Critical Approaches to the Curator

D
Abstract Surveys a broad range of approaches to the figure of the curator,
including medieval precedents found in illuminated manuscripts (Ser­
rano), new takes on nineteenth-century roles and debates over what
"curating" meant in the early twentieth century (McTavish), and
critiques of Okwui Enwezor, who arguably embodies the contemporary
notion of the global curator (Ogbechie).

The Illuminated Guide and the Medieval Curator

Nhora Lucia Serrano

Comparative Literature, California State University-Long Beach

In 1 998 Michael Brenson proclaimed that the era of the curator had begun. Bren­
son defined the "curator" as someone who "work[s] across cultures and (is] able to
think imaginatively about the points of compatibility and conflict among them" be­
cause the task of the curator is to "be able to communicate not only with artists but
also with community leaders . . . and heads of state:'1 This model of the curator as a
socio-political envoy, however, is not new or modern. It can be seen in medieval il­
luminated manuscripts in which representations of monarchs and royal counselors
function similarly to Brenson's definition of a curator. Alfonso X, el Sabio's Cantigas
de Santa Maria ( 122 1 - 1 284) and Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea ( 1 400) are two
such manuscripts in which their richly-adorned portraits attest that there were po­
litical historiographers and cultural guides concerned with how history is read and
preserved. But it is more than their mere presence that equates these miniatures as
portraits of a curator; it is their gesturing hands so carefully painted and aptly di­
recting the gaze to the visual narrative of the page that establish their exhibitionary
aim, to shape and instill portraits of legitimate kings and strong empires.
While illuminated manuscripts proffer a seemingly panoramic view into the
past with colorful illustrations, these two selected manuscripts are nonetheless well­
crafted stories with striking sequential art throughout. After all, it is from the pa­
tron's unique point of view and for his/her benefit as well. As Hayden White posits
Collections: A journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, Volume 7, Number 4,
Fall 2011, pp. 381-390. Copyright © 2011 AltaMira Press. All rights reserved. 381
382 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE CURATOR '&

Christine de Pizan presenting her manuscript to the Queen.© British Library Board. Harley
4431, f.3r. Image courtesy of the British Library Board.

in Figural Realism, "narrative has always been and continues to be the predominant
mode of historical writing;' so too must these manuscripts be seen as historical
discourse because their text and image relationship is a special language "like meta­
phoric speech, symbolic language, and representation:'2 It is this very figural aspect
with its inherent multiplicity of meaning upon which these two historical illumi­
nated manuscripts rely. For instance, since the Iberian monarch and French royal
confidante are both curators and spectators of their textual exhibitions, the manu­
scripts provocatively inscribe political ideologies under which public, imperial per­
sonas and private, human desires can co-exist. On the one hand, these contrasting
portraits are a testament to a kingdom's opulent history and the noble character of
monarchy. On the other hand, they are reminder of what was not written, i.e. a rally
call for the heir apparent.
Las Cantigas' opening illumination portrays Alfonso with outstretched hands
poised on the threshold between two vignettes representing the celestial and ter­
restrial worlds, the task of a Holy Roman Emperor, an elusive and desirous title.
Meanwhile, on the outermost frame, there is a mosaic of colored rosettes that al­
ternate with boxed images of a castle and a lion, the symbolic shields representing
the northern kingdoms of Castile and Leon. These are, of course, the visual signs of
Alfonso's political power and authority that clearly identify him as the curator of his
own history.
& SERRANO, MCTAVISH, OGBECHIE, AND SOUSSLOFF 383

In contrast, amidst the turmoil of the Hundred Years War, Epistre Othea be­
longs to the medieval genre of "mirror of princes" devoted to instructing royal heirs
on proper behavior. On the dedicatory page in the Harley Manuscript, Christine is
depicted as clutching her book as she offers it to Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of Charles
VI. Christine's task is to educate a Queen via myth and female figures so that Isa­
beau may in turn be political counselor to the dauphin, her son and future king. As
medieval curator, Christine teaches chivalry so that the glory of France is not for­
gotten.
Both manuscripts illustrate that what is at stake is not only legitimacy but also
the legacy of an empire, which can only be preserved and cultivated by the curator,
who was on the scene long before 1 998.

Cleaning the Museum: The Curator as Custodian

Lianne McTavish

History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, University ofAlberta

The term museum keeper is used in Britain, suggesting an authority figure who
preserves a valuable collection. But what if other meanings associated with the term
keeper are invoked, including that of custodian? What if the museum keeper is re­
envisioned as a kind of housekeeper engaged in cleaning? My paper explores these
questions in both historical and conceptual terms, shedding light on how the pro­
fessional identity of the museum curator was produced amidst debate during the
early twentieth century and how it might now be reconfigured.
I have undertaken extensive archival research at a number of natural history
museums founded in Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
including those in Montreal ( 1 827), Saint John ( 1 862), Winnipeg ( 1879), and Van­
couver ( 1 903), as well as at the Newark Museum ( 1 925). The term curator was used
at these institutions in a broad and ambiguous manner. Members of the Natural
History Society of Montreal referred to William Hunter, the man employed in their
museum between 1 859 and 1 87 1 , variously as caretaker, janitor, cabinet keeper, and
curator. His tasks were correspondingly diverse, and included taxidermy, mopping
the floor, cleaning the exhibition cases, and staffing the museum when it was open
to the public. William Macintosh, consistently identified as the curator of the Mu­
seum of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick between 1 898 and 1 940,
lived on site, caring for the museum building in Saint John as well as the collections
inside it. He met with fund raising committees, operated the magic lantern during
lectures, greeted museum visitors, executed secretarial work, purchased coal to heat
the museum, repaired the roof of its storage shed, classified and arranged insect
384 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE CURATOR &

specimens, and ordered supplies for the annual camping trips. When members of
the Canadian Museums Committee-funded by the Carnegie Corporation-strove
to replace this "amateur" museum worker with a young man equipped with a PhD
in 1 935, Macintosh exclaimed that "a person holding that degree would not roll up
his sleeves and get down on his hands and knees and perform [the] manual labor
required of the position:' He clearly saw physical labor as an essential part of cura­
torship.
The professionalization of the curator was highly contested during the 1 930s
and 1 940s in both Canada and the United States. My paper analyzes the debates
occurring around the supposed domestic labor performed in the museum, high­
lighting the historical role of "amateur" male and female museum workers in Saint
John, New Brunswick, and contrasting the agendas of the members of the Canadian
Museums Committee with those of John Cotton Dana, the founder of the Newark
Museum who defended the education of a practical, non-elite museum personnel,
largely female.
This emphasis on the history of physical labor and cleaning within the mu­
seum enables a new image of the curator to emerge. Instead of a revered storehouse
or temple, the museum comes to resemble a garbage dump filled with discarded or
otherwise useless objects, which are then sorted, stored, and recycled by the curator,
a professional organizer.

The Curator as Culture Broker:

A Critique of the Curatorial Regime of Okwui Enwezor
in the Discourse of Contemporary African Art
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

History of Art and Architecture, University of California­

Santa Barbara; Getty Research Institute

Okwui Enwezor's curatorial practice of the past decade is one of the most significant
developments from the discourse of contemporary African art. It has succeeded
in validating this context of practice in the discourse of contemporary art while
ironically negating a critical engagement with the history and development of mod­
ern and contemporary art in Africa itself, or with indigenous forms of African art
whose contemporaneity remains untheorized. Enwezor's curatorial focus is devoted
to radical notions of contemporaneity built mainly on the practice of African artists
who live and work in the West, and an unfailing interest in defining contemporary
& SERRANO, MCTAVISH, OGBECHIE, AND SOUSSLOFF 385

African art as a context that emerges with the postcolonial African subject. His cu­
ratorial work thus produces ahistorical interpretations of contemporary African art
in general and echoes Marianne Eigenheer's criticism of curators as "perpetuating
the automation of self-reflexive autonomous systems within closed 'contextualiza­
tions;"3 or in other words, of advancing a very self-referential narrative of contem­
porary practice using a limited number of artists recycled ad-infinitum in closed­
loop exhibitions.
The underpinning of Enwezor's curatorial interventions is underwritten by a
notion of globalization that assumes the free flow of cultural producers: however,
this notion is patently false since the global context enforces the locality of con­
temporary African subjects with increasingly authoritarian protocols. Even if we
assume a free flow of artists as cultural workers in the global economy, [ c] ultural
"

globalisation impels us to neither negate our own background nor to take it as the
only premise but to question it time and again in the contextual flow of ongoing
cultural projects:'4 In this regard, I propose that the curatorial regime of Enwezor
can be faulted for legitimizing a notion of Africa that dispenses with the continent
itself as a historical theater of cultural and contemporary engagements. His work is
not really about Africa but about a self-referential institutionalization of the cura­
tor/Enwezor as a proxy for Africa in the discourse of contemporary art. Who then
does Enwezor speak for, and how are his critical and curatorial positions affecting
the kind of knowledge emerging in the discourse of contemporary African art?

Approaching the Curator Critically

Catherine Soussloff

Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia­

Vancouver

Paradigms establish a broader problematic context that they both con­

stitute and make intelligible. -Giorgio Agamben5

The topic of the curator gives us a subject around which a number of practices and
a variety of objects, artifacts, and institutions have circulated, but without any con­
sensual concept regarding the particularity of the subject, the curator. Unlike the
artist, the curator has not yet been mythologized, as Roland Barthes (2009) would
have it. The ambiguous or mutable cultural status of the curator today may be found
in the most cursory examination of the usual, and often conflicting, definitions:
386 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE CURATOR &

one who cares for, cures, manages, oversees, stewards, guards, supervises, preserves,
exhibits, organizes, collects, translates, interprets, and so on. Or, in the fact that no
individual curators have yet gained the degree of celebrity status and renown tra­
ditionally reserved for the mythologized figure in culture, such as the artist or the
movie star.
The meaning of these cultural figures in and for contemporary society can be
legitimately considered understood or relatively fixed. They have become accepted
and known in the sense that Michel Foucault used in The Archaeology of Knowledge
( 1 972) : the procedures and effects of the artist and the star are integral to the entire
domain of contemporary culture and manifested discursively. In addition, our fa­
miliarity with them as both cultural types and as individuals is reinforced by that
culture. In contrast, the curator is relatively unknown outside of museum studies
circles and networks of related professions.
Tellingly, the most recognized contemporary curator is the American visual
artist Fred Wilson, whose installation Mining the Museum ( 1 992) opened up the
discussion of the artist-as-curator, one who intervenes critically in the institutional
arena. An aspect of the message of artist-as-curator interventions lies in the inher­
ent freedom that the figure of the artist assumes in culture, and thereby confers
upon art installations by Fred Wilson.6 The name of the artist or the star constitutes
an important characteristic of the known cultural figure.7 For the cultural anthro­
pologist, the proper name functions as a place for the social inscription of the group
upon the subject.8 According to this view, a name tells us more about the society
than the individual. In the case of Wilson, the artist is free to critique the very insti­
tution of the museum, with its practices of collection and display and in which s/he
exhibits, while the curator as an employee of the institution could not. The curator
may remain anonymous in discourse, as many exhibition catalogues suggest, but
the artist will not. From this it might be inferred that the artist possesses cultural
capital that is invested in the individual subject, while the curator does not.
The essays in this section establish certain key aspects of the historicization of
the figure of the curator. At the same time, they attest to a lack of consensus regard­
ing how the subject of the curator operates in the production of knowledge, or of
how to locate power in the subject of the curator. Thus, it is through these essays that
the nature of the problem of establishing a critical approach to the curator may be
signaled and theorized. I want to suggest that if the discursive situation of the cura­
tor may be considered unclear, that is, if s/he does not rest comfortably within any
one or several of the conceptions of the cultural figures indicated above, then it has
something to do with the horizons of possibility given to us for the critical approach
to the culture to which the curator belongs. Aspects of that culture may be found in
the definitions given above, but where is the subject of the curator in a critical ap­
proach to the ensemble in which s/he may be found?
Nhora Serrano addresses the question of how far back in time the notions
of collection and custodianship associated with the curator may be traced. She
& SERRANO, MCTAVISH, OGBECHIE, AND SOUSSLOFF 387

provides us with examples of specific individuals, or representations of historical

elites: the thirteenth century Iberian king Alfonso X, el Sabio and the fourteenth
century French author Christine de Pizan, both of them pictured in illuminated
manuscripts commissioned for the court. In these illustrations Serrano finds the
functions of the curator who helped to establish the political legitimacy of empire.
She argues that the curator enables the hegemonic goals of rulers through their kin­
ship lines by picturing curators as intermediaries. However, projecting the curator
onto the visual representation also illustrates the desires of the present day viewer
or reader, who seeks to find the curator in both the medieval portrait and the activi­
ties of the mediator to the ruler. It may be, considering Brenson's pronouncement of
a new era belonging to the curator, that the impulse is to demonstrate just how old
some of the practices attributed to curating are, and how it may not be possible for
there to be a "curator's era'' without borrowing cultural capital from other related
figures that are mythologized.
Lianne McTavish's careful archival work on the role of the curator in the New
Brunswick Museum provides a social history approach to the subject of the curator.
Located precisely in the context of changing roles in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, McTavish approaches the issue of curatorial labor in which the
delineation of activities and professionalization depended upon society's different
attitudes towards the work of men and women. Given the historical legacy of the
curator laid out in McTavish's examples, and the impact on the institutions in which
these individuals interacted, the gendering of the conception of the figure of the cu­
rator emerges as significant to its history. Further, McTavish suggests that the vari­
eties and discrepancies of what constitutes curatorial practice might be understood
as fundamentally a part of the history of the curator in culture. For, if these various
and variously gendered activities continue to signify the subject of the curator even
today, then it might be understood as a cultural category that withstands the pres­
sures of cultural stereotyping or standardization, to which the artist and the star had
succumbed long ago. If being a curator is not "man's work" or "woman's work;' but
cultural work, could this state be considered salutary for the institutions in which s/
he operates? Additionally, if the curator of art or artifacts is not a metaphor for the
art historian or anthropologist, then what is s/he?
These questions about the identity of the curator concern Sylvester Ogbechie
in his examination of the curator as culture broker. In his analysis and elevation of
Okwui Enwezor, Ogbechie shows how he epitomizes Michael Brenson's definition
of the new figure of the curator (cited by Serrano) : "who work[ s] across cultures and
[is] able to think imaginatively about the points of compatibility and conflict among
them:'9 While Enwezor has been praised in the art world for his imagination as a
curator, this is precisely the point that Ogbechie criticizes. By focusing on the Afri­
can diaspora as seen through the lens of an increasingly globalized contemporary
art market, Ogbechie believes that the curator has contributed to the de-authentifi­
cation of African art production. This view strikes Ogbechie as dangerous because
388 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE CURATOR &

it celebrates the commodification of Africa and Africanness only through the arts
of the diaspora, with the results of a further subjection of the post-colonial African
subject and devaluation of practices taking place on the continent. His essay sug­
gests that we know the curator by what he curates, a situation akin to projecting the
personality of the artist onto the work of art. So too, Ogbechie and others seek to
endow the individual curator, Enwezor, with the power of the singular artist.
Given the examples and histories found in these essays and the criticisms
posed by them, the curator's activities emerge as analogous to many other figures,
but without any set meaning transferred from any particular one. In Fred Wilson's
installation, the artist is an artist, not a curator; Christine de Pizan resembles a cu­
rator but she was an author; William Macintosh resembles a house cleaner but he
was a curator; Okwui Enwezor resembles a culture broker but he is a curator. From
these examples and in my interpretation of the discursive range of cultural figures
allied to some conceptions of the curator, I have attempted to get at something more
than the curator as. To be sure, the diverse ways that curators have operated and
continue to operate relate to historical situations and economic and institutional
possibilities. Thanks to Serrano, McTavish, and Ogbechie, and other studies similar
to theirs, we can know more about the curator in history and about the histori­
cal period in which the curator found her/himself by examining particular cases.
However, if the curator operates as a cultural paradigm in the sense that Agamben
defines it-"the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only
insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble,
whose homogenitiey it itself constitutes"10-a case arises in which we might under­
stand how both the particular and the universal in art and culture simultaneously
produce knowledge, in which then we might understand the particular power that
the curator has in this production. It cannot be that power which the artist had or
has in any one situation, nor that which the hedge fund dealer has. The critical task
becomes clearer. The particular power of the curator is paradigmatic, and as such
first requires recognition, followed by a careful description of its legibility without
falling into an uncritical acceptance of its analogies to seemingly allied-whether
by time, place, or form-cultural myths. Finally, a critical approach to the curator
would be to understand that whenever s/he appears it is to tell us as much about
the "phenomenon'' culture as about the person who operates in it. If the curator
has been found here to cleave-as in clings, adheres, and remains faithful-to every
aspect of contemporary culture and its interpretation, then we already know more
about the subject than we did before.

Notes

1 . See Michael Brenson ( 1 998), page 16.

2 . See Hayden White ( 1 998), page 3.
& SERRANO, MCTAVISH, OGBECHIE, AND SOUSSLOFF 389

3. See Marienne Eigenheer (2007), page 5.

4. See Marienne Eigenheer (2007), page 5.
5. Giorgio Agamben (2009), page 1 7 .
6. On the idea of the freedom of the artist in culture, see Catherine M. Soussloff ( 1 997) .
7. See my extensive discussion of this topic, Catherine M. Soussloff (2008), pages 83-99.
8. See the extensive discussion of identity and the name in Claude Levi-Strauss ( 1 977), especially
the essay by Jean-Marie Benoist, "Facettes d'Identite:'
9. See Michael Brenson ( 1 998), page 1 6.
1 0 . See Giorgio Agamben (2009), page 1 8 .

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