Dance and the Gallery: Curation as Revision

Abstract

… for several years now I've failed to find a solution to the London Tate Modern's demand for an exhibition of dance. … I never managed to find an adequate connection between the museum framework and dance. … We must try and solve this problem: dance is starting to be recognized as art. In the end it's as if you had to enter the museum to be legitimized! As a result, pressure to exhibit is growing.(Jérôme Bel n.d. 2014)13 Rooms, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Serpentine Gallery, London) and Klaus Biesenbach (MoMA, New York) and presented in Sydney in April 2013, included the work of choreographers and dancers as authors, performers, objects, and gallery guides. Described by its curators as an exhibition of “living sculptures” featuring “protagonists,” it raised many issues around dance-based knowledges, power relations between dance and the visual arts, art as commodity, and performer agency in performance-based works exhibited in galleries, particularly re-enacted durational works. During the course of the exhibition, a cast of around 100 performers, drawing on their own repository of physical training and “body-archive,” realized works by artists such as Marina Abramovic (Luminosity, 1997) and Joan Jonas (Mirror Check, 1970). These two works in particular required physical skills and training, and the performers were chosen on this basis. For both these pieces, the body-to-body transmission of the artists' intentions—which is so important in dance processes—was undertaken by the artists' representatives.