Io sono un curatore

Lecture, published in L’arte contemporanea 100 anni dopo
April 2018
ISBN 9788885821521

I am a Curator
Daniele Capra




The Art System
It is difficult to make people understand the role of the curator within the art system — especially at this moment of great change in the system itself — when no professional role is fixed or single-purpose anymore, but instead is subject to constant negotiation. Here is a brief overview of the key players as they have been outlined since the post-war period.
The primary driving force is the artist, who either physically creates the works or oversees their production processes. Both the critic and the curator are involved in interpreting works and placing them in the present, devising exhibitions, and developing the intellectual and relational aspects. The gallerist, on the other hand, is the figure responsible for selling works and developing commercial and/or cultural strategies that lead to their dissemination and increase in value. A collector is someone who feels the need to acquire works, for reasons that may be aesthetic, cultural, or even economic. The museum’s purpose is to educate citizens culturally, to offer opportunities to artists, and — where possible — to preserve their research, making it part of our shared heritage. The spectator, eventually, is the ultimate recipient of the work and of the museum’s cultural policies.


Curator or Critic
There are differences — more in approach than in concrete tasks — between the roles of critic and curator. Put simply, the critic is more likely to view the contemporary from a historical, diachronic perspective, in relation to what has come before. The curator, on the other hand, is immersed in the contemporary and adopts a synchronic perspective. This tends to make the critic somewhat more detached, interested in the work only after it has been completed, whereas the curator generally prefers to be present during the creative process, even acting as a generative element within it.


Making an Exhibition
The concept of the exhibition, as we understand it today, evolved after the Second World War, as the tendency grew to develop exhibitions around a thesis — with works arranged as though they were the parts of an argumentative text, aimed at demonstrating an idea or intuition. In the early twentieth century, exhibitions were still characterised by a simple, free juxtaposition of works by the same artist, or more often by different artists.
In the historical evolution of the exhibition, the first radical change was introduced by Harald Szeemann, who turned the exhibition into a kind of living organism. The exhibition began to engage directly with what was happening, offering an interpretation and articulating the cultural and aesthetic reasons behind it.


What a Curator Does
A curator organises exhibitions, writes articles and essays, and participates in debates. Their life is a blend of cultural, emotional, and aesthetic stimuli, along with constant interpersonal relationships. Most importantly, a curator must know artists deeply — their thinking, their lives — sharing their aspirations, certainties, doubts, and potential. I often say, half-jokingly, that the artist is my employer.
A curator must also engage with the other players in the system —institutions, galleries — and be familiar with the essays, and cultural elements permeating the contemporary, since the reasons behind our actions often lie outside the art world itself, in cinema, literature, television, current affairs, or philosophy.
In my case, I am an independent curator, meaning I do not work for a single institution, but am free to present and share my projects both in public or non-profit spaces (where the sole aim is cultural) and in commercial galleries (where the works are for sale). One should not assume that public institutions necessarily offer more freedom, and galleries more market constraints. Quite the opposite: galleries often provide broader research opportunities and modes of expression than institutions — especially in a country like Italy, where public support in contemporary art is lacking. In my conutry, it is fair to say that contemporary research is economically supported more by galleries through the market than by institutions.


Matters of Love
I am a curator, and when I am asked what this profession means, the first word I use is love. Unlike in other jobs, where people wake up in the morning knowing exactly what they will do and enjoying a degree of certainty, being an independent curator means waking up in the morning with such a deep love for your work that it allows you to endure financial difficulties, stress, and professional uncertainty.
Love is also what I feel — intellectually — for the artist: it manifests in striving to place them in the best possible conditions to express themselves. This means being their friend, their parent, their supervisor, and sometimes their partner in crime — ready to run at the right moment.
Then there is a third form of love: love for the work itself. Not all my colleagues agree, as many curators are more interested in ideas, in ideological construction, in macro-structures, rather than in the work as such. For me, however, I feel a sense of respect for works in which I recognise elements of meaning. Being a curator, to me, also means dealing with the work — from its conceptual and production stages to the way it interacts within the exhibition and its context.
And love also means care. The word inevitably recalls also the medical sphere and, for me, it means dedicating oneself closely to the contemporary — to things happening now, that have just happened, or that may happen — with the aim of improving and refining cultural and factual processes.


Cross-eyed and in Motion
A fundamental aspect of my work is what I call a heightened form of cross-eyed vision — the ability not to look perfectly straight in one direction. Being cross-eyed means looking in two directions at once and making comparative assessments to understand whether an artist’s research is meaningful or not. Acting closely and synchronously in the present means dealing with something that has just happened, or that one has helped to make happen, without yet having the interpretative tools in hand.
It is essential to act and judge based on as many examples as possible, to compare, and to learn to trust your own legs. And you must keep those legs constantly in motion — going places, seeing things, comparing, and relating what you’ve seen to what has been and to what might be.


Tensions
For me, being a curator means being aware of how thought is developing, and being able to recognise the forces at play and the tensions that emerge day by day. As with tectonic plates and the shifting of continents — often invisible — artistic research emerges in much the same way. It creates tensions, ripples the Earth’s crust, and brings about deformations and tremors, sometimes beneath the surface.
A work is never an isolated entity: it arises within an anthropological and socio-political context. Perceiving frictions and tensions is essential. In my view, a curator cannot deal with art solely as an aesthetic phenomenon — they must be able to grasp the deeper tensions underlying the work.


Cultivating Doubts
Personally, I do not appreciate art that is not ambitious, and that — as so often happens — accepts being merely decorative, pure entertainment. Artists who merely repeat existing approaches bore me and I find them of little significance. Without formal, cultural, or political substance, art is useless because it refuses its greatest potential: to be a tool for doubt, investigation, change, and awareness.
For me, if art does not keep us awake and does not pose questions, it is nothing more than a product, a manufactured item. The profession of curator, like that of the artist, is therefore an intellectual one. Ultimately, being a curator means cultivating and sharing doubts about the world — doubts that reality constantly pushes me to perceive.