Issue 12 now available
The Exhibitionist’s 12th issue, a special “La Critique” issue in which we take a critical look at recent matters within our pages and discipline, is now available.
Issue 12 scrutinizes our founding premise, that The Exhibitionist is a journal “by curators, for curators.” When we launched six years ago, this circuit of self-reflection seemed necessary, and enabled a conversation that was not available in other venues. But one effect of this focus, as we see it now, was a siloing-off of curatorial thinking from other parts of the field of exhibition making—which is, after all, based in collective forms of authorship.
Therefore this issue centers on that social form, and features conversations between curators and artists who have worked together over long periods. We encouraged them to move past caricatures of their relationship as a zero-sum game in which either the artist is the autonomous genius or the curator is the overwhelming performer stealing the artist’s thunder. We rejected as well the whole consideration of “artist-as-curator/curator-as-artist” as hopelessly circular. Instead we focus on exchanges of ideas, points of mutual influence, connections, conflicts, struggles, and social life.
In the first section, Fia Backström and Anthony Huberman discuss the territory between manipulation and collaboration. Anne Ellegood and Kerry Tribe weigh how a curator’s provocation can inspire an artist’s practice and vice versa. Inés Katzenstein speaks with the painter Juan José Cambre about the shifting identities of artists and curators, understanding both to inhabit the same mental geography, the all-encompassing “cosa mentale.” And The Exhibitionist’s founding editor Jens Hoffmann talks with Claire Fontaine about collaborations in which “sublimated aggression, humor, and a slight insanity on both sides play important roles.”
This section concludes with a missive written by the eccentric artist James Lee Byars to the iconic curator Harald Szeemann at a point when their once-convivial relationship had begun to sour. Flush with affection and antagonism, Byars proposes to embody Szeemann in a performance of the latter’s death.
For the second section we invited writers to respond to The Exhibitionist’s archive. Triple Candie investigates the slippery lines between artistic action and curatorial practice. Emiliano Valdés resists the emphasis on artist and curator, instead considering the relation between artwork and audience. Daniel Birnbaum charts the institutional cooptation of attitudes from the Situationist International in the 1960s. Nontobeko Ntombela points to misapprehensions of the curatorial role in South Africa, while artist-publishers Slavs and Tatars speak of that role in semi-mystical terms. Finally, Rachel Rose meditates on curators’ and artists’ shared impulse to transform the unknown and chaotic into meaning.
Issue 12 will be the final issue of The Exhibitionist as a biannual journal. In early 2017 we will release the journal’s entire run as an omnibus edition with new essays, copublished with DAP. The book’s release will be celebrated at a public event co-organized with Independent Curators International and featuring members of the editorial board, contributors, and others. The journal’s continued activity will shift to the-exhibitionist.com, as well as to upcoming books and special issues.
The Exhibitionist is a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, to encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and to actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.
The Exhibitionist: Journal on Exhibition Making
Editor: Jens Hoffmann
Senior Editor: Julian Myers-Szupinska
Associate Editor: Liz Glass
Editor at Large: Chelsea Haines
Copy Editor: Lindsey Westbrook
Design: Jon Sueda / Stripe
Friends of Exhibitionists: Noreen Ahmad, Jack Kirkland, José Kuri, Mónica Manzutto, Elisa Nuyten, Outset USA, Andrea Rosen, Ross Sappenfield, Luisa Strina, Julia Reyes Taubman, and VIA Art Fund
Editorial board: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Patrick Flores, Massimiliano Gioni, Mary Jane Jacob, Maria Lind, Carol Yinghua Lu, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Adriano Pedrosa, João Ribas, Gayatri Sinha, Christine Tohmé
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