Christov-Bakargiev at Documenta 13 in the Karlsaue Park in Kassel, Germany, with Giuseppe Penone and his sculpture, 'Idee di Pietra' ('Ideas of Stone'). (Uwe Zucchi/AFP/Getty Images)
LAST MONDAY EVENING, the most important person in the art world was giving a lecture at the Soho pâtisserie Ceci-Cela. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a sprightly, voluble 54-year-old with a halo of blond corkscrew curls, hadn’t informed Ceci-Cela, and the waitstaff didn’t seem especially happy about her being there. About twenty people had packed into the pâtisserie’s tiny back room, leaving little space for new patrons to sit down. On the plus side, most people were ordering coffee and cakes. One man, apparently not there for Ms. Christov-Bakargiev’s talk on topics like wealth and time, stormed out.
And a waiter walked in, looking more bewildered than angry. “What exactly,” he asked, “is going on?”
“I was just having a talk with these people,” Ms. Christov-Bakargiev said, good-naturedly.
“Yeah, that’s great—”
“Is it illegal?”
“It’s not illegal, but I just spoke with the manager, and it’s hard to accommodate this many people.”
“If they all order coffee, we’re allowed to talk, right?”
“The talking isn’t an issue. It’s just coordinating an event without us knowing.”
“It’s not an event.”
CECI-CELA didn’t know it was dealing with the art world’s most important person. But then, as of last Monday evening, no one did. Her official entry in the No. 1 slot on London-based ArtReview magazine’s “Power 100” list—a hotly anticipated annual ranking of the international art world’s machers—didn’t hit the internet until three days later. And when the list did come out, it raised eyebrows. Sure, she’d curated the 2012 edition of the quinquennial exhibition Documenta in Kassel, Germany, possibly art’s most vaunted festival, but that opened in June and closed in September. Did she really deserve to beat out art mogul Larry Gagosian, who just this month opened his 12th gallery, practically on the tarmac of a Paris airport that serves private jets?
“I was, on the one hand, pleased,” Ms. Christov-Bakargiev told The Observer. She noted that she is the first woman to top the ranking. “On the other hand, I thought it was funny because I usually associate that list and that hierarchy with a more market-oriented universe than the one that I’m in.”
The universe she is in is Europe’s jet-setting curatorial world. (Literally: she took The Observer’s call in Rome, where her flight from New York had landed earlier that day.) A former curator at MoMA PS1, she began in the early 2000s as curator at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, then became its director. She’s organized a number of heavy-duty exhibitions, including the 2008 Sydney Biennial. But Documenta, the quintessential European event, is the feather in her cap. In Europe, as American critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in his review of Documenta 7 in 1982, “curators ... are not kingmakers but kings,” and summer 2012 marked the reign of Carolyn.
“Recent Documentas have tended to be so underwhelming that they have propelled their directors off rather than up the list after opening,” ArtReview’s editor, Mark Rappolt, said over e-mail. “I think the legacy of this show will be much longer-lasting, regardless of what [she] does next.” The scale of her Documenta was beyond grand. Ms. Christov-Bakargiev spent more than three years preparing the show—“a wildly ambitious and in many ways outrageous exhibition,” Daniel Birnbaum, a curator who’s organized grand shows of his own, dubbed it in a largely favorable review in Artforum.
Then again, it is, well, over. “I’m the most powerless person in the world right now,” Ms. Christov-Bakargiev observed from Rome. Maybe, she said, the fact that she came in at No. 1 says more about the art world than it does about her. “I think it probably does indicate a sense of slight bankruptcy in a universe of ideas around the association of art, social status and financial power,” she said. Then again, shrugging it off could be attributable to an allergic reaction. “I’m a little allergic to the word power,” she said. “I like the words potentiality and potential and possibility, which are all coming from the same etymology.”
She also happens to be a little bit allergic to the word curator—“You curate pork to make prosciutto,” she’s said. Kassel, site of Documenta since its beginnings in 1955, wasn’t big enough to contain her. Assisted by an army of “agents,” she organized a Documenta that included conferences and exhibitions in Kabul, Cairo and Banff, Canada, with projects from around 300 participants, including not just artists but also physicists, anthropologists, poets and even a gardener. More than 100 pamphlets were produced, not to mention an iPhone app and numerous videos. As for the Kassel component, she built it, and the art world came: her Documenta stretched across more than a dozen venues in the city, and received some 860,000 visitors during its 100-day run. It was a stunning exhibition. However sprawling it seemed when you were trying to dash from venue to venue, the actual experience of the artworks was intimate and often poetic. The charges levied against many high-powered curators—heavy-handedness, narcissism—was nowhere in evidence. Individual artworks had room to breathe.
THE WHOLE CECI-CELA THING originated the previous Friday, during a TED-style talk that Ms. Christov-Bakargiev was giving as part of the nonprofit art organization Creative Time’s annual summit.
“What I wanted to tell you today is very long, and it’s about a 40-minute lecture, so I can’t actually do that,” she began. She’d only been allotted eight minutes. So she invited everyone to Ceci-Cela.
“Well, of course, there are a hundred thousand reasons” for her choice of that particular pâtisserie, she said from Rome. “One, it has the best croissants in New York City. Everybody knows it because everybody says it, as Gertrude Stein would say.” It’s also a convenient location for many people. It’s near Dan Graham’s studio, and furthermore relates, in various ways, to a Lawrence Weiner piece and some of her ideas for Documenta 13, which was “about what it means to be in one place and not another.” As the French say, “ceci, cela,” “this-that.” Mainly, though, it just felt right. “I don’t ever accept anybody’s limitations,” she said. “I just do whatever I feel like doing.”
At the Creative Time conference, she addressed some of her recent interests. “What would a world be if the bees were voting, and how could the bees vote?” she asked. “Or a strawberry, how can a strawberry vote?” She said that now is the time for “inventing a new form of politics that involves the human only partially.” Sleep was mentioned “as a revolutionary possibility.” (“Our real problem is daycentrism,” she explained. “It’s not only Eurocentrism.”)
When her time was almost up, a drummer onstage began to tap out a light beat, the awards-show cue to exit. She looked in panic at an onstage clock. “Twenty-two seconds!” she exclaimed, and leapt from her seat. “I’m just going to shut up!” She then began clicking through dozens of slides of Documenta on a screen behind her, describing each one. The drumming continued. “This gives it a kind of rhythm here!” she said as she clicked along. (At Ceci-Cela, she described that presentation as a "performance.")
Christov-Bakargiev. (Courtesy Eduardo Knapp/Folhapress, Ilustrada)
Ms. Christov-Bakargiev’s outré thinking and sometimes-outrageous behavior are easy to mock. An early press kit for Documenta included a bizarre trove of photos of her posing throughout Kassel. In one, she sat barefoot near a pile of garbage bags, wearing a manic smile. Blogger Nadja Sayej was blunt: “This bitch loves the camera.” (Ms. Christov-Bakargiev called the distribution of those photos at a tourism fair a “mistake,” and admitted she hadn’t checked the materials.) And at the opening-day press conference Ms. Sayej asked her to address “all the people who think this exhibition is too much about you.”
“It’s true that the artistic director of Documenta generally becomes a little bit of a decoy and a target,” she said. “You’re a little bit of a decoy, you know, for the artists. You’re like one of those little plastic ducks that are out there so that the actual ducks can be free to do what they want.” The fact that she is a woman probably also played a role in the reception. “There is this thing that women get, ‘What is she wearing? What is she not wearing?’” It’s not the kind of scrutiny previous Documenta directors have come in for. “They didn’t actually ask that of Harald Szeemann.”
At CECI-CELA, Ms. Christov-Bakargiev explained to the waiter what she was doing there. “It’s just a meeting of people having coffee in the same place,” she said. “It’s not a public event. It’s like in the old days in the ’60s. But it’s actually not illegal for me to speak here, so if everybody buys coffee and cakes—”
“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” he sighed. “I’m just trying to make this manageable for us.”
“I think they should all buy coffee, first of all,” Ms. Christov-Bakargiev reasoned. “And cakes.”
There was some discussion about the easiest way to do this, and an uneasy détente was achieved.
“Nothing like this ever happens,” the waiter told her.
Ms. Christov-Bakargiev smiled. “I’m really proud to be initiating it, then.”
Before ending her talk a bit early (the cafe was eager to clear the tables), she told everyone she’d be back to the same place, to pick up where she left off, on New Year’s Day 2013, at 5 p.m. “This is the beginning, only, of the talk,” she said. “So even here I couldn’t do it. Here was just 10 percent of the talk.”
“I have a lot of trust that it will work out,” she added. “It just takes time.”
arusseth@observer.com
