Foci.

Carolee Thea

New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, 2001

Foci is a collection of short interviews published by the Apex Art Curatorial Program, a non-profit contemporary exhibition space established in New York in 1994. It brings together an assorted group of international curators from three continents--Asia, Europe and North America. The curators range from the more seasoned Harald Szeemann and Barbara London to current high-profile figures such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Kasper Konig and Dan Cameron, and the collection also includes resourceful newcomers such as Vasif Kortun and Maria Hlavajova.

In her introduction Carolee Thea describes "globalization" as the preoccupation of the collection, yet this theme is never adequately developed. At the conclusion of his interview curator Obrist states, "Exhibitions have to go past geographical and cultural boundaries; they must be transgenerational and interdisciplinary." This ripe remark on the theme of globalization should have opened the interview, constituting the focus of the discussion, Instead, it closes the interview, thereby ending any fruitful discussion of Obrist's comments. Personally I expected the book to address precisely how exhibitions can do what Obrist proposes, and although Foci poses the question, it is not prepared to fully discuss an answer.

The book does convey meaningful details about each curator's particular projects, concerns and questions, but the interviews do not tell us enough about their ideas and accomplishments, Yuko Hasegawa's conceptions of gender, Vasif Kortun's thoughts on preparing the Istanbul Biennial, Maria Hlavajova's ideas about curatorial collaborations, and Barbara London's overview of film and video are particularly engaging, Nevertheless, the interviews are unsatisfying. The substance is somehow missing, and this lack may be part of the persistent problem facing curatorial practice. If we accept the curator as somehow "disinterested"--as Barry Schwabsky maintains in his puzzling foreword that seems inconsistent with the intent of the book--then curatorial practice runs the risk of being stuck in some kind of never, never land: never entirely transparent, yet never fully grounded in ideology either, and perpetually paralyzed.

Thea presents her text as driven by the transition into a new millennium, yet the presentation of new insight is not the book's strong point. The interviews rehash familiar late twentieth-century concepts such as identity, locality, capitalism and colonialism, without scrutiny. This shortcoming may be due to the conventional question and answer format that often suffocates rather than stimulates dynamic discourse. Except for the impressive conversations with Cameron and Obrist, a substantive interrogation of curatorial practice itself is disappointingly absent. The interchanges rarely examine the curatorial process, particularly in light of "globalization," changing technologies and the expanding mass-marketing techniques used by museums. It is not just artists, but curators and curatorial practice too, that respond to the transforming historical moment.

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