Michael Tarantino; Contemporary art curator
Hyfler/Rosner
Creative curator of contemporary art
Adrian Searle
Friday December 5, 2003
The Guardian
Michael Tarantino, who has died of cancer at the age of 55, was one of the
best, and most creative, curators of contemporary art, with a career that
encompassed work in Boston, Brussels, Oxford and across the continent. He
was the most European American I ever met, yet he was always the baseball
fan.
Tarantino's self-deprecating, downbeat wit hid extensive learning. He
thought like an artist or a poet. He had a hangdog, lugubrious look, and a
thorough, appraising eye. If he ever had a tendency to make a meal of
things, it was always a great meal. He never trumpeted his talents, but
worked maniacally.
Born in New Jersey, he held an MA in cinema studies from New York
University, and his career in America, before he moved to Belgium in 1988
with his partner, the translator Tiffany Fliss, was impressive.
As director of the new works programme for the Massachusetts council for the
arts, in Boston in the 1980s, he commissioned and produced more than 200
projects, working not just with visual artists like Judith Barry and Antoni
Muntadas, but also with the Wooster Group experimental theatre company,
composer John Adams and with Robert Wilson, whose mammoth The Civil Wars he
commissioned for the American Repertory Theatre. He was a pioneering
supporter of artists' video and film installations, at a time when many
institutions did not know how to deal with this emerging form.
Tarantino became more widely known in Britain when, in 1998, he was made
head of exhibitions at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. Among other
exhibitions, he curated shows about the relationship between architecture,
gardens and landscape (Enclosed & Enchanted), and about the influence of
Alfred Hitchcock on contemporary art (Notorious).
He was always fascinated by the links between art and film, and another
exploration of the theme, So Faraway, So Close, pitched Jean-Luc Godard
against Ed Ruscha, Jeff Wall against Dennis Hopper. His ability to make
unexpected conjunctions - setting up startling juxtapositions which shed new
light on their works - meant that artists were as keen to have him curate
their monographic exhibitions as to take part in his thematic group shows.
If this convivial, passionate man's capacity for friendship seemed
limitless, so was the list of international artists and filmmakers whom he
commissioned and collaborated with, in shows throughout Europe and America.
These included some of the major figures in British art, including Antony
Gormley (whose work Tarantino curated in Santiago de Compostela), Sam
Taylor-Wood, Anish Kapoor and Rachel Whiteread (for the Palacio Velazquez in
Madrid).
Most recently, between bouts of illness, he worked on projects with the
Portuguese artist Pedro Cabrita Reis, for the Baltic in Gateshead, and at
this year's Venice Biennale. He was also the curator of the recent Cristina
Iglesias exhibition, which travelled Europe and came to London's Whitechapel
Art Gallery earlier this year.
Tarantino returned to Brussels in 2001 to take up the artistic directorship
of a new centre for the arts. His illness returned, though it was hard to
know whether he was more exacerbated by his health or by hospital food.
Such things could set off spiralling jokes, long, arcing riffs that wound
art, life, movies, books and scurrilous talk together. A typical essay, on
the photographer Richard Billingham, entwined Proust, Eisenstein's Ivan The
Terrible and a discussion of horror and envy into the text. His left-field
references and diversions were illuminating rather than gratuitous, and made
his prose, and his talk, so energising.
Latterly, while planning an exhibition together, the same principle led our
discussions to slew from art and artists into Michael's vivid descriptions
of table-dancing midgets in Lisbon, plot lines in The Sopranos and
recollections of unforgettable menus. A certain beetroot cappuccino, and a
novelty dry martini he was once served (the olive stuffed with blue cheese)
ignited his pleasurable fury. He had standards, in life as well as art.
· Michael Tarantino, curator and writer, born May 27 1948; died November 28
2003