The Exhibitionist #12. Jens Hoffmann (ed.) The Exhibitionist.

Posted in magazines, Motto Berlin store on May 25th, 2016
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The Exhibitionist #12
contents

Response I: Artists and curators

Fia Backström and Anthony Huberman Re: family dynamics

Anne Ellegood and Kerry Tribe Long Term Relationship

Claire Fontaine and Jens Hoffmann Artistic Bitches and Curatorial Bastards

Inés Katzenstein and Juan José Cambre Agreement

Response II: Archival

Introduced by Liz Glass
Dear King Harry
James Lee Byars: Correspondence with Harald Szeemann (1988)

La critique

Triple Candie: Let the Artists Die
Emiliano Valdés: Who Has the Power?
Nontobeko Ntombela: Remastered
Daniel Birnbaum: Hijacking the Situationists
Slavs and Tatars: The Splits of the Mind, If Not the Legs
Rachel Rose: Artist, Curator, Meaning
+
An Illustrated Bibliography of the exhibitionist, Issues IX–XII

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The Exhibitionist #11. Jens Hoffman (Ed.). The Exhibitionist

Posted in magazines, writing on October 23rd, 2015
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Overture
Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers-Szupinska, and Liz Glass
A peculiarity of the current field of curating is an ongoing contestation over the very meaning of “to curate.” As Alice said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Humpty Dumpty answers, “The question is which [meaning] is to be master—that’s all.”

On the cover of this issue is Thomas Ruff’s 1989 portrait of a young Hans Ulrich Obrist. If this fresh-faced guy has done more than most to consolidate the identity of the curator—as a ubiquitous, cosmopolitan character, tirelessly promoting him- or herself, an exhibitionist of the global age—he has also presided over that identity’s confusion and multiplication. Is the curator, as Obrist often describes the role, a catalyst? Or is she, to quote Obrist’s frequent collaborator Suzanne Pagé, a modest commis de l’artiste, an “artist’s clerk”?

Curating has become a global concern, yet many languages still even lack a steady term for it. Meanwhile, in some circles, “curation” has a gained a buzzword-ish currency, signaling taste and discrimination across a dizzying array of cultural activities, from so-called “data curation” to creating playlists and dinner menus. The hope, it seems, is that a renewed connoisseurship might discern value amid the profusions of a global market—separate the wheat from the cultural chaff—even if it means, too, that Kanye West now has as much claim on the term “curator” as Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev or Okwui Enwezor. The more we stretch the word, it seems, the easier it becomes to hijack. It is time for some clarity.

In Attitude, João Ribas meditates on this semantic drift of the word “curating” into marketing, where it is proposed as a cure-all for digital excess and consumer glut. Following John Searle, who warns that the terms we use control the field of meaning, Ribas argues that contemporary curators must battle to retain the understanding that “curating” has held historically in the field of art, beyond connoisseurship and mere selection. He emphasizes in particular the spatial and temporal character of exhibitions, which may still offer the possibility of resisting the behavioral paradigms inflicted by capitalist urbanism and digital technology.

Geopolitical space is a central concern for several essays in this issue. In Back in the Day, Clémentine Deliss contends with the Museum of Modern Art’s notorious 1984 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern, which “remains bedeviled by criticisms and emotional refutations that are hard to dissolve.” Comparing that exhibition’s model of “formal affinity” to a recent exhibition by the Senegalese artist and curator El Hadji Sy, she argues for exhibitionary methods that might “effect a remediating affirmation” of ethnographic objects in order to recover something of their “conceptual code.” Missing in Action republishes passages from Rasheed Araeen’s introduction to his 1989 exhibition of British Afro-Asian artists, The Other Story. By assembling the fragments of their collective story, Araeen dismantles the chauvinism of a “master art history” that had excluded non-Western contemporary artists.

In Assessments, Claire Bishop, Cristina Freire, Tobi Maier, and Octavio Zaya address the exhibition Histórias Mestiças (Mestizo Histories), a trenchant critique of Brazil’s racial democracy curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo. The writers find consonance around one remarkable installation that juxtaposed photographs of indigenous people by Claudia Andujar, 18th-century watercolors of the “discovery” of Brazil by Joaquim José de Miranda, and drawings from the 1970s by Taniki Manippi-theri, a Yanomami shaman. Says Bishop, “Such an anthropological gaze can diminish the present-ism of contemporary art and allow it to become a method or system of thinking. Would that more curators, in more countries, had the nerve to investigate so unflinchingly cherished national myths.” Curators’ Favorites asks contributors to elaborate on an exhibition that has inspired their thinking. Guy Brett describes a 1979 installation by the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles, an allegory aimed at the military dictatorship in power at the time. Natasha Ginwala contends with The One Year Drawing Project, an experimental exchange of artworks across Sri Lanka meditating on the traumas of that nation’s civil war. And Vincent Honoré considers the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, claiming the museum itself as a “constant, ever-changing exhibition.”

Six x Six challenges curators to name the exhibitions that have mattered most to them. In this issue, Ionit Behar, Astria Suparak, Inti Guerrero, Gianni Jetzer, Sarah Demeuse, and Nikola Dietrich assemble their miniature pantheons. In Rigorous Research, the scholar Vittoria Martini deliberates the little-discussed 1970 Venice Biennale, a turning point for that venerable institution. In the gap opened by a political stalemate, the staff assumed control, and embraced experimentation and research. Research and reflection also connect the two essays in Rear Mirror. Ruba Katrib details the thinking behind her exhibition Puddle, pothole, portal, co-curated with the artist Camille Henrot at SculptureCenter, New York, describing their attempt to capture something of the weird, rambunctious spatiality of early Disney animations. Scott Rothkopf evinces, in turn, the extraordinary spatial and conceptual deliberation behind his recent Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Across this issue, then, the specificity of curatorial labor emerges—the thought needed to build aggregate meaning from disparate things in space. The word “curating” is not infinitely plastic. This, for us, is what it means. We all know how Humpy Dumpty ended up.

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The Exhibitionist 10. Jens Hoffmann (Ed.)

Posted in magazines on November 19th, 2014
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The Exhibitionist 10

Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers-Szupinska, and Lumi Tan

A half-century after the emergence of the curator in the contemporary sense, and 27 years after the founding of the first study of curatorship at École du Magasin in Grenoble, France, misgivings remain about the curatorial role. On the one hand, curators are faulted for being mere facilitators and cultural managers whose intrusion into the essential components of exhibition making—art, artists, publics, and counterpublics—is unnecessary, even unwelcome. (Our cover depicts Cindy Sherman at Artists Space in the 1970s, posing cheerfully as this sort of worker bee.) On the other, curators are accused of usurping artists’ rightful share of self-determination and interjecting a distracting performance of their own authorship into the happy and transparent relationship between art and people. These complaints cast curators as megalomaniacs or middlemen, lackeys or celebrities, exhibition makers or exhibitionists. Taken together, these anti-curatorial postures produce an odd double picture of a figure that in one gesture arrogates and abolishes their own position.

Language: English
Pages: 83
Size: 18.7 X 26 CM
Price: €10.00

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The Exhibitionist 9. Jens Hoffmann (Ed.).

Posted in Exhibitions, Journals, magazines on April 30th, 2014
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The Exhibitionist 9

Overture
Jens Hoffmann and Lumi Tan
Curator’s Favorites
Monika Szewczyk – Idolizing Twilight
Chen Tamir – Liminal Spaces
Hendrik Folkerts – WACK the Canon!
Back in the Day
Inés Katzenstein – Experiencias 68: A Threshold
Missing in Action
Lucy Lippard – After a Fashion: The Group Show
introduced by Chelsea Haines
Attitude
Massimiliano Gioni – What I Did Last Summer
Assessments: Bergen Assembly 2013: Monday Begins Saturday
Christopher Y. Lew – Workers’ Compensation
Ase Lovgren – More Verbs, Please
Laurel Ptak – Art in the Age of the Norwegian Semi-Social-Democratic-Post-Welfare-State
Johanne Nordby Werno – Love for Labour
Rigorous Research
Germano Celant – The Territories of Exhibition
Six x Six
Ngahiraka Mason, Fionn Meade, Pable Léon de la Barra, Fillipa Ramos, Maria Inés Rodriguez, Syrago Tsiara
Rear Mirror
Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielsky – Considering the 2013 Carnegie International
Jennifer Gross – The Société Anonyme’s Dada Destiny

Edited by Jens Hoffmann, Julian Myers-Szupinska, Lumi Tan
Pages: 84
Issn: 2038-0984
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The Exhibitionist #4

Posted in Exhibitions, magazines, writing on September 2nd, 2011
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The Exhibitionist #4 – La Critique, Journal on Exhibition Making

The Exhibitionist, a journal made by curators, for curators, focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making.The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns – encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

Editor: Jens Hoffmann

Editorial board: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Okwui Enwezor, Kate Fowle, Mary Jane Jacob, Constance Lewallen, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Jessica Morgan, Julian Myers, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O’Neill, Adriano Pedrosa, Dieter Roelstraete, Dorothea von Hantelmann

Design: Jon Sueda and Jennifer Hennesy / Stripe, San Francisco

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The Exhibitionist #3

Posted in magazines on February 22nd, 2011
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The Exhibitionist #3, Journal on exhibition making.
Published by Archive Books.

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The Exhibitionist #2

Posted in magazines, Motto Berlin store, Motto Zürich store on July 30th, 2010
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The Exhibitionist #2, Journal on exhibition making.
Published by Archive Books.

Contributors:
Tara McDowell, Matthew Drutt, Juan A. Gaitan, Aurélie Voltz, Constance Lewallen, Eva Díaz, Robert Storr, Jenelle Porter, Jane Simon, Mary Jane Jacob, Nato Thompson, Joshua Decter, Okwui Enwezor, Jack Bankowsky, Peter Eleey, Jens Hoffmann.

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The Exhibitionist #1

Posted in magazines, Motto Berlin store, Motto Zürich store on March 31st, 2010
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The Exhibitionist #1, Journal on Exhibition Making
Edited by Jens Hoffmann
Published by Archive Books

The Exhibitionist is a new journal focusing solely on the practice of exhibition making. The objective is to create a wider platform for the discussion of curatorial concerns, encourage a diversification of curatorial models, and actively contribute to the formation of a theory of curating.

D 10€

Available for distribution.

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