The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design

302 Pages·2021·47.992 MB·English

by  Fleur Watson

The New Curator: Exhibiting Architecture and Design examines the
challenges inherent in exhibiting design ideas. Traditionally, exhibitions
of architecture and design have predominantly focused on displaying
fnished outcomes or communicating a work through representation.
In this ground-breaking new book, Fleur Watson unveils
the emergence of the ‘new curator’. Instead of exhibiting fnished works
or artefacts, the rise of ‘performative curation’ provides a space where
experimental methods for encountering design ideas are being tested.
Here, the role of the curator is not that of ‘custodian’ or ‘expert’ but with
the intent to create a shared space of encounter with audiences.
To illustrate this phenomenon, the book explores a diverse,
international range of exhibitions. Divided into six themes, a series of
project profles are contextualized through conversations with infuential
curators and cultural producers including Paola Antonelli, Kayoko Ota,
Mimi Zeiger, Catherine Ince, Aric Chen, Zoë Ryan, Beatrice Leanza,
Prem Krishnamurthy, Marina Otero Verzier, Brook Andrew, Carroll
Go-Sam, Rory Hyde, Eva Franch i Gilabert, Patti Anahory and Paula
Nascimento. The book also features a foreword by Deyan Sudjic and an
afterword by Leon van Schaik AO.
Featuring over 100 colour illustrations, this highly designed,
beautiful book offers an innovative contribution to the feld. An essential
read for students and professionals in architecture, design, art, visual
culture, museum studies, curatorial studies and cultural theory.
Dr Fleur Watson is Executive Director and Chief Curator for the Centre
for Architecture Victoria | Open House Melbourne. From 2013–20, Fleur
was Curator at Design Hub Gallery, an exhibition space dedicated to
cross-disciplinary design exchange and practice-led research at RMIT
University in Melbourne, Australia, where she is Honorary University
Fellow. She has held senior curatorial positions in Australia and
internationally including as the founding executive curator of the Lyon
Housemuseum Galleries; invited architecture curator for the National
Gallery of Victoria’s survey exhibition Melbourne Now (2013–14) and
program curator (architecture) for the European Capital of Culture
(Maribor, Slovenia, 2012). She was a co-founder of the independent
gallery Pin-up Architecture & Design Project Space and former editor-in-
chief of Monument magazine.
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First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Fleur Watson
The right of Fleur Watson to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted
by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher
of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Publisher’s Note
This book has been prepared from camera-ready copy provided by the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Watson, Fleur, author.
Title: The new curator : exhibiting architecture and design / Fleur Watson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2020050061 (print) | LCCN 2020050062 (ebook) | ISBN
9781138492721 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138492738 (paperback) | ISBN
9781351029827 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Design--Exhibitions. | Architecture--Exhibitions. |
Curatorship.
Classifcation: LCC NK1520 .W38 2021 (print) | LCC NK1520 (ebook) | DDC
745.4074--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050061
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050062
ISBN: 978-1-138-49272-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-49273-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-02982-7 (ebk)
Book designed and typeset by Stuart Geddes.
Typeset in Plantin, Akzidenz Grotesk and Staunch Titling.
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Exhibiting
Architecture
& Design
Fleur
Watson
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Dedicated to the memory of Desmond John Watson
4
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CONTENTS
7 Foreword: Deyan Sudjic, Emeritus Director,
Design Museum, London
13 Introduction: The New Curator:
Exhibiting Architecture and Design
21 Curating and collecting contemporary design in the local/
global context. Aric Chen (Shanghai) in conversation with
Kayoko Ota (Tokyo, Japan)
29 Chapter 1: Design as Exhibit
(Curator as Space-maker)
59 Meta-curation for inclusion and diversity. Catherine Ince
(London, UK) in conversation with Prem Krishnamurthy
(New York, US/Berlin, Germany)
67 Chapter 2: The Mediator of Process / Research
(Curator as Translator)
109 Fridge in a tree: On curating and memory, remembrance
and representation. Brook Andrew (Melbourne, Australia) in
conversation with Carroll Go-Sam (Brisbane, Australia)
121 Chapter 3: The Prosthetic
(Curator as Interloper)
153 Curating potential. Rory Hyde (London, UK) in conversation
with Eva Franch i Gilabert (London, UK)
161 Chapter 4: The Hybrid to the Digital
(Curator as Speculator)
197 Curatorial labour. Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles, USA) in
conversation with Marina Otero Verzier (Rotterdam,
Netherlands)
205 Chapter 5: The Activist
(Curator as Agent)
237 The design of cultural agency. Zoë Ryan (Chicago, USA) in
conversation with Beatrice Leanza (Lisbon, Portugal)
245 Chapter 6: Event as Performance
(Curator as Dramaturge)
271 Performing and exhibiting ‘design ideas’. Paola Antonelli
(New York, USA) in conversation with Fleur Watson
(Melbourne, Australia)
279 Conclusion: The New Curator:
Towards a Specialised Practice
283 Independence as a disruptive curatorial practice in
the Global South. Patti Anahory (Praia, Cape Verde) in
conversation with Paula Nascimento (Luanda, Angola)
291 Afterword: Professor Leon van Schaik AO, Emeritus
Professor, RMIT University
294 Selected Bibliography
296 Credits and Acknowledgements
298 Index
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6
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FOREWORD
Deyan Sudjic
Director Emeritus
Design Museum, London
A substantial number of the contributors to this book are embedded
in collecting institutions. Among them is Aric Chen, now Curator at
Large for M+ in Hong Kong, who played an important part in building
one of the world’s leading collections of 20th-century design and
architecture from a standing start, and with the challenge of taking a new
perspective as the frst such collection based outside Europe or North
America. Rory Hyde and Catherine Ince are members of the curatorial
staff of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s frst institution
dedicated to collecting and exhibiting design, which is currently in the
midst of a substantial expansion of its activities in East London, where
its contemporary design collection will play an important part. Paola
Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design
at the Museum of Modern Art, and Zoë Ryan, the John H Bryan Chair
and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago,
are charged with two of the world’s most impressive collections of design.
And yet despite all this impressive activity, this book does not discuss the
concept of the permanent collection at any of their institutions. Instead
it explores new forms of curating. This emphasis refects a realignment
of the way that design and architecture are framed in the format of the
exhibition and the museum.
This book itself can be understood as a curatorial
project. Its author, Fleur Watson, is another curator who has made the
transition from the editorial feld, subsequently moving to the Design
Museum in London and then to RMIT Design Hub in Melbourne,
which has taken a distinctive discursive and performative approach to
exhibition making. Watson has organised the book to explore these and
other approaches to curating: among other new roles for curators, she
focuses on their potential as space-makers, or dramaturges. The book
makes a powerful case.
We tend to assume that we know what ‘old’ curators do.
They worry about the impact of daylight on their holdings of acrylic
furniture from the 1960s. They attend conferences on the struggle to
keep technologically redundant digital archives functioning. They wrestle
with purchasing new items that refect the tastes of curatorial committees
made up of generous museum donors. Those of them who operate in the
context of encyclopaedic museums fght for space with more fashionable
or better-funded departments. This book is very much not about the
idea of old curating, or the way that the collecting institutions display
their Otto Wagner table from the Post Offce Savings Bank in Vienna, or
their Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair. It’s not about the judgements
made in acquiring a work by Martino Gamper rather than by Konstantin
Grcic, or Hella Jongerius, or Liz Diller. The conversation is not about
defning a canon as it was once understood. For objects of use, this has
become a more and more problematic activity. What do we understand is
the signifcance of a museum acquiring a typewriter for its collection: an
object that means something when it is still in everyday production, and
something entirely different when it is not? This is not to question the
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value of collecting and studying such objects. They have a lot to tell us,
on the basis that a close enough reading of any object will yield signifcant
insights into the culture that designed, made and used it.
The new curator is busy working on ways to redefne the
subject of design. In that sense, this book is as much about the practice of
design as it is about curating design. An alternative form of practice has
opened up for the designer. It is signifcant to see how certain designers
use the format of the exhibition as a means of focusing their research.
Formafantasma, for example, the Netherlands-based, Italian-born studio,
has made an impressive reputation as designers through Ore Streams,
their exploration of digital waste, shown at NGV in Melbourne and at
the Broken Nature exhibition at the Milan Triennale, followed by Cambio,
their attempt to portray the underlying reality of humanity’s use of timber
at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Both these exhibitions feature
pieces that have been designed for the exhibit by Formafantasma, but
these are not exhibitions that are primarily about Formafantasma. They
are about presenting design so that it can be understood as a network,
or a system. The exhibition can include performance – demonstrated
by meaninglessness, Su san Cohn’s moving exploration of the threatened
confscation of personally signifcant objects from refugees in Denmark.
What would be important to understand is the continued relevance of
the role of a curator – of either the old or the new variety – in the context
of such forms of design practice represented by either Formafantasma or
Cohn. Do curators still have something to offer them?
When industrial design frst made its appearance in
museums, it offered the chance to explore new categories of object and
new materials, and to understand the impact that new technologies were
having on society. Given the commercial core of design, the museum
offered an alternative basis for thinking about design. New curating is not
even about the provocative, attention-grabbing acquisitions such as the
@ symbol, or the 3D-printed handgun that museum press teams know
will get a headline when they have an acquisition number – an action
with whose future consequences today’s curators do not need to concern
themselves. Whether or not these objects ever emerge from storage to
display is the concern of another generation.
New curating is about opening the doors to something new
and different. The ‘new curators’, through a growing calendar of inter-
national biennales, new institutions with audiences to attract, and recon-
fgured old ones, have created a new landscape of exhibiting and associated
publishing that is serving to defne the terms of the debate on design.
And yet some of the individuals leading this new approach
express reservations about what the curating phenomenon has become.
Eva Franch i Gilabert, previously of Storefront in New York and also
a former director of the Architectural Association in London, makes
clear her discomfort with the idea of privileging the curator. Other
participants in the book express a preference to be known as ‘exhibition
makers’ rather than curators. This discomfort is perhaps connected to the
perception that the visibility of the curator has become something of a
distraction from the subject matter.
As is often pointed out, many of those who are now making
a career within the feld of curating started out as journalists – me
8 Foreword
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Ore Streams was an investigation into the recycling of
electronic waste, developed over the course of three
years and commissioned by National Gallery of Victoria
(Australia) and further developed for Broken Nature at the
Triennale di Milano. The project makes use of a diversity
of media (objects, video and animation) to address the
topic from multiple perspectives. The offce furniture
objects act as a Trojan horse to initiate an exploration of
‘above ground mining’ and of the complex role that design
plays in transforming natural resources into desirable
products. Studio Formafantasma, Ore Streams (table,
screen, 2016–17). Commissioned by the National Gallery
of Victoria, Melbourne, for the NGV Triennial 2017.
Purchased NGV Foundation, 2017. Image courtesy of
Formafantasma. Photography: Ikon.
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