/ 10 October 1997

The curator as God

Hazel Friedman

People dont understand the role of curator, particularly the intellectual role, says Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian- born New-York-based critic and curator, now artistic director of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. The curator today is not an administrator as in previous years. He or she is more critically engaged with the subject matter, more willing to be implicated in it and accountable for it.

We are conducting a hurried telephone interview on the shifting role of the curator, and Enwezor, a consummate strategist, is playing the game of a chess pro. You can almost touch the interior logic that determines his answers. These are not simply individual responses to individual questions.

The interview takes place against a backdrop of last-minute preparations for Johannesburgs second biennale. It is markedly different from the first, in terms of logistics, size (smaller), atmosphere (calmer) or theme (Trade Routes). And South African artists are no longer the coy-but- keen debutants at the international art ball. Theyre part of the global club of cultural nomads, curated overseas shows and international dealerships.

The chosen few are doing great. And the rest? Well, that is food for another dinner table. But for now, lets just say that Enwezor with the assistance of five other curators is at the helm, attempting to set up a debate among a select number of artists about issues affecting art in a post-colonial context. He claims it is an opportunity to convene new contact zones, where serious dialogue, disagreement and exchange can take place.

Maybe so, but the trade is occurring along a prescribed thematic route paved by a particular discourse favoured by a core group of artists. The rest remain on the outskirts, either erecting their own salons des rfuss or settling for inactive outsider status.

I am not apologetic about the position I have assumed, says Enwezor. The curator is not simply a facilitator but a conceptualist. He or she has to set up a dialectic. After all, art is not simply about aesthetics. It is ideological and we all occupy specific positions in relation to it. He adds: But the issue of curators and power is completely overblown.

Or perhaps not. Artists are peacocks, critics are pigs is how Bonito Oliva, controversial curator of the 1993 Venice Biennale, once described two of the whos who in the art zoo. But he couldnt quite come up with an equally apt metaphor for the keepers who hold the keys to the cages the curators. In much the same way that art cannot simply be described as visual ideology or love equated with marriage, it is obviously simplistic to claim that curators occupy the status of cultural deities.

Yet they are widely regarded as practically omnipotent their whips fashioned from hide of economics and wielded with the power of ideas and persuasion. In secular terms they are the undisputed royal family of that surreal, relatively small and ever- fluctuating network of galleries, museums and collections that invests its lifeblood in art.

It wasnt always like this. Three decades ago, a handful of critics ruled the roost. But these days the critics role has been relegated to that of commentator or accomplice rather than prophet or prince.

Today, the curator largely determines what we see in museums and galleries, and exerts influence on how we see it. Surveys conducted in 1995 and 1997 of the 50 most powerful people in the art world, published by the international art glossy, Artnews, reveal the same names. Many, like Germano Celant of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Kaspar Konig of Frankfurt or Fumio Nanjo of Tokyo have curator on their tags.

In its most dynamic incarnation, curatorial power is about the ability to promote dialogue, to try and scramble the hierarchies, to bring new breath to old bodies. In its most vulgar incarnation, curatorial power is about the might of right: right artists; right discourse. Right time, place and response. It is about the ability to turn yesterdays artist starving in a garret into the brightest star in the art firmament; to condemn one genre to death and transform another into gospel.

In a perfect world it would be the actual producers of art who occupied these thrones of power. But every actor needs a director, every concert a conductor. These days, where information is just a computer key away, knowledge no longer means power. Networking does.

The most visible places where the networking apparatus gleams brightest and the curators kingdom becomes most powerful are international art exhibitions and biennales (or beernales given the copious amounts of alcohol consumed). They are intriguing extravaganzas, promising to show the personal and public moments of the time and place in which they occur. But those blockbuster art marts, where the works are not for sale but the colour of currency is everywhere, rarely emerge unsullied. The renowned come to dine, the marginalised to whine; the shmooze rules and the clique song is is the most fashionable refrain.

It is here, particularly in recent years, that the curator has reigned supreme. Take Catherine David, the cantankerous French curator who drove Documenta X the worlds biggest contemporary art exhibition like a Formula One driver in June this year. She began her appointment to this mammoth project in 1994 with the following promise: No names, no programmes, no rules. Corporate sponsors were sworn to secrecy and even critics who questioned her vision too closely were barred from press conferences.

Biennales in particular more as institutions than events constitute a microcosm of power relations in the real world. They have their centralised cores of high visibility and their undeveloped, neglected cultural peripheries; their skyscrapers and squatter shacks, city councillors and serfs. And if one examines the origins of the biennale itself, its role as asserter of power and centrality is reinforced.

In many ways it began as multicultural equivalent of the ancient Olympic Games.It was inaugurated in Venice during 1885 at the height of the colonial period, a mere 10 years after the Berlin Conference carved Africa up for the Wests taking. It was only after the colonial era that former colonies began instituting their own art events as a riposte to Western Europes assertion of cultural hegemony. The first Third World country to hold its own biennale was India in 1969, closely followed by biennales in Sao Paolo and Havana.

Previously colonised communities tried to reconstruct identities that had been repressed or ravaged through foreign or internal control, explained Artforum critic Thomas McEvilley during the 1995 Johannesburg Biennale. They tried to turn the tables by having their own international art exhibitions, by experiencing themselves not as peripheries but as centres. At the same time they were still aspiring to be accepted by the real (in the West-is-best sense of the term) cultural centres, like New York.

Africus, the first Johannesburg Biennale, succeeded both as a promotional exercise and as an installation revolving around the theme of utopian multiculturalism. But, like the first Documenta exhibition in post-war Germany, held in 1952, it didnt really address the problems of its own recent history; and it didnt attempt to critique or redefine South African identity.

Like the 1996 Kwangju Biennale in Korea the largest and costliest event of its

kind in Asia it sought primarily to legitimise, mainly in the eyes of the Western elite, the South African art worlds ascent into the international ranks.

And will this biennale be different? We have a curator who straddles (in origin, anyway) both the margins and the mainstream, yet whose discourse is vintage West.

He professes to want cultural peregrination along the multiple routes of a migrating world. To Enwezor, art history is not separable from history and the laws that govern life in the real world. The problem is, this biennale has already separated itself from the imbalances that continue to afflict a country that has not yet located its own centre of gravity.

Perhaps in the context of the global art mart, this doesnt matter.

After all, to the cosmopolitan cultural consumer the world is little more than a huge vine with grapes ripe for the picking. Enwezor might or might not be Bacchus. And who cares if, once the lights of this biennale have been switched off, we all go home and think in the words of McEvilley that the whole thing was nothing more than a lot of art?