My interest in the subject lies not in how artists might curate the work of other artists; but rather, in how they might curate their own and the vicissitudes of the process of making it. How do artists organize the realities of their everyday lives into the fictions we call ‘art’? How might a global exhibition like Documenta explore the intricacies of how individual artists approach their own aesthetic activity? This is what interests me.

The etymology of the word ‘curate’ is an intriguing one. Skeat, who is generally considered the foremost authority on English etymology, suggests a late Latin source, curatus, a priest or curate, or more succinctly: “one who has the cure of souls.”

This is not an etymology many people will find relevant to the task of curating, but I think it is an appropriate, if not also prescient, way of assessing the curatorial task: to integrate into one contextualized activity both physical and metaphysical concerns. Think of Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Unpacking my Library,” as a starting point. Benjamin explains that a library is not just a collection of books (any more than an exhibition is a collection of art works)—but that the sense of order is “a balancing act of extreme precariousness” that reveals itself as “a dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder.” Benjamin then goes on to narrate aspects of this tension—names, places, memories, stories. A book is always for Benjamin more than a book; even its acquisition, as much as its writing, has a history.

Suppose one were to unpack the histories that comprise the work of various writers, and the moments such an exploration might reveal: Keats’s annotated copy of Shakespeare. The manuscript of TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with Ezra Pound’s emendations. Emily Dickinson’s pencil stubs. Anna Akhmatova’s ashtray. Vladimir Nabakov’s butterfly collection. Think of Wallace Stevens sitting behind his desk at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Amos Tutuola writing and erasing his way through The Palm-Wine Drinkard. James Joyce proofreading Finnegan’s Wake. Martin Luther King Jr composing a speech (did he, as John Bayley said of Osip Mandelstam, “compose in the mouth”?).

These moments might seem incidental, but they are incidental in a way that the subject of a still life painting is incidental: they are part of the grand scheme of being, and become important in relation to the greater ideals we typically fixate upon. Sometimes their ordinariness is so unexceptional—Akhmatova’s ashtray for example—that only in the context of a larger narrative do these moments have symbolic meaning. But that is the point of such an exhibition: to reveal the complexity of the ways art comes into being. The issue here is not creative ‘genius,’ whatever that may be. The issue is creative reality: the idiosyncratic and typically arcane ways in which individual artists work, and the manifestation of their likes and dislikes as part of the process.

What if Documenta were to be based on such an approach—80 artists maybe—showing not their ‘art’ as we already know it—but rather, the machinations of their minds? A show that is not so much about objects as it is a show about processes? A show that is, in so many ways, organic and dynamic, and takes us closer to the confluences of creation?

Imagine for example, a show that might include, as transitory moments: Karen Kilimnik’s bedroom; Rirkrit Tiravinija’s shopping lists; Matthew Barney’s storyboards; Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé’s engineering and political science notebooks; Douglas Gordon’s wastepaper basket; Andreas Slominski’s contracts with construction equipment operators; Adam Chodzko’s telephone message tapes; Lisa Yuskavage’s lingerie drawers; Dinos & Jake Chapman’s recycling bin; Tacita Dean’s postcards to friends, which are as compelling as Nam June Paik’s postcards to Gregory Battcock; Richard Serra’s installation documentation, including the rigging calculations and notes by Ray La Chapelle & Sons. Perhaps also we could include documentation of situations where artworks were damaged or destroyed as a consequence of human judgment and misjudgment—because it is accidents like these that contribute to taking us closer to the complexity of the way art manifests itself, and moves, through culture.

It’s not that I imagine examples like these to be exhibited in isolation, where there is an ostensible danger of fetishization; rather, I imagine such examples to be part of an imbricated layering of an otherwise ineffable dynamic. Gerhard Richter’s Atlas project from Documenta X in 1997 was in some respects a meditation on influences, and it was presented as an artwork in and of itself. The project I envision here would not necessarily be so determinate. I can imagine it will be pretty messy in places. That it might not take place entirely in Kassel, but wherever some artists wish to expose the source of their interests. That this could be indoors or outdoors, in Europe or Asia, in a museum or in a café: Kassel would be the nexus from which all of the projects would radiate. Not that it would be easy, or that artists would approach it all alike. And one should not presuppose that the process is necessarily or inherently interesting. Once, when Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked what he would do if Tolstoy lived across the street from him—would he go visit him and talk with him about writing?—Singer replied: no, he’d rather stay home and read what Tolstoy writes.

The idea is not to establish a new paradigm for curatorial practice, but simply to inflect and footnote existing practices for which precedent already exists.

Laboratorium, which took place in Antwerp in 1999 and was curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden, was an exhibition that moved, and not just in a figurative sense: Bruce Mau installed a book machine that, quite literally, produced catalogue pages; Matt Mullican rebuilt five rooms of his NYC studio; Luc Steels created a working laboratory for continuing his experiments with computer-based language acquisition models; and the exhibition included a series of lectures which took place in the buildings of the Prince Leopold Institute for Tropical Diseases. These lectures were not so much lectures about art, but art itself: Panamarenko gave a multimedia demonstration on Toy Models of Space; Xavier Le Roy talked and gestured on biography as theory; Bruno Latour performed Pasteur’s Sorbonne Lecture of 1864 on ‘Spontaneous Generation’—a performance that provided a new take on Borges’ story, “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote.” The newness of Laboratorium was in how the exhibition explored the laboratory as a studio and the studio as a laboratory, and did so in a way that offered an accessible approach to the demystification strategies that began to evolve in the early 1990s.

One example of such a strategy was Donna de Salvo’s insightful show at the Parrish Museum of Art in Southampton, Long Island, Past Imperfect: A Museum Looks at Itself (1992). Here the curatorial process involves self-examination, a way of discovering not what certain art might ‘mean’, but rather the processes by which meaning is produced. A related exhibition, Zeitmaschine, curated by Ralf Beil and Christoph Lichtin at Kunstmuseum Berne in 2002, invited a small group of artists to interact with the Museum’s permanent collection, and reinstall the work in ways that reflected their idiosyncratic interests. Where the Parrish Museum show explored the museum’s history in relation to American cultural identity, the show at Kunstmuseum Berne explored the museum in relation to the participating artists’ excavation of it. Both were essentially introspective exhibitions: they didn’t valorize objects so much as they tried to understand how objects come into being, and relate them to the continuum of cultural history, including the micro-histories of individual artists.

That Documenta can be organized in a way that takes further the prescience and the pragmatism of exhibitions like Laboratorium and Zeitmaschine seems to me both viable and feasible. The dilemma of course is who would ‘pick’ the artists, who would then curate themselves: a very real conundrum. I do not have an answer for this, outside of my own predilection for a mix of both curators and artists, who, in the words of Olu Oguibe, have a good eye—as well as an unperturbed and unperturbable disposition. Whether such a show would ‘work’ or not seems to me a moot consideration; all exhibitions ‘work’ even when they work badly, because even in their badness they take us somewhere we might never imagine going on our own. This is because of the way an exhibition performs a framing function—it localizes cultural activity in a circumscribed space in which we essentially slow down and spend time with it—and hope, as an outcome, that it will alter our understanding of the world—disturb the equilibrium of our complacency—and do the sort of things that take us a little closer to nothingness, wherein we might find within it the words of a world.