Three of the best put to the test

By RICHARD DALE*

Curating in our public art institutions has had a bit of a rough time during the restructuring of the past decade. Many galleries and museums downsized the number of hands-on practitioners, saw cuts in their buying power, and, most horrible of all, increased management.

Curators looked to be a dying breed. Now, in something of a new phase, the situation for curators looks healthier than ever.

Three key positions in our public galleries are being filled this year with some of the best talent available. Robert Leonard, formerly a permanent director of Artspace, returns to Auckland to take up the vacated position of curator of contemporary art at the Auckland Art Gallery. Tobias Berger, an experienced German curator, arrives from Berlin today and will start as the new Artspace director in three weeks. And Simon Rees, the youngest of the three, joined New Plymouth's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery towards the end of last year.

All three are curators of contemporary art. They will have a paramount role in selecting and exhibiting new art, local and international, and identifying important emerging artists. Their choices will greatly influence the New Zealand art scene.

Leonard, one of the country's most experienced contemporary art curators, took a breather last year to write a recent history of New Zealand art. In his time as a curator, Leonard has gone a long way to filling in the gaps in our art history, and never shied from controversy. He has been an advocate for Billy Apple's conceptual art, organised a 70s show that looked at conceptual and post-object art, and tirelessly promoted our art overseas. Once published, his book is sure to be a thorough and complex history, one which will turn assumptions about recent New Zealand art on their head.

After stints in the public art galleries in Wellington, New Plymouth and Dunedin, Leonard took on the job as director of Artspace in Auckland, a position he held for five years. As a board member of Artspace I watched him turn the gallery around, make it slicker, more professional, presenting better exhibitions.

Along with a handful of other curators, such as Greg Burke, he has gone a long way to upping New Zealand's game on the international art scene. Leonard edited a special New Zealand edition of the influential journal Art Asia Pacific. He was the New Zealand curator for the last Sao Paulo Biennial, for the third Asia Pacific Triennial, and is the curator for our second major outing at the Venice Biennale. He seemed to have a hand, either directly or indirectly, in all the best contemporary projects New Zealand has staged lately.

This breadth of involvement will strongly benefit the Auckland Art Gallery.

Replacing Leonard as the new Artspace director, Berger leaves a successful European career to work in Auckland. He has worked for five years at the Kunsthalle at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel, which will be familiar as the home of the five yearly mega-exhibition, Documenta, in my mind one of the world's most prestigious.

Choosing Berger is a significant shift for Artspace, signalling the gallery's increasing emphasis towards international art.

"After 10 years working on international art in Europe, it is nice to get a small and flexible space, and in a language that I can understand," says Berger. "I am looking forward to getting back to the gallery floor, to more practical work after being in a large institution. It makes more sense to me to do this, to come to grips with artists and their work in this way."

Berger, who first visited New Zealand four years ago, views working here as a logical step. He has come to know local artists in the regular visits he has made since, and included two New Zealanders, Yuk King Tan and Peter Robinson, in the Baltic Biennial in Lithuania, which he curated, favourably reviewed in Artforum and Flash Art.

The talk of more international art in Artspace's programme may increase anxiety levels for some gallery goers. But Berger imagines running two parallel programmes, one local, the other international. In the main, the latter focus will be on our immediate neighbours, the South Pacific region, Indonesia, and Australia. He curated for the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea.

New Plymouth continues to be one of the important locations on the art map. The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery under director Greg Burke, himself one of the country's leading curators, has generated a substantial programme of contemporary art, balancing local and international exhibitions. Rees has been co-curator there since late last year. Although he studied at Auckland University, he is fresh from Sydney, where he worked for the journal Art + Text, before it shifted office to Los Angeles. He took his first job as curator at Sydney Artspace, where he was involved in maintaining their publishing programme.

As he will continue to be the Australasian correspondent for Flash Art and Art + Text, I asked him if he felt out of the loop in New Plymouth. "I keep up a network of friends, travel regularly to Auckland, Wellington and Sydney and the internet has made culture globally accessible," he said. "I think I have a different set of Australian and international contacts to complement Greg Burke's. I belong to a younger generation and am coming at it reasonably fresh, with new ideas for contemporary New Zealand art practice."

His first exhibition for New Plymouth, Break, a biennial summer review of last year's new art, is a chance to find out what that is.

These exhibitions are always good indicators of who the emerging artists are and who needs to be watched. "Contemporary artists are beginning to shuck off the fascination with landscape, identity and nationalism. Instead they are making art to do with broader international concerns and personal issues."

To indicate the scope of the gallery's direction under these two, Rees is working with Burke on their next exhibition, Extended Play: Art Remixing Music, which will include international luminaries Christian Marclay and Stephen Prina.

These three curators are an injection of new blood into an already healthy body. Certainly, our art scene should prepare itself for some engaging and intelligent developments.

* Richard Dale is an independent art critic and curator.