administration

—Some of the stakeholders seem to believe that museum directors manage superintendents, accountants, and technical services, whereas I prefer to think that superintendents must do their own job, while the priority of the director lies in the field of meaningful content. After all, new roofs and well-scraped floors are not exactly what we are after. Professionally, museum directors are ‘personally liable,' as official documents put it, for content. But from the point of view of the city or the government, it is the content rather than the operational support that gets driven into heavily regulated, top-down structures. The trend is for operational departments across the country to implement the shared cultural agenda, although it is supposed to happen the other way around: the cultural product should be developed by museum experts, while repairing roofs should be the prerogative of someone else.

—Our biggest asset and our biggest problem is the enormity of facilities, including the collections that eat away at our physical resources and state assignments that we have to fulfil in order to keep the 14 roubles and 50 kopecks per visitor that are due for any individual service. Probably some day we will be able to find a mechanism enabling us to glide past the state assignment in our programming instead of falling over.

Today, the process and the assessment of its efficiency are two completely different stories. If a museum branch gets 5,000 visitors, the person in charge gets 40,000 rubles of salary. If visitor numbers rise to 10,000, the salary will be 41,000 rubles.

In theory, every branch should enjoy a wide autonomy, including a basic operational budget. Because today, if you are based in Vsevolodo-Vilva, the village five hours away from Perm where Pasternak wrote his first poems, you still have to ask permission at the headquarters to get a new lamp. This is a bad bottleneck: many operational and financial issues depend upon one person, the director.

—Today, a chain of contemporary art centres needs doers, not curators. Experienced managers and administrators who would get busy hammering together the necessary structures. Many people know the ropes of creating contemporary art content, but no one has the know-how of managing marketing, communications, and operations. The skills that are lacking have to do with getting state financing, setting up facilities, completing renovation works, recruiting new team members. No one knows how to turn content into products, except for Anna Gor in the Arsenal in Nizhny Novgorod and the Ural Industrial Biennial.

—When we unveiled the reinvented permanent exhibition, the mayor said: "The director is a good administrator! I can see that things are managed wisely here." For me it was the best of compliments: I know I am good at inventing and designing, but it was important for me to be recognised as a person capable not only of dreaming, but also of getting things done.

—One of the weaknesses of our museum is operational management and shortage of staff. Coming up with new ideas and putting nails into walls fall within the purview of the same person. This is a problem shared by at least a half of all museums. Theatres and filmmaking are more diversified, with more structured production chains, whereas in a museum everything tends to snowball. Operational issues must get a structure, and I would like to organise the workflow in a way that allows me to cut down on manual labour.

—We knew what we were getting into. Municipalities are extremely poor in Russia. Administrative and maintenance issues must be dealt with in order for the curators to be able to do their work well. Right now we are trying to raise the bar and set new standards. A curator’s job is to build a network, a system of interrelations within an artistic project. Artwork selection and agreements with artists are a managerial, not a curatorial task. In a private gallery, they would be the responsibility of an art manager. Ideally, curatorial practices are about creating new perspectives, referencing lifestyles established elsewhere, establishing subtle, nontrivial connections through time and space to bring together artists, statements, and documentary materials of various generations. These things are infinitely fascinating: the relations of facts and fictions, the appearance of fictional artists and imaginary biographies and the conclusions they suggest for real life. I try to focus on these issues, but I need more time, which is taken up by administrative issues.