As curators we are always involved in space: finding the right location, wall, or floor for installing a work of art. Museums build new and bigger spaces for their collections; curators seek out spaces beyond the gallery to present works. An essential reason for making exhibitions—to make spaces where the audience can see works of art and have an art experience—might seem self-evident. I recently visited the Museé d’Orsay. Now granted, it’s impressionism and postimpressionism and we all know those mid- to late-nineteenth-century French masters have ready, mass appeal. But it wasn’t so different over at the Pompidou: long lines, big crowds, people looking at art everywhere. Okay, it was Paris, but still, in other cities, at biennials and art fairs, even without the queues, the effort needed just to get to the galleries—the spaces for art—can be considerable and I thought: does the art reward the effort? What is the attraction? What is the message we are giving about art? What is the experience we are engendering? So I want to talk about address some other kinds of space essential to the experience of art and, though we might not walk into them as we do galleries, we inhabit them nonetheless, and without them, art doesn’t happen. They are empty spaces and full ones, quiet and noisy spaces, where art experiences happen.

Museum exhibitions historically have been places to obtain knowledge as well as observe works, the art, or artifacts exposed. These shows depend upon a curator’s scholarship and selection process. As a profession, ours is a field distinguished by judgments, discriminations, exclusions as much as inclusions. In the realm of today’s art, where the patron once stood at the sidelines making art possible, the curator is often the one who commissions artworks, creates the occasion for, and even takes a part in their making. Since 1990 I have devoted my practice exclusively to this way of working, making art with artists and participating in a dialogue around questions that generate the context for the work’s emergence and (as the projects I am involved with are nearly always temporary) its very existence.

In the mid-1980s, after working together on an exhibition, a new installation work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the artist Ann Hamilton said to me “you give permission.” This was a confusing, uncomfortable statement for me, connoting a status of superiority from which one bestowed opportunity, funds, space; an identity far from my self-image of friend and colleague to the artist in the process of creation. This remark stayed with me and it took some fifteen years to understand that permission occurs when, as a curator, I make a space—the conditions and circumstances, intellectually, socially, physically, in whatever ways necessary—for the artist to make art: empty space, a space of experimentation, and more than that, a space in which the artist can linger not knowing.

Then I also began to think of her words and about the space we make for the audience. In the latter 1980s, as we in the field came to scrutinize who the audience was for art and what publics remained outside arts’ institutions, I wondered who has permission to be there, to look, and whose responses are given credence and why. And could space be made for the viewer, an empty space of permission, rather than filling up space with information or amenities to alleviate the profession’s perceived deficiency of the viewer? How can we foreground the function of museums as a place for experiencing art’s unique ability to move beyond its objectness and out into the world—and our experience of it and others? John Dewey saw this deep and useful connection of art and life when he said: “To some degree we become artists ourselves as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is reoriented.... This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude.”

I wondered how to nurture the public’s experience with art beyond offering classes, lectures, and tours, and the like. I knew, from experience, that our capacity for being with unfamiliar art depends on our capacity to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. But there are few indicators along the way to guide us in the perception of art, a process that is so unfamiliar to the experience of many; to give us permission to rest—as did the artist before us during the process of making—in what Buddhist practice calls the “mind of don’t know.” Yvonne Rand, who uses art and museum exhibitions in her Buddhist teaching, offers that this quality exists when “one immerses one’s mind in the process of inquiry and experience, giving up any orientation toward outcome or result. The practitioner cultivates the willingness to sit at length with a question and to allow answers to arise as they will out of intuitive understanding, not through willing them forth by analytical thinking.”

Key to this concept of “mind of don’t know” is the distinction between aims and goals. Now “to have no goals” is anathema to us, irresponsible or wrong, and with moral or monetary implications. (Perhaps this is one reason why the “mind of don’t know” is so curious, so radical to our learned way of being.) Aims are underlying directives, notions that answer the “why,” why we are pursuing something; goals are the “what,” the tangible thing or action undertaken and presented as product. But if we suspend goals, leaving them undefined, flexible, and open to discovery, then anything is possible; and if we are clear about our aims and attentive to them, then no matter what path we go down, exploring where it might lead but guided by our essential aims, it is possible to arrive at the appropriate, perhaps unexpected, but responsive, end. If the audience can share in the “mind of don’t know” and stay open to experience, then they, too, can arrive at a new, powerful and not prescriptive place. Rirkrit Tiravanija, whose art evades identity and thingness even as it finds its place in museums, sees his method of practice as fluid, living, a place of possibility. He said “ I always get asked, ‘What are your expectations?’ and I say, ‘I don’t have any,’ because I don’t predetermine things…. And I think this is quite important in terms of living in a Buddhistic way: not to have preconceived structures or to close off possibilities; but it’s not even about being open or closed it’s just about being blank, in a way, of course, you can receive more if you are empty.” Yet many museums have been attracted to sponsoring projects by Tiravanija, giving him “exhibitions,” as if there were a need on the part of museums for what this artists brings, fulfilling something they cannot. For the artist, the museum is a place that we need to reenter to change the preconceived notions of what art is.

Creating this open space for the audience to experience can be the role of museum architecture. Some art museums, like the spaces of Tadaeo Ando, make the art resonate within; many, even new and much-touted designs, do not. Artists and curators have increasingly turned in the last two decades to site-specific practices as attempts to focus experience and heighten awareness, immersing the viewer in the art-and-environment as one, at times crossing realms of experiences, space, and time. But creating space for viewers also encompasses a mental space that gives room for a wide range of subtleties and ambiguity that parallel the ways of life itself but which we often can’t perceive with the clarity of distance ... and sometimes art provides that distance. This creating of space is about making room for individuals to find their own place in relation to the work of art. In doing so, people may locate what they already know from their experiences—or perhaps instinctively—but that may have receded with diminished awareness, gone untapped for a very long time.

Now this is not to say that there isn’t knowledge to impart to the audience. I strongly advocate bridging the gap, disclosing information on an artwork and its context, and sharing in transparent ways the workings and thought processes of art- and exhibition-making. But there is another kind of knowledge important to the art experience and, while it cannot be written on a label, it can be created or curated into an exhibition. The artist Christian Boltanski tells an ancient story in everyday terms of the little girl who desired to have time alone with her newborn brother. With trepidation, the parents consented, then surreptitiously listened in as she asked the baby: “Tell me about god, I am beginning to forget.” Some wisdom traditions believe that everything already exists (this is a crisis for the modernist Western mind anxious to claim the avant-garde), that existence comes first and our awareness of it follows, that at birth people are potentially all-knowing and life is a process of forgetting with occasional realization of what they we already know; and that certain experiences—including, notably, art experiences—trigger the release of that information and help them to recollect what's “on the tip of their psyche,” as architect Michael Rotondi puts it. If we value the viewer as not empty, but instead make an empty, open, and expansive space—and exhibitions can be one of these generous spaces—then the fullness of the visitor’s experience (rather than the museum’s or sponsor’s or curator’s experience) can fill that space, fill it with the experience of art. I’ll give a couple of examples.

Verandah was an installation, a vision based on a Japanese teahouse, a minimal sculpture, a space for art and for dance and artworks but at times hardly visible at all. It was the dream of educator and curator Linda Duke, and the result of collaboration in 2003 between the curator, Rotondi, artist Hirokaszu Kosaka, and choreographer Joe Goode. As Rotondi tells it: “We were interested in what would happen if, when people left the room, they could only describe the experience and not the ‘object.’ Their memory would be of a process (personal experience) not the product (the constructed verandah) if the thing itself had presence but was relatively neutral, if it was a way of modulating space as opposed to putting an object in the space. We wanted to give equal status to the experience of matter and light. Movement would be modulated; the body in space, moving and at rest, would be our frame of reference. The thing wouldn’t really exist except for the reflection of the light off all the surfaces. And it worked.”

Ann Hamilton makes works that are palpable; we experience her work with our body and senses as well as intellectually. Her own sensations, derived from direct experience, become a starting point for the work. Of myein, her installation in the American Pavilion for the 1999 Venice Biennale, a work criticized in the press for its emptiness, nothingness, she said: "I have been a live presence in much of my work ... there was no live presence in this work yet I realized the live presences were the people who came and moved within it, sometimes erasing it ... I learned of the need, perhaps the hard way, for some of my pieces to be quiet and to be solitary.”

In 2002 Marina Abramovic made The House with an Ocean View. She lived in full view of her audience for twelve days at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. To the artist it was a direct transmission of energy. “I created space with no time. I created the feeling of here and now. You know how people go through galleries ... three minutes here, two minutes there, just go in and out ... I had people staying. I had the people who would come every single day, some for hours; some sat there for five hours. I had people going to work with their briefcases who would wait in the front of the gallery for it to open, just to be there, like addicts, just to have that gaze, and then go out into the world, because out of that they can get something. It was amazing because I had an incredible feeling of unconditional love toward any person who came there and wanted to look at me in the eyes. Nobody was looking at them the way I look at them, unconditionally.” Abramovic realized and acknowledged that this work was completely dependent on the public: “the public and I actually made the piece. Without the public, the piece doesn't exist, so they filled it.” She finds her function as an artist to be important and useful. And while the experience during her performances is profound for her, she knows it is transforming for the visitor, too: “they take what they need for their own life to enlarge awareness.... I give art unconditionally so that it might have its own function in the lives of everybody.”

You find these days, among people of very different economic, social, cultural circumstances, that everyone describes their lives as hectic, burdened, complicated, demanding—too full. Artist Bill Viola, in part, grounds the experiences he creates in the need in our world for quiet time for reflection and re-centering: “We must take time back into ourselves, let our consciousness breathe and our cluttered minds be still and silent,” he admonished, offering, “This is what art can do and what museums can be in today’s world.”

The quiet, contemplative space of art can be a refuge, a remedy, an aesthetic antidote to life. But the full and seemingly fully occupied space of life can also be a space for art. So instead of the quiet and removed exhibition space of the museum, it is equally possible to make an exhibition that presents art that is invisible, seamless with life, or as Tiravanija describes, having “no seams”—an art so neutral that it is not really seen yet has a presence. Exhibitions of artists’ projects intrinsically connected to everyday life weave themselves into the fabric—or fray—of our existence. It is no wonder that in recent years this mode of working outside conventional art spaces has been so fruitful in concept and number, and that a multitude of artists and curators have found it invigorating and gratifying to feel how art resonates outside the gallery box.

There are also art experiences that happen in the space of life, with no art objects or art actions at all. They happen as lingering or reignited reflections on artworks seen in the past and later digested ... maybe much later, outside the exhibition timeframe and any reporting timetable. This experience is an echo as it reemerges, or leaps to mind more powerfully than the first time, its meaning magnified by intervening life experiences. For Viola, this special power of art evokes responsibility on the part of artists: “I think contemporary artists need to be more cognizant of the spiritual nature of their work, and its place as part of a great tradition that stretches back through time.” Then there is also a way in which we live life informed by art. Art hones our awareness, keeping present in us our relation to other things and heightening our sense of place in the world. This is possible to achieve without art as we know it, but in our world art is one of the few instruments with which we can tune our sensibilities of things beyond self.

I’d like to add to this discussion of the spaces of art that, for me, the space of curating is an empty space—not just when I am cohabiting it with an artist during the process of making but in the process of determining the “why” of an exhibition and then, with these questions as my aim, maintaining this empty space so that others can eventually come in, too. When I began in 1991 to work with communities outside museums—constituencies that would be the audience, but that at the outset were the informants and participants in the art process—I began to realize that my background as an art historian and museum curator could not serve me in full. One school of thought would say: seek the right training or read books in community activism, sociology, video production, whatever it takes. I subscribed to another school of thought, using my “unknowingness” and “outsiderness” and, like with looking at art, accumulating direct experience. I had to depend primarily upon listening to others, to the public; I had to work with communities not my own but also outside the contemporary art world to become educated. This was a big shift from picking artists, artworks, and telling audiences about art. As curator, I was not the authority; at best I could become a conduit for ideas of others, translated and transformed by the artist. Meanwhile, in the process, I had to reveal that “I didn’t know”—about a place or a community, about what the art would look like in the exhibition or what its thesis would finally be. I also had to trust my past art experiences, the ones that were revelations. I had to depend on anecdotal comments, stories that came back to me over time in response to shows I’d organized, most of all those from unexpected, “unhip” sources, people who got it and gave back the most profound observations and understandings of so-called sophisticated new art. I was bolstered by the knowledge that for some the indifference, even hostility, had fallen away; that for some art had made a difference. I trusted that there were others from whom I would never hear, but the art mattered to them, too. Then I had to create a space—a sufficiently wide and empty-enough space—where different publics could listen to and hear themselves as they listened to the art.

What can exhibitions do now and why might they even be important? Open situations for experience don’t happen often. They can be disconcerting, intimidating, so programmed are we to being led to or told the result of our experiences (how we should feel, what we will feel). “Not knowing,” being given permission to be on one’s own and really have a full experience, can be scary. But we need more spaces for thoughtful experience in our society, spaces where experience can take us to a renewed place in our lives, a transformation, a fuller sense of being beyond the limitations of self. So what we need is to curate the conditions for the audience’s own creativity and deep engagement. This requires a safe and empty space for a wider view, for an intense and longer inquiry. Surely those of us in the curatorial field can each recall certain works of art that have transported us and contributed to our desire, in turn, to engender an experience in others. As curators we make exhibitions as space for experience.