Becoming a Curator by Holly Brubach

Author:Holly Brubach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-09-02T16:00:00+00:00

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Like many curators, Sussman has come to be identified with the artists she has presented. Her commitment to them continues long after the exhibitions have ended and the catalogs have been published. She revisits their work, and her understanding of it keeps on evolving. New insights add more layers of appreciation.

In 2003, just six months after her Hesse exhibition closed, Sussman’s show on Diane Arbus opened in the same galleries at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was the first thorough reexamination of Arbus’s work since the landmark retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1972, the year after her death. In the interim, all manner of speculation about Arbus, her motives, and her regard (or supposed lack of it) for the people she photographed had poisoned the air around the work. The quasi-anthropological curiosity Arbus brought to her fellow humans and the way they sorted themselves into subcultures, with a neutral gaze that passed no judgment, was condemned as unsparing, lacking compassion and tact, exposing people who might otherwise have remained invisible.

Among her most outspoken detractors was Susan Sontag, whose 1973 essay, “Freak Show,” published in the New York Review of Books, turned the tide. Sontag presented her chief objection to Arbus’s pictures on moral grounds, claiming that they violated the people they portrayed. “Armed with a camera,” Sontag contended, Arbus “could insinuate anguish, kinkiness, mental illness with any subject,” even babies, and this was unethical because the people had somehow consented to be photographed without realizing how ugly or grotesque they looked. (This assumes that subjects are entitled to a becoming likeness, a notion worth debating.) Sontag attributed this act of aggression to the fact that Arbus was a fashion photographer, obliged to produce pretty images of beautiful women—as if “fashion photographer” were a type, despite the fact that all sorts of photographers, many of them “serious” or “art” photographers, worked in fashion at the time because the assignments were well paid. And then there’s Arbus’s suicide, triggering what Sontag deplored as “a kind of apotheosis,” as if the overriding significance of her untimely death were not the fact that she lost her battle with a persistent sense of hopelessness but that ending her life proved to be an effective career strategy.

In response and in defense of her mother, Doon Arbus closed the door on any situations she couldn’t entirely control. Among people in the art world, the Arbus estate became notorious for saying no. Arbus’s reputation went into eclipse as a result of Doon’s determination to protect the work from the received opinions and foregone conclusions that had enveloped it.

“The photographs needed me,” she later wrote. “Well, they needed someone. Someone to keep track of them, to safeguard them—however unsuccessfully—from an onslaught of theory and interpretation, as if translating images into words were the only way to make them visible.”

Sussman’s show marked a departure from this embargo. Over a research phase that lasted nine years, she earned Doon’s trust as they combed through Arbus’s agendas, letters, notebooks, snapshots, and other memorabilia.

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