PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.

Kathy Battista with Marko Daniel and Shumon Basar

This course examines the relationships between cultural institutions, intellectuals and cultural professionals, taking the modern art museum as its main object of study. It looks at how the expanded field of contemporary artistic production has affected curatorial practice in recent decades.

Are the ‘critical’ accounts of the museum offered by traditional intellectuals still useful? What happens to traditional notions of the value of museums as ‘the visitor experience’ becomes increasingly important? How can thinking about the example of the modern art museum help us to understand the current condition of the public sphere? The course will explore these and other questions in different contexts and through different theoretical and practical approaches.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS COURSE IS NO LONGER RUNNING. VIEW CURRENT COURSES HERE.

Session 1: 21st century Museums: The Tate Re-hang

Kathy Battista with Marko Daniel

The first session discusses the current state of museums. The idea of a universal survey museum is not a model that applies to contemporary practice. Museums today are more geared towards an experience rather than a didactic approach. Today we will discuss the current trend of hanging collections thematically rather than by chronology or national school. Using Tate Modern as a case study we will endeavour to understand the rationale behind this practice, as well as how it affects the visitor, be it a member of the public, an academic or an art professional.

Reading
Nicholas Serota, Experience or Interpretation: The Dilemma of Museums of Modern Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1996
Charles Esche, ‘What’s the Point of Art Centres Anyway? Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance’, Republic Art, April 2004

Session 2: Frequent Flyer Curating

Kathy Battista with Shumon Basar

Since the advent of dematerialization in art, curatorial practice has changed immensely. Once keepers of collections, curators today trawl the globe for new trends and artists and often produce events or temporary exhibitions rather than permanent displays. Today’s session will look at the new ‘ubiquitous’ curators, and attempt to analyze how this affects curatorial and museum practice, as well as artistic production.

Reading
Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘Cedric Price: Curating with Light Luggage’ don’tstopdon’tstopdon’tstopdon’tstop, Sternberg, 2006
Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘In the Midst of Things, at the Centre of Nothing’, Art and Design, Vol.12 No 1/2, 1997
‘A Conversation: Between Seth Siegelaub and Hans Ulrish Obrist’, TRANS, No 6, 1999
Dialogue between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Paul O’Neill, Contemporary Magazine, Issue 77, 2005

Further reading
Susan Hiller and Sarah Martin eds, The Producers: Contemporary Curators in Conversation, Baltic, 2002
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, Charta, 2003

Session 3: Relational Aesthetics and Its debates

Kathy Battista with Marko Daniel

Today’s session looks at artistic and curatorial practice that is now termed ‘Relational Aesthetics’. Artists such as Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Rikrit Tiravanija have expanded art practice to include reading rooms, puppet shows and dinner parties. How has this new practice, which demands participation, shaped current debates in contemporary art? And how authentic is this type of viewing experience?

Reading
Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Le Presses du reel, 1998
Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110
Liam Gillick, ‘Letter to the Editor’, October 111

Further reading
Nicholas Bourriaud, Post production, Lukas & Sternberg, 2005

Session 4: Curating Architecture

Kathy Battista with Shumon Basar

How does one curate a show in which the subject is only ever seen in documentation? Unlike most other disciplines, curating architecture is an especially difficult challenge, as one is never working with the primary object, that is the building or built environment. In today’s session Shumon Basar will discuss the perennial ‘badness’ of architectural exhibitions.

Reading
Ralph Rugoff, ‘Beyond Belief: The Museum as Metaphor’, Visual Display, Peter Wollen and Lynn Cooke (Eds), The New Press, 1995
Shumon Basar, ‘Urban Myths’, Sunday Telegraph, 17 September 2006

Session 5: Curating New Media

Kathy Battista with Haluk Akakce

Artists have always been at the forefront of new technologies, from Portapak video in the early 1970s to the World Wide Web today. This session will look at how artistic practice in recent decades has embraced new technology, and the challenges this presents for curators, both inside and outside of museums.

Reading
Haluk Akakce: Sky is the Limit, ed. Peter Eleey, Creative Time Books, NY, 2007

Session 6: Visit to the Tate Store in Southwark

Only a fraction of any museum’s collection is on display at any time. What happens to the work when it is not on exhibit? Where and how is it stored? And who looks after it? And how do new media affect conservation? Today’s session attempts to answer these questions as we visit Tate Store, the primary holding facility for Tate’s collection. Students will get behind the scenes and learn what happens to a work of art, from the moment it leaves the walls of the gallery, while it is moved, documented and finally stored. Issues around conservation of artworks, and the challenges presented by contemporary practices, will also be addressed.

Session 7: Rethinking Spectacle symposia

Tate Modern Starr Auditorium - please reserve a place via the Consortium office

This symposium addresses recent claims that contemporary art is spectacularised and increasingly inseparable from the marketing of large-scale museums. But what do we really mean by ’spectacle’ today? And how useful are Guy Debord’s ideas (Society of the Spectacle, 1967) for analysing new conditions of the display of contemporary art? Are Turbine Hall commissions such as Carsten HÃ¶ller’s Test Site really comparable to other forms of mass entertainment? Art historian Ina Blom (University of Oslo), artist Andrea Fraser (UCLA), Tate curator Frances Morris, and art critics Claire Bishop (University of Warwick) and Mark Godfrey (Slade School of Fine Art) will examine whether the denigration of art as ’spectacle’ masks an elitist resistance to populism, or if it contains a more serious critique of the global market and the role of art within this.

Details of the symposia are online here.

General background reading: T W Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Alexander GarcÃa DÃ¼ttmann et. al., The End(s) of the Museum (Barcelona: FundaciÃ³ Antoni TÃ pies, 1996); Alvin Gouldner, The Future of the Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (London: Macmillan, 1979); Reesa Greenberg et. al., Thinking About Exhibitions, Routledge (London: Routledge, 1996); Christian Kravagna, ed., The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2001); Jean-FranÃ§ois Lyotard, ‘The Tomb of the Intellectual’, Political Writings (London: UCL Press, 1993); Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989); Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Richard Rogers Partnership, Bankside Urban Study: Tate Modern Neighbourhood (London 2001); Edward Said, Representation of the Intellectual (London: Vintage, 1996).