Curation should be seen alongside the network formations that played such a pervasive and definitive role in modern experience. From its rise in the 1980s—in the media theory of Friedrich Kittler and the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour—the network as a functional paradigm has made visible a broader array of cultural agents. That is, its expansiveness, the way connections lead to other connections, has helped in the recovery of neglected artists, out-of-print novels, obsolete technologies, etc., and thus in the description of a more inclusive modernist scene, along with a more nuanced understanding of its mechanisms.
The theoretical expansiveness of the network should not obscure, however, an opposing and equally powerful force on modernist activity: curation. The formation of designated groups of people and/or texts, organized to advance particular goals or methods and often expressed in material forms like anthologies, periodicals, collections, or exhibitions, is one well-known species of modernist curatorial activity, but there are many other processes of selection, editorial intervention, and arrangement to consider. Curatorial restriction often worked in tandem with network expansion, of course, to focus or channel particular interests within a larger set. But it could also work as a brake or barrier: to segregate, hierarchize, or eliminate rival interests.
Curation is also a good word to describe what we do as critics when we assemble constellations of texts which we believe are or ought to be in dialogue with each other—that is, when we write syllabi, prefer one copy-text over another for an edition, select examples for anthologies and digital collections. Within the context of modernist studies, the contemporary scholarly work of curation that aims, for example, to reconstruct a lost library, break apart a canonical cluster in order to propose a new one, or dig deep into the history of a certain circle of collaborators is a second register of curation, acting upon the original curatorial work of a twentieth-century source. Moreover, just as network theory has made us increasingly aware of the social, economic, technological, and political resources that are leveraged in the service of cultural production, we should be transparent about the real-world constraints and opportunities that structure our contemporary curatorial practices so that we can accurately communicate signal vs. noise in our own assemblages.
The three presentations we propose for this panel will investigate different contemporary modes of re-presenting modernist works of curation, each at a different scale: from the single author exhibition (Dean) to the recreation of a groundbreaking collector’s personal library (Helton) to the digital meta-collection (Drouin).
Dean’s presentation will locate the first exhibition of the Gertrude Stein collection at Yale in 1947 within the larger and as yet unwritten history of the “special collections exhibition,” a species of display that arose in tandem with modernism and yet, from its origins in the private bibliophile club, adopted all the appurtenances of convention. The Stein exhibition in 1947 represents a pivot towards the goals and standards that are implemented today. Nevertheless, the elitism of the exhibition as a genre continues to present a challenge to the radical accessibility that contemporary curators hope to facilitate—especially when it comes to complicated figures like Stein.
Helton will present her work over the past five years to reconstruct a catalog of Arturo Schomburg’s library and the inscriptions in his books—a gift to the New York Public Library in 1926 that formed the basis for what is now known as the Schomburg Library. And yet, mysteriously, the Harlem Renaissance’s quintessential documentarian left incomplete records of his own life and work, and no inventory of his own collection. The new picture of Schomburg’s library will allow scholars to plot out new points of connection between authors, understand the complicated market that shaped the curation of Black culture, and trace the minor or surprising texts that were included in a Black archive in the 1920s.
Drouin will review the ways in which the transformation of print periodicals into electronic surrogates and datasets make contact at the intersection of textual theory, network theory, historicist inquiry, and forms of algorithmic criticism based in machine learning. What does that mean for the re-curation of modernist corpora, given that social networks and content affinities can be discovered computationally, not just through intentional selection and juxtaposition?