November 28, 2003
P. S. 1: What happens next?
There is another withering review of a P.S.1 exhibition in today's New York Times. (Click through to the end of the article to see the discussion of P.S.1's exhibition.)
(Full disclosure: I was an intern/assistant in the curatorial department at P.S. 1 from August to December 2001.)
P.S. 1's location in Long Island City is, I think, the one thing that has saved it from the damning criticism lately heaped upon the Guggenheim and the Whitney museums. Were it in Manhattan, and therefore more visible on the public's cultural radar, it would have come in for some serious bashing. What was the last exhibition you saw there that could be described as particularly strong or relevant? Or, rarer still, a combination of the two?
Whereas the Whitney and the Guggenheim have seemingly suffered from overmanagement, P.S. 1 suffers from neglect. Approximately two years ago Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, then Chief Curator, left for the Castello di Rivoli in Turin; a few months later Associate Curator Larissa Harris also left, eventually ending up at Artforum. Those departures left a curatorial vacuum greater than what Klaus Biesenbach and Daniel Marzona, two part-time curators with other gigs in Europe, could fill. Instead of immediately hiring someone to begin applying a new vision to the museum, P.S. 1 began curating by committee: recently there have been exhibitions curated by registrars, assistants, and others on the staff in conjunction with a curator or director. Curating by committee necessarily dilutes the focus of any exhibition--see the criticism heaped on recent Whitney Biennials--but this phenomenon is particularly acute at P.S.1 given their lack of funds. You can run a museum with a vision and only a little money (the New Museum in its early years) or get by with a lot of money and mediocre exhibitions (the Guggenheim), but having neither will only lead your institution to irrelevance. Perhaps the hiring of Amy Smith Stewart as Assistant Curator and Jimena Blazquez Abascal as Curator indicates change to come. I certainly hope so, because right now I no longer put the museum's exhibitions on my mental "must see" lists. And if I, as someone dedicated to visual art by passion and profession, don't do that, who will?