The curator’s art is exaggerated – or so I used to think

The curator’s art is exaggerated – or so I used to think. It’s exaggerated because it doesn’t in the end make that much difference. Clearly a great deal of care and judgement goes into arranging exhibitions and galleries. Clearly shows can be put together more or less beautifully, dramatically, coherently – and one can appreciate these arrangements almost for their own sake But the main thing is the individual work.

So the main part of curating is selecting works, and ensuring their clear visibility, and anything beyond that, in the way of schematic or sensitive presentation, is probably wishful It reckons without the visitor

Visitors, after all, are not complete zombies. They come in with their own interests and priorities, they seek things out or stumble on them or have their eyes drawn to the far end of the room They follow their own paths and make their own connections. That freedom seems both right and inevitable, and, in the face of it, the most carefully laid plot and telling juxtaposition won’t count for a lot (except for those voluntarily servile visitors who put on talking headsets). Viewers make their own show and, as for curators, a random miscellany is as rational a procedure as any…
Or so I used to think, until I went to the new Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art last year.It was a conversion experience: conversion, that is, by recoil. It wasn’t the very dodgy quality of the work as such that did the trick.

And the gallery’s defiant populism – a collection of post-war art specifically culled to appeal to the widest public – was almost attractive in its heresy No, the problem was in the arrangement, the presentation. I hadn’t realised before how ruinously it could be done, and how much I’d just been taking some basic standards for granted. One unforgettable example: a room where some jolly, bouncy paintings by Beryl Cooke were hung in close proximity to the late Jo Spence’s photographs of her own body post-mastectomy.Uh? Did the incongruity of this just not strike anybody? Was there (incredibly) meant to be some “fat women” theme linking the two? Was it deliberate mischief? Or was it an attempt at non-curation, on the visitors-make-their- own-show principle? Hard to say, but it became clear that the principle did have a limit. The conjunction was there, and you couldn’t ignore it – and, once noticed, it was utterly destructive of both sets of work.Reluctant conclusion: individual works can’t be left entirely to speak for themselves; the viewer simply is not as free an agent as one might think or hope; the curator’s art is, for good and ill, most effectual.If you know the Glasgow GOMA, you may be reminded of it at the ICA’s current show, Belladonna. It’s a group exhibition of work by 29 more or less contemporary artists – paintings, objects, videos, working models – organised by two in-house curators, Emma Dexter and Kate Bush. And although, by a quirk of contemporary taste, quite a lot of the work included here might also have got into the Glasgow museum (knowing kitsch and ironic gaucheness coming to look pretty much like the authentic people’s choice), it isn’t the works that make the comparison pressing.