++++ The status of curators in the modern art industry has still not been clarified and has also been scarcely reflected upon theoretically to date. Is the curator who takes on the organization and design of exhibitions merely an assistant to the artists? Is he or she a public relations or marketing expert? Or is the curator him or her self aesthetically productive, perhaps even the genuine, secret creator whose name disappears unjustifiably behind the more prominent names of the artists exhibited?
That such questions can only be answered with difficulty because the legal, economic and aesthetic foundations of curatorial work have hitherto not been defined either by the art industry or the art disciplines was underscored by the curator and publisher from Geneva, Lionel Bovier, in a lecture which he gave in the framework of the art biennial, Manifesta 4, at the Frankfurt Städelschule. Bovier, who has been the director of the Swiss art publishing house, JRP Editions, and curator at Le Magasin, the centre for contemporary art in Grenoble since 1999, started his talk by listing the metaphors employed to describe curatorial work. Thus, the curator has been called a meta-artist, DJ, conductor and director. The common feature of these comparisons is that they emphasize the synthesizing and supervisory functions of the curator. On the other hand, these terms have been borrowed from other arts and are not able capture the characteristic trait of curatorial work adequately.
Bovier came to terms with this difficulty by sketching a methodology of curatorial work on the basis of his own projects in which, in his view, the curator's autonomy consists. Employing his own exhibitions of Fluxus artists, photo-realist art works and a new project on aesthetic minimalism for the Graz Kunstverein, he illustrated his endeavours to present artistic situations instead of objects in order to counteract the reification of the art works exhibited into faceless objects. Moreover, he tries to “test the limits of social acceptance by incorporating marginal art forms”. The freedom of curatorial work, he said, is realized not simply in the selection of the works to be exhibited, but in the procedure of collage and assembly, that is, in the way in which the pieces are combined. In this sense, the curator is far more than a person to whom artistic authority is merely temporarily delegated. From being an assistant and aide, the curator becomes a producer. For this reason, Bovier claimed, exhibitions must not be comprehended as the final result of artistic processes of creation but as a point of departure for something new.