I Am a Curator, an exhibition project by the artist Per Hüttner, took place at the Chisenhale Gallery, London in November/December 2003. Support Structure is an evolving work by artist-curator Gavin Wade and architect Celine Condorelli. It was first commissioned for Per Hüttner’s exhibition in London and has since then ‘supported’ a number of other projects, spacesand organisations around the UK.

Barnaby Drabble:

Per, do you think you can briefly describe the exhibition I Am a Curator?

Per Hüttner:

The original idea was to invite members of the public to come each day of the project and, during one afternoon, put together an exhibition at the Chisenhale. I made surethat these slots would be made available as democratically as possible, divided between different people from different backgrounds and ages. Interestingly this focus of theproject changed as it progressed and each session became more focussed on the artwork that was made available for the participants to curate. Increasingly the curator of the day wouldreflect on the questions and problems that they wanted to approach and use these artworks as a resource to do this. This change of focus was partially practical because to fill a space that is almost three hundred square meters in four and a half hours is not an easy task, and for the first exhibitions people were just running around shouting ‘look we justneed to get this up’. We fairly immediately understood that this strict focus on the finished exhibition didn’t work and that a looser model with more preparation for the curatorsof the day, was working the best.

Because I didn’t want the curator of the day to curate my taste, I asked five other people to select works that the invitedcurators could select from for their show. In the end there were fifty-seven artists from seventeen countries that were partof the exhibition. In addition to this selection process there were also other elements in the exhibition itself like the Support Structure that Gavin will talk about later, the interface cards that Scott Rigby designed, and the gallery crew. At the beginning of the day the fifty-seven artworks were packed into the Support Structure, and it was very hard to get anoverview. The interface cards had an image and a description of each artwork so when the curator of the day came in in themorning we sat down at the table with them and basically laid out all the cards, they were also viewable on the website,and most people had printed them out and came in with their own pack. The gallery crew were responsible for both handling the work and also leading the curator of the day through the process of realising theirexhibition. To avoid damage we didn’t want the actual curator of the day to handle the work, a point of a lot of frustration but a necessary precaution when doing thirty six showsin six weeks. The gallery crew were a pool of roughly fifteen volunteers, mostly art students or curating students, headed by Hannah Rickards who was in there every day.

Barnaby Drabble:

Regarding the title of the exhibition. In your published thoughts and projects you said ‘Contrary to what the title suggests the project had little to do with curating’. If so,why did you decide to call the exhibition I Am a Curator?

Per Hüttner:

Well there are two things I need to say to that. Number one is that we were toying with a lot of different titles for the show that more explicitly dealt with the complexity ofthe project, but those titles were not very straight-forward and, given the people we wanted to involve, we decided on something that was kind of catchy. The statement that you quote is also very important, because I wanted to make it clear in the catalogue that I am an artist, who is interested in curation from an artist’s point of view and that I make no claimsto doing a curator’s job.

Barnaby Drabble:

In the exhibition, as you have described, members of the public were invited to arrange pre-selected art works or art objects in the gallery space. How would you respond tothe criticism that this represents a very particular or very traditional approach to the idea of how an exhibition might be made? What about the questions of commissioning artistsor being involved in the initial selection, how did you feel about perhaps presenting an imaginary choice, but at the same time restricting the possibilities that a normal curatormight have?

Per Hüttner:

I think that there are many different answers to your question really, I do agree, when you are faced with the possibility of just selecting existing art work, that is a very traditional take on what a curator is. But then again, I think that I Am a Curator tried to do something that goes beyond that. By using a very traditional approach it enabled us to dosomething that was extremely creative and which opened new ideas about how to put together exhibitions. In terms of selecting the works, it wasn’t as if they had only five pieces to choosefrom. To consider the work of fifty-seven artists in one afternoon is a major task. Also, a lot of the work was not finished, it was up to the curator of the day to complete it, a lotwas interactive, and a lot had different elements that needed to be put together. So there were many different approaches on offer, reflecting the working methods of the originalselectors. You could also read the text that each of these people had written about their selection, and these were often dealing with this interactive aspect.

Barnaby Drabble:

One thing that interested me was the question of the opening of the exhibition. Presumably nothing had been achieved at the moment of the opening, why didn’t you do aclosing instead?

Per Hüttner:

Well I wanted an opening and I felt it was really important. Basically, in the central space we had the Support Structure with all the work in it, and then the doors were open and wehad the interface cards mounted on the inside of the doors so visitors could virtually browse all the work that was there. I thought there was something extremely poetic and strong inimagining the array of infinite pos- sibilities that could take place in the coming six weeks.

Barnaby Drabble:

You variously described I Am a Curator as a ‘solo exhibition, one project by one artist’ and ‘a collaborative experiment’. And you have already mentioned that you are coming into this as an artist and not as a curator. Can you tell me how you see these contrasting or conflicting models of authorship, functioning within the project? What was theresponse of your collaborators to your very clear insistence that this was a solo show by Per Hüttner?

Per Hüttner:

Well, collaboration is a cornerstone of my artistic practice, no matter what I do. It’s always based on collaboration in one way or another. And for me there is no contradiction andno conflict between these different models. I think that they coexist very harmoniously. And also even in the historical perspective I think that all the great artists have beencollaborators and every good artist makes use of the people around them, even if it is just a case of conversation or dialogue. Concerning my insistence on calling this a solo show, I think that that all worked out very well. There were jokes that were made about me being the ‘über-curator’; and hogging the limelight. But I think that everyone felt that there was room for their participation and that there input into the project was recognised and made visible. If anything, I should have probably been a lot firmer about the fact that itwas my solo exhibition. But that is easy to say in retrospect.

Barnaby Drabble:

In an historical moment where curators who introduce creative strategies in their dealing with art and exhibition are heavily critiqued for assuming authorial positions, do you feelthat there is a fundamental difference if you do this as an artist?

Per Hüttner:

I think there is, because there is a fundamental understanding of collaborative process among artists and perhaps also between artists and curators who have come from an art-makingbackground. To my mind there is a different expectation with people who have come form an art-historical background or those who have trained as curators. It is a big claim and goesagainst common knowledge, but my experience of artists is that for them it is not always necessary to be in the limelight. There is more fundamental trust in the work at hand and the roles emerge from that. Naturally, among the participating artists there was a slight concern that their work would not be seen, simply because there was such a number of works inthe show. As each show, each day, was different their doubts were in some way valid; the work wasn’t seen by as many people as it would have been seen if it was on the wall all thetime. But it is also, and I kept saying this at the time, that the people who saw it, saw it very differently because they had to think about where it came from and how it was placed in the context of other artwork. There was a more profound understanding and viewing of the works than in a normal show. And that kind of goes with my ideology about art; that it is better to be seen by few people who really see it, than to be seen by lots of people who just glance at the work.

Barnaby Drabble:

Gavin, you were involved in this project I Am a Curator, on the invitation of Per you provided a structure to support the exhibition. Can you briefly outline what SupportStructure is?

Gavin Wade:

Support Structure changes all the time, but how it actually panned out in the exhibition was a physical structure that played host to all of the artworks. It had six sections for the six different selections of work; from the five invited selectors and Per. It was movable, exactly as wide asthe gallery so you could turn the rectangle of the gallery into a square or a corridor, whatever was required. So it introduced another set of spatial strategies for the daily curator to use as well, by providing a gallery within a gallery, a tool to develop ideas while you were in the space, in addition to the art works in the exhibition.

Per Hüttner:

Support Structure became very much the aesthetic part of I Am a Curator because it was always there and it was very big, it became a visual marker for the exhibition andparticularly when you go through the documentation you see lots of different permutations of how Support Structure was used.

Gavin Wade:

I agree, but I would like to think that the concept of Support Structure was broader than what was physically there, and I think that you understood that when you came to useit. We wanted to make a structure that informed you and led you to do certain things, and provide a tool that was able to critique the exhibition, to deal with ideas ofcurating and to deal with all aspects of exhibition making, including the production of art. That concept was developed very strongly out of my previous work and as aresponse to Per’s invitation to come up with the best thing possible for this exhibition called I Am a Curator. We contemplated how to add to it, how to be of value and how tomake the daily curators aware of what they were doing.

Barnaby Drabble:

Can you describe your work with the architect Celine Condorelli in relation to Support Structure. Did you come up with the idea prior to Per’s invitation?

Gavin Wade:

The idea for Support Structure existed before Per’s exhibition, but in a very different form. I saw it initially as an exhibition, a display of devices, structures and systems thathad been used throughout recent history. I was interested in producing a wooden bench that went around a pillar that Lawrence Weiner used for naked models to stand on inone of his films. I wanted to make elements of walls that were constructed originally for the Museum of Modern Art to display works by Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.The idea was to have a whole array of say forty different structures, in a way an archive, a reproduction and also a curatorial artwork. I got in touch with the architect CelineCondorelli after Per contacted me and together we began to start thinking about designing some sort of facilitating system for the exhibition. I wanted to push beyond theknowledge and experience that I had already gathered working on other projects, so I invited Celine to collaborate with me on I Am a Curator, but also beyond.

Per Hüttner:

This was symptomatic of what happened in I Am a Curator, in that I asked people to contribute with something slight and everyone kind of took it beyond what the originalpitch was. Basically, I asked Gavin to design a shelving structure and he came back with Support Structure, which went way beyond that.

Gavin Wade:

In relation to this I have to say that I disagree that this was a collaborative project. Per was the director of the project and he invited me to provide a service. To do this I collaborated with Celine but not with Per, although his ideas and his invitation provided my context. This wasreally a case of a commissioner and a brief, so for me there wasn’t collaboration between us as such.

Barnaby Drabble:

So I Am a Curator was potentially less a collaborative project and more a project of collaborations?

Per Hüttner:

Yes, maybe.

Barnaby Drabble:

I wanted to talk about what happened beyond I Am a Curator, what other things has Support Structure supported?

Gavin Wade:

From the beginning one of our goals was that Support Structure should become an interface, and we wanted to become more of a general interface than something that wouldjust be exhibition design. We soon set up four other sites around the UK that we would go to as Support Structure. We aimed to take the gallery system that we produced for I Am aCurator to the other sites and evolve that, letting it develop in relationship to whatever the site was. The next site was the Economist Building; there has been a gallery run therefor the past fifteen years or so and I was interested in that site as one that had been adapted for showing art but that wasn’t particularly good as a gallery site. In our work there we dealt with that change of function and proposed a further change of function for the site. On the one hand we aimed to deal with the business activities in the building and,on the other, the more general context of Alison and Peter Smithson’s architecture. The building is one of the best examples of modernist 1960’s architecture in Britain and was meant toresemble a miniature city, a concept that interested us and formed the starting point of the support we offered.

This is just one example, and I would like to briefly mention the others. After the Economist Plaza we went to support a multi-cultural group in Portsmouth, a context entirely outsidethe art world. They offered us a very precise brief to come up with a new shape for their multi-cultural festival. Portsmouth led to Greenham Common, where the brief was to develop the interpretation of the common, in the light of its recent change of status. It was a public common for a few hundred years and inthe 1940’s was taken over by the military, during the Second World War. In 1980, or there about, it became an American base and controversially housed nuclear missiles, and onlythree or four years ago was it given back to the public. We are now exploring a further two sites for Support Structure and as such it is an ongoing, evolving project.

Barnaby Drabble:

You mentioned how the initial idea was to take the structure which you had at the Chisenhale Gallery and adapt that, was that eventually the case?

Gavin Wade:

Yes, but only partially. In the Economist Building we used all parts of the physical structure for I Am a Curator, but adapted it. We took some parts away but the main frame ofthe structure was still there, split into two and converted it into two office units instead. The structure hosted Celine and myself as we were in residency there throughout the duration of theproject. In Portsmouth the only physical element we used was Unit E, which became the multi-cultural archive. This we left with the multi-cultural group as some kind of legacy. That triggered an idea that has become a part of the Support Structure concept: to leaveparts at different sites. That is also kind of what has happened at Greenham; although we haven’t used any of the actual elements from the Chisenhale we have produced a new,much larger space there, including a bill-board structure, which we originally imagined for I Am a Curator.

Barnaby Drabble:

I wanted to ask you about this definition of support, which is in the title of your project. In respect to an active term like intervention, how passive is your definition ofsupport here?

Gavin Wade:

I don’t imagine that it is passive, but I think it could be. The support could be quite understated and hidden, something you are actually not even aware of it. Support Structureat the Chisenhale was a huge thing, but somehow it was taken for granted. It is interesting that at the same time as being taken for granted it could actually program you to docertain things. That for me is then an underlying concern for a curator, you need to imagine that there are some programmable aspects of what you can do, but you don’t knowwhat they all are. You set up a system to interrogate this.

Barnaby Drabble:

Both Support Structure and I Am a Curator have been described in terms of their ‘playfulness’. I’m interested in the possibilities of understanding the exhibition as a gameand the idea of the viewer as player, but also concerned with whether these strategies lead us towards prescriptive interactivity and a lack of seriousness. Do you see a conflictthere or do you think that these ideas can co-exist?

Gavin Wade:

Well I don’t think the exhibition and the things that I have talked about are a game as such, but I think they are resolutely ‘play’. The big difference is that with a gamethere is one goal, there is one outcome and one way of winning, and with open play, there are structures and rules and systems but there is no singular goal.

Per Hüttner:

I think also that this show was truly interactive because when the curator of the day came in, they were given this resource, and three people working for them the whole day. By‘true interactivity’ I mean opposing the ‘push button’ mentality, which can be seen as pseudo- interactivity, and actually offering people a chance to create something themselves. Thisis what the exhibition offered; the space was virtually empty when you came in and you really had to interact with it. One of the curators of the day even came in and said, ‘we’re just going to spend the whole day discussing which work is going to be in the show’. The day was spent in a democratic discussion where everyone had to vote. This was a verydeliberate creative choice, ‘we’re not going to show anything’. This shows how I Am a Curator raised questions about the idea of the elitism of art, in particular questions having todo with access, democracy and the roles of the artists, the beholder and the curator.

Barnaby Drabble:

Yes, I have a question about that, in both I Am a Curator and Support Structure you have both made clear your wish to involve ‘non-art world people’. Can you explain your reasons for choosing to involve audiences who have little knowledge of contemporary art in these projects? What, in your eyes, is the difference between art worldpeople and non-art world people?

Gavin Wade:

With Support Structure, the impulse is to test an idea.

Our idea was, can we take the idea of support and evolve it, not just for the benefit of art, but for the benefit of life. We had to take it out of the art world to do this. Theimpulse was to see what art could do in other types of situations that I had no experience of. I see no major differences between the art-world audience and others, but there may be differences in motivation of why they want certain things and what they are interested in dealing with. I think there is also an issue relevant to curating here. Predominantly curatorswork with people that are self-motivated to produce art, but with experiments like Support Structure, we approach people with no clear motivation in this direction and ask simply‘How can we support you?’ With the emergence of a brief, and our response to that, expectations are reversed and the fact that the outcome might be described as art is oftensurprising and problematic for those we support.

Per Hüttner:

I think I come from a very different angle when it comes to the non-art world audience because in my

artistic-curatorial practice I am dealing with exactly the same issues that I do in my photographic practice. My photographic work is always shot in busy public spaces, and I amputting myself in this situation in order to raise issues about vulner-ability, but also about the role of the artist, about what is staged and what is real. I am interested in differentlayers of reality, as perceived by different kinds of people. This goes also for I Am a Curator, where working with different members of the public can be seen as a learning process, as much for me as for them. Most of my time in art school was spent collaborating with scientists, particularly people involved in medical research. My initial aim was to prove that artcould be as precise and exact as science. After a few years I realised that it was the other way around, that science is exactly as haphazard as art. It is just that the rules that apply areviewed differently and inscribed in different systems of evaluation. What I learnt from this experience was the value of appropriating parts of the methodology of science, and Ithink that I use that a lot in my work. I want to find stuff out; my works are steps in this research, experiments along the way.

Barnaby Drabble:

The scale and complexity of both projects suggest that they are labour intensive, involve long timescales and as a result require relatively large budgets. What do theseconsiderations suggest for the planning of future projects of this kind? Is this intensity manageable within current structures for supporting art practice?

Gavin Wade:

To my mind, there just isn’t enough out there to sustain a huge number of practitioners working in this way. Its clear to me that with Support Structure, we actually neededdouble the budget that we had and I needed to give myself double the amount of time that I had. This makes you question how important the project is, what the outcomes are, arethey worth the time and money invested in them. I think that is probably what I am dealing with now. I am trying to work out if other methods might have been more productive indealing with say the multi-cultural issue, or the issue of public ownership of land.

Per Hüttner:

Well, all my work is about pain, and there is a level of masochism involved in the way that I approach my projects. I think you need to make these labour intensive, crazy,insane, projects in order to find out what it is that you want and need to do as an artist. Once you have arrived at this, it is not an end point, but a starting point, maybe then, andonly then you can start to be more selective.

Gavin Wade:

I guess I agree. Each phase of Support Structure has been a big investment, primarily because each phase raises very new challenges, but by the end of each stage we havedeveloped a set of tools, either as concepts or physical products. Now we have been commissioned to do a new phase, and the brief that we received for that was quite similarto a combination of some of the other briefs from previous phases and as a result we are able to deal with it very efficiently. So suddenly what we have been doing becomes clear: we have been setting up, making priming tools and developing prototypes. We have been learning to support.

What also becomes clear is how, as this project progresses, it strays further from art; I think we are producing architecture now, and for the last phase we were thinking of a retail site in Birmingham, so we would end up with a clear link to this idea of designing a product. I am quite happy with this evolution; in fact I am fascinated by it. What we might be able to do at some stage is present Support Structure like an autonomous toolbox. It’s like: ‘Here is our kit – give us something to do. We are going to support youwherever.’

The interview was conducted in Copenhagen, November 2004.

 

 

Title of exhibition: I am a Curator
Place: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Rd, London.
Date: 5 November to 14 December 2003
Artist: Per Hüttner
Display system: Support Structure (Gavin Wade and Celine Condorelli)

 

Barnaby Drabble is a curator and writer based in Zurich. Previously curated exhibitions include Ein Zweites Leben (Stadtgalerie, Bern, Autumn 2007), co-curating Nothing to Declare (Oberschwaben, Contemporary Art Triennial, Spring 2008), I almost feel like doing it again… (Zurich, 2004), New Visions of the Sea (National Maritime Museum, London, 2000-2003) and Burning Love (London, 2000). He works in long-termcollaboration; with Dorothee Richter: Curating Degree Zero Symposium (Bremen, 1998) and Curating Degree Zero Archive (touring since 2003); with Hinrich Sachs as Drabble+Sachs The City that never Sleeps (Umea, 2004-2005), Geneva Unplugged (Geneva, 2003), and Trademark Guerrilla (Swiss Expo, 2002). He completed his PhD research at the Edinburgh College of Art, and between 2000 and 2007 has taught and lectured on the topics of curating, contemporary art and cultural criticism at colleges and art-centres worldwide. In 2005, together with Dorothee Richter he established the Postgraduate Program in Curating at the School of Art and Design in Zurich. Today he is a lecturerat ECAV in Sierre.

Per Hüttner is a Swedish artist who uses curation as integrated part in his artistic practice, but has chosen to refute the title curator since his interest in questions related to curation liespurely in attempting to rephrase what the role of the artist could and should be. In his artistic practice Hüttner investigates how change in our lives reveals human vulnerability. He does so by putting himself in vulnerable positions in public places and has throughlong research found that approaching questions of curation is a formidable way of doing so. The aim with his artistic practice is that art will become life and not a representation thereof. Hüttner was a co-founder and co-director at Konstakuten Gallery in Stockholm 1996-2001 and founder and director of The Hood Gallery in Los Angeles 2002-2003. Important solo exhibitions include I am a Curator at Chisenhale Gallery in London, Repetitive Time at Göteborgs Konstmuseum and Xiao Yao You at Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou.

Gavin Wade is an artist-curator, serial collaborator and Research Fellow in Curating at the University of Central England based in Birmingham. He is a founding member and thedirector of Eastside Projects in Birmingham. His practice combines a number of strategies from developing structures within exhibitions for ‘supporting’ the work of others to a broader enquiry into utopian sites of/for art, resulting in projects merging fiction, public space and whatever else feels urgent at the time. Projects include: Public Structures, Guang Zhou Triennial,China (2005); Support Structure Phase 1-6, with architect Celine Condorelli, various locations (2003-2006); Strategic Questions (2002-ongoing) a series of 40 questions/projects in 40 publications inlcuding The Interruptors: A Non-Simultaneous Novel (2005); ArtSheffield05: Spectator T, a cross city project with Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum (2005); Kiosk3: Merz Kiosk (with Simon &Tom Bloor), Magazin4, Bregenz, Austria (2006) and Thin Cities, Piccadilly Line, Platform for Art, London Underground (2006-2007).