| | Following on from a flurry statements and polemics by various figures, most of them curators and critics, the French art world has recently been debating the issue of exhibition organizing. This ongoing discussion revolves around two salient questions: firstly, which is the more suitable name for the professional activity involved here, the Anglo-American curator/curateur, or the traditional French commissaire d’exposition? And, secondly, the possibility of viewing the curator as a kind of author, which idea limits the status of the profession to its relation to the signature on the piece of work (hence the recent emergence of the notion of “exhibition author”). This problem of “authorial authority” is a very French complaint which has few equivalents in other countries (a national symptom, maybe?). As for the quarrel over terminology, it is even harder to universalize. So, to be honest, on these two points at least, the debate is of no great interest, invoking as it does a set of social and symbolic positions in which the “curator” will always be more international and the author more individual than the commissaire d’exposition.
Curateur or commissaire, author or artist, whatever the handle, the corresponding activity will always be hard to grasp if we cannot apprehend the social realities and the practical and abstract work that actually gets done, and if we lack the tools for describing and understanding the forms that are produced—forms that do not necessarily belong in the symbolic register. While in French universities and schools (and even more so in England and the United States) there has been a fair amount of archive-based research and analysis, reassessing the historical importance of past exhibitions and trying to define their aesthetic models, attempts to clarify the curator’s “task” (or rather, “tasks”), which ought really to be made in parallel, are still few and far between. And yet this is the kind of the work that would make it possible to understand what curatorial activity actually brings into play—the skills and knowledge it brings to bear, its possible methods and forms, but also its symbolic position within the different mediations of art and the power games in which it is involved. Let’s hope that the articles in this issue will accompany and stimulate more studies in this area.
Christophe Kihm
Translation, C. Penwarden
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