Overture

Chelsea Haines, Jens Hoffmann, and Lumi Tan

The Exhibitionist was founded in 2010 as a journal by curators, for curators, in which the most pertinent questions on exhibition making today would be considered and assessed. This mandate often meant looking exclusively at the contemporary art world’s most recent currents. While maintaining this core mission, the journal feels ready in its third year to broach dialogues beyond the world of contemporary art, mainstream exhibitions, and biennials by developing new editorial formats and commissioning new kinds of writers to explore themes related to exhibition making and culture at large that are as of yet unaddressed in these pages. Regular readers of The Exhibitionist will find several significant changes in this issue. Most notably, it inaugurates a new section, Six x Six, in which we invite six curators from across the globe to send us short texts about what they feel are the top six exhibitions since 1945. The diversity of their selections demonstrates that the existing literature on exhibition histories has only scratched the surface of a rich field of study.

In this issue, Curators’ Favorites includes contributions on very different exhibition formats. Ingrid Schaffner reminisces about Jan Hoet’s watershed exhibition Chambres d’Amis, giving a personal and poetic take on her 1986 journey through art installations in domestic interiors in the city of Ghent, Belgium. Melanie O’Brian takes a second look at the modest exhibition Camera Elinga: Pieter Janssens Meets Jeff Wall, held at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in 2002, coincident with Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11; the unexpected but thoroughly considered pairing of the Dutch Golden Age painter and the contemporary Canadian pho- tographer proved to her that great things can indeed come in small packages. Miguel Amado analyzes the birth of Tate Modern in 2000 by setting up a comparison between its innovative (and often controversial) collection display models and its first temporary exhibition, Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis. That exhibition encapsulated high moments of the 20th century in nine global cultural capitals, reconfiguring the art historical narratives of Modernism that still dominate most large-scale institutions.

For Back in the Day, Zdenka Badovinac reflects on the concept of the local as seen through the spirited efforts of the artist collective Irwin, whose members were so determined to bring a 1983 survey of up-and-coming New York artists to Ljubljana, Slovenia, that they re-created the exhibition themselves (keeping its original title, Back to the USA). The mirrored and conflicted relationship between the exhibition and the world at large is the subject of this issue’s Attitude, in which Terry Smith describes how dOCUMENTA (13) avoided well-worn interpretations of globalization’s effects on contemporary art.

In Assessments, four writers tackle Indian Highway. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones, this large-scale national-survey exhibition originated at Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008 and then traveled to Oslo, Rome, and Beijing. Shanay Jhaveri, Geir Haraldseth, Francesco Stocchi, and Carol Yinghua Lu each examine the show in one of its iterations, analyzing how context and community, as well as form and content, give poignancy and meaning to exhibitions. The theme of the traveling exhibition is carried forward in Typologies, in which this ever-growing but frequently unexamined format is given proper analysis. As interest in cross-institutional and international exchange in the art world grows, more and more exhibitions travel, creating the need to examine how exhibitions can most effectively translate and change across different times, spaces, and cultural and institutional contexts. Carlos Basualdo, Susan Hapgood, and Harrell Fletcher reflect on their own experiences working on traveling exhibitions, the uniqueness of the process, and the opportunities and challenges the format faces today.

Missing in Action this time offers a reprint of a text by Thomas Hoving, originally published in the March 1982 issue of Connoisseur. Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a known proselytizer for the importance of the work of art as a unique cultural artifact. In the article “I Like Anything That Makes My Blood Rush” he speaks with an anonymous collector about the latter’s astounding collection and and idiosyncratic process for acquiring new works. The two recent exhibitions discussed in Rear Mirror both share iconic authors as their starting points. At the British Museum, Dora Thornton actualized William Shakespeare’s texts through a diverse selection of objects, focusing on the role of the theater in shaping the public’s perception of London and beyond. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Janet Bishop recounts the experience of organizing The Steins Collect, which reunited the extensive collections of Gertrude Stein and her brothers to cement their unique role in the history of Modern art as key patrons and participants.

Finally, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has given The Exhibitionist a selection of her poems written during the lauded dOCUMENTA (13) as an insert for this issue. These poems give unusual insight into Christov-Bakargiev’s thought process and reflections. By publishing her poetry, the journal is initiating through experimentation with literary forms an expansion of its engagement with exhibition making as a creative and subjective process. This issue is the last time Typologies will appear in The Exhibitionist, as the journal shifts its editorial direction to focus less on the internal contrivances of exhibition formats and more on the broader popular relevance and cultural contexts in which exhibitions are made and understood.

While The Exhibitionist remains a journal for curators by curators, the geographical, historical, creative, and cross-disciplinary expansion of our purview indicates a push toward broader questions and looser boundaries when it comes to exhibitions and exhibition making. We believe that the world of contemporary art is only one small arena in a vast field of in- quiry. If The Exhibitionist is to remain relevant and establish new discourses rather than simply represent timely issues, it must work toward a more holistic understanding of culture and politics, both contemporary and historic. The Exhibitionist will release its next issue in summer 2013, presenting a renewed structure, editorial board, and mission. To paraphrase one of our heroes, the great Muhammad Ali: We know where we are going and we know the truth, and we don’t have to be what anybody wants us to be. We are free to be what we want.