Independent Curators International (ICI) – serie

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. These include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibition-making; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and the challenge of curating contemporaneity itself. In these five essays, art historian and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current thinking by curators; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in recent, present and past art; describes the enormous growth world wide of exhibition infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the contribution of artist-curators and questions the rise of curators utilizing artistic strategies; and, finally, assesses a number of key tendencies in curating as responses to contemporary conditions. Thinking Contemporary Curating is the first book to comprehensively chart the variety of practices of curating undertaken today, and to think through, systematically, what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought.

Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More...On Collecting examines the collecting impulse in its various incarnations, raising fundamental questions about why we collect and why we collect what we collect. Surprising and eccentric, this publication features three utterly different collections: Pictures (and other contemporary art objects) from the renowned Robert Shiffler Foundation in Ohio; Patents, a selection of the Smithsonian's collection of patent models submitted to the US Patent Office in the nineteenth century; and finally Monkeys, from a private New York-based collection of approximately 1,600 sock monkeys toys. Running the gamut from high art to the unmapped inspirational dregs of American culture, Pictures, Patents, Monkeys, and More...On Collecting draws on such diverse talents as Ingrid Schaffner--adjunct curator at ICA Philadelphia--and artist Arne Svenson, whose photographs of the sock monkeys combine the haunting and the beautiful. Also included are such artists as Janine Antoni, Willie Coles, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Marclay, Alan Rath, Jason Rhoades, Kay Rosen, Jessica Stockholder and Lisa Yuskavage, among many others.

Family photographs are a universally familiar genre, and an intimate one, which makes this collection an accessible entry point for its deceptively simple but deeply complex social and representational issues. In turning their cameras on their own households,17 artists including Miguel Calder*n, Ari Markopoulos, Chris Verene and Gillian Wearing consider the family as a dynamic social institution, and confirm, if there was any doubt, that its affairs are never simply personal, but rather are entwined with and illustrative of broader historical, anthropological and economic considerations. Using the languages of snapshots, documentary and staged photography, as well as conceptual and performance art, and focusing on the undercurrents of contemporary domestic life, these artists link the family to class and financial issues, gender and ethnic stereotypes, shifting marital and generational roles, and the impacts of war and immigration. Emotionally incisive and visually inventive, Shoot the Family transforms that most common artifact--the family photograph--into an illuminating investigation of contemporary culture. Essay by Ralph Rugoff and a short story by Lynne Tillman.