Collaboration, Multiple Authorship, and Shared Exhibition Curation are aspects of contemporary arts practice that have continuously and radically redefined the roles of the artist and curators alike as individual authors and producers of art. Simultaneously, art objects and projects which we encounter in the multi-complex spaces of the artworld today are not always as easily defined as they may be presented by the galleries and museums that present these works.  The Idea of the curated collaborative exhibition can be traced back to seminal exhibitions which were developed during the 60’s and finds it most critical developments in the 1970’s. In this section I wish to critically reflect on 2 models in particular which developed side by side and are still being disputed today. One is the emergence and development of the exhibition or project created by the artist themselves working like a curator. The second is the exhibition project of the curators that could be likened to singularly authored work of an artist but is in most cases the collaborative curatorial work of collective collaboration.

As early as 1855, before the idea of a Curation as we think of it now, artists began to challenge the exhibition conventions of the authorities and produce their own exhibition context. One such story is that of Gustave Courbet, The French realist painter who after being rejected by the Salon Officials for his 1854-55 entry painting ‘The Artist’s Studio’, set up his own one-person show, located across the way from the 1855 Salon in Paris. This encouraged others to follow Courbet and in the following years Courbet established The Salon des Refusés of 1963, French for “exhibition of rejects”. In a time before the establishment of the fully professionalized “curator”, artists were endeavoring, on their own, to choose the location, organize the scenography, make the selection of artworks to be featured, and even devising the financial scheme – all so that they might better determine the conditions of the artworks reception. In the 20^th Century more independent actions arrived. Artists who not only made discrete objects in their own studios but took into their own hands the context of presentation and dissemination of the works they had produced – and often the works of other artists as well.

Of course Duchamp, many times over, played the role of what could later be considered ‘The Artist as Curator’.  From his role as exhibition director for the Association of Independent Artist in New York, from which he resigned after the refusal of his famous Readymade Urinal ‘Fountain’, signed R.Mutt in 1917 – To his ‘the Box in a Valise’ 1938-42, the artists construction of his miniature portable exhibition including sixty-eight reproductions of all his works – To his role as curator, (or “generator arbitrator” in his idiosyncratic surrealist terminology) for the International Surrealist Exhibition, first in 1938 and then again in 1942, 1947, 1959, and 1960.^[1] Although Duchamp performed these tasks more as an artist than a curator as we may think of it now, his orchestration of the exercise seems to treat the exhibition not only as a locale for the presentation of things but also a site of inquiry. A testing ground from which the artist or the audience could learn that an object only appears as a work of art under certain conditions. A condition that implies to be on exhibit. The exhibitions were, in each case, radical reimagining’s of the conventions of display - that proved immensely influential to the generations of artists that came after him. 

In 1958, Yves Klien presented his exhibition Le Vide (The Void, 1958) to the public In a Parisian art Gallery. It was a precise strategic move that although a one-person orchestrated show could be considered as a collaboration not with other artists or curators but with the public and the critics of art. Klien removed all recognizable “content” from space and then carefully painted the entire gallery whiter than white, combining several coats of pure white lithopone pigment blended with his own special varnish of alcohol, acetone, and vinyl resin.^[2] The very whiteness was the signature of the modern white cube rendered as an extreme of itself. As Klien later explained:

The object of this endeavor was: to create, establish, and present to the public a palpable pictorial state in the limits of a picture gallery. In other words, the creation of an ambience, a genuine pictorial climate, and therefore, an invisible one. This invisible pictorial state within the gallery space should be so present and endowed with autonomous life that it should literally be what has hitherto been regarded as the best overall definition of painting: radiance. ^[3]

Klien cleverly used many of the conventions of the art exhibition, to willfully and provocatively stage the exhibition opening. His staging exaggerated these exhibition conventions. He created specially printed invitations, 3500 to be exact, he commissioned an exhibition text by a critic, set up an entrance fee (unusual for commercial galleries but common for museums), performed an opening speech, served his signature special blue cocktails, and hired guards to protect the whiter than white painted walls.^[4] He installed conditions and rules that would usually characterize a typical institutional exhibition in a museum. Through his own curatorial strategy, Klien played with any expectations that the public audience might have had of an art exhibition, however the radical negation of the exhibition convention was that: anything that might be mistaken for an artwork was absent.

A work often cited as one of the pinnacle examples of ‘the artist as curator’ is Mel Bochner’s ‘Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art’, 1966. Bochner presented 4 plinths in a straight row, each with a large folder placed on top, containing the ‘Working Drawings...’ by the 46 artists Bochner had gathered to participate in his project. Cited as the first Conceptual art exhibition and responsible for spawning decades of lousy Xeroxed artists’ books. Ironically, the project was the result of an innocuous Christmas exhibition at the New York School of Visual Arts that Bochner, as an art history faculty member, was asked to curate. He collected drawings from his friends, conveying to them that the offerings needn’t be ‘art’ per se. Not satisfied with Bochner’s procurement of work, the gallery’s curator refused to spend money framing the submissions, so Bochner photocopied four sets of the 100 drawings, reduced them each down to standard paper size, inserted the sets into a binder and placed each binder on a pedestal. In the exhibition, which has continued now in many new contexts from 1966–2006’ viewers could flip through these seminal books, comprising – each with 100 studio notes and working drawings by Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, John Cage, Eva Hesse, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd, among others.^[5]

The conceptual and historical weight of this piece are located in its attitude more than in its content. Like Bochner’s assessment of Minimalism at that time, the four identical black office-style archives signal a paradigm shift away ‘from the humanistic stammering of Abstract Expressionism, Happenings and Pop art’. Working Drawings ‘dematerialized’ the symbolic, original artwork into a reproducible idea, a notion that later became a valid theory in 1960’s conceptualism where the artwork as primary and the documentation as secondary was deconstructed and rejected. Displaying a reproducible document as the artwork of an exhibition, Bochner prioritized what Seth Siegelaub (1941 - 2013) would later call secondary over primary information.^[6] The other notable aspect of this project is that by calling for, collecting and organizing the submissions by other artists the piece although perhaps not a collaboration as such, calls into question the notion of multiple-authorship. By featuring so many works by so many other artists the exhibition work is essentially co-authored by its participants.

More often than one would expect, and even in cases of some exhibitions, the history of which has been linked to an individual curator’s name, innovations in curating have actually resulted from collective or collaborative endeavors. In saying this I do not wish to imply that the idea of individual curatorial authorship is just a fallacy or a historical mistake. I do maintain, nonetheless, that the extent to which it has become canonical is due to the, until recently, lack of systematic research in the histories of curating and exhibitions. (an opinion also shared by Eva Fotiadi in ‘The Canon of the Author’ as well as Filipovic, Elena & Hans Ulrich-Obrist in ‘The Artist as Curator’)

In Eva Fotiadi’s essay – ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’, (2017), Fotiadi references Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is an author’ (1969-70). She mentions that Foucault’s perspective could be useful in rethinking this dominant idea that the emergence of contemporary art curating is linked primarily to a single-author model.  According to Foucault, the modern concept of the author as an individual figure came gradually into being since the late Middle Ages, when the author’s figure appeared to perform various functions’.^[7] As author – what today we would call ‘curator’ – served a number of functions. On the one hand it gave the public, audiences and critics someone to hold responsible for the concept and content of an international art exhibition.

Very early on before the term curator had been established in art the way we know it today, I cite an early paradigm of curation by a ‘non-artist’. In 1955 Arnold Bode created the exhibition of contemporary art at the Museum of Fridericianum which was part of the flower show in Kassel. He carried on for some years curating the exhibition with a team of curators until 1968. But, One of the first examples of the star individual curator can be found in the examples of the exhibitions directed by Harry Sneezman, who first made his mark as a curator with his landmark 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. In 1972, Harald Szeeman directed Documenta 5, who introduced the “themed” exhibition because he wanted to put forward the perspective of time.^[8] In a sense Harald Szeeman established the concept of the single star curator, who establishes a ‘Curatorial Theme and Framework’ to guide the artists production. Strangely enough, while Documenta 5 is considered today a major highlight in the history of contemporary art curating, it is almost never remembered as a team project. To the contrary, it is primarily considered the individual curatorial achievement of Harald Szeemann and the implementation of his curatorial vision, the creativity of which has even caused the resentment of some artists who felt that they were used as material for the curator’s artwork. ^[9] Exactly this idea of Documenta 5 as the first major exhibition project in which a curator can be seen as creative author is the one frequently met with both reverence and critique in theoretical texts on contemporary art curating. Many claim it was a collaborative project, to which its success is owed to the efforts of the participating artists and the multiple-authors of the curatorial team.

Not every exhibition organized or curated by an artist or an artistic collaboration explicitly shifts the terms of the exhibition as a medium as such. Many are little more about anything else other than the artist or artists expressing their own subjectivity or taste in aesthetics. In contrast, there have been many notable exhibitions made by “Professional” curators, or at least “non-artists” who have accomplished extraordinary tasks of reimagining the form of the exhibition. Some of the projects are acknowledged as collaborations between the curator, the artists and the hosting art agency or institution while other are still acknowledged and accredited to the individual curator as main author. Some exhibitions to note include Lucy Lippards various “Numbers” shows, 1969-74; Sieglelaub’s Xerox Book, 1968; Gerry Schum’s Television Exhibitions I & II, 1969-70; and Jean-Francois Lyotard and Thierry Chaput’s Les Immateriaux, 1985. ^[10]  In 1997, Documenta 10 was led for the first time in its history by a woman, French art historian and curator, Catherine David. Her intellectual approach to the exhibition examined the political, social, economic and cultural issues of the contemporary globalized world.

Pioneering women’s role in the profession of “curating” Japan’s Yuko Hasegawa has also been involved in the curation of many seminal exhibitions both in Japan and Globally around the world. She has developed and taught post-graduate course in curation at both Tama University of Art and Tokyo University of the Arts, establishing her 3 ‘C’s framework for considering art in the 21^st Century.^[11] She has worked with many galleries, artists and museums and is Chief Curator the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Prof. Hasegawa is known for her work in various biennales including the 7th Istanbul Biennial, 2001, “Performativity in the Work of Female Japanese Artists in the 1950s-1960s and 1990s” in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, 2010; Kishio Suga: Situations at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan, 2016; Japanorama: New Vision on Art Since 1970 at Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2017; and the 7th Moscow Biennale, 2017. ^[12]

The exhibition projects Utopia Station (2003), Coalesce(2003-2010)^[13], Documenta 10 (1997) & 11(2002)^[14], various John Kaldor Projects in Australia, many Biennials & triennials from across the globe, etc. and many more, could also serve as examples for considering a reason why the image of the single-author curator – and artist for that matter – still persists today, despite the acknowledgement of the expansion and diversity of models of multiple authorship. That reason is to be found not in the art world’s difficulty to deal with the question of the author, and the author's function. The question of the author only distracts attention from the more difficult questions, which are: what is the meaning and the function of the art work and the exhibition – in other words, the question 'what is a work?'. It seems quite easy to address cultural products that resist categorization as exceptional, extraordinary cases, the peculiarity of which is due to the inspiration of an extraordinary author, whether an individual or collective one. Nonetheless, this approach distracts attention from the need to study these hybrid cultural products in order to challenge the limitations of our understanding of the meaning and function of art works and art exhibitions.

As I have stated, there are many more unmentioned collaboratively authored and curated exhibitions and projects that I would like to discuss, however this is the final reference in this section. Utopia Station, Venice Biennale (2003) was a multi-authored multi-curated project curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, assistant curator Elena Filipovic, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and art historian Molly Nesbit. The project brought together contributions from approximately sixty artists, architects, writers, and performers, which was organized into a flexible exhibition structure by Tiravanija and the artist Liam Gillick.^[15] To further illustrate the unique exhibition structure of Utopia Station and the nature of its Multi-Authored collaborative mediation, What Utopia Station did was offer a very different possibilities to usual white cube or museum curatorial installations, even those recognized as the work of Tiravanija and Gillick. Here, the exhibition display structure, which was supposed to serve as a provisional response to the questions posed by the concept of Utopia. (And, That that question could not be answered only in physical terms but could perhaps only be addressed in conceptual or even in performative terms.

Comprising of a long, low platform – part dance floor, part stage, part quay – it refused to play at being the scenography of a conventional “art exhibition”. Instead it announced itself as something else, and asked visitors to act with it (and on it) also as something else other than just the audience. Indeed it proposed a zone of non-hierarchical participation by artist, curator and audiences alike. As Hans Ulrich Obrist explains, “As curators, we were following Gillick’s description, proposing to see the exhibition as a “free-floating, non-defined sequence of propositions that wander in and out of focus and avoid being lodged within the consumable world of the concept”.^[16]

Against all logic of form, Utopian Station  tried to demonstrate an artistic and curatorial deconstruction. A questioning of authorship and a reinvention of how an exhibition can come together and function. This was evident not only in the project itself , but also in those who organized it: an artist, a curator, and an art historian. Works like Utopia Station set the ground for the later and recent architectural and performance collaboration Serpentine Pavilions and conferences that Ulrich Orbist has been co-authoring and curating in recent years, 2014-2018. 

In some if not many circumstances the roles between artist and curator have been exchanged. At least they negotiate with each other. The artist works as operator or director of a large team or studio producing pieces designed for blockbuster Museum shows. While the independent curator traverses the smaller tightly knit world of the artist-run community extracting artworks and ideas for their individual/ independent Projects. Examples of the former exist in works and studios produced by Jeff Koons, Matthew Barney, Takahashi Murakami or Ai Weiwei. More recently Anne Imhof has been the artistic force behind projects such as her Venice Biennale work in the German Pavillion (Faust, 2017), which won the prestigious Gold lion award, a work that nonetheless functions through the presence of multiple performers enacting improvised and staged actions designed by the artist.

In the after word of The Artists as Curator, Hans Ulrich Obrist explains, ‘one of the threads of connection that emerges between many of these artist curated and collaborative projects is a desire to change the rules of the game – to question, and in the process re-invent, conventional formats for making art public. This is perhaps related to a cultural shift, from regarding the exhibition as a display device or frame to seeing it as an artistic medium in its own right’. He further explains, ‘Curating always follows art; it’s not the other way around’. Yet the practice of the curator as it is finally beginning to be popularly understood extends beyond the Latin etymology of cura (care) into a constellation of different actions: filtering, enabling, synthesizing, framing, remembering.^[17]

Collaborations and sharing authorship certainly requires all of these actions as artists take on a kind of intellectual care work with the memories and materials of other artists. What connects all these words together is their reference to a continuous state of becoming, of process, momentum and motion. The curator is a passeur who exists at the intersection of different disciplines, audiences, and spaces. Artists and curators alike exist in independent social circles and also in the social sphere which is supported and facilitated by the public and private institutions of art. But To truly notice the work of the independent curator like that of the artist still building their practice in the circuits of the ‘artist led art space’ (ARI’s) exhibition context we have to practically be there ourselves. These exhibitions and projects are too numerous to mention and the best we could do is select a few to discuss as examples. One such difficulty in discussing these projects in a context of a)(an) art history or b) a formulated art criticism is that unless they are discussed and brought into context they don’t yet formally exist. They have yet to be recognized. This then means that the artist, curators and circles of participants in these scenes are each responsible for the documentation and circulation of the events,  activities and its history ( its ‘legacy & survival’).

“…Although the project is introduced as a term in the 1990’s to describe a more embedded and socially / politically aware mode of artistic practice, it is equally a survival strategy for creative individuals under the uncertain labour conditions of neoliberalism”. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells.

What is intended (in art) as a radical overhaul of the portable work of art and its lack of social agency is at the same time an internalization of the ‘60’s logic of post-studio service-based art^[18] that, by the 1990’s, comes to prioritize personal qualities of interaction rather than the production of objects: personality traits (such as adaptability, nimbleness, creativity and risk) replace the production of visually resolved ‘works’ or ideas. When faced with a slew of site-responsive projects in exhibitions, biennials and ‘project spaces’, it is tempting to speculate that the most successful artists are those who can integrate, collaborate, be flexible, work with different audiences, and respond to the exhibition’s thematic framework.

^[1] The Essential Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Matthew Affron, Yale,  2018

^[2] Filipovic, Elena ‘The Artist as Curator’ ( the publication series that occupied eleven issues of Mousse from no.41 December 2013 / January 2014 to no.51 December 2015 / January 2016 )

^[3] Klien, Yves (1982) ‘Le Vide Performance (The Void).’ From Yves Klein 1928-1962: A Retrospective. Institute for the Arts, Rice University, Houston. Internet:http://web.tiscali.it/nouveaurealisme/ENG/klein5.htm

^[4] Filipovic, Elena ‘The Artist as Curator’, 2017ÓMousse Publishing, Milan, Koenig Books, London, Printed in Germany

^[5] https://frieze.com/article/mel-bochner

^[6] Meyer, James, ‘The Artist as Curator’,  Mel Bochner, ‘Working Drawings and Other Visible Things...’, 1966.

^[7] Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, lecture presented to Societé Francais de philosophie, 22.02.1969 and in modified form in the USA in 1970. Translated with slight modifications by Josué V. Harari, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm, last accessed 12/8/2014.

^[8] Eva Fotiadi’s essay – ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’, 2017

^[9] Eva Fotiadi’s essay – ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’, 2017

^[10] Filipovic, Elena ‘The Artist as Curator’, 2017ÓMousse Publishing, Milan, Koenig Books, London, Printed in Germany

^[11] Yuko Hasegawa coined 3 Keywords and Terms for considering art in the 21st Century, 3 ‘C’s’. Co-existence, Collective Intelligence & Consciousness. Importantly these are 3 keywords for ‘Surviving Together’. A conceptual Framework for looking at art encounters & our engagements of the 21st century.

^[12] From Interview for Survival Aesthetics, conducted at Tokyo University of the Arts, Yuko Hasegawa Interview, by Jesse Hogan. Tue, July 23, 2019

^[13] The exhibition project Coalesce that was initiated by Paul O’Neil in 2003 at the London Print Studio Gallery and continued until its fifth edition in 2010 at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam. O’Neil, The Cultures of, 93-96.

^[14] Documenta11 was the eleventh edition of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition. It was held between 8 June and 15 September 2002 in Kassel, Germany. The artistic director was Okwui Enwezor. Okwui Enwezor, a native of Nigeria, was the first non-European art director of documenta―and the first documenta of the new millennium was the first truly global, postcolonial documenta exhibition. https://www.documenta.de/en/retrospective/documenta11

^[15] Eva Fotiadi’s essay – ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’, 2017

^[16] Hans-Ulrich, Orbist, ‘The Artist as Curator’, 2017ÓMousse Publishing, Milan, Koenig Books, London, Printed in Germany

^[17] Hans-Ulrich, Orbist , ‘The Artist as Curator’, 2017ÓMousse Publishing, Milan, Koenig Books, London, Printed in Germany

^[18] The term 'Service-based art", here refers to art that serves a social or community function