The Form of the Exhibition is a Text

These words are taken from curator Louise Déry’s essay “Curator, your love’s on display” (“our curator exposed by love knows that the form of the exhibition is a text”). As I see it, this sampling also traverses the halls of any project in the framework of which archives make history.

Building a portfolio is in itself an act of exhibition; it relies on a selection, on a perceptive arrangement in whose framework the work becomes a mediating image between someone who knows and someone who knows something else.1 1  - This idea is articulated as a personal conclusion regarding an issue raised by Manuel Borja-Villel in a lecture given at the The Now Museum: Contemporary Art, Curating Histories, Alternative Models, a conference organized by CUNY Graduate Center, Independent Curators International and the New Museum in New York, in March 2011. Also see www.ici-exhibitions.org/index.php/site/events/the_now_museum. For a journal like esse, the decision to produce a publication around a theme is also a curatorial act; it aims to testify to issues underlying the topic under examination. In light of these observations, how does one develop the iconography of such a theme: Curators?

From the outset, one had to envisage each essay as a space on which to hang a thought, and to conceive each page, not in an attempt to illustrate the artist’s subject matter—an impossible endeavour it seems to me— but to look through the glasses of the spectator, following that thought out loud, developing peculiar (because subjective) trajectories between the visual and the textual.

To develop the iconography of a thought one first has to take samples, which means making choices. My fist instinct was then to list the action verbs used by authors to describe the curator’s role, as if such a listing could give me a palette of traits, could profile the typical figure.