Contemporary Curator: Nick Waterlow

NICK WATERLOW
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Nick Waterlow
Nick Waterlow was a curator of the Sidney Biennale and a well-known and respected cultural diplomat within the Australian and global art community until his unfortunate death on 9th November 2009. After serving as the inspirational director for Sydney Biennale, beginning in1979, Waterlow was made the director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, where he mentored generations of local artists and students. He was also on the editorial board of Art & Australia, a biannual digital magazine and one of the oldest art journals in Australia. Waterlow is credited with transforming the Sydney Biennale into a global showcase for modern art that challenged Australian colonial attitudes. Before assuming directorship of three biennales of Sydney, many artists in Australia focused on New York as the global center of culture. However, Waterlow managed to connect Australian artists to European counterparts and turned the Biennale of Sydney into a grand and sophisticated narrative of world-class exhibition. This essay will examine the methodology of Waterlow using the example of the 1979 Sydney Biennale, which he directed, and particularly his appreciation for Aboriginal art.[Janet McKenzie, “Nick Waterlow Obituary,” The Guardian, November 17, 2009, sec. Art and design, /artanddesign/2009/nov/17/nick-waterlow-obituary.]
After the tragic murder of British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow by his mentally ill son at the Sydney suburb on November 9, 2009, his partner Juliet Darling chanced upon some handwritten notes on what the curator believed characterized the art of curation. Waterlow defined a good curator as passionate, having an eye of discernment, willing to learn and unlearn, and having an ability to be uncertain. Moreover, he thought that a good curator must have a thorough understanding of works of art in order to question, inspire, and stimulate the audience, but more importantly, have the capacity to alter people’s perception of works of art. Waterlow’s notes provide critical insight into his methodology and explain why he worked hard to dismantle the stereotype of curators as old men and women who believe that their museum collections should remain flawless. He believed that in addition to fulfilling the traditional roles of archiving and preserving art collections, a curator must use the eye of discernment to include as many artists and themes as possible. Waterlow’s focus on inspiring and facilitating various artistic themes rather than competing with the artists whose works he was tasked with exhibiting is probably one of the most distinguishing features of his methodology.[F Fenner, “Document - Gale Academic OneFile,” go.gale.com, 2010, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA460761414&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=0004301X&p=AONE&sw=w.] [Ólöf Gerður Sigfúsdóttir, “Curatorial Research as Boundary Work,” Curator: The Museum Journal 64, no. 3 (May 24, 2021): 421–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12417.]
Waterlow employed an inclusive and creative approach to curating since the start of his career, and particularly in the 1979 Biennale of Sydney. The curator launched the exhibition as a global event by seeking out audacious works of art from Western Europe. The 1979 Sydney Biennale was significantly larger than its predecessor and helped establish the city as a global art center. As the inspirational director, Waterlow sought to investigate the influences and relationships between Europe and Australia. The fact that he was British-born gave him a good opportunity to present European avant-garde art to Australian audiences. To this end, Waterlow negotiated and compromised with various leading global avant-garde artists, including Mario Merz, Daniel Buren and Ulrike Rosenbach, Hanne Darboven, Gerhard Richter, Marcel Broodthaers, Valie Export, as well as Marina Abramovic and Ulay. Besides liaising with international art talents and marketing Sydney as a global art center, Waterlow also understood the relevance of inclusivity in expanding understandings of contemporary art. His methodology of inclusivity and creativity was evident from the importance he gave to local artist selection and community consultation.[UNSW, “The World Is Here - 20th Biennale of Sydney,” UNSW Sites, 2016, /news/2016/03/the-world-is-here---20th-biennale-of-sydney.] [Felicity Fenner, “De-Beuysed but Not Forgotten: Joseph Beuys in Sydney,” Public Art Dialogue 9, no. 2 (July 3, 2019): 182–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/21502552.2019.1644131.]
Waterlow not only included local artists and especially Aboriginal artists from north-east Arnhem Land in the 1979 Sydney Biennial but endeavored to include their various interests in a meaningful way. One of the reasons why the biennial was regarded as a global success was because it also existed at the local and national level. Waterlow was not just interested in marketing Sydney as a world art center but he was also keen on ensuring the exhibition was a fuller representation of Australians and local artists’ wishes. The biennial had two purposes: to question the predominance of European and American biennials and to be a dialogue with local artists. Before the third Sydney Biennale, Waterlow had not curated for any other global exhibition. Although he had been living in Australia for nearly a decade and had collaborated with numerous community arts organization in the country, the 1979 Sydney biennial was his first big challenge. His directorship at Biennale was at first marked by clashes with frustrated local artists who believed that the Biennale organization was biased in its artist selection. Many local artists complained that the event forced local artists to assume a subsidiary role and that the exhibition poorly reflected needs.[Jalees Rehman, “Curating Science,” The Next Regeneration, March 4, 2013, https://thenextregeneration.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/curating-science/.]
For many artists, the biennial event was an extravagant event that defined the situation local artists should work in rather than reflect their interests. However, Waterlow managed to address most of these issues by ensuring the 1979 Sydney biennial represented Australian artists from regional and rural areas including, for the first time since any exhibition of modern art in Australia, Aboriginal artists from the country’s remote “Top End”. The reason the exhibition can be considered to be an embodiment of Waterlow’s methodology is because all the things he believed to constitute a good curator (in the handwritten notes that were discovered by his partner shortly after his death) are evident in his directorship. For instance, the struggle to mediate global spheres (connecting Australian art to European influences) and local spheres (ensuring the exhibition was a complete reflection of Australia and local artists’ interests) required the curator to be passionate, have an eye of discernment, be willing to learn and unlearn, and be comfortable with uncertainty.
Waterlow dubbed the 1979 Sidney biennial European Dialogue thereby suggesting that his focus was showcasing to Australians more political and adventurous European works of art even as he sought to increase the representation of local artists. This approach was a departure from previous biennials that recycled Parisian modernism and American neo-expressionist curatorial themes. Waterlow focused on including several European transavantgarde works including those by Gerhard Richter and Howard Hodgkin, which had never been seen in Australia. Before his stint as director of the 1979 biennial, Waterlow had travelled around Europe and was familiar with a range of new avantgarde work that had not yet reached Australia. The global artists who participated in the exhibition had new postobject works of art to offer and revised the widespread notion that New York was the center of the global modern art world. Waterlow wished to reshape art history by eliminating the huge influence of American art on Australia by examining the relationship between European and Australian art and especially the influence of the former on the latter. The 1979 Sidney biennial was an attempt at establishing Australia as a self-sustaining and respectable center of contemporary art.[Sibyl Fisher, “Fluent in Venice: Curating Australian Aboriginal Art beyond the ‘Urban/Desert&rsquo...