“Why I Am Not a Curator”

Think about what defining skills make up the professional museum world. I don’t mean the people who are marketing, finance etc. No disrespect meant. I know that they provide excellent and necessary services that require a lot of knowledge about museums, but I believe that a good cultural marketing person would be a good marketing person anywhere. These people provide structure, not definition.

Which basically leaves the various guises and aspects of the “curatorial” staff. What were these people trained in? How do these people define themselves? I will make a generalised statement: most of them what fit into the following categories; archaeologists, historians (art or otherwise), conservators and what I tentatively call “educators”. There are some qualifications I’ve purposefully left out. Probably to the chagrin to many people I know, I purposefully left out things like “designers”. It’s a position I don’t believe many museums have, can afford or don’t delegate around the staff anyway. I imagine there are many other types I’ve forgotten.

But let’s look at the list. Conservators… well, it’s a pretty strictly defined role. Part scientist, part engineer and in some cases part artist. “Educators” I realise is a cop-out “Misc” category. But let’s get down to the crux of the issue:  when it comes to the curatorial process of museums, how has it become dominated by archaeologists and (…I stick my neck out here) art historians?

This is where I come to explain the title of this article, a play on the title of Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Why I Am Not a Painter“. I feel I have to explain these literary references. The last time I did it as a pun on a Roland Barthes essay, people thought I was calling for an end of curators.

O’Hara’s poem describes the interaction between him and artist Mike Goldberg and the differences between their respective art forms. Years after I first discovered O’Hara, I found out he worked on the front desk at MoMA and eventually an assistant curator (some sources say he was an “associate curator”. I don’t know the difference).

I said a few times on here that curators need to come out of the shadows and offices and get there names and faces attached to the work they do. Then I think of Frank, more famous for his poetry than his work at MoMA.

Was there a better person suited to a New York contemporary art museum than New York’s finest contemporary poet? He – more than anyone –  understood the human condition of 1960s New York, hammering out poems on his typewriter, trying to capture the Present Moment knowing that the act of writing has put the moment already in the past. That’s why he used a typewriter; for speed.

So then I think, “Why aren’t there more Frank O’Hara’s” in the museum world?”

There are two things this is not a call for. This is not a call for a mass replacement of archaeologists and art historians in order to combat inertia. This is also not a call for more artist-curators, a term I don’t understand because of the very fuzzy definition. I can’t help but feel there are many artist-curators who are artists who project-manage their own exhibitions. Maybe involving some of their artist friends. What I’m talking about goes a bit further than that and not necessarily into art but definitely including it. A poet is an artist, true. But Frank was a very different artist to the artists he was curating. This was only to his benefit.

Who knows the power of meaning and interpretation of movement than a dancer? Who knows the effect of theatre and mise-en-scène better than an actor? Hell, who understands the forward-pushing narrative of one-thing-after-another than a comic book writer?

If you don’t have these people on your staff, then train them. This is professional development and possibly more fun than usual development courses. This is augmenting your staff’s creativity and innovation. Lord knows we need that now. This may be a very UK-centric statement now, but I just don’t believe we will get that by trying to force our museums workers into being part-time teachers.

Who understands the transfer of meaning within information than a journalist? Who understand argument better than a lawyer or a philosopher?

After you’ve been training your staff in the basics of various humanities they’ve never approach before, the other part to this idea is to use the museum as an outlet for their new skills. Talk about assigning emotional value to objects! Your staff write, direct and perform a play using the museum objects as stimulus (or… props?), you could reach new depths with all kinds of new audiences… if done right. As far as I can tell, the world of Frank O’Hara the poet and the world Frank O’Hara the museum worker barely overlapped despite him often writing poetry in his office. O’Hara went the usual route of publishing poetry. Today, we have far more scope in our museums to act as outlets for the staff’s abilities. The museum would almost become a production house of activity which could maybe bring out the poet in all of us.