Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times - Nancy Spector, of the Guggenheim, speaking, and curators listening at a training program in Manhattan.

July 18, 2012
By RANDY KENNEDY

Over the last decade, as the contemporary art world has grown to planetary size — more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling Web sites, bigger museums, new biennials almost by the month — it has sometimes seemed as if a new kind of cultural figure has been born as well: the international curator, constantly in flight to somewhere.

The phenomenon is not wholly new. Roaming European curators like Harald Szeemann and Germano Celant set the terms in the 1960s. But the art world’s transformation has transformed the curatorial field, and this week you needed go no further than a few places in Manhattan to sample its increasingly global sweep. One afternoon in a meeting room near Madison Square Park a young Australian curator who specializes in aboriginal art was sitting next to a Yale-trained painter-art-professor-curator from Tennessee, who sat across a table from fellow curators from London, Beijing, Mexico City, Madrid (by way of Brazil) and Berlin (though working in Albania). In previous months curators from 20 other countries, many of them far from contemporary art’s beaten paths — Sri Lanka, Latvia, Nigeria, Bulgaria — had been in the city for the same reason.

Each of the curators had paid $1,900 — and in some cases more, for airfare and lodging — to come to New York for a 10-day training and networking program recently established by Independent Curators International, which has been known through most of its three decades for helping turn curators’ ideas into traveling exhibitions that are rented by established museums.

But over the last three years this nonprofit organization, based in modest offices overlooking lower Broadway, has reinvented itself, and its profile has begun to rise along with the profile of the profession.

While not exactly lucrative — the most recent snapshot by the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the estimated mean salary of a curator, broadly defined, in the United States at $53,540 — the profession has grown rapidly in cachet. The word itself has seeped into the language, a little too deeply. (“Curate your Facebook profile like you curate your life,” a social media blog counseled recently.) And while the term “independent curator” is misleading — curators are usually attached to institutions or programs, if only temporarily — the example of itinerant curators who have become art-world celebrities in recent years, like Okwui Enwezor, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Neville Wakefield, has had an effect.

“This whole phenomenon is really a post-millennium thing,” said Kate Fowle, a longtime British curator who took over as the executive director of Independent Curators in 2009 after working for a year as the curator of a new art center in Beijing. “It’s a profession growing at a very, very fast rate.”

Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Ms. Fowle said that an indication of the field’s size worldwide was that in the two and a half years since her organization started a training program in 2010, 672 applicants from more than 62 countries — “many more than we ever expected,” she said — have vied for what has turned out to be about 150 spots in the program, chosen by a jury. Two sessions are held each year in New York, each with room for only about 14 participants. And the popularity of the program quickly led Independent Curators to begin collaborations with other groups to start parallel training sessions elsewhere: in Philadelphia, Mumbai, Beijing and southeast Brazil, at the privately financed contemporary art complex known as Inhotim.

In New York this week the latest participants, ranging in age from early 20s to early 50s, spent time with some of the most prominent professionals of the city’s museums and nonprofit spaces: Nancy Spector, the chief curator at the Guggenheim; Scott Rothkopf, from the Whitney; Laura Hoptman from the Museum of Modern Art; Matthew Higgs from White Columns. The subjects and discussions — from the aesthetic subtleties of plinths and sandpaper tape to ideas about organizing exhibitions against one’s own taste — were as expansive and amorphous as the job description.

Ms. Spector spoke about the difficulties of “grappling with the authority” of the Guggenheim’s architecture (“I sometimes think that I can’t install in a square room anymore”), but also, more extensively, about the dangers of the “helicopter model of international curating,” which too often leads to superficial understanding of cultures and their art — and to bad shows, she said.

Mr. Rothkopf, who was headed to another curators’ conference in Boston the next day, extolled the virtues — those he joked might seem almost “neocon” in an accelerating art world — of working closely with museum collections and with artists over long periods of time to create exhibitions “that shape an argument.”

“I want to have some voice as a curator,” he said, “not just as a kind of movie producer.”

An unofficial theme of the gathering was a desire among many curators to find ways to to define themselves against the juggernaut of the commercial art world while still being able to pay the bills.

“It’s very hard for people doing this in China to find the right kind of place, that doesn’t feel like just a part of the market,” said Su Wei, an independent critic and curator from Beijing. Meaghan Kent, who worked for Chelsea galleries for many years and recently started a nonprofit program, site95, that organizes shows in temporary urban spaces, said that many curators she knows are as creative about their livelihoods as they are in their work with art and artists.

“There are a lot of people out there who are artist-curator-bartender-whatevers, and they just put it all together to make it work,” she said. “They want to be able to have the freedom to make things up as they go.”

Emilia Galatis, a curator from Perth, Australia, who spent part of last year in the desert meeting aboriginal artists, said that visiting New York and talking to curators from around the world underscored for her how far off the radar of contemporary art aboriginal art remains, and how narrow the focus of the curatorial field can be despite its size.

“It’s really hard even to talk precisely about global curating when the world is still so diverse,” she said.

But Mr. Su said that the more he traveled as a curator, the less diverse the art world was coming to seem. “I was at another curators conference just before I came here, in Guangzhou, and all the things we were discussing there weren’t much different from what we’re discussing here today.”

 

Photographs courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, at the Guggenheim Museum, with portraits here from Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland and Ukraine, as well as New York and South Carolina. More Photos »

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: July 5, 2012

Rineke Dijkstra has enormous faith in the power of two things: youth and the camera. In her best work this 53-year-old Dutch artist uses photography and sometimes video to coax out the emotional subtleties and raw energy that are special to children, adolescents and young adults, with grave, revelatory and sometimes ecstatic results.

 

At other times her portraits are more opaque, which can yield another kind of magnetism: We see pictures of resistance to photography in which Ms. Dijkstra’s subjects hold on to their secrets, showing us a more armored youthful vulnerability.

Both kinds of images can be found in Ms. Dijkstra’s richly affecting 20-year midcareer survey at the Guggenheim Museum. Organized jointly with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — and overseen by the curators Sandra S. Phillips of that museum and Jennifer Blessing of the Guggenheim — it brings together more than 70 color photographs and 5 video works. They create an engrossing meditation on the anxieties, pride and tumult of youth and the emergence of the self, and also on the degree to which the camera can capture these rites of passage.

Ms. Dijkstra studied photography at art school in Amsterdam and spent a few years working commercially, taking corporate portraits and images for annual reports — activity that left her frustrated. She felt that her subjects remained hidden behind social and professional masks and habits of self-presentation, while she sought a greater emotional intensity.

A serious injury gave Ms. Dijkstra needed time to think: five months in bed followed by physical therapy that culminated in swimming. One day in June 1991, toward the end of her recovery, she photographed herself immediately after swimming a grueling 30 laps. She thought that fatigue would lend the photograph an emotional immediacy. It did.

That self-portrait, which shows the artist in a dripping bathing suit, looking winded and slightly bowed but staring defiantly at the camera, is in the show. Drawing from traditional portraiture and postmodern setup photography, it signals the beginning of Ms. Dijkstra’s work as an artist, in particular her tendency to photograph the young, who are less practiced at self-presentation.

Echoing the swimming pool image, she began photographing teenagers in similar moments of physical exposure, in swimsuits on the beach. She then sought out situations of genuine stress or momentous change, as in her large head shots of young Portuguese toreros just after emerging from the bullring, their faces bloodied and garments torn, their eyes glowing with triumph and relief; or her full-length photographs of dazed young mothers standing naked with their newborns in their arms, like no-frills, modern-day Madonnas.

Ms. Dijkstra is member of a prominent generation of European photographers that includes Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, all Germans. But it is often said, and it is true, that her work is less glamorous and more human and frankly expressive than theirs.

Moreover, Ms. Dijkstra uses photography in a way that few of her contemporaries do: as a kind of pivot between portrait painting and reality — that is, between completely hand-formed and therefore fictive pictures of real people and real people themselves. Her photographs adopt some formal aspects of painting, but their subjects are also much more present and unmediated in realistic detail and emotional mood.

The pivoting nature of Ms. Dijkstra’s images is clear in the first gallery of the Guggenheim show, which is distributed somewhat awkwardly through four of the museum’s tower galleries adjoining the rotunda. It begins with an imposing selection of the beach portraits (1992-94) that established Ms. Dijkstra’s reputation: the full-length, nearly life-size color photographs of teenagers and slightly younger children taken at ocean’s edge in the United States, Poland, Britain, Ukraine and Croatia.

The monumental isolation of the figures is enhanced by low-angle shots, along with frontal poses and the austere, slightly abstract background bands of beach, water and sky, all of which echo the full-length portraits of Goya, Hals and Manet. This sense of form and formality contrasts markedly with the pictures’ contemporary casualness — the exposed flesh and intimations of fun and sun — even as it is confirmed by the prevailing seriousness and subtle anticipatory anxiety.

Some subjects, like a Ukrainian youth in a red Speedo-type swimsuit, are rawboned and angular; they have not grown into their bodies. A tall, lanky girl on a Polish beach has full hips but a flat chest; her pale green bathing suit is wet only up to the waist, suggesting the upward progress of puberty. A more mature blond girl in a silky orange two-piece in Hilton Head Island, S.C., has mustered makeup, jewelry and an elaborate hairdo worthy of a local teenage beauty contest.

Speaking about the beach portraits in an interview, Ms. Dijkstra hit the nail on the head when she said, “They showed what we don’t want to show anymore but still feel.” Looking at these pictures, we understand that the emotional vulnerability of youth is not so much outgrown as hidden.

Time, change and the lack of change are among Ms. Dijkstra’s themes, which she often emphasizes by photographing the same person over time. In a series of seven half-length portraits shot over three years, we track the maturation of a teenager named Olivier, starting with two images from July 21, 2000, the day he joins the French Foreign Legion, has his head shaved and dons fatigues. Over the next five images, as he appears in uniforms or sweaty T-shirts, his expression remains amazingly, almost frighteningly, constant and, in a way, young, even as he hardens and fills out, progressing from boy to man.

A fuller transformation is revealed in the same gallery by a series of 11 images taken between 1994 and 2008 that follow a young Bosnian refugee named Almerisa into adolescence and beyond, to motherhood. Always shown seated in a chair, Almerisa becomes tall and gangly, then womanly and, according to some writers, more assimilated.

More transfixing, however, are the subtle and not so subtle changes in her face and, it seems, her attitude. As she tries out different makeup and hair colors, her visage gains a palpable brittleness, becoming slightly common. In the final image she is shown with her infant; corny as it may sound, her face has regained some of the softness apparent in the first images from her childhood.

In Ms. Dijkstra’s videos the passage of time is, as might be expected, even more present, but in remarkably different ways. At one end of the spectrum is the near motionless quiet of “Ruth Drawing Picasso,” a wonderful six-minute portrait that may be as close to still photography as video can get but is much more revealing.

It shows a young schoolgirl seated on the floor of the Tate Liverpool completely absorbed in copying a Picasso painting (that is never shown) into her sketchbook. In her subtle shiftings of gaze, expression and position, Ruth comes across as an immensely likable, self-sufficient child whose existence brightens your view of the future.

In contrast to Ruth’s stillness is the sometimes ecstatic energy found in Ms. Dijkstra’s videos of teenagers in dance clubs: a two-channel projection from 1996-97, “Buzz Club, Liverpool, UK/Mystery World, Zaandam, NL,” and the four-channel installation “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK,” from 2009.

In both Ms. Dijkstra once more presents her subjects in formally controlled circumstances, against white seamless backgrounds and shot mostly at three-quarter length. In “Buzz Club” the subjects mostly hang out: They smoke, chew gum and drink beer (often simultaneously) while swaying to the music and largely ignoring the camera. But one young woman in a white dress that reveals her midriff is an exception; as the music’s beat becomes irresistible, she locks eyes with the camera and dances her heart out, to riveting effect.

Her generous performance may have inspired the “Krazyhouse” video, for which Ms. Dijkstra invited selected clubgoers to dance before her camera to their favorite music. Again, their performances vary greatly in generosity or, put another way, in the degree to which the music (and the camera) is resisted or surrendered to. But when they cut loose, as do Simon and Dee, it is hard not to be enthralled, and grateful to Ms. Dijkstra for capturing such powerful flashes of human potential.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” continues through Oct. 8 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street; (212) 423-3500, guggenheim.org.

 A version of this review appeared in print on July 6, 2012, on page C19 of the New York edition with the headline: What’s Hiding In Plain Sight.

By TED LOOS

Published: June 28, 2012

SOME time in the mid 1970s Dorothy Lichtenstein stopped by her husband’s studio on the Bowery one day after lunch, expecting to find him at work on a new painting.

 But instead of creating, the Pop master Roy Lichtenstein was intent on an act of destruction.

Using a matte knife, Lichtenstein — who had long been a household name for his Benday dot paintings of the 1960s — was slashing away at several earlier works, small and colorful abstractions dating to the late ’50s.

“He had dug them out of somewhere and was just cutting them up,” Ms. Lichtenstein recalled recently. “So his assistant and I yelled, ‘Stop!’ ”

They managed to grab a few of the paintings and tucked them away. Now three of them, lent by Ms. Lichtenstein from her large trove of her husband’s works, are appearing in “Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective,” a major exhibition of work by the artist, who died in 1997, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago until Sept 3.

“In a way I’m hesitant to lend them since Roy was destroying them,” Ms. Lichtenstein, 72, said, seated in the living area of the large West Village complex, created from several buildings, that serves as her New York residence and also houses her husband’s last studio and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, which she started to preserve the legacy of her husband, whom she married in 1968.

Ms. Lichtenstein added that she assumed he simply wasn’t happy with the early pieces, but that they may round out the public’s perception of his work.

“I think it’s good to have them there,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who suddenly emerged fully formed in 1961. He had a somewhat tortured career as an artist before that. He used to describe putting his works on the roof of his old car, driving in from Ohio and going from gallery to gallery.”

Merely by saving them in the first place, Ms. Lichtenstein helped shape the Chicago show, which features more than 170 works and will eventually travel to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Tate Modern in London and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

But her influence is felt more pervasively too, since she lent dozens more works for the exhibition from her personal holdings, which number in the hundreds. And the foundation, of which Ms. Lichtenstein is the president, also lent pieces to the show.

Flipping through the catalog and referring to the lender identifications, she said cheerily, “Where it just says ‘private collection,’ that’s usually me.”

The organizers of the retrospective said that Ms. Lichtenstein’s participation was crucial.

“The biggest thing for us in the beginning is that she blessed this project,” said James Rondeau, chairman of the contemporary department at the Art Institute, who organized the show with Sheena Wagstaff, chairwoman of modern and contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “We wouldn’t have been able to move ahead without it.”

“A lot of people have come to her and wanted to do this,” he added. “Sometimes she has encouraged smaller shows, but nothing on this scale.”

Ms. Lichtenstein, who spends much of her year in Florida and the Hamptons, confirmed that there is no shortage of requests to lend crossing her desk. She often parts with one or two pieces here and there.

But she had been feeling that her husband was due for a “really major show”; his last full-on retrospective was in 1993, at the Guggenheim Museum, when Lichtenstein was still alive.

The Chicago show has many of the Pop paintings that audiences may already know, like “Drowning Girl” (1963), but Mr. Rondeau said that he was particularly pleased to feature nearly 50 works on paper, a medium that was not included in the 1993 show.

Ms. Lichtenstein encouraged Mr. Rondeau to pore through 70 boxes of works on paper that are kept in storage. “She had never given access to those before,” he said.

The focus on drawings pleased Ms. Lichtenstein, she said, because they “show Roy’s hand more” and make clear that he wasn’t just an artist who appropriated from comic books, but a master of composition in his own right.

But she stressed that she never tries to guide the hand of curators in terms of content. “I always love to see somebody else’s ideas and interpretations,” she said. “I’ll see things in a new light.”

On special occasions, however, she will get involved behind the scenes, if she knows works that the curators want to include are in other hands. For “Picasso and American Art,” a 2006 show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she wrote two letters to collectors who own major Lichtensteins, encouraging them to lend. “I knew how important Picasso was to Roy,” she said. One letter did the trick; the other was a no-go.

For the Chicago show Ms. Lichtenstein went a step further. She knew that Agnes Gund, the renowned collector and president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, was being asked to lend one of the most famous works of the Pop era, “Masterpiece” (1962), in which a blonde tells a square-jawed artist, “Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece!”

Ms. Lichtenstein said that she surprised Ms. Gund, a friend, by offering another Lichtenstein work of the same size and shape so that she wouldn’t have a blank space on her wall for the run of the exhibition. “Masterpiece” did end up in the Chicago show.

Mr. Rondeau said that such diplomacy and effectiveness were typical of Ms. Lichtenstein’s efforts.

“She’s dedicated a huge amount of her life to protecting Roy’s legacy,” he said. “Not all artists’ spouses choose to manage and maintain that mantle. She feels it acutely and acts on it. She sees this as her job.”