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Curating as a Labour of Love Even with several waves of institutional critique, as well as curatorial and exhibition studies calling attention to the powers of display and the ways in which curators produce meaning, the discourses dedicated to feminist curating have been largely concerned with these identity issues. Because relatively little attention is paid to the ways in which the conditions of presentation in the art world are also gendered, in this essay I expand the scope to consider the political economy of exhibitions and their gendered divisions of labour. Starting from heuristic homologies between museums and households, with their respective (representational) economies, I will use a feminist perspective to show how curatorial practices and subject positions are constructed as complementary to, or competing with, those of artists, which leads to a number of problems of recognition, status, and remuneration. Before the late 1960s, when some curators started to acquire authorial merits, curatorial practice was usually an invisible custodial labour taking place behind the scenes in museums. Against this backdrop, the author-ization of curating since may be understood as a “masculinization” of curatorial practice that casts the curator as a charismatic meta-artist or exhibition maker whose tasks are understood no longer as merely reproductive maintenance of the museum, caring for collections, and conservation of exhibits, but as creative production of the exhibition as a “work of art.” With his 1974 exhibition Großvater, ein Pionier wie wir (Grandfather, a Pioneer like Us), for instance, Harald Szeemann made exhibition history. Having directed the large-scale exhibition documenta 5 in 1972, he now came up with an intimate show dedicated to the life and work of his grandfather, an innovative hairstylist. Installed in his three-room apartment in Bern, it was one of the first exhibitions by an art curator with no art on display. As an (auto)biographical exhibition that focused on the everyday life of a more or less ordinary man, this show was an important step in the development of the idea of the curator as author.See Søren Grammel, Ausstellungsautorschaft: Die Konstruktion der auktorialen Position des Kurators bei Harald Szeemann. Eine Mikroanalyse (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2005), 36 — 41. At about the same time as feminists were politicizing the private realm with the slogan “the personal is political,” Szeemann was using his home as a medium to make public his personal family history. He thereby constructed a genealogy of male pioneers, into which he inscribed himself, rather immodestly. The heroizing pathos with which such a masculinist narrative aggrandizes male deeds as exceptional achievements of individual great men seems to have maintained its appeal even today. Hans Ulrich Obrist, for instance, includes only men in the canon of what he calls “Pioneers of Curating.” Notably, he, too, had started his career with an intimate exhibition in his own kitchen that displaced its original mundane purpose, the domestic labour of cooking. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2014), 60 — 65, 81 — 87. I would like to intervene in the logic of the “master” narrative by calling attention to the less-glamorous care practices of women and other “others.” Their reproductive labours and contributions to artistic and economic valorization often remain in the dark, even though they provide the conditions of possibility for the life and work of authorial figures to appear publicly. Instead of simply adding invisibilized care workers, curators, and cultural producers to the canon, however, my aim is to challenge the underlying logic of singularity by considering the political economy of the curatorial with a particular focus on its blind spots. Because eminent economists as disparate as Adam Smith and Karl Marx agreed that housework was “unproductive,” in the 1970s Marxist feminists demanded wages for housework to make visible the constitutive contribution of housewives, mothers, and other care workers to the social production of value.See Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Walls Press, 1972). Their critique of the naturalization of domestic labour as a “labour of love”Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Walls Press, 1975), 2. for which remuneration is not expected corresponds in a way with Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s revelation of “the love of art”Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Museums and Their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997). as a socially re/produced and re/producing means of class distinction: both call into question the idea that caring for art or others is extra-economic. In the field of curating (curare, Latin for care), however, still today the curator’s hand is often required to remain as invisible as that of the domestic (or colonized, for that matter) labourer in order to avoid threatening the individual singularity of signature styles and the aesthetic autonomy of single “master” works. In fact, well into the twentieth century, curatorial care for collections and the self-effacing housekeeping usually performed by women could be compared as backstage agencies that had few public merits but adhered to a separation of spheres, in which the author-ity and autonomy of both artists and men were secured by the invisible care labours performed by curators and women (and other “others”), respectively. The twentieth-century ideology of the “white cube”Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986). — which, as Brian O’Doherty explains, veils curatorial agency in favour of a purported autonomy of artworks — thus corresponds to nineteenth-century ideals of pure femininity personified by the Victorian “angel in the house,”who was expected to perform her domestic duties quietly to provide the backdrop against which her husband could stage himself as the head of the house. Even today, the figure of the angel in the house, famously criticized by Virginia Woolf,Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942). has its counterpart in curators who modestly declare their innocence. In a manner befitting the ideal of the desexualized hostess and mother who labours invisibly in the background to care for her loved ones and guests, curators of all genders claim that they merely prepare the stage for the artists as the protagonists and do not have any authorial ambitions of their own. It is therefore important not only to question the innocence of the exhibition space as epitomized in the purity of the white cube, but also to discuss the shifting economic implications of a gendering of curatorial practices and subject positions. Since the 1970s, feminist artists and historians have theorized the complementary relationship between the notions of femininity and authorship in the master narratives of fine arts, in which women are ascribed the role of supporting or assisting male geniuses. As art critic and curator Lucy Lippard remarked in 1971, “It is far easier to be successful as a woman critic, curator or historian than as a woman artist, since these are secondary, or housekeeping activities, considered far more natural for women than the primary activity of making art.”Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 164. Calling attention to museums’ representational economy, with its gendered divisions of labour, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art performances explicitly draw the connection between hidden feminized and curatorial housekeeping activities. In Hartford Wash (1973), she cleaned a museum by scrubbing floors, mopping stairs, and dusting display cases, without announcing the performance, which is why her maintenance of the museum’s infrastructure remained largely unnoticed at the time. Despite the historical coincidence of institutional and feminist critiques of a symbolic and economic order that systematically veils the necessity of care labours and curatorial practices to sustain the contexts in which (art) work and (wage) workers appear as autonomous sources of value, there is at least one important difference: in the context of institutional critique, curators were usually criticized for having too much power and for their supposed competition with the authorship of artists, whereas feminist critique protested women’s lack of authority and authorship in androcentric power structures. Szeemann’s self-staging as an author has paved the way for a general authorial empowerment of curating, whereas feminist struggles for the remuneration of housework, political and professional equality, and greater artistic and authorial recognition for women have been less successful. It is telling that only recently have Lippard’s achievements as an advocate for and curator of conceptual art been fully recognized, heroizing her as an important “pioneer of curating”See Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel, 2009), 196 — 233. and inserting her into the curatorial canon alongside the likes of Szeemann and Seth Sieglaub.See Cornelia Butler et al., From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Number Shows 1969 — 74 (London: Afterall, 2012). By applying masculinized models of creative artistry, curators thus became heroized, celebrated role models for today’s creative entrepreneurs of the self, whereas the relocation of feminized reproductive, maintenance, and care labours into the public sphere more often results in precarity and low wages rather than in glorification of exceptional achievements. A gendered double standard also remains within the art field, in which it corresponds not only to status hierarchies but to ambiguities within the performance of curatorial authorship. Sarah Rifky, for instance, writes that she “envisioned ‘the curator’ as follows: a woman, attractive, with the genes of a prototypical white male subject, a powerhouse that could make things happen… a hybrid between an artist, academic and politician.”Sarah Rifky, “What Do You Do Exactly? Sarah Rifky on Being a Curator,” Egypt Independent, January 10, 2011. Nevertheless, a great number of curators, many of them — but not all — identifying as female, still perform a kind of post-heroic curatorial authorship. Sometimes they unwittingly repeat a traditional gendered division of labour with the woman as the supporter, enabler, and carer in the background who allows artists to stage themselves as protagonists. Such a distribution of roles echoes stereotypical relations of wife to husband or mother to child. The production and reproduction of creative subjects and of the belief in exceptional individuals — be they artists or curators — is thus sustained by a multiplicity of other agencies that “create the creators,” to use Bourdieu’s terminology.Pierre Bourdieu, “But Who Created the Creators?,” in Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), 139 — 48. In order to maintain the myths of the autonomy, independence, and singularity of central figures, the “others” have to labour invisibly. For instance, curatorial assistants, “gallerinas,” gallery educators, and interns, apart from often working for free or very little money, rarely receive authorial credit for their contributions. This is probably possible only because their enthusiasm forand love of art are considered to be as natural as a mother’s love for her child, so that demanding (more) pay seems almost like heresy.Of course, the notion of “mother’s love” is itself a naturalizing cliché. Besides the fact that not all mothers love their children, “parent’s love” or “caregiver’s love” would be more appropriate terms. If publicly acknowledged at all, these labours of love are often regarded as ornamental, not as a contribution to the work proper. This ongoing naturalization, invisibilization, and precarization of care work in the art field may be partly explained by the ideology of exceptionality that would be undermined if it became more obvious how much individual creativity relies on a collective effort or the privilege of being supported by significant others. To account for the historically shifting political implications of curatorial home economics, it is, moreover, important to assess the relative persistence of stereotypical gender roles in relation to changing socio-economic conditions.See Nanne Buurman, “CCB with…: Displaying Curatorial Relationality in dOCUMENTA(13)s The Logbook,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1 (June 2016): 78 — 101. Confronted with the biopoliticization of production in post-Fordist societies, we need to pay close attention not only to the precarity of care work but also to the ways in which constructions of femininity assume a variety of governmental functions. Because post-Fordist regimes of immaterial and affective labour imply a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, an increasing recognition of the value of affect, and an expectation to labour for the sake of love, they have also been discussed as a “feminization of labour.”See ibid. for a discussion of the controversies surrounding this term. Against the backdrop of such a generalized capitalist deployment of love, it is urgent to search for ways in which feminist and feminized, as well as artistic and curatorial, practices may be reclaimed from co-optation into biopolitical regimes of re/production. Nanne Buurman

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