Speculations on a curator function

“What difference does it matter who is speaking?” This is the question Michel Foucault leaves us with at the end of his essay “What Is An Author?” (read an excerpt here).¹ It’s a culmination of a line of inquiry along which Foucault attempts to delineate the contours of a space for the author in the wake of contemporaneous claims of her/his death. This question, which is intended to read with an indifference—who cares who is speaking?—belongs to Foucault’s imaginary future: one in which modern claims for authorial originality and authenticity have fully subsided and allowed for the return to the text as a site of multiple interpretations. The question is asked in such a way that casts the stable subject—once assumed to reside at the heart of any authored text—as thoroughly irrelevant, perhaps to the point of redundancy.

In his essay, Foucault does more than simply reiterate his contemporaries’ claims for the loss of the authentic subject. His writing instead moves on in an attempt to understand and articulate what exists in its place. It’s there, in the schism between two versions of the author—one who engages in the task of writing, the other who produces a text of a certain historical status—that Foucault both discovers and invents the author function. The simplest way to think of this is that the author is a function of discourse. That is, the author comes into existence through the signing of the text.

Foucault gives a disclaimer about his essay’s limited focus on a particular kind of author: namely one engaged in a selective kind of writing. He points to others who might—elsewhere—be relevant to discuss in a similar light, noting the painter and the musician. Somewhere within this mix of writer, painter, musician, it might also be appropriate to consider the curator, whose work shares a similar inter-texuality as the written (poststructuralist) author, but with an equally exigent affectual capacity that comes about by way of the curatorial work’s extension into space. Like a good proportion of painting and music, the curatorial work can resonate beyond language in a way that is harder, if not very likely impossible, for texts to do.

Whereas painters and musicians and even critics have frequently been written about in ways that grapple with and continually revalue their status, the curator figure has not received as widespread critique and absorption. This could very likely reflect a perceived lack of gravitas of curatorial work. Certainly it is a partial result of the curatorial still being a reasonably young field. In addition, its modes of operation are not just cross-disciplinary, but rather seem to exceed the very notion of disciplinarity altogether. (Indeed this very lack of disciplinary conventions is just one of its tensions with Art History.) Self-reflexive curatorial strategies, including those that interrogate conditions of labor, are reasonably common these days, particularly in curatorial pedagogy. What is not so common is the thorough investigation of the way the curator is positioned within the cultural realm with respect to how the two versions of the curator—one who executes the actual curatorial work, and the other who lends such work a particular status as “curated”—might be thought of together. With it’s different and mostly modern lifespan, the curator exists for entirely different reasons than the author that Foucault describes. In fact, the moment that Art Theory and Curatorial Studies programs began to form their own departments within universities (thereby securing their legitimacy), was the very same period that Foucault’s theories on writing and authorship—along with Barthes’ and Derrida’s—were being rigorously taken up in academia beyond France. It makes sense to acknowledge that the curator and the author have incredibly different lineages in spite of their commonality as discursive modes of being. It’s also fair to say that the critique of the authorial voice that was a watershed for literary theory in the seventies became the theoretical underpinning for a newly institutional curating in the late eighties and early nineties.

Of Foucault’s four characteristic traits of the author function, there are two that warrant our attention in this instance:

“(3) it [the author function] is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of discourse [text] to its producer, but rather by a series of specific and complex operations;”

“(4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects—positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals.”

In substituting the author as the object of these traits, with the curator, the first point here stipulates that the curator function is more than just putting together—conceptually and logistically—an exhibition. A curator doesn’t just come into being by curating a show. Instead the curator function emerges by way of a “series of specific and complex operations” that construct the curator function based on “our way of handling” curatorial projects. The curatorial is a shifting ground.

The second point here is perhaps even more complex for the curator, given that collaboration rather than isolation is essential to their practice. It also pulls back from a vision of the curator as a complete social construction by investing in the possibility of finding the self within the function. The question: What does it matter who is speaking carries a different meaning in the case of the curatorial, at the foundational level of artist-curator relationships and the distribution of power. This is one of the hinge points for the reception of curatorial practice: whether to be first and foremost an advocate for the artist, sometimes at the expense of limiting one’s own specific read of a collection of works or a practice; or to instead privilege one’s own thinking-through of specific works and their contextualization. Already there are at minimum two selves to consider in the most reductive of curatorial encounters: that of the curator and that of the artist. Both of these positions call for a further breakdown, but it’s on the former that I want to focus here. The curator might be considered as a plurality of selves in the sense that s/he is constituted—even in the most idiosyncratic of exhibitions—by, at the least:

1. an institutional voice with its set of imperatives;
2. a set of conventions for interpreting work, whether they be based in the discipline of Art History or broader forms of Media Culture, Visual Studies and other medium-specific disciplines;
3. a pragmatic set of concerns involving the negotiation and coordination of real-world logistics and personalities that contribute to an exhibition;
4. the self that exists outside of the curatorial framework, that is what we would normally consider as an interior function. This position is no more pure or authentic than any of the aforementioned “selves”, and yet it nonetheless ensures very particularized reading of artworks as well as a specific orientation towards the conditions of production.

This is not an exhaustive list, and it’s one that would likely shift a little for different curatorial contexts. In addition, these various selves needn’t be entirely discrete. And yet acknowledging each of them and their individual marks of distinction is important in establishing an understanding of where any one curatorial practice is positioned within the convoluted power structure that is the art world. Rather than trying to contain the role of the curator or precisely pinpoint what constitutes the curatorial, we might do best to follow Foucault, who saw in the division and distances of these various selves—in the scission between them—a place where the discursive function operates (be it an authorial/curatorial/painterly/musical function). The significance of this lies not just in the recognition of the curator as a negotiator of multiple positions both interior and exterior to themselves; but essentially in the fact that the curator function determines how receptive we are to specific works of art, thereby producing the conditions wherein those artworks can even be said to be made by “artists”.

So now, when asked “What difference does it make who’s curating?” the question doesn’t sound quite as throw-away as it initially did. For even as we are forced to acknowledge that very particular “modes of existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses within society” have enabled a certain recognition of the curator to take place in the present moment, we’re also compelled to contend with a complex of selves that gives rise to the curator function at the points of their absolute differences. What we take from Foucault’s question then, a question that ironically, derived from as significant an author as Beckett with his “What matter who’s speak-ing”, is not so much a question of “Who cares who’s curating?” as “What differences make the curatorial?”

Alicia Ritson is a curator currently pursuing her M.A. at Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies.

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1. Foucault, Michel. “What is An Author” The Death and Resurrection of the Author? Ed. William Irwin. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. 9-22. This text was originally given as a lecture in 1969, and was first translated into English in 1977.