"Exhibitions of an Exhibition": Casey Kaplan Gallery - New York - Jens Hoffmann and the game of curating

When Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist began organizing exhibitions in the early '90 his clear point of relation was the '60s and '70 in bourns of both content and his possess persona, which drew on Harald Szeemann's transformation of the curator into an auteur. Whatever individual thought of shows like Obrist's "Do it"--which self-consciously revived Fluxus-era instruction-based projects--he not at any time hid his historical debts. through contrast, Obrist's less rigorous followers--and they are many--thrive upon the knowledge that current curatorial practice is a voracious and permissive beast and allows for greatly exaggerated claims to innovation and criticality. Jen Hoffmann, a Berlin-based Obrist protege who started mounting exhibitions in the late '90 may be the greatest in quantity ambitious among them.

As summer collection shows go, Hoffmann's "Exhibitions of an Exhibition" was not terrible. upon view were works by Meschac Gaba, Simryn Gill, collaborators Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel Roni Horn, Brian Jungen Marepe, and Rosemarie Trockel--a varied assembly balanced between elderly hands and up-and-comers. But the curator's traditional prerogative of choosing artists no longer appear to bes to be enough of a challenge; cunning maneuvering must now accompany it. Hoffmann asked four other young curators to each write a short body (to be available at the gallery) explaining the makeup of his exhibition, thus supposedly offering not individual but four "different" curated exhibits Declaring that he wanted to avoid the average curator's drive to "resolve" the relationships among the realitys Hoffmann passed along the responsibility to his visitants and received the credit as uber-curator (on this point, visit his other summer throw The Next Documenta Should Be Curated by dint of an Artist, at e-flux.com). Hoffmann's construction superficially resembles the team-curating principle seen in Okwui Enwezor's Documenta II and Francesco Bonami's 2003 Venice Biennale, omit here all the artists were picked by the agency of Hoffmann, who then delegated the task of explaining his motives. single thing was dear: Hoffmann would at no time give up the power of appointment.

Instead of acting as curators, Hoffmann's quartet actually functioned more like visitors recording their impressions in a visitant book or as rapid-response, on-the-spot critics (a format for the use of all to alternative spaces). One of the invitees, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy of the Americas Society in fresh York, captured the emptiness at the core of Hoffmann's practice. Her curatorial statement consisted of selected passages from Portuguese writer Jose Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness, in which the inhabitants of a city let slip their vision and find themselves in chaos. It was easy to read her contribution as a dig at Hoffmann's emphasis upon curatorial gamesmanship at the expenditure of the artworks.

Of the works themselves, perhaps the greatest in quantity telling was Gaba's Game of Democracy, 2000 a series of six grove tables in the center of the gallery with confuses in the form of national flags built into their surfaces. An alternate title in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts might have been Game of Curating. Rather than operate as a critique of the artwork-as-illustration original of curating, Hoffmann's meta-exhibition single reinforced it. Such projects exist almost exclusively in the barren space of the pres release; single hardly even needs to diocese the show, since in the extremity a gimmick has been made to carry all the weight.

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