Introduction

Translation, Intervention, and Innovation

in Curatorial Practice

D
Lucian Gomoll and Lissette Olivares

Museum and Curatorial Studies, History of Consciousness, University of

California-Santa Cruz

What is the task of the curator? What histories have shaped this professional role,
and which theoretical frameworks might offer us new insights into what it entails?
How can we learn from curatorial methods both in and out of museums, or reimag­
ine them to enable new forms of exhibition and relationality?
Etymologically, curating is a practice steeped in "keeping;' "guarding;' and
"caring for" -though how these meanings have been interpreted and translated into
action has changed dramatically over time. As Lianne McTavish explains in this vol­
ume, curating in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was once associated
with custodial work and other forms of manual labor. In the early- and mid-twenti­
eth century, it became a profession that required highly specialized knowledge and
skills, often legitimized by a PhD, to guide how collections would be interpreted
by the public, and to introduce that public to institutionally legitimized forms of
connoisseurship. Yet, in demonstrations of the pliability of curatorial methods and
definitions, several artists and activists throughout the twentieth century appropri­
ated the role of the curator to wager critiques of Western cultural institutions and
commoditization. Such artists in the 1 960s and 1 970s included Graciela Carnevale,
Hans Haacke, Ida Biard, Colectivo Acci6nes de Arte (Collective of Art Actions), and
Andy Warhol-to name only a few. Around this same period, oppositional minor­
ity institutions such as El Museo del Barrio and the U'mista Cultural Centre were
established by activist curators and cultural agents in response to dis-identification,
exclusion, and misappropriation in museums, reactivating yet again the open-end­
ed connotations of "curating" to challenge its conventional expressions.
The 1 980s and 1 990s particularly witnessed an explosion of debates related
to exhibitionary practice, foregrounded at the 1 988 Smithsonian conference that
produced the widely cited anthology Exhibiting Cultures ( 1 99 1 ), featuring signifi­
cant (almost canonized) articles by James Clifford, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
Susan Vogel, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, Stephen Greenblatt, and many others. In

Collections: A Journalfor Museum and Archives Professionals, Volume 7, Number 4,

Fall 2011, pp. 375-380. Copyright © 2011 AltaMira Press. All rights reserved. 375
376 TRANSLATION, INTERVENTION, AND INNOVATION &

addition to scholarly discourse, curators in the 1 980s and 1 990s staged interven­
tions that would ultimately denaturalize the exhibition form, undermining previous
museological claims to "universality" and "neutrality:' Notable examples include:
-Susan Vogel's Art/artifact at The Center for African Art ( 1 988), which demystified
the ways African material culture is disciplined into Western categorical and display
conventions, by placing objects where they normally did not belong, thus engender­
ing what she called "critical visiting:'
-Cuba's Havana Biennial ( 1 984), which forged dynamic connections between art­
ists from Latin America and the Caribbean who were marginalized in Eurocentric
art history and cultural institutions, and who were reductively categorized accord­
ing to their ethnic minority status. In 1 986, the Biennial expanded its curatorial
frame to include artists from Africa and Asia, becoming one of the most important
transnational art networks in the so-called Third World.
-Mary Nooter Roberts' Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals ( 1 993),
which challenged the Enlightenment equivalence "seeing is knowing" by presenting
the visual as mediation and obstruction, based on how various African objects per­
formed in previous contexts. As a curatorial intervention, Secrecy innovatively drew
from the content of displays to rearticulate the exhibition form itself.
-Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum ( 1992), which, through creative juxtapositions
and haunting exposures of which groups are included or excluded in museum ar­
chives, revealed hidden and often shameful parts of collections related to colonial­
ism and institutional racism at the Maryland Historical Society. Wilson's conceptual
praxis also subverted traditional categories and created new ones to put into rela­
tion many objects and stories that were previously segregated at that institution.
Today, as museums turn toward what is often referred to as the "new museol­
ogy;' many curators still rely on the traditional white cube gallery model to avoid a
political stance, or to maintain a self-effacing relationship to their own practices of
framing, contextualizing, and disciplining objects. At the same time, we might hope
that there are just as many scholars and practitioners whose goal it is to disrupt and
even annihilate such conventions-the latter an expression of what Sandy Stone
calls "curating insurgencies:'

On May 1 3- 1 5 2010, Museum and Curatorial Studies (MACS) at UC Santa Cruz

hosted an international conference entitled, The Task of the Curator: Translation,
Intervention and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice. Presentations foregrounded
the roles of curators in relation to how objects and people are engaged in muse­
ums and galleries, as well as alternative sites, considering a variety of disciplinary
and professional perspectives. The event was originally scheduled to be a single-day
symposium; however, we were stunned by the overwhelming number of proposals
& LUCIAN GOMOLL AND LISSETTE OLIVARES 377

we received from the world over. With so many excellent applicants we re-imagined
the event as an international conference by adding two days with extra panels and
special events. The conference was informed by a graduate seminar of the same
name that we co-directed, simultaneously offered at UCLA and UC Santa Cruz.
Several of the graduate student participants assisted with the organization of the
conference itself. In addition, we enlisted a seven-person review committee to se­
lect panelists from the hundreds of proposals we received, using an online blind
peer-review process. Many other individuals contributed to the event, and we thank
them all by name in the Acknowledgments section that appears in the final pages of
this special issue.
The conference title, inspired by Walter Benjamin's theories of translation,
brings attention to the sometimes overlooked or naturalized labor of curators,
which involves subtle but nonetheless transformative acts of framing and poetic in­
terpretation. All of the contributions to this special issue clearly indicate that there
is no single task of the curator, but of course, there are many tasks. Today, it is com­
mon for multiple curators as well as other institutional staff members and interested
parties to work together on an exhibition, and each person participates with very
different agendas, interests, expertise, and other situated knowledges. These multi­
faceted, intersubjective, and open-ended dimensions of curating are also analogous
to how texts are translated. Both curators and translators act as interlocutors who
relay knowledge to an audience with variable types of experience and degrees of
access to "an original:' As Walter Benjamin insists in his famous 1 923 essay that
inspired our conference title, "the transfer can never be total, but what reaches this
region [of conceptual fidelity to an original] is that element in a translation which
goes beyond transmittal of subject matter:'1 Just as it is impossible to translate phras­
es by interpreting each word separately from the rest, requiring us to also translate
messages from "between the lines;' we believe a responsible curator must also be
attentive to the "in-between'' spaces of an exhibition that engage differential audi­
ences, ideas, interactions, and objects. According to this logic, the relational prac­
tices of curation and translation are intimately connected.
This special issue is itself a curatorial effort: it is a collection of texts and im­
ages that represent various approaches to historicizing and theorizing exhibitionary
practices across social, historical, disciplinary, professional, and regional locations.
It is also a translation: together the contributions constitute a partial and intro­
ductory representation of intense debates and collaborations that took place over
the course of three days in Santa Cruz-activities that are impossible to duplicate,
but nonetheless deserve fruitful (and critical) afterlives. Authors are grouped with
the panels and events to which they contributed, including nine thematic panel­
sections that feature paper precises followed by section responses, an extended ex­
cerpt of James Clifford's keynote address "The Times of the Curator;' analytic sum­
maries of roundtable discussions and other special events, as well as critical reflec­
tions on Sandy Stone's interventionist finale, "Curating Academic Insurgencies:' All
378 TRANSLATION, INTERVENTION, AND INNOVATION &

sections are organized according to the original conference schedule, and all of the
event's participants are represented in the pages that follow.
This conference celebrated the culmination of the Museum and Curatorial
Studies 2009-20 1 0 annual research theme Critical Curations, which included a
three-part Speaker Series consisting of talks by Griselda Pollock, Irit Rogoff, and
Carolina Ponce de Leon, an active faculty reading group, undergraduate and gradu­
ate seminars, and multiple exhibitions curated by UC Santa Cruz faculty and stu­
dents. For all of our events, and especially this conference, we have done our very
best to encourage dialogues between artists, curators, collections managers, librar­
ians, and scholars, as well as individuals who work across multiple professional and
academic fields, and from a variety of social positions. Following suit, none of the
section themes in this special issue are specific to a single discipline, region, identity
formation, or profession. They were constructed not only with the panelists' work in
mind, but in relation to the expertise of our esteemed respondents, the majority of
whom are committed to a collaborative feminist and anti-racist politics. It was very
important that we choose critical panel themes that would put different perspectives
into conversation with each other-in chorus with Gayatri Spivak's suggestions for
developing topic-based courses instead of historical- or group-centered approaches
-encouraging dialogues, while also respecting differences and disagreements in
ways that do not restrict anyone to a stable or comfortable "Otherness:'
In his contribution to this special issue, James Clifford provocatively theo­
rizes what he calls "the times of the curator." Playing with his phrases' polysemy,
he suggests that we are currently immersed in a historical shift that is decenter­
ing the West and is accompanied by the proliferation of curatorial sensibilities that
are "enmeshed in multiple, overlapping, sometimes conflicting times:' Such exces­
sive temporalities perhaps demand new approaches to translation and relationship­
building, which we may characterize as the tasks of a still-emerging curatorial figure
that surpasses institutional conventions and boundaries. At a moment when an at­
tention to curatorial labor is gaining incredible momentum, we believe that the fol­
lowing edited contributions from The Task of the Curator: Translation, Intervention
and Innovation in Exhibitionary Practice will be of great interest to interdisciplinary
scholars and practitioners for years to come.

To learn more about Museum and Curatorial Studies (MACS) at UC Santa Cruz,
or to join our growing network of MACS affiliates, please visit the following
websites:

M
http://macs.ucsc.edu/
http://www. macs-mirc.org/
http://www. macs-tv.org/

Museum and Curatorial Studies

& LUCIAN GOMOLL AND LISSETTE OLIVARES 379

This special issue is dedicated to

Mary Nooter Roberts (UCLA),
for her extraordinary curatorial and scholarly career,
and whose continuing influences can be traced
throughout all of the sections that follow.

Notes

1 . See Walter Benjamin ( 1 977), page 75.

Consulting Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. 1 977. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:' in Illuminations.
Schocken; New York, NY.
Butler, Shelley and Erica Lehrer (eds) . Forthcoming. Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James. 1 997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Corrin, Lisa (ed). 1 994. Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. New York, NY: The New
Press.
Gomoll, Lucian and Lissette Olivares. 20 1 1 . "Inversion de la Materia: Reframing 1 980s Chilean
Conceptualism as Performance and Transnationalism" in Ivana Bago, Antonia Majaca, Vesna
Vukovic (eds), Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters. Zagreb, Croatia: Institute for
Duration, Location and Variables.
Gomoll, Lucian and Lissette Olivares. 20 1 0. Writing Resistance in Crisis and Collaboration. Exhibition
catalogue. Berkeley: University of California eScholarship Digital Press; Santa Cruz: UC Santa
Cruz Museum and Curatorial Studies.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. 2008. Subject to Display. Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art. Cam­
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hamilton, Roxanne Power (ed). 20 1 1 . Viz. Inter-Arts, Volume II, special edition on Interventionism.
Santa Cruz, CA: Viz. Inter-Arts Publisher.
Haraway, Donna. 1 996. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege
of the Partial Perspective" in John Agnew, David J. Livingstone, Alisdair Rogers (eds), Human
Geography: An Essential Anthology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell: 1 08 - 1 28.
Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine (eds). 1 99 1 . Exhibiting Cultures. Washington DC: Smithsonian.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1 998. Destination Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University
of California Press.
Levin, Amy (ed). 2007. Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's
Changing Communities. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Roberts, Mary and Susan Vogel. 1 994. Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art. New York, NY: The
Museum for African Art.
Roberts, Mary Nooter. 1 993. "Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals" in African Arts. Vol.
26, No. 1 : January.
380 TRANSLATION, INTERVENTION, AND INNOVATION 'f3

Soussloff, Catherine. 2008. "Image-Times, Image- Histories, Image-Thinking;' in Tyrus Miller ( ed),
Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context. Budapest: Central European University Press.
Soussloff, Catherine. 2012. "Toward a New Visual Studies and Aesthetics: Theorizing the Turns;' in
Ian Heywood and Barry Sandywell (eds), The Handbook of Visual Culture. New York, NY: Rout­
ledge.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2005. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. New York, NY: Rout­
ledge.