Abstract

Exhibition studies, exhibiting histories, curatorial histories – however we want to call the study of past exhibitions and curatorship – there seems to be a persistent concern that a new discipline is in development, ready to entrench yet another canon and to confirm the hagiography of the curator. But disciplines need firm foundations, something that exhibitions and curatorship rarely offer. For what does it mean to photograph curatorship? How do we document not just exhibition design but our experiences of an exhibition? And how do we derive our knowledge of exhibitions when so many holders of the past – whether they be people, on paper, or in institutions, and especially from periods before the archiving craze struck after the 1970s – have decayed, disappeared or never existed in the first place? What I want to do here is to see these modes of resistance as a positive foundation from which to develop our analyses of exhibitions, rather than a burden to overcome or deny. I want to explore these unstable, frayed and fragile repositories, and the challenges they provoke, as a method that may underpin not a new historical discipline but a more complex and, perhaps, more creative prospect that ‘undisciplines’ histories.

Bio

Anthony Gardner  is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Oxford, where he was the Head of the Ruskin School of Art from 2017 to 2020. He has published widely on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism, and curatorial histories. His books include Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art against Democracy (MIT Press, 2015) and, with Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (Wiley, 2016).