotic space, a
left-over velvet applique antechamber in a cosmetics emporium, a pre-
echo that shudders through algorithms of wanting: Marcel Broodthaers >
Sturtevant > Madeleine Vionnet? What are other ways of relating things,
of proposing counter-constellations, of making problematic correlations?
These are the questions I asked myself as I worked very closely and with
great pleasure with two curators as an artist included in a recent biennial,
as a way of making my presence porous within the framework of this
particular attention-grab. Something like a presence that also had the
intensity of an absence – of self-annihilation. As they opened up the
entirety of the museum’s collection to me, and as I navigated through the
database, it began to call out different names, to radically affect my paths
of search and selection.
I also remember going through the vetting process of one particularly

cynical youth triennial, which was managed entirely via email, in order to
allow for the filtering of large amounts of data points (masses of
recommended names and pdf portfolios) to arrive at a final selection of
artists, all under the premise that this was a new and up-to-date way of
generating an exhibition: ‘globally’, ‘digitally’. By the time I was invited to
participate in the exhibition and to sign off on the image rights to
photographs of my own work for purposes of the institution’s publicity, I
realized that there was no reason for me to participate in this show, as all
the relationships had become flat, entirely interchangeable. I had never
met or spoken to any of the curators, I had no idea what the show was
supposed to be about, or what it was even interested in being about, and
thought it strange that nobody questioned the complete perversion of the

exhibition as a possibility to a fully realized bureaucratic travesty.
Self-sabotage as aesthetic.
Nick Mauss is an artist who lives in New York, USA.
Tom Nicholson, Evening shadows, 2011–12, installation in the Elder Wing of Art Gallery of South Australia of 38
painted copies of H.J. Johnstone’s Evening Shadows (1881), borrowed from citizens in and around Adelaide,
and a stack of 10,000 off-set printed posters, each poster: 60 × 84 cm
TOM NICHOLSON
I have mostly been fairly privileged in having good experiences of being

involved in large themed exhibitions or biennials. In the best cases, I’d say
that these shows – and specifically their curatorial conceptualization –
honours the art work by considering it in relation to a range of intellectual,
political and experimental work, inside and outside art. The process of
exhibition-making, then, functions as part of the making public of those
relations (and the leakage) between the art work and those different kinds
of intellectual, political and experimental work. That is something I both
welcome as an artist (in that I think art should be part of our wider,
collective, public discourse) and also feed upon (those relations in turn
flow into my own working and in this way become part of that ongoing
generative process that is critical to any artist).
I would not say that I have ever felt as though my work is instrumentalized.
Perhaps this is naivety on my part but, in a general sense, I have faith in
the nature of the encounter with an art work, in the wildness of that
encounter, in the way that the sustained process of attending to an
interesting art work is not exhausted or contained by a single framework.
Possibly it is simply my good fortune, but the conversations and
exchanges I have had with curators in these large-scale shows have been
overwhelmingly interesting, usually generous to the work, and generally in
tune with the singularity of the work and the demands of that singularity.
At the level of the pragmatics of exhibition-making, my conversations with

curators around the physical placement of a work have occasionally been
affected by curatorial preconceptions, in a way that I have felt risks
flattening the work. In these cases I have simply said ‘no’, and that has
been fine. I generally welcome very frank conversations with curators,
which are both a happy liberation from Anglo-Saxon forms of reserve
about potential disagreement or offence, but also, in the best situations,
yield really interesting insights about the work – something that I imagine
is the closest that an artist gets to the position of a writer with an excellent
editor. In even the most trusting and intimate versions of this relationship
with a curator, I have never the lost the sense of being able to simply say
‘no’ to a suggestion, so there is certainly a limit in that relationship I would
always maintain (and I have, at least in my experiences, always been able
to maintain this limit in a very friendly way).
On the other hand, in the published written responses to themed shows or

biennials, I think there is often a subsuming of the art work to curatorial
authorship. I guess this partly arises from the shorthand involved in the
word-length limitations in reviewing. I suspect it is also because writers
are sometimes also curators or, in some wider sense, peers of curators,
and it often feels like the writing addresses curatorial structures or
devices rather than the singularity of art works. On several levels I regard
this as a problem, not least in that it flattens what an art work is or can be,
the way that art works unsettle our taxonomies and preconceptions rather
than illustrating them.
As an artist living in a fairly far-flung place (Melbourne), one of the things I

most appreciate about large themed shows or biennials is contact with
artists from other places. The artists I have met through these shows have
often become very close friends and valued peers, and though we may go
many years without seeing each other, the exchanges established by that
first occasion of showing together becomes the basis of a very particular
and durable connection. Though the first meeting often occurs in an
institutionalized context (a museum or a biennial) what is striking to me is
that these friendships and exchanges quickly become autonomous. They
become part of the conversations, networks, exchanges, generosity and
reciprocity that enable artists to keep working, to keep generating, and to
do so with a kind of (relative or qualified) autonomy that is (and sorry for
the grandiosity of invoking this term) necessary to the strange sovereignty
of art works.
Tom Nicholson is an artist who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He

is a lecturer in drawing at Monash Art, Design and Architecture. His work
was recently part of the inaugural Qalandiya International, a biennial event
held across a number of locations in Palestine.
Zofia Stryjeńska, installation view, 2008, an exhibition curated by Paulina Olowska for the Schinkel Pavilion as
part of the 5th Berlin Biennale
PAULINA OLOWSKA
I like flirting as an artist-curator. With the works I select. With histories and
themes. With artists. With exhibition curators. With whom and with what I
flirt stems from necessity, or is the natural course of things – it constitutes
a key theme of my art. Art historian Claire Bishop once described my
artistic practice as ‘direct curatorial’.
Continuing with flirtation as a metaphor, I’d like to talk about the exhibition
‘Olinka, or Where Movement is Created’, held at Museo Tamayo, Mexico
City, last year. The show was inspired by the life and work of two artists,
Nahui Olin and Dr. Atl, living outside of ‘the centre’, in the idealistic-
Utopian world of a Mexican province. Magnolia de la Garza and Adam
Szymczyk offered the artists they invited the opportunity to co-create the
exhibition.
This joint creativity (flirtation) of curators and artists, as well as of artists

and artists, took place on three levels. Firstly, at the level of the creation of
new works, or the choice of existing ones from an artist’s output.
Secondly, juxtaposing these in an open-ended manner with works
selected by the curators from the archive collection. Thirdly, there was the
opportunity to work together on the visual aspect of the show, for
instance, through collective discussion of the most suitable hanging of
works in relation to each other. What I mean to say is that the curators
were in a permanent creative dialogue with the artists, and the exhibition
was ‘open form’ up until the very last moment. The process of developing
the exhibition was dynamic and extremely fascinating. This scenario also
made the artists look at the show in a more synthetic way. They were not
focused only on their own work, or the works in the immediate vicinity of
their work.
To me, it doesn’t matter who’s who – if an artist is an artist, if a curator is a

curator, if a curator is an artist, or the other way round – this is an old and
very constraining narrative. I opt for a new narrative, one that sees such
categories loosely. It is my experience that the most rewarding practice is
one that involves collaboration switching traditionally ascribed roles in
order to navigate exhibition territory seamlessly, and charting the borders
that are reached in the process of development. I hope that this is the
future of art and exhibition-making.
Paulina Olowska lives in Raba Niznam, near Krakow, Poland. ‘The Method’,
an exhibition that she devised, is currently on view at Studio Voltaire,
London, UK, and in June she will have a solo show at Kunsthalle Basel,
Switzerland.
Slavs and Tatars, Beyonsense, 2012, installation view as part of Projects 98, Museum of Modern Art, New York
SLAVS AND TATARS
It can’t be oysters and foie-gras every night, can it? Otherwise, we risk
coming down with what the French suffer each new year: a crise de foie
(‘crisis of the liver’), only in this case perhaps the homonym – a crise de
foi (‘questioning one’s faith’) – would be more appropriate. With curators –
as with lovers, friends or accountants for that matter – we must mix it up
a bit. Some nights just call for plain rice and yoghurt.
While the gilded discourse surrounding the role of the curator appears
increasingly sophisticated, if not at times outright esoteric, it also comes
at the expense of some brass tacks. In these oft-amnesiac times, we tend
to be in the arrière-garde rather than the avant-garde. If anything, we
seek more rather than less engagement from curators. Is it a coincidence
that the heightened logorrhea in curatorial discourse coincides with an
uptick in the transactional? Instead of entertaining a discussion about the
ideas driving an exhibition – how a particular work fits the given proposal
or how the context provides a new understanding of the work, perhaps
even steering it to new frontiers – we are too often asked to move
immediately to questions of logistics. Transport, budget, schedules, etc.,
are the standard fare before even these are cast aside in pursuit of the
next pressing engagement. Is it because such responsibilities strike most
as rudimentary, low-hanging fruit, not worthy of the otherwise noble
aspirations of curators, museum staff, administrators, gallerists and artists
alike?
The actual hanging and scenography of an exhibition are as integral, if

less seductive, as the more immaterial discussions about representation,
engagement or agency. We find The Menil Collection staff’s debates (not
to mention hermeneutic implications) over the height to hang a picture –
Jermayne MacAgy’s famous line that the centre should ‘hit at the tits’ –
as compelling and relevant as our more abstract research, into say
linguistic hospitality or mystical substitution, even if we do not paint nor
have any intention to. Nearly four decades ago, the radicalism of Heiner
Friedrich’s original dictum for the Dia Art Foundation – ‘one artist, one
space, one work … forever’ – still holds up against the more daring ideas
put forward today across innumerable periodicals and symposia.
Due perhaps to our own relatively late arrival to art after a decade spent in
other fields, from public-sector strategy to media and graphic design, we
do not have any shame in understanding the stakes involved as artists. We

can’t help but shake the feeling that we are all – every single one of us,
from teacher to trapeze artist, financier to filmmaker – in the service
industry. So instead of a puerile pitting of the curator versus the artist or
vice versa, we believe it would be better to ask: ‘Service to whom? To
what?’ For Slavs and Tatars, the service is to our region, Eurasia; to the
public; to each other. But it is also, crucially, to the integrity of the
commission and idea behind a project. Most of our work exists largely
thanks to the commission of the curator and the accompanying
institutions. Given the collective nature of our practice, we look to curators
as we do to academics, gallerists and installation crews among others, as
integral partners in an almost alchemical process, that allows for a series
of thoughts to resonate spatially, formally, intellectually and affectively.
Slavs and Tatars’ ‘Behind Reason’ is on view at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart,

Germany, until 6th May and their ‘Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite
Showbiz’ opens at Presentation House, Vancouver, Canada, on 12 April
and runs to 26 May.
W.A.G.E., Poster for ‘Consciousness Coffee Klatch’, 2009, NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, New York
W.A.G.E.
W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the General Economy) was founded by a

group of artists, performers and independent curators who were brought
together by a common sense of institutional exploitation. Independent
curators – along with other cultural producers – provide a workforce
within a multi-billion dollar industry from which others profit greatly. Like
artists and performers, independent curators are often not considered as
wage labour or subcontracted labourers, and relegated to fee categories

that bear no compensatory relationship to the work we’re asked to
provide.
Last year, W.A.G.E. was invited by Tirdad Zolghadr to present a workshop

with his graduate students at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard
College, Annandale-on-Hudson. Together with the class, we made a list of
curatorial responsibilities and duties:
— Research and development: seeing exhibitions, archival research,

reading, email correspondence, studio visits and site visits.
— Conceptualizing an exhibition: proposal writing and commissioning art
works, as well as working with artists to produce them.
— Fundraising: maintaining or cultivating donor relations, both socially and
through submitting written proposals.
— Legalities: facilitating permissions, loans, insurance, contracts and
visas.
— Mounting an exhibition: overseeing exhibition design and architecture
with fabricators, writing and preparing wall texts and labels, organizing
public programming, public relations, essay writing and catalogue design
for publication.
— Ongoing administration: oversight, invoicing, designing and maintaining
budgets, arranging shipping and managing labour from installation to de-
installation.
If independent curators complete even half of the work on this list, then
curatorial fees are symbolic figures. Since we have accounted for the
actual labour being performed – the kind of labour that in any other
context would be remunerated unless it were an unpaid internship – we
are able to quantify and valuate it in terms of real wages. This should be
done either in relation to other comparable forms of labour, or it could be
a wage or fee calibrated to the cost of living.
The rise of the independent curator has an impact upon artists because it
represents another mouth to feed from exhibition budgets. If artists and

curators are pitted against each other in the battle for compensation, we
have been divided; and if curators don’t support artists by writing
equitable artist fees into their budgets, we will have been conquered by a
system that inherently denies the value of all cultural labour.
W.A.G.E. is an activist group based in New York, USA, that focuses on

regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions, and
establishing a sustainable model for best practices between cultural
producers and the institutions that contract their labour.

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Being Curated | Frieze 06/05/2024, 16:45

Second only, perhaps, to the white-hot temperatures of the art market,

Reflecting today on his original statement, Buren still argues passionately

DANIEL BUREN: EXHIBITING EXHIBITIONS

Here, it is unmistakably the ( ———————— ), headed by (

The exhibition is clearly the ‘enhancing receptacle’1 [receptacle

41 years later! After accepting ‘Exhibiting Exhibitions’ for the Documenta

Since that time, in terms of group exhibitions, to my eyes everything has

Many artists are content to be invited to take part in a show, without

Daniel Buren is an artist living in France. Recent exhibitions include

MARC CAMILLE CHAIMOWICZ

Performance went some way to redressing this … of necessity – we were,

Is it not curious that the showing of my more anarchic installation

Ranging from the ‘Primitive’ to the ‘Conceptual’, these are to be displayed

… Initially somewhat tentatively, we are now, with greater aplomb,

My experience, which is conspicuously limited, is that there can be a great

Curating, it seems to me, might best be understood as a kind of

So this relationship and its slippages might, in this idealized mode, do

For myself, the confusion between a curator and me can be hugely

because there’s not really a consistent division.

I should say that I’m predominantly thinking of my gallerists when I talk

Still, there have been several other experiences of wonderful equi-

Ed Atkins lives in London, UK. Recent solo projects include those at

Nobody likes the curator as functionary or octopus, pushing artists’

of responsibility, a loss of glamour, even, on behalf of all these parties –

Or, we could work slowly, deliberately, giving licence to indulgence or

I also remember going through the vetting process of one particularly

thought it strange that nobody questioned the complete perversion of the

Nick Mauss is an artist who lives in New York, USA.

I have mostly been fairly privileged in having good experiences of being

generative process that is critical to any artist).

At the level of the pragmatics of exhibition-making, my conversations with

On the other hand, in the published written responses to themed shows or

As an artist living in a fairly far-flung place (Melbourne), one of the things I

Tom Nicholson is an artist who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He

This joint creativity (flirtation) of curators and artists, as well as of artists

To me, it doesn’t matter who’s who – if an artist is an artist, if a curator is a

SLAVS AND TATARS

The actual hanging and scenography of an exhibition are as integral, if

do not have any shame in understanding the stakes involved as artists. We

Slavs and Tatars’ ‘Behind Reason’ is on view at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart,

W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the General Economy) was founded by a

wage labour or subcontracted labourers, and relegated to fee categories

Last year, W.A.G.E. was invited by Tirdad Zolghadr to present a workshop

— Research and development: seeing exhibitions, archival research,

represents another mouth to feed from exhibition budgets. If artists and

W.A.G.E. is an activist group based in New York, USA, that focuses on

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