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Description: Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late...
“…exhibitions and museums show, academics write. “Emphasis added. Andreas Beyer, “Between Academic and Exhibition Practice: The Case of Renaissance Studies,” in Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, proceedings from the Clark Conference,...
PublisherBard Graduate Center
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00276.011
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Commentary II. What We Do: The Focus Gallery
Nina Stritzler-Levine
. . . exhibitions and museums show, academics write.“1Emphasis added. Andreas Beyer, “Between Academic and Exhibition Practice: The Case of Renaissance Studies,” in Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, proceedings from the Clark Conference, April 9–10, 1999 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1999), 25.
 
“Focus Gallery”—the name we have chosen for the new exhibition program at the Bard Graduate Center—emerged discursively as we searched for a way to convey the essence of this new program.2These discussions took place with Peter Miller, Dean of the Bard Graduate Center, and Susan Weber, Founder and Director. Now with Objects of Exchange as our inaugural exhibition, the name seems especially appropriate. The purpose of this initiative is to bring curatorial practice clearly into focus, highlighting its role in the academic life of a graduate center with MA and PhD degree programs in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture.
With the establishment of the Focus Gallery, the BGC enters a debate that has been ongoing. A conference organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, “Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University,” in 1999 explored the discourse on a divide perceived at the time to be separating curators from academics, and since then discussions generated at the conference have contributed to creating a rapprochement between the two groups, in some cases aligning them, in others intertwining them, especially pedagogically. One of the issues raised at the conference centered on the different ways the two professions conduct research and scholarship, practices that lie at the center of academic achievement and advancement. Andreas Beyer’s succinct and pointed description of this difference, quoted above—a distinction between showing and writing—is directly relevant to the Focus Gallery. Beyer was articulating a polemic. He understood that this was a dialectical formation, and caution should be used in asserting a more reductivist point of view. Academics and curators are both educators, although they function in very different arenas and are responsible to very different “publics.” The cultural field of the museum emphasizes the acquisition of knowledge through the display and interpretation of works of art, visual representations that play a distinct and major role in producing new scholarship, contributing in ways that other forms of research simply cannot. Academics, on the other hand, construct and substantiate arguments grounded in new research, using different theoretical constructs and methodologies. The Focus Gallery shifts the emphasis in the academy from writing to a form of practice that combines writing and showing with curatorial thinking.
Focus Gallery exhibitions are different from the other exhibitions organized at the BGC, primarily because faculty members curate them and each exhibition unfolds in the classroom. Faculty research determines the subject; their scholarship informs the ideas; and they are the ones who select the objects to be shown and the strategies for displaying and interpreting them. Thus the Focus Gallery establishes a closer alliance between the Gallery and Academic Programs, the two main divisions of the institution, which emerged in tandem when the BGC opened in 1993. This new initiative brings the display function of the gallery into the classroom and makes the educational domain of the classroom more visible to the public.
BGC exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues entered the cultural arena with considerable ambition, aiming to assert and even redefine the position of the decorative arts by making this marginalized field within academia and the museum our primary focus. Adhering to standard museological conventions, particularly in assembling, handling, and installing works of art, was critical to establishing our reputation, given that the Gallery does not have a permanent collection and depends on loans of objects from public and private museums and individuals. By focusing on publishing catalogues and curating exhibitions, the Gallery shares with Academic Programs the institutional commitment to scholarship and research. Our success is revealed in the international reputation we have garnered for excellence in both these domains. Yet until the Focus Gallery there was no direct connection between the Gallery and Academic Programs. By this I do not mean a pedagogic connection, which has certainly existed, but rather a connection that better integrates curatorial thinking into the academic research of our faculty and clearly identifies the Gallery’s connection to an institution of higher education.
Peter Miller, Dean of the Bard Graduate Center, has explained how the Focus Gallery contributes to bridging this gap by being “part of a wider institutional rethinking of the journal article—the basic building block of scientific and professional advancement from the beginning of the modern university system in the mid-nineteenth century—in a dawning age of digital production. Our goal, in keeping with our commitment to exhibition-making and graduate education, is through these focus exhibitions to develop a practice of rigorous research-driven argumentation in space.”3Peter Miller, e-mail to the author, November 21, 2010. Miller’s formulation has long-term institutional implications at the BGC, and perhaps by extension within academia in general, by suggesting that curatorial thinking and the publication of exhibition catalogues are a measurable form of academic scholarship and that this scholarship retains what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called academic value within the realm of higher education.4See Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); and Bridget Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London: SAGE Publications, 1997). The metaphor of the journal article helps differentiate Focus Gallery exhibitions from the other BGC exhibitions, which are for the most part monographs. Because our faculty are the designated curators of these exhibitions, they not only determine the subjects but also formulate and substantiate the arguments offered by their research through their selection of objects. They work closely with the exhibitions department staff to create the display strategies and interpretation in the gallery and in the extended visual spaces related to the exhibition on the Internet and through different forms of digital media.
Synthesizing the practice of the curator and the professor is an underlying goal of this initiative, which we emphasize by identifying the faculty member involved as “professor-curator,” a title that linguistically connects two professions that have been institutionally separated in the past. (When Ivan Gaskell discussed curatorial practice at the Clark conference, he was compelled to use language—curator scholar and professor scholar—that evoked the divide in the respective scholarly domains.5Ivan Gaskell, “Magnanimity and Paranoia in the Big Bad Art World,” in Haxthausen, Two Art Histories, 14–24.) The Focus Gallery places the professor-curator at the center of exhibition practice, with a research seminar used for planning and determining strategies for implementation in the Focus Gallery. We consider the Focus Gallery a laboratory that encourages creativity, intellectual exchange, and experimentation with new ideas. This concept has been used elsewhere in academia, especially in writing about new ideas at university art museums and galleries that developed from exhibitions featuring students as curators.6See Janet Marstine, “What a Mess! Claiming a Space for Undergraduate Student Experimentation in the University Museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 22, no. 3 (2007): 303–15; Juliette Bianco, “A Purpose-driven University Museum,” University Museums and Collections Journal 2 (2009): 61–64; Anna Hammond et al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (2006): 20–39. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) used the term to identify its exhibition practice during its early years.7A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: A. Conger Goodyear, 1943). At the BGC the concept is pushed farther, allowing for risks to be taken in shaping arguments and in formulating curatorial practice in the classroom and the gallery. The laboratory metaphor applies to the Focus Gallery exhibition and catalogue as well, in a way that illuminates what Foucault called a “history of discursive objects” in his Archaeology of Knowledge.8Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 48. In Objects of Exchange, Professor-Curator Glass and the BGC students have revealed a network of possible convergences in meaning and identity evoked by the objects in this exhibition and visualized in the Graphic Index on page 90.
The Focus Gallery adheres as well to more practical specifications or parameters in this practice, such as the designation of a single space in the gallery for each exhibition; however, the size and location of the Focus Gallery space will vary from exhibition to exhibition, migrating within the overall display area of the BGC Gallery. We are initiating the Focus Gallery in conjunction with the opening of a renovated and expanded gallery building that allows two exhibitions to be on view simultaneously during each academic semester, a scheduling decision that enhances the resonating potential of Focus Gallery projects in the academic life of the institution. Other specifications include a limit to the number of loans in any given exhibition, a decision predicated partly on limited space, partly on economy. A small budget is given to the professor-curator for research, and the catalogue, which is designed in-house, cannot exceed a given size, a word-count limitation that is comparable to specifications imposed on authors of journal articles.
In other critical ways, however, the Focus Gallery diverges from the model of the journal article Dean Miller described or from scholarship in academia, which tends to encompass writing that is often hermetic and frequently demands solitude. Figure II.1 is a graphic representation of the curatorial practice associated with the Focus Gallery with the corresponding diagrams for “showing” and “writing” and their respective points of intersection in practice. The professor-curator appears at the top with the various branches of this practice extending from that position. Yet the scope and complexity of this project makes teamwork indispensable to planning and implementation. The composition of the team—including staff from Academic Programs and the Gallery who have not worked together before—is revealing of another primary objective, to bring new technologies to the curatorial process and to combine the digital media resources of the Gallery and Academic Programs in showing and interpreting objects and ideas in fresh and innovative ways while implementing the notion of making an argument with objects in space.
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Description: Focus Gallery: Practice and Production, program at the Bard Graduate Center by...
Fig II.1. Focus Gallery: Practice and Production, September 2008–April 2011.
The Focus Gallery exhibition is usually connected to a four-semester teaching cycle. When the practice shifts from research to more concrete curatorial thinking, the team actually forms and continues to meet through the planning period of the exhibition and the catalogue. This was an addition to the curriculum and to curatorial practice that Professor-Curator Glass initiated for Objects of Exchange as a way to develop his ideas and to generate participation in his project within the institution. In many ways the outcome exceeded all expectations. Seated at a table in the Digital Media Lab in the Academic Programs building (I emphasize the location to evoke the democratic aspect of the encounter and the process), I joined the professor-curator, graduate students, exhibition designer, assistant director of the digital media lab, digital technology designer, webmaster, and manager of curatorial projects to discuss implementation of the exhibition. Although Professor-Curator Glass prepared a detailed agenda for each session, the discussions were open, lively, not without constructive conflict and critique.
The introduction to this publication, Essay 1, the catalogue section, and Commentary I delineate the approach Professor-Curator Glass has taken to curatorial practice in Objects of Exchange. The exhibition focuses on an especially fortuitous subject with which to begin the Focus Gallery initiative. Anthropology has been an important bridge across the academia/museum divide and has a particular resonance at the BGC, where it is a new area of academic inquiry. For Professor-Curator Glass, the Focus Gallery has served as a neutral disciplinary field in which to reinterpret objects—especially indigenous objects—extending beyond the long-prevailing debate between art and anthropology.9Conversation with the author and Aaron Glass. For the past thirty years, anthropology has actively engaged with museological revisionism, particularly in directing critical inquiry into display paradigms that, despite being recognized as inadequate in the way they convey meaning and knowledge about different societies and cultures, are pervasive in the global museum world.10See, for example, Mariët Westermann, ed., Anthropologies of Art (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). A primary example was the conference organized by the World Visuality Committee of the Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 2007, which raised questions about the presentation of art and artifacts in the art museum and how museums of art and anthropology might collaborate more effectively, thus reflecting changes in scholarship and museum practice that had ensued at Harvard particularly during the renovation and expansion of HUAM. A goal of the conference was for HUAM to “view their respective collections as a scholarly resource to be shared intellectually . . . and to participate in scholarly collaborations widely within the university.”11See Ivan Gaskell and Jeffrey Quilter, “Museums—Crossing Boundaries,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 (Autumn 2007): 5–7. The conference sought to position the Harvard museums as sites of scholarship and called into question the prevailing notion of the museum as a place for empirical inquiry in contrast to theoretical insights and scholarship grounded in argumentation generated by academics.
Two papers presented at that conference—”The Museum of Art-thropology: Twenty-first Century Imbroglios,” by Ruth B. Phillips, and “Crossing Cultures: Redefining a University Museum,” by Henry S. Kim—relate to the Focus Gallery.12Ruth B. Phillips, “The Museum of Art-thropology: Twenty-first Century Imbroglios,” in ibid., 8–19; Henry S. Kim, “Crossing Cultures: Redefining a University Museum,” in ibid., 44–49. Phillips’s presentation encouraged curators to consider the notion of imbroglios, a formulation applied in this context by Bruno Latour and generally defined as “an entanglement of unrelated phenomena,” or in museological terms, an attempt to deconstruct homogenous displays and instead to create installations that show “borrowing, hybridization, and overlap of art and artifacts,”13Phillips, “Museum of Art-thropology,” 14–15. a curatorial agenda that informs the use of tags and the relational index in Objects of Exchange (see Essay 1, Catalogue of the Exhibition, and Commentary I). Henry Kim’s paper addressed the meaning and function of a university art museum (specifically the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University) as a locus of research and connectivity across different fields and departments at the university. Kim described the way an extensive building project led to reinstalling collections by looking at the relationships between art and anthropology with a fresh curatorial eye. The new installation achieved what Ruth Phillips had advocated for in her paper. Objects of Exchange and each of the exhibitions that follow it—there are currently eight projects planned into 2015—look anew at the notion of display, its relevance to different academic and cultural fields, and how display constructs meaning.
The question of what constitutes curatorial practice or makes a great exhibition is not a new one in academia, at least not since the Clark conference spurred considerable discussion on this subject. Such questions are asked frequently and insightfully in the discourse on contemporary art, as new forms of making art, digital interventions, and globalization have demanded new approaches to curatorial practice. The Focus Gallery adds to this discussion by making curatorial practice part of faculty research and scholarship. A striking similarity to this approach exists at the University of Chicago’s Mellon Program, a series of exhibitions organized under the auspices of the university’s Smart Museum to foster collaboration between the museum and university faculty.14See “Faculty and Student Initiatives,” University of Chicago, Smart Museum, http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/learn/university/. The only other Focus Gallery we were able to identify using the same name is at the University of Florida, where a lobby gallery hosts shows of contemporary art. Although its mission is related to the BGC program, in that it gives students and faculty curatorial experience, it is not grounded in a distinctive research or scholarly initiative.15See “Focus Gallery,” University Galleries, University of Florida, http://www.arts.ufl.edu/galleries/focus/focus_home.html.
In the larger museum world, there are, of course, curatorial initiatives that focus on particular aspects of practice or seek to illuminate certain aspects of a collection, but these do not have the same curatorial resonance as at the BGC. Although questions about what constitutes curatorial practice in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture may be less visible, they are no less pressing. The objects we focus on at the BGC are theorized and historicized, but other than the market-driven question “Is design art?,” comparatively little attention has been given to the meaning created by exhibitions in this field or to the way objects are curated. Paola Antonelli, curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), articulated this absence when she was interviewed in What Makes A Great Exhibition?, a publication that presented answers by curators of contemporary art, design, craft, and architecture to a series of questions leading to a response to the main question articulated in the title of the book. Antonelli explained: “when we talk about curators, the first thing we think about is art. Maybe it is also because art curators often come from academia, and moreover from the same institutions . . . architecture and design curators are often architects. They usually do not have Ph.Ds.”16“Design and Architecture: Paula Antonelli Interviewed by Bennett Simpson,” in Paula Marincola, ed., What Makes A Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 86–93. Subsequently Antonelli has organized closed discussions with curators and designers at MoMA to discuss exhibition practice among other issues. There are exceptions to this absence in the work of artists such as Fred Wilson who uses objects as a form of critical inquiry of the museum. See for example, “Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson,” of 1992–1993, a collaboration of the Contemporary Gallery and the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD. This work in general functions outside the realm of curators of design, decorative arts and material culture.
Notably, the opening illustration to the introduction of What Makes a Great Exhibition? is the painting by Henry Courtney Selous of The Opening of the Great Exhibition by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851, an exhibition that was, in fact, devoted in large part to the problems of maintaining quality in mass production of objects at the height of the Industrial Revolution. While attempting to bring the curatorial issue into focus, What Makes a Great Exhibition? reasserted another divide that isolates the decorative arts and material culture from design, craft, and architecture, ostensibly because the latter areas are thought to be closer to contemporary art practices.
Perhaps this problem of categorization or typology is the reason our own institution—the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture—has such a dense name, representing a cultural field that requires three proper nouns to convey the idea that each area is distinct, rather than using the term material world, whose referent is typically the things that embody everyday life, to express the overall field of study. All three areas encompassed in the name of our institution are relevant to contemporary discourse and visual culture. What Makes A Great Exhibition? relates to this discussion on the Focus Gallery by setting the questions we are asking in our gallery against the broader cultural discourse that often occurs within fields such as Contemporary art where questions about curating and exhibition making have been raised for some time.17See Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking About Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996). Our objective is defining the identity of the curator and how curatorial thinking relates to the acquisition of knowledge, but we are careful in the language we use to define this process and to ask the questions. Thus the words laboratory and professor-curator are operative when discussing the Focus Gallery.
With the opening of the Focus Gallery, the BGC makes curatorial thinking a primary concern in critical and intellectual inquiry among our faculty. Objects of Exchange demonstrates what happens when an exhibition uses critical methodologies to construct an argument with objects, gaining insight into the meaning and context of material culture. In the process, this inaugural exhibition has firmly established the professor-curator identity, further expanding the parameters of the BGC’s cultural field.
 
1     Emphasis added. Andreas Beyer, “Between Academic and Exhibition Practice: The Case of Renaissance Studies,” in Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, proceedings from the Clark Conference, April 9–10, 1999 (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1999), 25. »
2     These discussions took place with Peter Miller, Dean of the Bard Graduate Center, and Susan Weber, Founder and Director. »
3     Peter Miller, e-mail to the author, November 21, 2010. »
4     See Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); and Bridget Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations (London: SAGE Publications, 1997). »
5     Ivan Gaskell, “Magnanimity and Paranoia in the Big Bad Art World,” in Haxthausen, Two Art Histories, 14–24. »
6     See Janet Marstine, “What a Mess! Claiming a Space for Undergraduate Student Experimentation in the University Museum,” Museum Management and Curatorship 22, no. 3 (2007): 303–15; Juliette Bianco, “A Purpose-driven University Museum,” University Museums and Collections Journal 2 (2009): 61–64; Anna Hammond et al., “The Role of the University Art Museum and Gallery,” Art Journal 65, no. 3 (2006): 20–39. »
7     A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: A. Conger Goodyear, 1943). »
8     Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 48. »
9     Conversation with the author and Aaron Glass. »
10     See, for example, Mariët Westermann, ed., Anthropologies of Art (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005); Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). »
11     See Ivan Gaskell and Jeffrey Quilter, “Museums—Crossing Boundaries,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52 (Autumn 2007): 5–7. »
12     Ruth B. Phillips, “The Museum of Art-thropology: Twenty-first Century Imbroglios,” in ibid., 8–19; Henry S. Kim, “Crossing Cultures: Redefining a University Museum,” in ibid., 44–49. »
13     Phillips, “Museum of Art-thropology,” 14–15. »
14     See “Faculty and Student Initiatives,” University of Chicago, Smart Museum, http://smartmuseum.uchicago.edu/learn/university/»
15     See “Focus Gallery,” University Galleries, University of Florida, http://www.arts.ufl.edu/galleries/focus/focus_home.html»
16     “Design and Architecture: Paula Antonelli Interviewed by Bennett Simpson,” in Paula Marincola, ed., What Makes A Great Exhibition? (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2006), 86–93. Subsequently Antonelli has organized closed discussions with curators and designers at MoMA to discuss exhibition practice among other issues. There are exceptions to this absence in the work of artists such as Fred Wilson who uses objects as a form of critical inquiry of the museum. See for example, “Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson,” of 1992–1993, a collaboration of the Contemporary Gallery and the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD. This work in general functions outside the realm of curators of design, decorative arts and material culture. »
17     See Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking About Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996). »
Commentary II. What We Do: The Focus Gallery
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