In Terms Of

Category: Lectures

  • The Authorial Intent

    Public Art Fund Talk at the New School: Jeff Koons
    Wednesday, September 10, 2014
    New School, John L. Tishman Auditorium, University Center, New York

    Jeff Koons discusses his Inflatables from the late 1970s (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Is it possible to be indifferent to Jeff Koons? For many years my attitude toward the artist’s work has been impassive and disinterested. It exists whether I like it or not and has some visual interest, but I’ve never cared enough to form an opinion beyond that. Among the most successful living artists, Koons is comparable to Jay Z or U2: a talented mainstream artist whose early output is considered groundbreaking but whose later works are noteworthy more for their high production values and their exorbitant, multimillion-dollar price tags than their aesthetic worth. Over the years Koons has managed to stay relevant, with critics and journalists dutifully covering his exhibitions and appearances, just as they would report on Bono’s activism and Hova’s exploits.

    A retrospective covering Koons’s entire career, organized by Scott Rothkopf, sits in the Whitney Museum of American Art until October 19, the final exhibition at the museum’s Upper East Side location before a move to the Meatpacking District. The exhibition was among the reasons for tonight’s sold-out talk at the New School. Dressed in a navy suit, a pale-blue open-collared shirt, and black dress shoes, Koons delivered an hour-long, well rehearsed lecture in which he presented himself as an animated but never overbearing orator, using a variety of hand gestures, movements, and poses that enhanced his spoken words. At one point he even crouched down to greet an imaginary dog. Woof!

    After thanking the Public Art Fund, which sponsored the talk as well as the sculpture Split-Rocker (2000), a large outdoor floral arrangement on view at Rockefeller Center during summer 2014, Koons talked about his upbringing and his understanding of and approach to public sculpture, the subject of this lecture. He first became aware of the genre through a childhood encounter with the statue of William Penn that stands atop Philadelphia’s City Hall building. Created by Alexander Calder’s grandfather, the work embodies, Koons said, a history of society’s values on a mystical scale. Art deals with issues of interior and exterior, he continued, that elicit emotional responses. Further, experience and emotion form the vocabulary of art, and to interact with public art in physical space is a “communal activity.”

    William Penn stands on top of City Hall (photograph by G. Widman for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation)

    Koons emphasized what he called the “unitative,” explained as something bigger than us but at the same time collectively shared. The York fairground in the artist’s Pennsylvanian hometown, founded ca. 1765, was the first fair in the United States, he said, and there he experienced games, visual stimulation, joy, pleasure, and terror—both as an individual and as a group with other fair goers. Fireworks, parade floats, and houses decorated with Christmas lights also inspire him, providing “excitement, awe, and wonder.” “Our governments,” Koons even said, “are a form of public sculpture.” If by this he means the socially engaged practice of argument and debate, with the elation of progress and success and the frustration of stagnation, then art is like not only politics but also science, business, religion, and myriad other things.

    Koons’s vacations were also formative experiences. As a kid he and his family visited Dolphin Land or Dolphin World in Florida (perhaps he meant the Miami Seaquarium), where he internalized the relationships between humans and animals. These relationships are evident—in some way or another—in his Antiquity 3 painting, which depicts a woman riding an inflatable dolphin. Recalling the aquatic-theme-park performances of jumping dolphins and such, Koons applied abstract ideas about the surface of the water versus going underneath to sculpture. Indeed, surface and depth are the core—if not the most important—qualities of Koons’s art.

    Jeff Koons, Antiquity 3, 2009–11, oil on canvas, 102 x 138 in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    At this point Koons switched to autopilot, pulling ideas from the usual spiel he gives when discussing his own work, trotting out stock phrases about generosity, transcendence, perfection, communication, and sharing, like he most recently did on Charlie Rose and The Colbert Report. “As soon as things become public, there’s a sense of generosity,” Koons said. People share the transcendence created by art collectively, the artist explained, and there is no private experience. Deflating the importance of his artistic production, the artist said, “There’s not any art in that object,” which instead acts as a “transponder” for the art experience. Transponders, he noted, both send and receive. Later Koons said, “We don’t care about objects—we care about people.” I have no obligation to the object, he continued, but rather to the people and their trust. I wonder if he gives the same populist rap to the elite collectors who spend millions on his work.

    Koons traced the beginnings of his involvement in outdoor, public sculpture. His first foray was the stainless-steel Kiepenkerl (1987), made for that year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster in West Germany. The hot metal accidentally bent during the casting process, damaging the work in several places. Since there wasn’t enough time to redo the piece, the artist faced a grave decision: either pull out of the exhibition or attempt a hurried fix. “I went with the radical plastic surgery,” Koons said cheerfully, giving the punch line to this story for the umpteenth time.

    Jeff Koons’s Rabbit in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007 (photograph by Librado Romero for the New York Times)

    Koons described several more public artworks from the past twenty years, expressing amazement that Macy’s included a gigantic version of his mirrored inflatable Rabbit for its Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2007. He also revealed that he had been looking at Baroque and Rococo art when conceiving the monumental Puppy (1992), a large floral arrangement in the shape of a dog that appeared outside Rockefeller Center in summer 2000 (among other sites); he wanted to put those historical styles into a piece of his own. Issues that Koons grappled with for Puppy included biology, ephemerality, symmetry/asymmetry, and internal/external. Ultimately—and this was the highlight of the talk—Koons described Puppy as “a piece about control,” the kind of control a person exercises or relinquishes in his or her life. “It’s whether you want to serve or be served,” he said. This commentary evoked not only the “greed is good” mantra from the 1980s, but also the exercises and abuses of power in any political or economic dictatorship —all frightening stuff, even threatening. Here the menacing qualities of Koons’s seemingly happy, carefree art bare its fangs.

    Returning to formal and logistical issues, Koons professed that photographs of Split-Rocker typically show the piece in a pristine state, when it was first erected in early summer. Koons, however, intended the work to get “shaggy and chaotic” over time, which it had certainly done when I visited the work in mid-September. An unrealized outdoor work called Train, Koons explained, will feature a functioning, performing steam locomotive dangling from a crane. “It’s a metaphor for an individual” that huffs and puffs in a determined manner, he said, and the train experiences an “orgasmic moment” when it hits one hundred miles per hour. “To me, that’s William Penn,” he said, reiterating his themes of history, power, and the connection of an individual’s experience to something bigger.

    Koons also returned to his biography, recalling the showroom of his father, who was an interior designer. The elder Koons had sold paintings by his young son in the store window, integrating them into arrangements of furniture and other household objects. “He gave me great confidence,” the artist said of his dad. Koons also gave a shout out to W. Bowdoin Davis Jr., his art-history professor at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, who revealed the many operations in play in art, such as psychology, religion, sociology, and symbolism.

    Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), 2013, plaster and glass, 128½ x 67 × 48⅝ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Koons revealed his Balloon Venus sculpture (2008–12) as a hermaphroditic fertility object and announced that the Gazing Ball series (2013) is among his favorite bodies of work. Coincidentally it was at that moment when I noticed the artist’s intense blue eyes as he showed images of several Gazing Balls. With an image of his oversized sculpture Play-Doh (1994–2014) hovering onscreen, Koons told us “I’m trying to make works you can’t have any judgment about.” If you make judgments,” he decreed, “you’re limiting yourself.” He advised his critics to “Open yourself up and keep everything in play.”

    The event organizers had collected written questions for Koons earlier in the lecture, and Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund, read a selected few to the artist. Did Koons ever fear there was a time when he felt that his career was over, and what did he do? In his early years the artist admitted to going broke a couple times, leaving New York to live with his parents. But he came back to the city because, in his own words, “people want to be involved in dialogue. People depend on you.” I cannot imagine anyone taking that statement at face value.

    When has technology not kept up with your artistic vision, asked another question. Koons claimed he prefers not to use new technology, which implied an apprehension of his work being tied to a particular method or process or—worse—appearing dated. Yet as the Friday symposium “The Koons Effect Part 2” determined and as Michelle Kuo noted in her catalogue essay, the artist uses complex software and highly intricate three-dimensional modeling to fabricate his recent work. Some even say that his level of technological perfection is higher than is needed by the aerospace industry and the military. Again, Koon’s modest words can be readily dismissed.

    Jeff Koons on Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Someone wanted to know how Koons can manage his studio workers and still be creative? Acknowledging his longtime studio manager Gary McCraw, who sat in the audience, the artist said he is always walking through the studio, watching and educating his loyal workers. How loyal are they? The average tenure of an assistant, he pointed out, is nine years. In the end, tight organization and long-term stability give the artist his creative freedom. Another Q&A dealt with the white skin color of the porcelain figures in Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988). At the time, Koons replied, radical changes were happening to the performer’s body, and the Italian craftsman who fabricated the piece wanted to know “How am I supposed to make his nose?” when it was constantly changing in real life. Koons noted that porcelain was the “king’s material,” so he wanted Jackson to appear godlike, as in a pieta. Further, he said, the thick black outlines surrounding the singer and monkey’s eyes alluded to Egyptian art.

    How would aliens from the future interpret your work? “They’d see a lot of the world, from our day-to-day lives,” Koons responded, pointing to the archetypal, universal qualities from our present historical moment embedded into his art. To what do you owe your fame and commercial success? “My family,” he replied, as if giving an Academy Award acceptance speech. When he was child, Koons remembered becoming ecstatic when his parents told him he could draw better than his older sister, whose life, he perceived at the time, had until then been superlative to his in every way. I wondered what that sister is doing now. What don’t critics get about your work? Koons repeated the transponder argument and boasted that negative people aren’t “prepared” for his art and are “insecure.” While seemingly arrogant, this response isn’t so atypical for an artist, though many would probably not state it so baldly. Koons does receive a healthy amount of negative criticism, but it’s rare for an artist to be so untroubled by it. Koons’s attitude may serve as a model for other artists. Or not.

    Installation view of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, June 27–October 19, 2014 (artworks © Jeff Koons; photograph by Ronald Amstutz)

    I wish someone had asked about appropriation and copyright. Koons has been the subject of four lawsuits: he lost the first three on weak parody defenses but won the fourth with the transformation argument. The losing cases—Rogers v. Koons (1992), United Feature Syndicate v. Koons (1993), and Campbell v. Koons (1993)—each involved works from the Banality series: String of Puppies, Wild Boy and Puppy, and Ushering in Banality (all works 1988). The last, Blanch v. Koons (2006), focused on a photographer’s complaint that Koons used an image she took in a painting from his Easyfun-Ethereal series.

    Toward the end of the lecture Koons returned again and again to his aphorisms on affirmation, acceptance, participation, and mutual support. It was hard for him to go off script—I doubt that he can—and the audience questions picked for him were relatively tame. In many ways Koons speaks like a politician, like Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail. And like a politician Koons doesn’t offer truth or salvation but favorable, enthusiastic rhetoric about those things. He proposes a welcoming, populist frame of interpretation for his art, not to foreclose other people’s ideas but rather to make sure his intentions are being discussed. You can take his words at face value, scrutinize them, or dismiss his sermon, but you can’t deny that Koons is smartly shaping the reception of his work. After this talk I still felt indifferent toward his art but appreciated hearing about it from the source.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

  • Revealing Mystic Truths

    Mainstreaming Psychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain
    Thursday, August 14, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    brucenaumanstudio
    Bruce Nauman in the doorway of his San Francisco studio in 1966 (photograph by Jack Fulton)

    Is Bruce Nauman psychedelic? Though his early work is generally considered formally and conceptually apolitical, one wonders how much the culture in San Francisco in the mid-1960s—from the Free Speech Movement to the Summer of Love—influenced his mindset at the time. After Nauman graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1966, he established a studio in a storefront in the Mission District, where he spent several years realizing a now-seminal body of work that drew from the city’s tradition of Funk art as well as Minimalism from New York and Finish Fetish from Los Angeles. Though the artist has only admitted to drinking a lot of coffee in the studio, might have he sweetened his beverage with special sugar cubes?

    “Nauman had a lot of time on his hands,” wrote Constance M. Lewallen in a recent exhibition catalogue, “and very little money.”1 Though the artist taught one class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he didn’t fraternize much with his fellow professors and spent many hours in the studio. In his Mission District space Nauman underwent intense self-examination and self-exploration, as the story goes, and made a monumental shift from making objects to foregrounding process. He contrasted the ephemeral nature of physical senses by casting his body parts—arm, ear, mouth, armpit, knees, hands, back, shoulder, and feet—in solid materials. He also explored language, especially the profound nature of jokes and puns, and documented loosely choreographed, seemingly absurd performances on camera.

    Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967, neon, 59 x 55 x 2 in. (artwork © Bruce Nauman)

    Let’s look at a few of these works. One film depicted Nauman, dressed in a light t-shirt and dark jeans, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68); for another, Art Make-Up (1967–68), he filmed himself covering his face and torso with white, pink, green, and black paint. Nauman also hung a neon sign in his studio’s front window—the well-known The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)—whose words must have both baffled and delighted passersby, which would have included stoned hippies. Another neon sculpture, My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), spelled out “bbbbbbrrrrrruuuuuucccccceeeeee” in lowercase cursive script, referencing the lower gravity on the Moon’s surface but also the slower sense of time that a drug user purportedly experiences.

    Traditional scholarship on Nauman’s work at this time focuses on his interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as to contemporaneous avant-garde dance groups (Anna Halprin) and underground film (Kenneth Anger) then flourishing in San Francisco. But what about psychedelia? After all, Nauman’s studio was located only three miles from Haight-Ashbury—the heart of American counterculture—and his work at the time was pretty far out, man.

    The art critic Ken Johnson offers a theory of psychedelic art in his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (New York: Prestel, 2011), which considers work that was previously understood as embracing psychedelic characteristics (Fred Tomaselli, Robert Crumb) to those that didn’t (Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper, Kay Rosen and Kara Walker). It’s fair to ask how the boxes of Donald Judd might look to a stoned viewer? How might the implausible or impossible works of Conceptual art correspond to the root of the word psychedelic, “mind manifesting”? Johnson makes a compelling argument for seeing twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in a new way.

    Rethinking the influence and potential of psychedelics is happening across culture, into business and science. The artist Emily Segal, the host for tonight’s event and a cofounder of a trend-forecasting company named after a drug experience, asked: “Is K-HOLE art influenced by psychedelia in a different way?” While recently browsing the shelves of a bookstore, Segal came across a Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The book, written by the handsome and youthful-looking Nicolas Langlitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, attempts to reconcile mysticism with materialism through a historical, anthropological, and philosophical analysis of his subject. Segal invited Langlitz to give a presentation at the Swiss Institute, in conjunction with its summer exhibition, The St. Petersburg Paradox.

    Nicolas Langlitz and Emily Segal (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During his talk Langlitz surveyed the history of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States and explored how mainstream society and the counterculture have found common ground, especially over the last twenty-five years, since President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” which initiated a federal campaign to raise awareness for neurological research. The history goes back further, though, to the mid-twentieth century. Langlitz reminded us that pharmocological breakthroughs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics were discovered, refined, and produced in the same era as LSD. From Albert Hoffman to Timothy Leary to Richard Nixon, Langlitz traced the decline of scientific research up to the 1970s. (Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] in 1973.) After that time the occasional rogue scientist operated on the fringes, such as the Californian scientist Alexander Shulgin, who created about two hundred varieties of psychedelic substances and tested them on himself with a government-approved license that was revoked in 1994 after self-publishing what were essentially drug cookbooks. Since then knowledge about psychedelic use has permeated the internet, notably through anecdotes on the website Erowid.

    Today there are two groups advocating psychedelic research. The first is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a group based in Santa Cruz, California, that frames its work to mollify—I mean, appeal to—the establishment by addressing such conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety for the terminally ill. “Nancy Reagan,” Langlitz joked, “would not say no to a drug that would alleviate anxiety.” The second group is the Heffter Research Institute, an institution based in Zurich, Switzerland, that Langlitz said has a “less activist brouhaha.” Advocates for psychedelic research have come from unusual places, such as the “Silicon Valley gods.” Bob Wallace of Microsoft funded Swiss research in the 1990s, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a longtime activist. Based on his positive recollections of psychedelic experimentation, Steve Jobs was approached for money—directly from Hoffman, it turns out—but the Apple cofounder declined to get involved.

    Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012)

    Switzerland has a liberal drug policy that dates to the 1910s, Langlitz stated, perhaps not unrelated to a large chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the famously neutral country. The 1990s saw a loosening of state policy: government-run clinics began supplying heroin to addicts, and scientists were permitted to run a mobile drug-testing lab in a popular Zurich techno club. When people come to find out what their still-illegal purchases are made of, they talk to social workers and take surveys, generating data that helps researchers to determine patterns of drug use and dosage, to monitor black-market products, and to educate club goers about current substances. Scientists also recruit, via the mobile unit, human test subjects for laboratory experiments.

    The lively Q&A session with the audience revolved around three issues: differences and contradictions between physical and spiritual experiences; the authenticity of mystical experiences, hallucinogenic or otherwise; and the aesthetics of psychedelic art. Indignant with the term “spiritual,” one audience member asked Langlitz to produce an objective term. The psychedelic “experience is material through and through,” he responded, calling attention to the chemical nature of all brain activity. Like many, though, Langlitz is curious about what does the subjective experience opens, especially regarding the shared qualities of oneness, loss of ego, and being neither subject nor object that drugs offer. Aldous Huxley believed that all religions are built around “unitative technologies,” Langlitz said, which were achieved through practices such as fasting, meditation, chanting, and flagellation (ouch!).

    Theologians may claim that hallucinogenic drugs provide an inauthentic, valueless experience, Langlitz continued, and prefer prayer and meditation. But Huxley had trouble obtaining elevating experiences the old-fashioned way, he continued. We shouldn’t limit the influence of chemicals on behavior to psychedelics. What does an authentic experience mean, Langlitz wanted to know, for a person taking Prozac? Is he or she experiencing real or false happiness? Similarly, he mentioned that anthropological research on psychedelics—especially in the 1970s—has focused too much on the shamanistic (and presumably authentic) use, in contrast to studies of how everyday people might find transcendence.

    Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent, 1999, Chromogenic color print, 81½ x 132 in. (artwork © Andreas Gursky)

    And what about psychedelic aesthetics, which Langlitz characterized as “the ugly and off-putting art of the 1960s.” You know the type—the wavy lines and bright colors found on posters for acid-rock concerts and in the earnest paintings of Alex Grey. Langlitz acknowledged that modernist abstraction was generally objective and cold, with Pop, ornamental Islamic forms, and East Asian traditions offering alternative formal models. He accepted the physiological aspect of psychedelic tropes—the cobwebs and other patterns—but pleaded, “What exactly does it have to do with psychedelics, anyway?”

    Langlitz finds that large-scale photographs by the German artist Andreas Gursky better represent the psychedelic experience, especially with the simultaneous macro- and microscopic perspectives in his busy images of hotels, stock exchanges, sporting events, raves, and commercial retail stores. As an art student, Gursky was influenced not only by his famous teachers—the straight photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—but also by his LSD experiences. Today Gursky is too famous or too concerned with his professional image, Langlitz conjectured, to talk openly about psychedelics, like he did early in his career.

    Alex Grey, St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution, 2006, oil on wood panel, 24 x 36 in. (artwork © Alex Grey)

    The art world has embraced the drug-inflected work of painters like Fred Tomaselli, as Ken Johnson has noted, but typically shuns the earnest spiritualism in the work of Alex Grey and others. Yet perceived shame of associating artistic output with drugs wasn’t adopted by everyone in the Swiss Institute audience. At one point a man stood up to describe his incredible personal experience on DMT at great length—cool story, bro—and an aging white-bearded hippie type proselytized the transcendent experiences that art environments by James Turrell and Robert Irwin offer, labeling the swirly stuff as kitsch. “So Alex Grey is the Norman Rockwell of psychedelics?” someone else asked, to much laughter. “Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough drugs,” joked Langlitz. “Everything reminds you of drugs.”

    In Terms Of count: 1 (an audience member broke the seal toward the end of the Q&A).

    1 Constance M. Lewallen, “A Rose Has No Teeth,” A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 45.

  • Building a Better Beehive

    Ron Breland
    Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being
    Tuesday, July 29, 2014
    Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY

    Ron Breland’s dodecahedron beehive at the entrance to the exhibition (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Pioneer Works in Brooklyn hosted a lecture, titled “Sacred Geometry and the Architecture of Well-Being,” by the upstate New York gardener and apiarist Ron Breland in conjunction with The Six-Sided Force, an exhibition of drawings by Louise Despont that take their inspiration from the hexagon of the honeycomb.

    Sporting a white beard, a gray mullet, and the normcore outfit of a high school teacher, Breland clearly had the eccentric polymath look down, and his wide-ranging talk surveyed scientific knowledge and folk wisdom, pragmatic environmentalism and esoteric spiritualism. For over an hour he talked about sacred caves, Greek mythology, and the vesica piscis (the shape of the overlap of two circles in a Venn diagram). Breland also discussed the physics of Ernst Rutherford and Werner Heisenberg, the woman’s face in Henri Matisse’s famous The Large Bathers (1906) in Philadelphia, stories by the humanitarian author Barry Lopez, and the work of the environmental architect Jérôme Sperling. Above all Breland was there to promote the stewardship of bees—not necessarily the production of honey—with the goal of bringing the art of beekeeping to the artistic community.

    Ron Breland speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The shape of a hive is inconsequential to the activity of a bee colony, Breland said. Bees can create homes in dead tree stumps, hang them from tree branches, or build them in the boxy cabinets that humans use for efficient honey harvesting. The nineteenth-century American teacher and pastor Lorenzo L. Langstroth patented a modular hive in 1852, and the form hasn’t changed much since. These hives, in which rows of square frames can be removed, replaced, and manipulated for the ease of commercial honey production, result in a “mechanical relationship to the bees,” he said. “All amazingly logical.”

    Managed bee colonies in the United States, Breland told us, have decreased more than 50 percent since the late 1940s. He blames what scientists call colony collapse disorder on an unchecked military-industrial complex that has manufactured pesticides and fertilizer as well as bombs. He also faults a lack of communication between left- and right-brain worldviews. Breland said that fixing watches, building railroads, and waging war are all right-brain activities, and to illustrate this point he showed a clip from the Martin Scorsese film Hugo (2011), which highlights the importance of both heart and mind. Breland then showed a snippet from a video on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, which in the context of the talk exemplified a refined combination of creativity and engineering—minus, of course, the cultural, economic, and political impact of the building. For Breland, this combination of art and science creates a quintessential relationship that a beekeeper needs “to get us out of this mess.”

    Running with the bees (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Many years ago Breland set out to invent a new hive that would reduce environmental stress on bees (when colonies are transported geographically) and to offer a structure for which harvesting honey was not its primary purpose. He had designed six-sided structures to resemble the honeycomb shape, but this direct correspondence didn’t feel right. What about five, since that’s the number of man? Some say the dodecahedron, a complex polyhedron that features twelve flat pentagonal faces, has mystical qualities. The ancient Greeks understood the notion, as this particular geometric figure has been associated with the five Platonic solids.

    So, in the late 1990s, Breland built a hive, which is about six or seven feet tall, that used the dodecahedron form. His creation intentionally resemble the modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. Based on photographs of his self-described ecofriendly, sustainable, specialty nursery in West Nyack, New York, Breland has built about a dozen of them. “This hive is not for honey,” he stated. Anne Raver described the results in a 2001 New York Times profile, “In industrial beehives, the bees are regimented: they are given wax cells larger than they would build, and the queen is tricked into laying more eggs. In Mr. Breland’s hive, the bees build their own cells, and the queen moves freely among them.”

    Balancing consciousness with the vesica piscis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Breland articulated humanity purpose as a desire to express love, to understand beautiful, miraculous phenomenon, and to do meaningful work—not simply to chase the bottom line. “In commerce there’s no hope for a remedy,” he warned. While I generally agree, I’d like to see investors help Breland to mass-produce his hive—with quality, sustainable materials, of course—and help to spread them across the country. Perhaps doing so would help alleviate the need for professional apiarists to haul five hundred boxed hives on a flatbed truck around the Southern states, traveling up to 20,000 miles, in order to aid pollination in places where bees are lacking. And besides, these hives look really, really cool.

    Toward the end of his talk Breland brought up the biological concept of the superorganism, which occurs when species such as bees, ants, and termites instinctively delegate responsibilities in order to accomplish a task—the collective transcends the efforts of the individuals. “Some say that is an image for mankind,” he observed.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

  • The Paradoxical Absolute

    Frances Stark on Robert Ryman
    Monday, June 16, 2014
    Artists on Artists Lecture Series
    Dia:Chelsea, Dia Foundation for the Arts, New York

    Frances Stark performs a lecture, maybe (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    If I understand her convoluted comment-question correctly, an elderly woman in the audience wanted to know, during the Q&A session, if the speaker, Frances Stark, had just done a performance. Based on Stark’s zigzag lecture on her relationship to the artist Robert Ryman, I had wondered the same thing. For about an hour the Los Angeles–based artist covered a range of topics, which seems typical of her multidisciplinary practice that embraces expository and confessional writing as well as visual art in diverse media (drawing, collage, photography, video, and performance). By the end it became clear that Stark’s talk was among the most bewildering and cryptic that I’ve ever attended, and I can’t decide if my frustration is justified—that Stark meandered without having anything substantial to say—or if I just didn’t get it. For the record, the artist did not disclose to the audience that a performance had taken place.

    Such confusion shouldn’t be surprising, since the work of both artists often perplexes and befuddles, from Stark’s rambling online conversations turned into video to the oblique materialism of Ryman’s career-long exploration of the color white. Tonight she emphasized tenuous connections between her and Ryman, comparing, for instance, the square shape of his paintings to her Instagram feed. Throughout the event Stark read from her “Scared to Death” essay, published in an exhibition catalogue in 2001, which includes a brief, humorous comment on Ryman. Perhaps for this reason Dia invited her to speak on him for its Artists on Artists Lecture Series.

    Robert Ryman guarding his own art (source of photograph not known)

    In the passage Stark recounts the plot of a novel that takes place in a museum, in which a guard was a central character, and retells the story of when Ryman decided to become a painter while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1950s. “[H]is first ambition was not to be a cop but a musician,” Stark read aloud, “and now, of course, he is known for his paintings not for his style of guarding them.…”1 Three of her artist friends in California—Jason Meadows, Richard Hawkins, and Morgan Fisher—all “were enamored of Ryman’s paintings, and I, too, am enamored of Ryman’s paintings. I struggled to speak of this fascination with Ryman’s work, and, embarrassingly enough, found myself asking, Is this some kind of mysticism?”2

    Stark’s stated aim tonight was to share, not to theorize, as well as to demonstrate overlaps and rhymes between her and Ryman. “That’s a concept I learned from Emily Dickinson at age fifteen,” she said. As a humanities student at San Francisco State University, where she studied art history, “I came to art as a reader,” Stark told us, “with aspirations to be a writer.” In the early 1990s she identified as a visual artist and attended graduate school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, though she felt that people favored her writing to her art as the decade commenced. As an MFA student Stark was exposed to Ryman after others had recommended him to her. At the time “the work didn’t turn the lights on,” but she eventually warmed up to it. After being asked to participate in an exhibition of favorite books, she recalled offering Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and a book about Ryman.

    Frances Stark, Push After Pull After Push, 2010, mixed media on canvas on panel, 69 x 89 in. (artwork © Frances Stark)

    Stark’s narrative slipped in and out of consciousness, with seemingly unscripted observations based on her prepared digital slide show. One pair of images juxtaposed Henri Matisse’s Red Room (1908) with Studio View (1959), a black-and-white photograph that Ryman had painted red. Stark then dwelt on a 1964 Ryman painting next to a photograph of his studio and uttered something about their mutual project of “creating vehicles for methodical making,” but the synthesis of these pairings didn’t produce a clear meaning for me. The head-scratching continued when Stark announced that “people love people to stand in front of things and explain” before playing a recent video interview of herself, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art, on the screen behind her—but without any sound.

    Perhaps Stark was suffering from a fatigue of speaking engagements. She admitted that she talked herself out in early May through participation on a panel on Sigmar Polke, who has a retrospective at MoMA, and at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, where she was paired with the technologist David Kravitz from Snapchat to create a new project. Her assessment of Polke’s work was that it looks like splooge and therefore resembles the universe. “Where is the artist in the universe, literally?” she asked before declaring, “Art is where you commune with the dead.”

    The language of Frances Stark (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Stark talked about the role of artists as educators in a university, telling her students who say “I want to make a style and get famous” that, in stark contrast, “being an artist is to fall in love with another artist.” Paraphrasing Alighiero e Boetti, she identified the artist as both a shaman and showman, fake yet sincere. “The fake being in the service of the real,” she explained, “not as a sham but as an inescapable condition.” Stark concluded her lecture by adducing “fake texts” and “ghost texts”—if “Greeky Lorem Ipsum” isn’t the title of a work by Stark, then it should be—and remarked that “the mutter reveals something else that you can’t see.” If poetry is language free from utility, then Stark’s use of language is often free from meaning. I’m not sure if the non-sense of her Dia lecture was liberating or hindering, but the ride was bewildering.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Frances Stark, “Scared to Death,” in Painting at the Edge of the World, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 209.

    2 Ibid.

    Read

    Megan N. Liberty, “Frances Stark on Reading Robert Ryman,” Hyperallergic, June 23, 2014.

    Listen

    This audio of Frances Stark on Robert Ryman was recorded as part of Dia’s Artists on Artists Lecture Series.

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  • Preexisting Conditions

    Prem Krishnamurthy: Double Agency
    Monday, March 31, 2014
    Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, New York, NY

    Prem Krishnamurthy

    Prem Krishnamurthy’s talk “Double Agency” addressed the speaker’s two primary roles: a founder of the design firm Project Projects (with Adam Michaels) and the director and curator of P!—an interdisciplinary curatorial space that he described as a “mom-and-pop kunsthalle”—on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Project Projects has a critical and conceptual relationship to graphic design, Krishnamurthy said, that includes curatorial and editorial roles. Challenging the traditional worker/client relationship, he aims to produce design that is porous rather than unidirectional, working with existing materials and ideas instead of starting each project with a blank slate. He also applies these ideas to exhibitions and public spaces to encourage agency and participation.

    Krishnamurthy spoke in what he called a school context, which would leave historical and business matters aside and simplify his professional roles. He gave an overview of “Elective Affinities,” a design class that he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Mindful that teaching has a sole voice and that life diverges from the classroom model after graduation, Krishnamurthy experimented with different modes of collaboration with his students. For example, they used an Exquisite Corpse model in which one person worked on an assignment before handing it off to others to develop and complete. He also configured students into groups of two and groups of three during the semester before involving the whole class. For “Collective Collection,” a 2009 workshop at University of the Arts in Bremen, Germany, he led a group of participants that activated unused space in the building. There he stepped back from his teaching role to become a producer and facilitator.

    Prem Krishnamurthy collaborates with his audience (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The magazine Print allowed Project Projects to edit and design its January 2011 issue, and the firm settled on the theme of collaboration. Krishnamurthy and others took over the entire issue, assigning articles, hiring photographers, and designing the layout. In addition to producing an issue of a magazine, a form typically considered ephemeral, Krishnamurthy wanted to establish a community. To that end, Project Projects held a roundtable discussion about collaboration at Artists Space in October 2010, before which none of the thirteen participants—artists, designers, writers, fashion entrepreneurs, and more—had actually met. The idea, he said, was for the group to “drink a bottle of wine” and ruminate on what collaboration means.

    An edited transcript of the Artists Space conversation runs through numerous pages in the issue, which also featured an unreleased typeface from a designer and several articles—on the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, the art collective Group Material, and the filmmaker Jonas Mekas—that would be normal content for an art journal but unexpected fare for a venerated design publication. An article from the Raqs Media Collective took the longest and was the most fraught, Krishnamurthy said, but when he finally received the text, it was amazing.

    Krishnamurthy switched gears to discuss P!, a curatorial space that intentionally lacks a fixed identity and allows for many voices. The first exhibition, Process 01: Joy (2012), featured letterpress work by the legendary designer Karel Martens, who created P!’s first logo; a mural by Chauncey Hare, a self-taught photographer who left the art world in the 1980s to become a socially engaged occupational therapist; and a New York outpost of the artist Christine Hill’s Berlin-based Volksboutique. She chose to paint the floor in her signature red color, which remains to this day. The exhibition’s press release was distributed in English and Chinese, a decision made to engage two linguistic communities that straddle the Lower East Side and Chinatown.

    Installation view of Process 01: Joy (2012) at P!

    Another P! project was The Ceiling Should Be Green (2013), organized by Krishnamurthy and Ali Wong (also known as Kit Yi Wong) with a feng shui master known as Mr. Ye, who was charged with “circulating the energy” through a pleasing arrangement of artworks and objects. Permutation 03.x (2013) was a six-month-long exhibition and event series on copying and appropriation that served as a meeting place, a reading room, and an art gallery.

    During the Q&A, Krishnamurthy emphasized not only a transparency in his methodology but also a resistance to conventions, such as avoiding the minimal signage and other visual codes of a contemporary art gallery. He compared the geographic location of P! to the overlapping metropolis in China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (2009), in which two cities occupy the same physical space in several places but remain strictly but irrationally distinct. In New York, Krishnamurthy said, pedestrians often pay attention to an art gallery’s storefront but “unsee” (to use a term from Miéville’s book) the Chinese characters in the window of the building next door.

    In all of his work, Krishnamurthy seemed concerned with the conditions of interdisciplinary working, whether that’s organizing exhibitions as research for himself, creating innovative design for art biennials, or promoting the prescient visions of figures such as Brian O’Doherty, whom he claimed was not taken seriously as an artist forty years ago because he was both a critic and an artist (using the name Patrick Ireland). O’Doherty enabled those who came after him to earn respect in different roles, something Krishnamurthy accomplishes in spades.

    In Terms Of count: 2½.

  • Suicide Solution

    This essay is the first of five that reviews a recent conference at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the second, third, fourth, and fifth texts.

    The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk
    Monday, April 7, 2014
    Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
    Center for the Humanities
    Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

    Boris Groys poses for photographs during his keynote address (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Boris Groys presented a keynote address called “The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk” to kick off a daylong conference, “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” that explored historical and contemporary approaches to organizing exhibitions. An interdisciplinary scholar and occasional curator, Groys is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. A few years back he wrote an excellent book called Art Power (2008).

    Groys’s accent made it difficult for me to concentrate on his words, and he repeatedly chuckled at what seemed like minor disciplinary quibbles between himself and other theorists (hardly anyone laughed with him). Reading a prepared paper, he relayed that “the artist of the future must be radically indifferent,” according to the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner. He also boldly claimed that “dictatorship is a curatorial project” and that documentation of such projects invokes nostalgia for the ephemeral event. I think he also made a quick reference to the experience of watching live sports (that is, in a stadium or arena) without hearing the play-by-play analysis and color commentary from a radio or television broadcast.

    Since Groys’s keynote contained significant chunks of a previously published essay, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” I was able to grasp several of his ideas afterward—and they are good ones.1 First he establishes that art museums traditionally removed works of art from the flow of time “to resist material destruction and historical oblivion,” which are precarious, unstable, and finite things that happen to humans or to things not saved in archives. Groys’s cumulative argument elaborates on Wagner’s notion of an author’s self-sacrifice in the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he likens to suicide, and how the kind of curatorial project popularized by the Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann—something Groys calls a “temporary curatorial dictatorship”—has displaced the traditional art display and transforms into a new Gesamtkunstwerk that returns to art its provisional status. An exhibition goes on view for two or three months, he said of the typical institutional calendar, and then is dismantled. The art museum has consequently responded, as written in the essay, by becoming “a stage for the flow of art events … which include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth.”

    What’s novel about the précis is how Groys postulates that the internet doesn’t embody the flow of time but rather, with its innate characteristics of surveillance and traceability, halts that flow. The documentation of museum events, he argues, whether a catalogue, film, or website—or streaming video, as his keynote was broadcast live online—is absorbed into the artwork. (Oh, process.) One crucial function for art museums, Groys concludes in the essay, will be to provide a space for an encounter to both take place and be “thematized and critically theorized.” The published text expresses a few more good ideas, but I’m not sure how to understand my experience of listening to Groys speak—during which I took few written notes because of his illegibility—to the written documentation I read later and can more easily remember.

    Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun using mirrors, light, and mist for The Weather Project (2003), which he said was the basis for exploring ideas about experience and mediation. Within two months the installation at Tate Modern in London had attracted more than one million visitors

    After his talk Groys was joined by the art historian Claire Bishop for a brief conversation and audience Q&A. She pressed him to talk more about the “suicidal dictator,” but he deflected the question, instead focusing on linking important curators to political leaders. “When you speak about Szeemann,” he mused, “you talk about Caeser, Alexander the Great.” Is reenactment a form of documentation? No, Groys said to Bishop, marking the former as a kind of fiction that the latter lacks. Curiously, Bishop told Groys that his writing has a polemical quality but does not advocate or criticize, which may reflect the lack of a straightforward position on the entertainment-industrial complex described in his essay.

    From his chair in the audience Dieter Roelstraete, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was pleased that Groys identified visitors as the most interesting objects in an exhibition (a statement absent from the published essay). What about wall labels, asked Roelstraete. What about exhibitions without visitors? “It’s good,” Groys smiled while regarding the second inquiry. With a show that no one sees, he suggested, the curator becomes a legend, which corresponds to his idea of the suicidal curator as discontinuous and immortal. Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center (and also one of three organizers of the conference), asked Groys if he had a similar term for the artist? The artist has the ability to subvert the curator, he responded obliquely, and also become a curator. I’m not sure Groys answered the question—perhaps he is saving his thoughts for another essay on the subject.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal 50 (December 2013). The author had presented the essay as a lecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, on November 8, 2013.

    Watch

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  • In Defense of Democracy

    Chantal Mouffe
    Thursday, March 27, 2014
    Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium, New York

    Chantal Mouffe, intellectual activist (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “People have lost faith in traditional democracy,” said the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. “They have a vote but not a voice.” But rather than call for revolution, she emphasized the need for better, more inclusive representation within institutions of power, such as when which leaders “come to power through election in order to implement a set of radical reforms.” Mouffe, a professor at the University of Westminster in London, is a hero in certain circles, and this lecture, presented in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, offered her the chance to elucidate her views for a diverse crowd of students, professors, art workers, and activists.

    Mouffee summarized recent philosophical challenges to neoliberalism, running through the basic ideas of theorists such as Nicholas Bourriaud and Paul Virilio, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially concepts from Hardt and Negri’s book Empire (2000), such as “multitude,” the new term for the proletariat, Mouffe said. She posited that we’ve gone from disciplinary society of hospitals and jails to a society of control, that is, one of biopolitics, immaterial labor, and communications. The multitude uses communications to express itself freely: these subjects are active, not passive—a concept in which neoliberals and capitalists, whose globalization efforts have liberated them from modernity, would delight. In an absolute democracy, according to Hardt, Negri, and friends, minorities in the multitude would never aspire to form a majority or a state, but rather a common. This is liberation, not emancipation, Mouffe said, and it denies a hegemonic structure’s role in power.

    Mouffe reaffirmed her ideas about agonism—a political philosophy she has long promoted—by emphasizing that change comes from working with and within institutions, transforming and improving them over time. (Agonism posits that political struggle based on difference and diversity can be passionate, constructive, and respectful, in short, confrontation is good.) This is a passive revolution and organic change, to borrow concepts from the twentieth-century Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. Even though the idea of swift revolution is enticing, representative democracy should not be abandoned or replaced. One gets to choose real alternatives, Mouffe said, in agonistic debate, which engages institutions instead of rejecting, resisting, or replacing them. “Pluralist democracy cannot exist without representation,” she said, expressing a point of view that, according to Slavoj Žižek, presupposes democracy is an idealized, optimum political form that cannot be questioned.1

    Chantal Mouffe at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Mouffe generalized about the role of aesthetic practices, stating that art which transforms political identity and modernizes affect is good. So is art that allows for other voices. Radical breaks in art and the tabula rasa, she continued, ignore the importance of incubation and deny the function of influence. Transgressive art, Mouffe declared, is not the most radical kind, and harboring the illusion of art being subversive has inevitably caused the avant-gardes to fail. For her, art should contribute to a multiplicity of sites and—leaving arguments about framing, context, and validation aside— take place both inside and outside the museum. During the audience Q&A, the art historian Terry Smith requested examples of such works of art. Mouffe was hesitant to offer names but eventually gave two: an unfamiliar name [pronounced “eh too jahr”] and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

    As one would expect, the Q&A session was a mess of convoluted comments disguised as questions. A man dressed like a Trader Joe’s cashier bloviated for several minutes about episodes in twentieth-century global politics before blurting out, “It’s not cool to talk about the communist party.” Mouffe responded by asking him where and when a communist revolution has succeeded. There are failures but also hope: “We have to keep trying,” she encouraged. “It’s a long process.” Indeed, I often think about how, in the United States, one hundred years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mouffe said that progressive political heroes of the past probably never realized how the “social rights of the welfare state could be dismantled,” as they have during the past couple decades under neoliberalism. Taking an agonistic stance, she fears that protest movements won’t succeed because they’re contesting existing institutions with the goal of deposing them. While I tend to agree overall that real change happens slowly, radical points of view—such as Occupy Wall Street—serve a crucial function of yanking political conversation into a certain direction. And some institutions—especially in the art world—would better serve their constituents if they were gutted completely.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4 (2001).

    Read

    Ayesha Ghosh, “GSAPP Lecture Addresses Architecture’s Role in New Democratic Systems,” Archinect, March 31, 2014.

  • The Social Network

    Connections Count: The Power of Social Capital
    Tuesday, March 11, 2014
    New York University, Deutsches Haus, New York, NY

    Mark Ebers explains a diagram of the Medici family’s social capital (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “It’s not what you know but who you know that counts” so goes the saying, which you’ve heard so many times that it’s basically become truth. But why? Among those who have investigated the issue—which sociologists call social capital—is Mark Ebers, a professor of business administration, corporate development, and organization at the University of Cologne. During a recent talk at New York University, he attempted to explain what social capital is, how it works, and what its effects are. Basically, Ebers stated, social capital is resources gained from networks—an incredibly vague, nebulous definition that begged for explanation.

    Ebers summarized several conclusions about social capital theorized since the early 1970s: who you know is categorized as strong and weak ties, and how you know them affects brokerage and closure. A strong tie would be a close family member or business partner; weak ties are composed of acquaintances and professional colleagues. The sociologist Mark Granovetter examined how social capital helped people find jobs, apartments, and instructors (such as a piano teacher). People with strong ties know the same things, Ebers said. Aficionados of medieval lutes will have read the same books. In contrast, weak ties have dissimilar interests. A musicologist conversing with a physicist can generate new knowledge—and possibly social capital—for each person. Through empirical evidence, Granovetter proved that weak ties are better for a job search; they also favorably influence salary and promotion. Getting $50,000 in funding for a start-up, Ebers said, typically originates in a strong tie.

    Brokerage, according to the sociologist and strategist Ronald S. Burt, describes negotiations between two separate networks. A broker, Ebers explained, helps to avoid redundancy, foster innovation, and serve as a gatekeeper. This is good, he continued, for an entrepreneur like Steve Jobs, who worked with diverse groups of people and drew upon distinct individual spheres of knowledge to realize his vision. Jobs was an interesting example: because although companies like Apple and Google benefit tremendously from collaboration and experimental production on the inside, its final products enforce an exclusive ecosystem that discourages the use of other kinds of hardware and software.

    The social scientist James Coleman, an early adopter of the term “social capital,” theorized closure and established the concepts of dense connections (in communities) and network closure (a situation in which everyone is inextricably connected). Drawing from an essay published in 1993, Ebers discussed how the strong and weak ties of Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici (1389–1464) served the Florentine banker well on September 26, 1433.1 On this day several families in the Italian peninsula with loose associations—the Strozzi and Albizzi among them—considered toppling the Medici-approved government in what could have been, Ebers proposed, the Tahir Square of its time. Because support for the coup was lazily organized, Cosimo was able to mobilize his own allies—which did not have ties with each other but only to the Medicis—and halt the rebellion. Ebers, though, is interested in business, not history. What happens when, for example, the Eindhoven-based Dutch corporation Philips transformed its closed research laboratory into an open campus in which a hundred other companies were invited to set up shop, with knowledge (and presumably profits) shared among everyone?

    Mark Eber works the crowd

    Ebers’s published research has explored how social capital transforms and exploits knowledge from within a company and how that same company acquires and assimilates knowledge from the outside. Studying the development of six biotech start-ups in Germany, he found that the less-successful companies had reached “relational and cognitive lock-in” because their founders—who were scientists—perceived themselves as scientists whose business plan called for funding for research with the goal of presenting papers in successively more prestigious academic conferences, achieving success in the wrong venue.2 “We have a great paper,” these scientists would say, but the venture capitalists supporting them responded with a colossal “So what?” The more successful firms, Ebers discovered, had avoided institutional inertia by establishing diverse relationships in scientific, political, financial, and administrative communities; they also better divided the labor within each company, with certain leaders taking on specializations in these areas. One founder of a successful biotech, Ebers said, had a father in finance who had supplied advice; connections were also made with regulators in government.

    An audience member asked if a certain type of product from, say, a pharmaceutical firm, would prefer development in a closed network. Apparently they do, but in a cannibalistic way. Ebers reported that Big Pharma has been buying smaller biotech firms and bringing them into the fold. Further, he said that two teams within the same company will sometimes be assigned an identical project so that two solutions are produced, the better of which may not have occurred if only one team had worked on that same project. Other times, he noted, such competition may lead to resentment.

    Ebers discussed other potential and actual clashes. The boards of German companies, he disclosed, have few women and few non-Germans, which would make one assume that cognitive lock-in based on sexism and xenophobia might lead to financial downfall. Yet the merger between the Japanese automobile manufacturer Daimler and its American competitor, Chrysler, faced setbacks because of cultural differences. Still, the smaller the points of view, Ebers advised, the bigger the differences. Are Czechs and Slovaks all that different? Most definitely yes, a Czech or Slovak would believe. So, too, would residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn argue that their cultures are worlds apart.

    From a certain perspective, Ebers’s conclusions seemed painfully obvious. Of course a company, biotech or otherwise, would not find success unless it diversified or segmented its approach. The scientists for whom research—and not a product—was a top priority were doomed to struggle. Likewise, a designer building a smartphone app would need to marketing and legal advice, unless he or she wanted to lose a patent or copyright. It would only be remarkable that Ebers had found evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the concept of social capital—like the notion of “collaboration” in the art world—is problematic because it cannot be quantified, only alluded to with anecdotal evidence. As the sociologist Ben Fine has written, “Almost any form of social interaction has the potential to be understood as social capital. As a positive resource, it is presumed to have the capacity to facilitate almost any outcome in any walk of life, and to be liquid or fluid across them to a greater or lesser extent. And it is equally adaptable across subject matter, disciplines, methods, and techniques, at least within the social sciences. In short, in principle, and to a large (if selective) degree in practice, social capital can be anything you like.”3

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 See John F. Padgett and Christopher K. Ansell, “Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400–1434,” American Journal of Sociology 98, no. 6 (May 1993): 1259–1319.

    2 For the complete report, see Indre Maurer and Mark Ebers, “Dynamics of Social Capital and Their Performance Implications: Lessons from Biotechnology Start-Ups,” Administrative Science Quarterly 51, no. 2 (June 2006): 262–92.

    3 Ben Fine, “Social Capital,” Developments in Practice 17, no. 4–5 (August 2007): 567.

    Read

    Deutsches Haus, “Professor Mark Ebers,” Deutsches Haus: The Stories Inside, May 22, 2014.

  • The Trashy Place Is a Happy Place

    Quijote Talks presents Naomi Fry, “Make Them Choke on It”
    Tuesday, February 25, 2014
    School of Visual Arts, 132 West 21st Street, Sixth Floor, New York

    Naomi Fry

    A recent talk by the Brooklyn-based critic Naomi Fry was as wide ranging—one could even say scattered—as both her cultural interests and her curriculum vitae. “I always have to remind myself that I’m a writer,” she said, reflecting on her roles as a professor who teaches writing at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University and also as a copy editor for the New York Times. Like many critics Fry must do other things to earn a living, which creates a shaky self-perception. At a lecture for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in art criticism, she didn’t have a paper to read, just notes, and thus spoke off the cuff for a small crowd of students, alumni, sympathizers, and friends.

    Asked beforehand to talk about her challenges and successes, Fry began by discussing a favorite piece of writing, her contribution to the series “See Something Say Something,” published by the Brooklyn-based journal Paper Monument in 2012. This five-hundred-word essay examined a photograph, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980, of the emerging actor Nicollette Sheridan at age seventeen with her then-boyfriend, the television and pop-music heartthrob Leif Garrett. This “check out my young girlfriend” photo, as Fry called it, “encapsulates everything that’s been interesting to me, ever … ever.” It was quite a surprise to hear this coming from a critic who has published in top art publications like Frieze and Artforum and other important cultural forums, such as the London Review of Books, T Magazine, n+1, and the Comics Journal. In both the essay and the lecture, Fry teased out what intrigued her about the image, which I understood to be celebrities, television, literature, sex, music, interior decorating, and politics. Putting the serious subject matter aside, how did she gravitate toward such vapid and vulgar things?

    An image of Leif Garrett snuggling with Nicollette Sheridan, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980 (photograph © Brad Elterman)

    Born in Israel to left-leaning academic parents, Fry spent a significant amount of time in the United States and grew up with American popular culture. She was also an educational product of the 1990s, a time when, she said, William Shakespeare and chewing gum wrappers were worthy objects of scholarly attention, and when books, movies, and art formed the core of interdisciplinary studies. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University, Fry studied literature at the PhD level until 2007, and since then has always tried to throw references to nineteenth-century novels into her writing. D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser make appearances in her Paper Monument article, and Honoré de Balzac and Horatio Alger are name-dropped in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece. The latter essay, “‘Till They Choke on It’: On Wolf of Wall Street,” rages against Martin Scorsese’s newest, much-maligned film about “the disgusting people of Wall Street,” a project that many criticized as being complicit with the 1 percent. “I’m this incredibly angry, bitter Marxist,” she snarled, who has “psychological problems with morally repugnant artifacts” such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Harmony Korine’s debaucherous 2013 flick Spring Breakers.

    After leaving Johns Hopkins, Fry worked as a fact checker for the glossy celebrity magazine Us Weekly from 2007 to 2011 while indulging her passion for writing. “You’re dancing with the devil,” people told her—or did she tell herself that? (My notes from the lecture are unclear.) At the time Fry was happy that someone had employed her, so when someone at an art opening asked her if she felt guilty about the real-world consequences of working at the gossip rag, she went ballistic on him. “By the time you read Us Weekly, you’re already fucked,” she explained. “I don’t feel like I was feeding babies poison.” Conversely, the work gave her endless material with which to work. “The trashy place is my happy place,” she said.

    springbreakers
    The cast of Spring Breakers on the set

    An audience member asked her about writing a “deliberately negative” review. Fry responded by saying she can be negative about things backed by money and power—such as books and films produced by publishing houses and production studios—but would hesitate for an exhibition, as long as that artist was “sincerely trying,” she said. I would argue that the work of any artist takes not an insignificant amount of capital—from purchasing artist’s supplies to paying rent on a storefront space—but her point was taken. My larger concern was what the questioner meant by “deliberately,” which would indicate a critic purposefully and nefariously trashing an artist.

    Naomi Fry wears many hats (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The writing process is hard for Fry, but she has a routine, a unit system, in which she writes for forty-five-minute chunks of time. During this time she’s offline—no Facebook, no Instagram—and doesn’t get up or talk to anyone. Fry briefly acknowledge that people write for little or no money these days, which makes it hard for critics who, as she mentioned at the lecture’s beginning, were not born wealthy and did not marry rich. Did she have advice for current SVA students? “I couldn’t really come up with anything,” she conceded. What makes her hopeful? Fry admitted that although she might sound like a “middle school art teacher, I think about being creative. The work—I told you I was a Marxist.”

    An audience member called Fry “intrepid” after the critic told a brief story on how she started getting assignments despite being a former academic without the usual writing clips. “The more things you put in your sack,” she said, “the more it grows. Before you know it, you’ve got a really big sack.”

    In Terms Of count: 0 (nice).