Before Collins & Milazzo.

Before Collins & Milazzo, "independent curator" was a slumberous designation for moonlighting art critics and academics. After the pair's roaring slope on the scene circa 1984 it became a full-blown piece of work description. A visit to a indicate organized by the twosome was an instant admittance to a world in which placid Conceptualism, an overheated market, and French theory in overdrive shared the same bed; for artists, being tapped according to the curatorial duo meant that pop one's work was part of the discourse. It was a heady time, made smooth more so by the deliberate ambiguity forwarded by the curators themselves throughout the role they played in marketing the work they championed.

While permanently altering the nature of curatorial practice in the US, Collins & Milazzo's part as catalyst in the late-'80s neo-Conceptual takeover of the East Village was no les decisive. smooth a cursory study of the former couple's take back is enough to make the popular generation of peripatetic curators blush: in the course of a decade, from March 1984 to May 1993 a mind-boggling forty-four exhibitions, virtually all accompanied according to catalogues, or at least a co-authored paragraph In many cases, the verbal pyrotechnics and occasional lapses into self-parody outweighed the work forward view. Unsurprisingly, the pair's greatest in number fertile period came early, with a series of groundbreaking minisurveys of recently made known art, whose titles still read like postmodern primers: "Still Life with Transaction," "The novel Capital," and "Paravision." One of the taboos they punctur was the notion that serious curators don't make exhibitions in galleries. Along with nonprofits like White rows a partial list of their local venue included International With gravestone Nature Morte, Postmasters, Tibor de Nagy, American Fine Arts, Massimo Audiello, John Gibson, Annina Nosei, Sidney Janis, and Tony Shafrazi.

In the close the reign of Collins & Milazzo fizzled for the same primal reason it came into being: Times changed, and the art that persons wanted to see changed with them. the same vainly scrutinizes the list of twenty artists in their 1993 swan ballad "Elvis Has Left the Building (A Painting Show)" to find more than a coupling of names that even register. As art in the '90 attempted to grapple with issues fix in the world outside the white cube, the work promot by dint of the duo began to present the appearance shallow in its endless attempts to rekindle the embers of postmodern irony. Today, Collins continues to raise younger artists at her Grand highway gallery, and Milazzo publishes critical verse s and produces the occasional exhibition, nevertheless the torch of their collaboration has been passed to a younger generation. Perhaps, like the social Darwinism that flourished in their wake, Collins & Milazzo helped plant up a system that ran no other than on the flamboyantly new, leaving anyone who could not adapt in the dust.

Dan Cameron is senior curator at the recent Museum of Contemporary Art.

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