1991: Then and Now by Teresa Gleadowe

1991: Then and Now by Teresa Gleadowe Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993, commissioned and produced by Artangel. Credit: Stephen White

The founding director of the Royal College of Art's MA course in Curating Contemporary Art considers how curators made exhibitions before the arrival of the Internet and re-visits what was happening in the artworld in the early nineties.


The image that comes to mind when I think back to my first days at the Royal College of Art is that of the Mac Classic. In the summer of 1992 a cluster of these small grey boxes with their little nine-inch screens awaited the first intake of students in the curating programme’s London course rooms. Although they had the capacity to email, our Mac Classics were used primarily as word processors, slow and a bit cranky.

They were quickly replaced by the more powerful Performa, and in a few years email had become the routine means of communication, but the Internet did not become a research tool until late in the decade, with the launch of Google and other search engines.

In the early nineties student essays referenced books and catalogues, and artists were researched through articles in art magazines, exhibitions, studio visits and word of mouth, not through websites, online journals and blogs. The idea of an exhibition researched primarily from the Internet was inconceivable.

Moreover, the British art world was still international only to a limited extent – connected to developments in North America and Western Europe but little exposed to contemporary production in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

And even the most mainstream Western art movements were not well represented in British museums and galleries; throughout the nineties the curating course year started with a study trip to Germany, to visit museums in Cologne, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and the Ruhr, so that students could see a range of modern andcontemporary art that was absent from British public collections.

But Britain – or more accurately London – was changing, although the excitements of the British art world in the early nineties were mostly focused on home production. The Saatchi Gallery had opened on Boundary Road in north London in 1985 and its authoritative exhibitions of work by American artists such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Richard Serra, and later Robert Gober and Jeff Koons, were immediately influential.

A group of students from Goldsmiths had launched themselves with the Freeze exhibition in 1988 and the Turner Prize of 1992 (reintroduced after a one-year break as a prize for artists under the age 50) included both Damien Hirst and Fiona Rae in its shortlist.

In 1993 another artist of that generation (though not associated with the yBa grouping) won the prize – that autumn Rachel Whiteread’s ‘House’ had claimed the attention not only of the art world but also of the news media and her Turner Prize award captured themoment.

Outside Britain shifts were occurring in art production and representation. In 1989 Jean Hubert Martin’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ in Paris had drawn together visual objects from across the globe, juxtaposing works made by artists associated with the western art world with objects made to fulfill religious, ceremonial or partly practical functions.

Critical responses concentrating on the problematic manner in which this exhibition approached cultural representation quickly permeated British academia, but its visual impact continued to resonate and it can be seen as one possible beginning for a more globally inclusive approach towards international exhibition making.

Seen from the perspective of 2012, the early nineties is a decisive period, when many of the questions that continue to preoccupy artists and curators were set out in provocative exhibitions and publications. This was also the moment when artists were invited into the museum to make selections against the grain of curatorial orthodoxy; Joseph Kosuth’s ‘The Play of the Unmentionable’ at Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1990 and Fred Wilson’s ‘Mining the Museum’ at Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore in 1992 are outstanding early examples.

And it was the time when museums began to question their own art historical narratives, exposing the lacunae and underrepresented aspects of their collections and introducing particular readings in the form of changing displays from their collections.

The Tate Gallery presented its first ‘rehang’ in 1990 and the principle of ‘rotating’ displays – often organised according to thematic rather than strictly art historical principles – would soon be adopted by museums around the world.

In his characteristically writerly review of Documenta 9 in 1992 Stuart Morgan suggested that the exhibition’s primary concerns were with a language of the body - the exhibition introduced important new works by artists such as Matthew Barney and Cady Noland.

But it is also remembered for works such as Jimmie Durham’s ‘La Malinche’ and David Hammons’s untitled sculpture made from clippings from dreadlocks, which proposed a much more complex understanding of racial identity than had been present in ‘Magiciens de la Terre’.

Works such as these quickly became central in debates around post-modernism and its relationship with the post-colonial.

Malinche-Jimmie-Durham

Jimmie Durham,Malinche, 1988, 177 x 60 x 89 cm, mixed media, S.M.A.K. Ghent. Image courtesy of S.M.A.K. Ghent


Many of these debates were assembled in the agenda-setting conference ‘A New Internationalism’, held in April 1994 to launch the new Institute of International Visual Art (now INIVA). Students on the curating course jostled for places at this ground-breaking event where an impressive array of artists, critics and theorists interrogated and exposed the hegemonic assumptions of the Western art world.

The early years of the nineties was also the period whenrelationships with site began to broaden and become more experiential, in the wake of the controversy around Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981-9).

In contrast to Serra’s Weight and Measure installation in the Duveen Galleries at the Tate Gallery in 1992 – still primarily formal and phenomenological in its relationship with the space it occupied – projects such as those we visited with the students at the second Tyne International in 1993, or installations commissioned by Artangel in the early nineties, worked with the narratives suggested by their sites, reflecting on collective memory and inviting social interaction.

Other crucial exhibitions of the early nineties included the retrospective of work by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), curated by Guy Brett for Witte de With in Rotterdam in 1992.

This exemplary monographic exhibition, and especially its scholarly catalogue, had a marked influence on the perception of art from Latin America, asserting the importance of that region’s art production and its particular forms of social and political engagement.

But perhaps the most significant development of the late nineties was the global proliferation of the large-scale international exhibition – the biennial – which is itself impossible to imagine without technological change: cheap international travel, the growth of the Internet, and especially the increasing availability of digital technology for the production of moving image work.

In 1994 students in the first curating course intake concluded their two-year programme by making a final exhibition, ‘Acting Out, the Body in Video Then and Now’, that included work made in the late sixties and early seventies by artists such as Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman and Nancy Holt, together with contemporary videos by young artists such as Matthew Barney, Cheryl Donegan and Steve McQueen.

In their catalogue essay the student curators wrote: ‘Our belief in the significance of these works led us to organize this exhibition exclusively devoted to video, at a time when this medium still fights for recognition in British galleries’.

This was indeed one of the first exhibitions in Britain devoted to video as an exhibition medium and it may serve as just one reminder of the ways in which the working environment has changed – for artists and curators – between then and now.


Contributed by Teresa Gleadowe

Teresa was the founding director of the MA in curating at the Royal College of Art and directed the course from 1992 to 2006.  She is now working as an independent writer, editor, lecturer and curator and is a visiting lecturer at the De Appel Curatorial Program and elsewhere.  She has initiated a series of events in Cornwall: The Falmouth Convention (2010), The Penzance Convention (2012) and The Cornwall Workshop, a weeklong residential workshops for artists and curators (2011 and 2013). 

http://www.thefalmouthconvention.com

http://www.thecornwallworkshop.com






Other features commissioned for our 21st Birthday

21 Years of Axis by Sheila McGregor >

1991: Then and Now by Zoe Pilger >

Being and Artist: Then and Now >

Looking Back (and Forward) by Mark Robinson >

David Sherry, Bear Theory, 2012 >

Plus the Axisweb team choose highlights from the last 21 years at Axisweb21.org >