This handbook will be a godsend to users who have just been thrown in at the deep end, or who, having curated small-to-medium-sized exhibitions for some time, need to up their game. It nails the key facts very efficiently – exhibitions are unpredictable affairs, difficult to manage and easy to slip out of control. Meticulous attention to planning, documentation and communications is vital whether you are putting on a major international show with multiple borrowings, or you are curating something more modest in the local community centre.
The author is a former head of collections management at the Tate, and is an expert adviser, teacher and author on museum standards and management; she speaks with authority, simply and effectively.
The book is divided into two main sections; the first outlines the exhibition-planning process from concept to legacy, and is intended as the practical how-to guide; the second gives more in-depth information on specific aspects – for example, ethical behaviour or import/export regulations – for those who wish to work to international standards. There is a sufficiently long bibliography including official standards documents, and a list of websites. The photography is poor as is the reproduction quality of the figures; the text is a little repetitious. These are minor details – the book does not pretend to be a thing of beauty.
There seems to be some confusion over the target audience. It is implied that the book aims to be as useful to the first-timer, and the sole operator, as to those concerned with international-standard shows. Certainly, several of the “ten top mistakes” are those which would be most likely to be made by inexperienced curators, and a suggestion that exhibition signage might be affixed with BluTack is unlikely to have originated in the Tate. However, much of the processes outlined are clearly aimed at the well-resourced institutional curator with a large project team, flexible spaces and the muscle to borrow internationally.
The people most in need of a book such as this – apart from students for whom it will be invaluable – are curators of small- or medium-sized concerns, with limited resources and facilities, and with a disinclination to borrow. Their exhibition themes will be decided by the limited artefacts available, and their exhibition space may be restricted or otherwise inflexible. Although the author several times acknowledges that the many responsibilities, which will be divided among a project team in a large institution, will have to be taken over by the curator in a smaller one, insufficient attention is given to this multi-tasking role, which must be the experience of many exhibition curators. The work of producing the text and images for exhibition labels, for the catalogue and for the associated information literature is remarkably time-consuming and is little mentioned here. There is scant acknowledgement of the imperative that this text be proofread, by someone who is good at it. Furthermore, where design is referred to, it means altering the configuration of the exhibition space, whereas for many curators, who will be working with a fixed space, changes will be rung by graphic designers whose printing deadlines are always tighter than one imagines they will be. This will be a nasty surprise to the curator who has read in her hand book that time constraints really only kick in at installation stage. This is a particularly dangerous statement to act upon where the curator is working with an unpaid guest research collaborator who must be handled diplomatically and who might not respond well to a harried curator looking for text three months before the opening night. Also, as only experience will teach, if the guest co-curator is an academic, she will have to be kept on a very tight rein or she will produce erudite essays of 800 words, instead of 250-word visitor-friendly labels. And she would not take kindly to being edited.
The “to-do” list for the opening event – which omitted any mention of identifying and inviting the guest of honour in good time – urges the event manager to leave plenty of time to clean up the exhibition space before the opening. This will raise a wry smile among those of us who have dumped the last handful of debris behind a nearby bookcase just as the guest of honour entered the building. As all curators know, there is never enough time.
Having said all this, the fact is that this is a very valuable book and will save the sanity and professional reputation of many a reader. Even if a curator has no need to deal with freight companies or the Press, the sheer variety of elements in the table of contents delivers a salutary lesson in just how complicated a project curating an exhibition is. And the great strength of the book – apart from its deep respect for the artefacts being displayed and its necessary obsession with documentation – is that it takes the curator past the stress of installation and the pleasure of the launch night, to the need to evaluate the success of the exhibition. In this, the author recognises that each exhibition teaches the curator something different, to be scribbled in the margins of her by-now dog-eared handbook. The author also urges the curator to protect the legacy of the exhibition, referring to great historical exhibitions, which made important and long-term cultural impact. Not all curators can aim so high, but, nonetheless, they are rightly advised to send the project’s archives to the archivist for preservation. On this issue of legacy, a point not made in this book is that many institutions curate an online exhibition, in tandem with the physical one, which ensures that what has been a significant amount of work has a life after de-installation.
