Carnegie Museum of Art has presented major
exhibitions of international art regularly throughout the 20th century.
These aesthetic and intellectually acute shows do more than reflect the
art of our time, says curator Madeleine Grynsztejn, they also exert an
influence on the present cultural moment. Since her appointment as curator
of contemporary art in January 1997 she has been preparing for the 1999
Carnegie International. Here is her first report on planning the next International,
as well as her thoughts about the changing world of international art.
to Europe for a two-week research trip
with Susanne Ghez, a member of the 1999 Carnegie Internationals
Advisory Committee. Together, we visited Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland;
Derry, Northern Ireland; Copenhagen, Denmark; Malmö, Sweden; and London.
At that time I was one year and one week into my tenure as curator of the
1999 Carnegie International.
For a contemporary art curator, there is
no greater excitement or challenge, and perhaps no greater privilege, than
organizing the latest installment in this 100-plus-year-old exhibition
series. Every few years, Carnegie Museum of Art presents the International
as an aesthetic and intellectually acute statement on the art of our time,
a statement that does not merely reflect on, but also influences the present
cultural moment. In the United States, the Carnegie International is the
most significant vehicle through which the public, expert and novice alike,
reaches a consensus on the current state of art.
April 199; en route. By October 1998, Grynsztejn had visited
200 studios in 27 countries.
Early on I devised a method for planning
my research trips abroad. My itineraries usually revolve around a major
exhibition, which allows me to see the work of many artists in short order,
and around which I then build a series of studio visits with artists. Having
picked my geographical target area, I follow up with a month or more of
in-depth research into local galleries and museums, garnering advice from
colleagues about artists of interest. Perhaps most crucially I arrange
for a local guide to accompany me to studio visits (particularly in countries
where I do not speak the language). Often these guidesyoung fellow curatorsprovide
me with a crucial perspective on the community I am visiting, and by the
end of the trip we have become friends. In this way I have thus far visited
27 countries and over 200 studios. My list of artists is taking solid shape,
and the thematic threads that will bind the show are likewise beginning
to reveal themselves through the artwork I am seeing.
In March 1997 it was symbolically significant
to me that my first research trip took me to Los Angeles. While New York
remains the center of American art commerce, Los Angeles has risen as a
center of American art creativity, and it is home to some of the very best
visual artists in the United States. I also wished to acknowledge that
while the Carnegie International has an enduring commitment to art worldwide,
it is a necessarily American project, with a primarily American audience,
and organized by an American-trained curator.
From the beginning I felt that if remained
sensitive to my cultural and geographic base here in Pittsburgh, USA, and
to the capacities as well as the limitations of that viewpoint, I could
proceed to organize an international survey from an admittedly subjective
but also highly informed position. My position as curator would become
tenuous only if I claimed to be free of geographic and cultural biases.
The most important element in my research would be to remain open and flexible
to the artwork I would see.
May 1997 found me in Havana for the seventh
Cuba Bienal, which since 1984 has focussed on the art of the so-called
Third World Central and Latin America, and Africa. This was the first
of a staggering seven international survey exhibitions that I would see
in 1997, including Germanys Documenta, the Münster Sculpture
Project (Germany), and the Venice Biennale in June; the Lyon
(France) Biennale in August; and the Johannesburg (South Africa)
and Istanbul (Turkey) Bienniales in October. Indeed, 1997 was a
banner year for large-scale international exhibitions both in their number
and in the consequent examination of their origins, purposes, and current
structures. The function and even legitimacy of international exhibitions
are being questioned today as never before. As a result, these shows have
gone beyond such traditional organizing formats as presenting artists by
their nationality (as in the Venice Biennale) having a single curator make
the selections. More recent international models have used a team of curators
who share authority for the selection artists, thereby incorporating multiple
and even contradictory viewpoints in process. The resulting exhibitions
(or conglomeration of mini-exhibitions) tend toward a multifarious and
multinational presentation that is a curatorial equivalent to our globally
diverse moment.
The increased activity in international
exhibitions has had the curious effect of making the Carnegie International
seem exceptional, even vanguard. What differentiates this exhibition is,
paradoxically, its traditional structure: it is curated by a single vision
with the active advice of an international committee of art experts, and
it modest in size relative to some of its newer counterparts. Consequently,
this show can distinguish itself with a strong artistic focus and thematic
cogency, those elements that are difficult to achieve in larger, more unwieldy
undertakings. At the same time, the Carnegie International will always
be distinguished by its longevity, its many manifestations serving as models
for other shows of its kind. This was made clear to me in August 1997 when,
in Bellagio, Italy, I attended a meeting of international curators organized
by Arts International and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. All
curators present were either in the midst of or fresh from organizing international
exhibitions in Australia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Italy, Senegal, South
Africa, Turkey, and the U.S.
On the second day I was approached by a
curator who expressed surprise that I was a fellow conferee; rather, as
a representative of the Carnegie International, he had assumed I would
act as an advisor to the other curators who were in charge of less senior
projects. This comment sent a clear message as to the importance and respect
with which the International is held worldwide.
I learned a tremendous amount from my curatorial
colleagues at that conference, and their comments clarified for me the
role of the international at the end of the millennium. With the greater
degree of global communications, an escalating interdependent international
marketplace, and an ever-growing ease of movement among art-world participants
(especially artists), the definition of international art is undergoing
rapid change. As the artists frame of reference is increasingly shared
worldwide by his or her peers, new internationalism is emerging in which
artworks combine global vocabularies with the artists local influences.
And whereas a decade ago the art worlds makers and exhibitors were in
the Western world (a perusal of the 1988 Carnegie International catalogue
makes this vividly clear), today the art world is at its most decentered,
with thriving communities based in such formerly outlying geographies as
Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Scandinavia, and cities such as São
Paulo, Seoul, and Vancouver. These changes in the art world will be reflected
in the selections made for the 1999 Carnegie International.
Derry, Northern Ireland, January 27, 1998; visiting video
artist Willie Doherty in Northern Ireland’s oldest cemetary.
I began 1998 on a high note, by inviting
Willie Doherty to participate in the International while I visited him
in Derry, Northern Ireland. Before sitting down in his studio to see a
selection of his videos and photographs, Willie took me on a walk through
his hometown. I was struck by the way Derrys cityscape spells out the
historic and present conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. Dohertys
work addresses with great passion and intelligence specific and urgent
issuesyet as grounded as his work is in a particular locale, it speaks
volumes about universal conditions. Willie Dohertys work carries out one
of the most serious functions of art: to give definitive visual expression
to the most important debates of our time.
May 1998 was a particularly gratifying
and productive month for the Carnegie International, as the Advisory Committee
met for the first time in Bellagio, Italy. Three of the foremost curatorial
talents worldwide joined me and Carnegie Museum of Art director Richard
Armstrong for three days of intensive discussions around the themes of
the International. Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian poet, critic, and curator, will
organize the next Documenta exhibition in 2002. Susanne Ghez is director
of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and is well known
for her prescient work with emerging artists who have gone on to become
important creative forces. Since Lars Nittve joined the committee in January
1998, he has left the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark to become
the director of Modern Art at Londons Tate Gallery, Bankside, where he
remains one of the most vital curators working in Europe. These three colleagues
have helped to refine the vision for the International in immeasurable
ways. Encouraged and inspired by their advice, I proceeded from Italy to
Israel for an in-depth week of studio visits in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
In July 1998 I traveled to Japan, Korea,
and Taiwan for three weeks. Even with Asias sobering economic circumstances,
there was strong new work to be seen, particularly in painting and photography.
A dedication to traditional forms of art production, combined with a taste
for popular and even garish everyday culture, was a common strain in the
work of the three countries I visited. Seeing the second Taipei Biennial
in Taiwan provided me with the opportunity to study a concentrated grouping
of artworks from Asia that deepened my perspective on the region.
I conclude this journal , in October 1998,
finding myself once again on a plane, this time to Luxembourg to see the
second Manifesta, an itinerant biennial devoted to emerging artists that
takes place in a different European city every two years. From there I
travel to Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Basel, Zurich, and London, all in the
course of ten days. A visit to Latin America in November 1998 and a trip
to China and Thailand in January 1999 will bring my extensive travels to
a close. Spending as much concentrated time as I have speaking with artists
and colleagues around the globe has been an enormously edifying and gratifying
experience. The International will undoubtedly reflect their keen visions
and generous observations.
This undertaking has clarified for me the
role of the curator. Once primarily a scholar and arbiter of taste, the
curator today is more likely to be a conduit and catalyst for the creation
of art and the engagement of the public. The curator is a facilitator who
helps engage artist and audience in an open-ended conversation through
which is argued over, made, and remade. For artist and audience alike,
the Carnegie International remains a way to think in visual form about
the present, a forum where is not only raised, but also shaped.
-Madeleine Grynsztejn
The 1999 Carnegie International is sponsored
by Mellon Bank.
