While pondering just what it meant to be a curator the editors at Radar decided to invite three accomplished curators currently working in Baltimore to share their viewpoints. In an informal round-table conversation at a local coffee shop, Jack Livingston and David Crandall spoke with Chris Gilbert, the new Curator of Contemporary Art at Baltimore Museum of Art, George Ciscle, Curator in Residence at Maryland Institute College of Art, and Laura Burns, former curator of the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College and a member of the Photography Faculty at Goucher. The following is a transcript of that recorded discussion, with minimal editing.

LIVINGSTON: Let's start with what your idea, in a personal sense, of what your role as a curator is–how you think of yourself as a curator. Anybody can start . . .

CISCLE: I see my role as working from the basis of the art object itself. To pick art that has inspired me or moved me or has been the genesis of some kind of inspiration to me that I certainly want to learn more about and be in direct contact with. But as a curator, my interest is really in tying in what that art object or experience has to do with the relationship between the artist and the audience. So as a curator I'm always looking for artwork that is tied to an artist that will give access both to me as a curator to witness the creation of the work as an artist and eventually how I might be able to connect that artist's creation to people's everyday lives and their own experiences wherever they might encounter the art work.

GILBERT: I think my position is a bit different. I often find myself defining my own position against that ideal of curatorial transparency or curatorial flexibility. The ideal that one can take all one's lessons from the art object or all one's lessons from the artist is not really the one I subscribe to. A curator can't be without a certain agenda, because art doesn't exist except for certain opportunities, exhibition opportunities, or spaces that exist for it. The best example of that in the last ten years is the emergence of the Biennial circuit and the kind of art that is produced for that circuit–where the art only exists because a certain kind of exhibition opportunity exists. So I see my role as a curator as creating a certain kind of space, creating opportunities that wouldn't exist without my intervention. Now I do think that there is a role for looking at the art . But the act of looking at the artist, or the body of work that one's presented with needs a certain process that I sometimes call "extrapolation." In other words, you can look at tendencies within the art but if you don't extrapolate through an almost mathematical operation to generate something that didn't formerly exist, then the curatorial process becomes too static.

Yet, I do agree with George that if you consider the curatorial position as kind of a triangle between donors, public, and artists, the curator should be closest to the artist and the artwork–and by serving the artist and the artwork, the curator ends up serving the the donor, the supporter, and the public best.

BURNS: It's very interesting to hear both of your takes on it because I came to curating accidentally–I hadn't given it a great deal of thought, except that essentially the opportunity to curate for a college art gallery fell into my hands. In some ways, I've seen it as a very local experience. And it also coincided with me arriving in Baltimore. So I used the opportunity to curate to just get to know peopleartists and their work. And it took a little while also for me to even understand the fact that I actually had a curatorial voice.

What I spent a lot of time doing was just going around and seeing what was out there and acquiring a set of objects and ideas and artists floating around in my head and then eventually, maybe a few months later I would think "Oh, there's an interesting idea that connects this, this, and this." And things would come to be organically, and I would decide that I wanted to put together a show dealing with "X" idea. And it was usually the work that would generate the idea, but occasionally there would be something that was intriguing to me and I would have to go out and find things that supported my thesis. But lI think the other thing that became really interesting to me, working through a college art gallery, was that I had a certain amount of freedom, even financial freedom, because I was really the only person in charge. I didn't have to deal with a huge committee. I didn't have to pass my ideas through a lot or people–I could find artists who I found really interesting and actually support their work financially and have them create work for this space. That was incredibly exciting to me. So I found my role as a curator as giving people a chance to take risks that they might not otherwise get to do if they were dealing with more established institutions.

CISCLE: I'm just curious where you saw your relationship then to the people who came to see the work? Especially since you're a college, but also a public space outside the auditorium there.

BURNS: That's a good question. Our gallery is actually a multifunction space that is a theater lobby, a reception hall, and a passageway for students. And so it was working with artists like Peter Bruun, who was very interested in the idea of the space itself and what the space meant that was different, that changed how I dealt with the idea of audience, because the audience did change. There were at least three different audiences, or four. So I was interested in seeing work that would articulate the space in different ways or have people think specifically about what was going in that space, instead of just walking past art as decoration.

CISCLE: So would it change how you would install the work or the work you chose?

BURNS: I would say more the work that was chosen and also the installation somewhat, although the installation was often physically hampered by certain physical problems in the space–for example you couldn't have things protruding into the floors in certain areas because it was a fire hazard–things like that.

CISCLE: It's interesting in terms of myself also being at an educational institution, dealing with students and colleagues, and working with students that are artists themselves. My work as curator there can perhaps provide a forum for dialogue for them as artists to talk about …how you choose works and how you write and how you speak about them. It certainly affects my choices in terms of the artists and the art work that I'm selecting and how it can benefit my students directly.

BURNS: That's very different because you are working with a group of people. I worked in a very isolated way, in some ways, or isolated from the school, but more with the larger art community. The curatorial process was such an act of discovery for me, it wasn't something I felt I could teach. But you're using it as a teaching tool–so how has that changed how you look, the way you create shows after your work at the Contemporary?

CISCLE: Well, I don't know if it's changed from when I was at the Contemporary; besides beginning with the artwork as I said before, it was about also the artist because of residency situations and public programming and just wanting, as a curator, to have a relationship with that artist, to learn from them and have the public subsequently learn, so I don't think it's different in that sense. What it's allowed me to do is look at these opportunities as more of a questioning both for myself as a curator and as a teacher for my students–so a lot of times I'm choosing an exhibition or artist at the Maryland Institute, where they don't have the answers at all, even from the beginning of the exhibition, and I pose those questions to my class to deal with along with me. So that's a big difference. Whereas at the Contemporary, it was either myself or staff curators, working with them to have dialogue. At MICA, I'm having that discussion with artists and also with people who are of a generation younger than myself. That's a big difference and very exciting obviously and energizing for me.

LIVINGSTON: Were there curators from the last fifty years that any of you were particularly influenced by?

GILBERT: It's interesting to know about previous curatorial practices but there's a limited amount one can benefit from them–one would really be mistaken to take another's curatorial practices as one's model. Recently there has been a lot of talk about the profession of curating and whether curators are professionals or not. And there are two sides of that. On the one hand, curators should take over the principled characteristics of professionals, but I don't think there is a fixed body of knowledge that curators should and can have in contemporary art. I don't think there is a real expertise or canon that they can actually know. And that leads me to say that a good curator is necessarily sui generis. Each one, much more than an academic, for example, will have to approach it from their own direction. And that's why, when looking to curators of the past, they can be an inspiration but certainly not a model. That being said, obviously there are many great curators in Europe especially, because in Post-War Europe, until recently there hasn't been a strong institutional structure and in many ways the curators supplied what was lacking in the institutions. Obviously there are greats like Pontus Hulten and perhaps the single most important curator of the last ten years is Hans Ulrich Obrist.

CRANDALL: Is it that relying on curatorship of the past can be sort of a trap?

GILBERT: I don't think it's a trap in the sense that one can certainly learn from them but it's just that they can't provide too close a template for one's own practice.

BURNS: I guess what I'm interested in is, first you were talking about the Biennial and looking at that as this venue that created a certain kind of art or a certain kind of curatorial practice. And so I guess for you personally, is that the kind of thing you might tend to look to rather than previous curators, but new ideas. Or was it that that compels you particularly?

GILBERT: I have no desire to recreate a biennial in my own museum or the Biennial spirit, but I do take that as an interesting example of how a new kind of art can come into being because of an opportunity that is created for it. In the past two years, biennials and "biennial art" have come under serious attack and I think what those attacks fail to consider is what the world would look like without the biennials, how much more limited it would be. I certainly would not be averse to curating a biennial, but I think there's a different path that I want to pursue in my museum. I often use this term wrest. You have to wrest a space away from its normal use to make a successful exhibition. But there is another dimension of curating which is time. A creative or innovative exhibition has to create its own time frame and have its own pace as well. So part of that act of wresting things away from their ordinary uses has to be about wresting time away from the schedules of work and leisure that exist in our culture.

BURNS: I'm curious about this time idea. I think this is a different question than what you were just talking about, but at the same time I think that it's interesting that the three of us work in very different kinds of venues. I mean you're [Chris] working out of probably the most, perhaps conservative (not you personally) but that space in the museum seems to be the most conservative space. Perhaps in terms of also how time is managed for creating an exhibition and for you it's, I don't know how you perceive that. And I'm coming from this place that is a lot…farther down on the totem pole. And so there is perhaps there is simultaneously a kind of flexibility but also rigidity for actually just coming up with ideas and in my position of being a single person having to do a lot of shows you have to just run through things almost like diarrhea sometimes and I don't know how that is for you working in the kind of institution you work in and how you can control that and how you can, because of your influence, control others' perception of time.

GILBERT: That's a good question. I often think there is a mistaken polarity or opposition between institutional curators who are bureaucrats, and curators outside of institutions who supposedly work more creatively. But the terms of that opposition need to be questioned, because in some sense a curator that is embedded in an institution has a greater opportunity to reach more deeply into the structure of an exhibition. Art is necessarily going to be threaded through institutions, and evidence of that is we all three have ties to institutions. A curator who is not in an institution can perhaps leverage an institution in a way that a curator inside an institution has difficulty doing. But by the same token, the curator who is inside an institution I think can reach more deeply in to the heart of the organization and actually change things like an institutional ethos. What you're saying is correct in that the curator on the inside faces more challenges, but insofar as those challenges are addressed I think there is a greater possibility for innovation, for meaningful innovation.

CISCLE: I agree–it's interesting in terms of some of the experiences I've had with the Contemporary, having experience working as a guest curator at the BMA, and in between–to go from the un-museum, anti-museum stance in the late 80s through '96 and then to go into the museum and work and be straddling both worlds. There was a dynamic in the 80s or early 90s in Baltimore here that really precluded the kind of creative opportunity and exploration that now does happen at the museum. So I agree that the collegial support and professional structure that you do have at the museum really does lend itself to deeper investigation and pushing the boundaries. But at the heart of it has to be the institution's commitment to not just the local community but to a broader perspective in terms of its audience and …that's the change I've seen in my time here that, say, 10-15 years ago, the artistic community here was rallying against. So I'm very encouraged to hear [BMA Director Doreen Bolger] setting that tone.

CRANDALL: What you're saying about wresting space makes me think of the City Hall Gallery and the Goucher space too: is it succeeding, should it succeed in pulling out of everyday life?

BURNS: I'm not actually interested in this binary either/or relationship or the haves or the have-nots in terms of spaces. But I do think it is very interesting that there are people coming from three very different curatorial experiences and backgrounds. It is frustrating to work in a gallery space that was also a public space in terms of issues like physical limitations of installations of exhibitions and even censorship which has been a huge issue, even at an educational institution . You show paintings of naked men, and all of a sudden it's very distressing and children's lives are going to be ruined and people's grandmothers are going to go home crying from a Christmas performance or something like that. Which is something that other curators don't have to deal with, but…when I was saying that…the institution of the museum has a more conservative background, I don't think that's a bad thing at all and I don't mean that in the sense that it's not forward looking, because I think that the Baltimore Museum of Art has been doing extraordinary things in the last couple of years in particular. But it is a very interesting position of power that you have. And you were starting to talk to that in describing your experiences inside and outside of the museum. I would love to you hear more about how you started and why were interested in becoming curators.

GILBERT: Let me say something about the idea of a big institution. You were saying "conservative," maybe you meant something more like "inertia"–a big institution obviously has more players; by the same token it has greater means. It's a common prejudice that a small institution is going to be more experimental and the larger institution is going to be more conservative. But the small institution's very existence is imperiled by an experimental project. Whereas as a large institution has greater means and it can afford to be more experimental and I think much of the recent history of the BMA bears that out.

Read part two of the interview...