In this sharply argued review, British writer and curator Alistair Hicks considers the English translation of Viktor Misiano’s five lectures on curating, published by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. While acknowledging the book’s importance as a history of curatorial thought from a Russian and European perspective, Hicks questions whether its theoretical framework leaves too little room for the very thing curating is meant to serve: art itself.

The history of perambulators would bore most of us without frequent mention of the babies they were designed to carry. Sadly, Viktor Misiano has kept his renowned warmth, passion for art and sense of humour under tight restraint in narrating the history of curating. In describing the systems and structures that support art and artists, the famous Russian curator has let the baby slip down the plughole. His book is informative and spits into life when he mentions stories and scandals about artists, but at the end of it all, it is the reader who is crying, crying for the loss of the baby - art.

The book is filling a gap. It tells the story of curating, from a Russian/European perspective, unfortunately too often relying on the art language of the time. The First lecture entitled ‘Curating as immaterial production’ gives the reader fair warning! Yet the conclusion of the preface does read very sensibly: ‘a true curator is not so much one who directs the artist along the right path, as one who takes up the artist’s ideas and shares them.’

In the beginning - the 60s & 70s - there were three pioneering shows , with which Misiano builds up the story: Harald Szeemann’s ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form’, 1969, at the Bern Kunsthalle, Seth Sieglaub’s multi-location exhibition ‘July, August, September 1969’ and Marcel Broodthaers’ ‘Musée d’art Moderne, Département des Aigles’, which began in the artist curator’s apartment in Brussels, but eventually took up the entire Düsseldorf Kunsthalle.

The first lecture lists the important intellectual curators of the last fifty odd years. The explanation of their ideas is skeletal. Broodthaers ‘turned the entire exhibition into a readymade and, consequently and ultimately, into a work of art.’ Hans Ulrich Obrist spells out the curator’s role by saying: ‘I see exhibitions as a result of dialogues, where the curator functions in the ideal case as a catalyst...” Joseph Kosuth reduces it all to ‘art after Philosophy.’ Achille Bonito Oliva opines that “Art today is not born in the secrecy of the studio.” Misiano does not give enough room to bring curators’ lives alive until he quotes Pascal Gielen writing about the typical trajectory of a curator’s career: ‘dumped by the cultural economy because you’ve had a burnout, because you are forty-five and no longer young and sexy, but above all because you are no longer affordable. You suddenly realize that you have no children (having kids is not done on the scene—it rules out flexible working hours); that your partner has just left you because you were always abroad; that your nearest friend is 350 kilometres away so you’ve got no one to help you move house; and that you haven’t saved a cent toward your pension because you’ve always worked on temporary contracts or no contracts at all.’

In Lecture Two Misiano sees the whiff of scandal as an essential part of the ‘art system’. ‘The curious thing,’ he writes, ‘is that no matter how irreconcilable the opponents are, after the scandal has died down former adversaries find themselves standing next to each other at an art opening and clinking their plastic cups of booze.’ He gives a remarkably succinct summary of ‘Relational aesthetics’ maintaining that ‘Bourriaud’s considerations boil down to the following: since modern institutions have become lifeless machines, artists should occupy them as if they were empty shells, reducing their artistic practice to the process of inhabiting them.’ Misiano can be brutally direct concluding that ‘the expert community has become motley, networked, and contextualized.’

Lecture Three talks about the grammar of an exhibition, but Lecture Four brings out the indignant Russian in Misiano, quite rightly complaining about how about most of the globe, including Russia, is marginalised by the Art System. ‘Why does the Western world ignore Russian art?’ he asks. Bizarrely he could be accused of attempting bravely to rectify the American perspective of the art world. He gives the Pompidou’s ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition great prominence without seeing it in context of the earlier pioneering exhibition at MOMA, New York: Primitivism in the 20th century.

In introducing his final lecture on the ethics of curating, Misiano goes back to his Latin. Curare means to care for. The etymology of the word, he would like to believe, should ensure an ethical stance. He tells a story against himself. He greatly admires the work of German born conceptualist artist Hans Haacke (b.1936) and spent some time with him but was saddened when Haacke refused to be part of Manifesta. Misiano was the director of the very first Manifesta. He had secured the sponsorship of Philip Morris and Haacke objected to that.

The last words of the five lectures are curious, drawing a line between ethics and morality. ‘By reading the curator’s biography, we can tell whether they obeyed moral precepts and therefore pursued a career or whether they were guided by ethical curiosity and thus chose a life.’

As a reader I yearned for more about that life, Misiano’s and the artists with whom he has worked in an illustrious career. The publisher undoubtedly recognised the need for a bible on curating. Certainly, Misiano with his didactic tone has managed to walk a winding path through a field of contradictions in a manner that echoes the Holy Book. Misiano is a good guide. Even the history of prams has its highpoints. Did you know that William Kent, the architect, made the first one back in 1733 for the Duchess of Devonshire? Misiano should have followed the lead of great Gombrich who started The Story of Art, with the words. ‘There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.’ He then went on to ignore his own reservations and wrote about nothing else but art, and true the artists behind it.