By Tyler Coburn

In sifting through the assembled, the heady and the bland at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Jerry Saltz dropped a tangential (but crucial) point about 'how troubling it is that there are basically 30 seasoned professionals curating all the big shows', who should 'slide aside and allow a new generation of curators, critics and artists into the driver's seat.' I found the comment somewhat surprising, not because the curatorial game doesn't often appear to be a battle of top-dog personalities, but because almost every other person I know in their twenties in New York seems to be applying to, entering, or graduating from a curatorial graduate program. If it's a new wave Saltz wants, it's coming, and it's going to be tidal.

Yet I must confess to being somewhat skeptical about the curatorial masters degree, given that beyond historical strategies and practical considerations, it does not readily boast an extensive discourse upon which to rest. A Ph.D in art history has been the traditional route, ensuring that scholars served enough time in devotional toil to earn the right-to-curate, to-book-publish, to-tenure. Which leads me to wonder: are the United States’ most prized curatorial programs actually giving students substantive education and training, or are they simply serving as 'finishing schools', per critic Brian Sholis, for the next generation of art-world professionals?

These questions were fresh in mind this past Sunday, when I ventured up to Bard's Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, in Annandale-on-Hudson, to attend the second in a series of three thesis exhibitions of second-year students. Bard's program, which was co-founded in 1990 by Marieluise Hessel and Richard Black, focuses on 'art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present day' and gained added prestige in 2006, when Hessel opened a 17,000 square-foot museum on the campus and offered her collection of over 1,700 artworks on permanent loan – entirely at the disposal of the CCS kids.

Installation view of Under the Influence, curated by Anat Ebgi, at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Photo: Chris Kendall

Second Thoughts, currently on display at the museum, is a notable example: first-year students were invited to respond to Exhibitionism, a late-fall/early-winter show in which Matthew Higgs curated elements of Hessel's collection into 'a series of autonomous and idiosyncratic micro-exhibitions' across the museum's sixteen galleries. Setting aside the nausea-inducing hero-worship potentially entailed in following Higgs' footsteps – and the fact that any undertaking of fourteen differently minded curators would produce a certain degree of incoherence – the show manages to produce its share of incisive moments. A room filled with works by Thomas Hirschhorn and Isa Genzken and entitled Rupture by Higgs in October 2007, for example, has been left intact and retitled Unmonumental, a clever acknowledgement of the New Museum's December 2007 reopening show (which featured Genzken) and of the shifting critical and curatorial terms (a.k.a. buzzwords) by which disparate practices are made to relate.

The other side of the museum plays host to three thesis exhibitions of second-year students, and this year, as before, the young curators have reached beyond the (expansive) coffers of Hessel's collection in producing their shows.

Barry Le Va's One Edge, Two Corners; On Center Shattered, (Variation 14, Within the Series of Layered Pattern Acts), 1968/2008, in Daniel Byers' show (loverboy), sleep, shatter, handheld bird at Bard. Photo: Letitia Smith

The most elegant of the three, Daniel Byers' (loverboy), sleep, shatter, handheld bird, builds a network of psychic resonances between works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Barry Le Va and Charles Ray. Rodney Graham's black-and-white video Halcion Sleep (1994) introduces the sparse show, with footage of the artist's drugged, sleeping body (in the back of a moving car) serving as an apt precedent for the type of lucid dreaming the remainder of the exhibition induces: from the threshold space of Gonzalez-Torres' synthetic blue curtains (Untitled (Loverboy), 1989) to Charles Ray's white, stainless steel sculpture of a bird embryo (Handheld Bird, 2006).

Under the Influence, Anat Ebgi's thesis show, integrates the work of stalwarts like Joan Jonas, John Baldessari, Nancy Holt/Robert Smithson with a younger generation of largely female practitioners, including Jen DeNike, Jill Magid and Rachel Mason. The results are brash, often dynamic, and certainly aimed to ruffle the feathers of any curator who believes that films and videos should adhere to artist's original installation instructions. Holt and Smithson's Swamp (1971), for example, is given a phenomenological treatment by Ebgi, who has chosen to digitally project the film to cover the entirety of a freestanding wall and install audio speakers behind the viewer, thereby mimicking the push-pull at the heart of the work, with Holt navigating the camera and Smithson – close behind with sound recorder – verbally directing Holt's movement.

What these graduates hold in store for the art-world when they come of age remains to be seen. Many have paired their time at CCS with part-time work assisting artists – among them Mary Lucier and Julie Ault – or sharpened their teeth mounting small, ambitious group exhibitions in the outer-reaches of Brooklyn. Graduates in recent years have advanced to curatorial assistant and assistant curator positions at P.S.1, Artists Space and MOCA Miami – all of which recommends the program and underscores the conviction, shared by many, of its careerist necessity. As best I can say, having recently seen a handful of friends enter and emerge from CCS with largely appreciative responses, the opportunity to develop one's curatorial sensibility at the periphery of the New York art scene can be a constructive endeavor. Yet the educational institution is, in its ideal state, a critical body. As Florian Waldvogel writes on Derrida, the school should be 'a privileged location of the forces of resistance and dissidence … The freedom to say everything that one believes is true and feels compelled to say creates an absolute academic space, which has to be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity.' With a growing industry of curating to service, let's hope that institutions like CCS can sustain a critical relationship to the mechanics of the industry, and above all to themselves.
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Tyler Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview magazine, an artist and writer in New York. See his previous blogs:
(Hopefully Not) In Memoriam: Triple Candie's Harlem Swansong
Playtime at the Armory
A Cruise Down the Hudson – and Through History – With Matthew Bucki...