Museum studies Exhibitions management : Anthony Bond

Exhibitions in Museums are normally owned by one of the Curators. While travelling shows are a useful part of the programme they do little to enhance the skills of the staff at the museum. Making original and well researched exhibitions also enhances the intellectual capital of the museum and helps persuade lending institutions to cooperate.

At AGNSW a curator initiates most exhibitions or else the curator has responded to a proposal from a guest curator. There are a number of departments that become involved in an exhibition from the start. In order to get approval for an exhibition particularly if it has a budget of over a million dollars the curator has to have the enthusiastic support of the people who will help realise it and market it.

AT AGNSW we have no government funding for exhibitions so we must budget to at least break even. With the big exhibitions we prefer to come out in profit because this allows us to transfer funding into acquisitions.

The support staff that the curator will work with are as follows:
1. Public Programmes (Education staff) who advise on the likely response from schools depending on the current curriculum focus and provide a sense of the general public response and then produce educational support material.
2. Marketing and press officers also need to be engaged from the very beginning.
3. Development officer who must try and find sponsorship.
4. Exhibitions department who assist with the budget and exhibitions registrars who handle contracts and freight arrangements and supervise couriers.
5. Book shop staff to advise on the nature of the catalogue for marketing purposes.
6. Designers for the catalogue and if necessary architects and interior designers for the exhibition space.
7. Conservation staff to prepare for condition reports and any special contingencies.
8. Installation crews, packing staff, technicians, carpenters electricians etc for installation.
9. Photography department to ensure good documentation.

The Curator has overall control and is responsible for the conceptual shape of the exhibition, for selecting the works and following up loans and for the production of the catalogue and for supervising the installation of the exhibition. They are also responsible for lectures and press conferences and may arrange a symposium to accompany the exhibition in conjunction with Public Programmes.

Securing loans

There is a growing consensus in Australia that the Curatorial Theme is an alienating strategy coming between the artist and their public. This has recently been raised in discussions about the Sydney Biennale but has been a cornerstone of populist criticism of museum exhibitions of contemporary art for 15 years or so.

In 2000 for the first time The Biennale of Sydney abandoned its successful strategy of inviting a curator to propose a theme. Instead they sought the advice of an Authoritative international panel to nominate a best 50 artists list. It therefore became an accessible museum exhibition of well-known works by established artists. The success of this strategy in 2000 has been taken to demonstrate that the curatorial theme is no longer valid.

The reality however is that when artists work with a single curator (or curatorial collaboration) on a theme of common interest it can be a very productive situation for everyone. An artist is not simply asked to lend works or agree to have works borrowed from collections on the recommendation of an expert panel. The curator acts as an intermediary to negotiate space and context to facilitate new and relevant work in the right space and at the right time and in collaboration with fellow artists with common interests.

In this way the exhibition is constructed as a social exchange not as a competition. Common artistic goals bring additional energy to the exhibition. Further more by clearly stating the theme and presenting it in public the curator provides a context for transparency and accountability. For the artist it is clear from the outset how their work is to be presented and selection of work can be negotiated in relation to sites and context. I must make the point that a theme is not the same as subject eg landscape but reflects something intrinsic to the art making process.

To ensure that a theme is not an impediment to reception the Curator must evolve it in response to the interests of the artists. The curator's responsibility to the artists and the public is to ensure that the context for presentation and the thematic discussion of the work accurately represents their concerns. Perhaps we should not call this a theme but a conceptual framework that characterises a significant aspect of the Zeitgeist. It is important to make a clear distinction between legitimate interpretation in collaboration with artists and (re)presentation in which works are used to illustrate a theory or a story that may not arise directly from the work.

It is certainly true that some curators have adopted themes that are idiotic concoctions that bring little conceptual clarity to assist our enjoyment of the work and may even undermine the seriousness of the artist's project. It is also possible to try to do too much with an ostensibly productive theme and lose the plot. However I am going to argue strongly for the virtue of a well conceived curatorial theme and to make my point I will discuss a particular project where I believe the theme provided an invaluable context for the production of new work that was specific to the location and the audience.

Slides 1-3 L&R cityscapes of Liverpool

In 1999 I was invited to curate the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary International Art. I was excited by the opportunity because Liverpool is a relatively small city but densely packed with history and richly endowed architecturally.

The foundation of Liverpool's wealth in the nineteenth century was based on the slave trade in the eighteenth century. Manufactured goods were sent from Liverpool to Africa and traded for slaves who were shipped to The Americas where in turn they were traded for sugar, tobacco, rum and cotton for the mills in Manchester. Each leg of this triangle would render the Liverpool ship owners substantial profits.

The history of the port was also implicated in the export of orphans and children of unsuitable parents a trade that continued up to the 1950s. So in addition to tracing the city I also wanted to trace the resulting Diasporas. I invited a significant number of Artists from Latin America and several African American artists.

The people of Liverpool are also very special. This seafaring community characteristically displays tough intellectual independence and fierce solidarity - they would be profoundly sceptical of the Biennial but if they could be won over they would defend it to the death.

This gritty environment seemed ideal for an exhibition that would extend beyond the museum. The old city can be traversed in a comfortable 20-minute walk and provided many potential sites. I chose the theme TRACE because of my continuing research into artists who employ objects and materials as triggers for memory in contemporary practice. To help anchor the exhibition in the community and take advantage of the physical space of the city I selected artists who would also be interested in tracing its history. The current renaissance in public art and the engagement of artists in specific sites and communities made this an ideal opportunity. Most of the artists came to Liverpool twice, for an initial research trip to negotiate sites and later to install their work. Nearly all of them came for the installation and typically spent two weeks in Liverpool.

I used TRACE rather than traces because it allows an ambiguity between noun and verb. In other words it would trace a path or search for clues and present material evidence. The evidence of materials and objects has a strong affective component. Implicit or bodily memory is triggered in the individual through sensory responses to objects and places. This exhibition would therefore privilege Affect however its objectivity was to be secured by its specificity to site and history.

Squaring Affect in art with realist objectivity is to be the subject of an AAANZ conference in Sydney in July 2001 (a brochure with a call for papers is available at the desk)

There were 60 artists in the exhibition showing at a dozen locations and a number of billboard projects, but I will just show a few examples to demonstrate how the theme worked in practice.

The first of these demonstrate how Material traces evoke bodily memory. They are physically site specific to Liverpool even though they do not refer directly to the history of the place.

Slides 4-6 L&R Salcedo installation in the Cathedral

The Cathedral was a demanding site because of its monstrous scale and its spiritual purpose. In my judgement Doris was one of the few artists capable of holding the space and making a work that was also an appropriate memorial for the building. Although the 14 individual sculptures already existed their selection for this installation was based on her prior study of the space. Their placement took 4 days to refine making the installation exquisitely site specific.

Doris Salcedo traces the distortion of reality that occurs when power and violence are used as means of social control. What comfort resides in the bed you once shared with a missing lover? What pleasure can one take in the intimate possessions of one�s spouse or child when they have been dragged away with no explanation? Objects retain traces of those who have used them. It is difficult to throw away such traces of an absent loved one, and yet it is equally difficult to continue using them as though nothing had happened.

Here at the Cathedral wardrobes and beds are rendered monstrous by their merger. All the holes, gaps and cracks in the wood have been meticulously sealed with white cement. It is as if they have been rendered blind and mute, just like those whose silence is ensured by the threat of further violence. This careful sealing of the cracks is also read as an attempt to keep something out or in. But in this case the �something� is elusive, like the nebulous fear of some unforeseen tragedy. Salcedo�s fusion of inanimate matter and human remains provokes a sense of abomination.

Slides 7-8 L&R Balka installation

Miroslaw Balka�s installations have autobiographical origins reflecting the proportions of the artist�s body and the spaces of his childhood. Balka spent many hours in his grandmother's house as a child. He recalls playing under the furniture and has a vivid memory of the textures and topography of the various rooms. The house is now his studio, and in many of his sculptures the artist re-works the dimensions and spaces between objects that are so deeply ingrained in his psyche. He later became aware that a Nazi death camp had been located nearby. This knowledge has subsequently infected his benign personal recollection.

At the Tate Balka installed a soap platform. Over the window of the exhibition space he placed a metal grid with lumps of soap wedged into it that had been used by staff at the museum. The worn soap indicates intimate contact and the residue of hair is a literal trace of the body.

Drawings burnt in a studio disaster hang on the walls surrounding the platform. This work is both visual and olfactory. From a distance the soap platform looks like a slab of marble, but on closer inspection its softness and soapy aroma reveal its true origins. The bodily associations of soap demonstrate Balka's preoccupation with the body and memory while the drawings imply the sinister aroma of trauma.

Slide 9-10 L&R Costantino installation at littlewoods

Nicola Costantino made her installation in a prominent Liverpool shop window. The window display includes an array of stylish garments presented on mannequins. Seen from a distance, the costumes could be made from suede, with a fur trim and a subtle pattern of flowers or some other simple motif. The garments are sufficiently intriguing to attract closer inspection but, as one approaches, the whole ensemble is radically transformed. The suede turns out to be latex and now seems more like human skin than leather. Worse still, the motifs that relieve the surface turn out to be directly moulded from the human body. Far from being florets they are revealed as direct body casts of navels, nipples and arseholes.

Slide 11-12 L&R Neto installation Tate

Ernesto Neto has created a world between body and architecture. His sculptures articulate the spaces of buildings while simulating bodily membranes. His basic forms are constructed from Lycra and filled with massive quantities of Turmeric, Cumin and cloves. This site-specific installation at the Tate exemplifies another feature of Trace that is the prominence of non-visual stimuli in this case olfactory.

Slides 13 L&R MacLennan performance at Liverpool

Alasdair MacLennan installed trestle tables running the entire length of his space and set them for absent guests at a wake. Their uneaten feast includes pigs� heads, fish and other items symbolic in the Irish Catholic tradition. The table is strewn with ticker tape listing the names of those who have died in the conflict in Northern Ireland. MacLennan�s performance took place, on alternate days, and consisted of his sitting next to the table dressed in black holding a branch and reciting the names of the dead. The length of the list was intellectually disturbing but the powerful sensation of mortality conveyed by the smell of the pigs heads made the experience literally gut wrenching.

Slide 14 L&R Domnenico de Clario performance

De Clario performed on 14 nights centred on the opening of the Biennial. (By chance, the opening night coincided with the equinox and was also, unusually, a night of the full moon.) Each night at a new site he played the piano accompanied by a saxophonist. The duration set by the interval between moonrise and sun set. The sites were illuminated with a different colour for each of the first seven nights on the outward journey repeating on the return. These colours were associated with the seven energy centres of the body (chakras). The audience were led to unusual and often very beautiful sites such as the crypt of a Cathedral, the roof of an old building and an abandoned church. A video of the journey was installed in the exhibition.

The next artists made works that responded directly to the city or the history of the site.

Slides 15 L&R Campos Pons Seven Powers and Unfolding desires

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pon's Yoruba grandfather was transported from Nigeria to Cuba to work on the Vega sugar plantation where her family still lives and works. With an oral tradition that kept their connection to Africa very much alive, the artist�s friends and family were a living testament to a history of displacement.

The Seven Powers are based on templates for the stowing of slaves on the transport ships that once sailed from West Africa to the Caribbean after trading manufactured goods brought from Liverpool. The layout of the bodies on the slave boards is a powerful image of the conjunction of mathematical efficiency and brutality.

Unfolding desires refers to the labour of her people at the same time as it suggests a fleet of slave ships at sea.

Slide 16 L&R Freeway to China (Version Two: for Liverpool) 1998-99

Allan Sekula continued his conversations with dockworkers that started in Los Angeles and included Australian and European ports. In Liverpool he documented the lives of workers who lost their jobs when the port collapsed including some poignant images of workers gazing through wire at the machines they used to operate.

One of the most interesting by-products of his involvement was a conference with a group of ex-Dockers who have set up an Internet system to monitor the operations of shipping companies. Seamen on vessels around the world email them with details of improper working conditions and unseaworthiness and this information is immediately sent to the authorities at the next port of call where the ship is impounded.

Slide 17 L&R Ghost Ship Liverpool

Dorothy Cross made this work as an extension of a recent installation, Ghost Ship, realised near Dublin in 1999. For the original work Cross painted a retired light ship with many layers of phosphorescent paint and moored it out at sea within sight of the esplanade of Dublin Bay. In years past Irish boats depended on this light ship for their safe passage to Liverpool. Every evening just before dusk the boat�s sides were flooded with light. As the sun faded the lights were turned off leaving the image of a luminous, ghostly presence between the shore and the horizon.

A video of this installation was projected over the Mersey each night from a jetty where boats from Dublin used to dock. In a dark room within the exhibition we installed a phosphorescent model of the ship, made in preparation for the original project.

Slides 18-19 L&R Fischer & el Sani Berlin sites

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani have been photographing the entrances to illegal nightclubs in Berlin. These venues are often only occupied for one night, and the signs of the event are ephemeral graffiti and posters. The artists were invited to seek out and document similar events in Liverpool, a city famous for its club life. As it turned out, Liverpool did have such clubs 10 or 15 years ago, but these have now become established venues. The artists decided not to show the entrances of these more established spaces, but instead to find obscure sites where a club could have been (or might one day be held). They brought with them posters made from their Berlin photographs, which they put up near the entrances of these phantom sites. They then re-photographed the posters in situ. The resulting photographs were run off as a poster series and pasted around Liverpool, suggesting potential or fictitious club sites. Posters of photos of these phantoms then appeared back in the exhibition.

Slides 20 L&R Gough at Bluecoat

Julie Gough came to Liverpool to research local histories. Her work was displayed at Bluecoat Art Centre that had been an orphanage in the eighteenth century connected to the continuing deportation of children from Britain to work in the colonies through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The children were employed making pins and sewing. At the cathedral cemetery she discovered a whole wall of memorials to children who had died at the orphanage. The palettes in this installation replicate the children's beds and the mattress carry the text frottaged from their memorials and then rendered in pins.

This work has been retained in Liverpool.

Slides 21-22 L&R Anne No�l in the shopping centre

Ann No�l set up a stall in the shopping centre and engaged passers by in conversation. She asked them to give her some object from their bag or pocket that held some significance for them. For example you may find that you have kept a bus ticket for years without consciously acknowledging the reason. Its significance may be recalled as a result of No�l's invitation often unleashing a flood of memories. No�l would then sew these fragments into her quilt of memories while writing down your story in her book. The book was indexed to the quilt. These quilted local stories have been retained in Liverpool.

Slides 23-24 L&R Erwin Wurm performance and billboards Liverpool

Erwin Wurm�s performance sculptures arise from simple daily actions: trying on new clothing, driving by a billboard, or opening a box. At the Exchange Flags in Liverpool, Wurm displayed drawings as instructions for one-minute performances. Each performance entailed everyday objects being used to complete an action, based solely on the criterion that the action was possible. The audience was encouraged to participate by following the instructions rigorously. A billboard was created in Liverpool displaying examples of these performances.