back issue

The year 2000 was charged with a momentous sense of history, a heady consciousness of being present at the turn of the new millennium that dramatically shaped the theme of the 2000 Biennale of Sydney. The biennale board's objective was to 'draw attention to the continuity of vision linking the two centuries'. To achieve this, the board invited an international panel to select artists for the exhibition, comprising Hetti Perkins, Fumio Nanjo, Louise Neri, Nicholas Serota, Robert Storr and Harald Szeemann, chaired by Nick Waterlow. The following interviews with four of the 2000 Biennale of Sydney's eminent selection panelists explore the role of the curatorium in that exhibition and in exhibition-making in general ...

Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate Gallery, London

NS: The obvious hazard of making an exhibition by committee is that the exhibition will be bland, lack rigour or have no point of view. The passions that are evident in a show made by a single curator need to be maintained in a big group survey. In the case of the Carnegie there was no hierarchy, but in Sydney it was clear from the outset that the detail of the show would be made by Nick, taking our advice, and using his experience and knowledge of the context in Sydney. He therefore became primus inter pares [first among equals]. There was no tension in this and it was a necessary outcome of the character of the advisory committee, given that we were spread across the world ...

Hetti Perkins, Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

MF: Does such a curatorium also bring challenges in terms of differences in culture, and of working and discussion styles?

HP: ... Of course, cultural understandings work both ways so, for example, when I am co-curating with other Indigenous curators on exhibitions of Indigenous art I can dispense with the tired old arguments about bark painters and weavers not being contemporary artists, identity and race being unfashionable, and politics being provincial. To move beyond shared or accepted cultural understandings, to gain a range of perspectives - that is the point of bringing together a diverse curatorium ...

Louise Neri, Gagosian Gallery, New York

MF: From your personal experience, including the 2000 biennale, what are the strengths and challenges of curating by curatorium?

LN: The strengths include the opportunity for a broad dialogue and polemic, the necessity of having to clearly articulate and present proposals and choices to others, exposure to the ideas and subjectivities of others, and the presence of a larger pool of information across generation and culture. The challenges include dealing with the illusion of consensus, having to compromise, incompatibility within the curatorium, unwieldiness of decision-making, and the way that your role can become more a conduit of information and ideas rather than a direct implementer ...

Fumio Nanjo, Director, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

MF: What was your reaction when you saw that biennale?

FN: It was a very concise directory of major artists of the contemporary art world. I had brought Mariko Mori, Yayoi Kusama and Yoko Ono into the discussions as they were three outstanding and well-known female Japanese artists. Of course there were artists from other areas of the world but I was interested to see how the Asian artists looked in comparison, and particularly whether the Asian artists were proposing new aesthetics or not. I still do not have the answer to that. But I clearly remember that there was an Aboriginal artist standing beside the three from Japan, and I really felt that things were changing, that the twenty-first century was coming with everything put out on the same table so the aesthetics of each culture could be appreciated in its own way. I remember that the Australian artists looked natural to be there and some foreign artists looked strange, meaning that the root of the art was cut from its original ground. But perhaps art is always like that since it travels from poor society to rich society and one country to another, sometimes as an ambassador of the culture ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.