German Art World

To name just two other positions: Ute Meta Bauer was a member of the Documenta 11 curator team, and was responsible for the third "Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art" in 2004. We spoke to her in anticipation of the International Workshop on Curatorial Practices (6-12 March 2006 in Jakarta and Bandung), organised by the Goethe-Institut Jakarta and the Asia Europe Foundation (ASEF).

Ute Meta Bauer, you are one of the few female curators from Germany whose name was already well-known about ten years ago thanks to high-profile exhibitions. How do you explain that?

It's probably something to do with the fact that not many women ran art institutions back then – even if it was only a little place like the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart that was a trendsetter ever since its establishment. In Germany at that time, Annelie Pohlen was in charge of the Bonner Kunstverein, and Katharina Schmidt was the only female director of a large museum, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn.

Generally speaking, how could the curator's situation within the local cultural sector be described currently? Are new positions being created at the present time?

By now there are many more freelance curators, who no longer just have art history degrees but frequently a qualification in cultural studies, and these days some have completed curator courses which have now become established.

Between pressure to adapt and free planning

That is likely to become even more acute. As much as institutions used to shy away from working with freelance curators, people have now recognised that it is financially more viable for curators to be contracted and paid for only one project. This is not very gratifying, and can lead to a certain pressure to adapt. Unfortunately you are only independent if you can pay your rent, phone bill etc. In some cases, becoming established with an institution can provide an opportunity in the first place to become involved on a long-term basis with a field of research, with a particular specialism. Then again, freelancers can work specifically on projects for particular contexts, in which they plan their own content.

In Germany – unlike London's Goldsmiths College for instance – there is no real diploma course for curators. In London on the other hand, art which requires looking after by a curator in the sense of a "Visual Culture" also subsumes much broader interdisciplinary formats, and can for instance be complemented by film-related, ethnological, urbanistic or media spectra.

In this context I would also cite the "Whitney Independent Studies Program" in New York City, led by Ron Clark, as a key trendsetter. There, artists work theoretically, conceptually and critically to teach young curators and artists, impressing upon them a different approach to communicating art. Numerous museum people who are very influential today – such as Vincente Todoli, Director of the Tate Modern, or Corinne Disserens, Director of the museum in Nantes – completed their postgraduate studies there.

Enlightened by the cultural sector

A backbone, and their own vision of the effects that encountering and analysing art and its adjoining fields can have on people's perception and thought.

How efficient is the international network for German curators these days? Is it at all possible to identify a specific or a development trend in the local curator "scene"?

If I think about my own generation, we were still really naive during our studies when it came to knowing about the cultural sector, and we were more fascinated by art or individual artists. Today, people are much more enlightened during their studies because they have access to information from many parts of the world – which is surely important. The many international biennials and exhibitions have also placed more emphasis on the presence of the "cultural sector".

The biennial as a catalyst

I would prefer to see more themed exhibitions in different parts of the world than to increase the merry-go-round of the biennials even further. But biennials are definitely justified when it comes to bringing contemporary art with international involvement into regions where it barely has a status at all, and they often function as a catalyst. For individual projects, small and often very specific exhibitions it is becoming even more difficult to be noticed or accepted at all. This is why – particularly in these times of shrinking travel budgets – curators and critics alike travel to major projects in order to see as much as possible in one trip. A further purpose of the biennials is to present contemporary art to a broad audience, and to fill the local audience with inspiration for it. But politicians and financial backers must also be convinced to set up art institutions that operate over a longer term.