In Terms Of

Category: Panels

  • The Last Woman’s Panel?

    Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want?
    Monday, March 31, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Despite Barbara Zucker’s accusations of “boring” or maybe because of them—this was a lively event, and the two responses stirred things up a bit more. Perhaps now that we have lived another sixteen years, anyone of us would respond differently. For Zucker’s afterthoughts, expressed at, yes, another woman’s panel, also at A.I.R [Gallery], see the Afterword.1

    Moderator: Corinne Robins
    Panelists: Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Zucker, Nancy Spero, Phoebe Helman, Howardena Pindell, and Mary Beth Edelson

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 1.

    I think the best thing A.I.R. could do would be to have men. I hope there won’t be any more women’s panels and I hope this is the last one I’m on. You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected. They expect us to continue the way we are…. I don’t think feminism is the real world any more. The point was to get women artists taken seriously. Women still aren’t as equal as men, but I don’t think women’s galleries are helpful any more. I don’t think it helps to be in A.I.R.2

    —Barbara Zucker

    That statement came midway in a brisk discussion by six well-known women of the art world, speaking to a full house at the Soho Exhibition Center, an audience which included the video eye of Ingrid and Bob Wiegand, and a noticeable proportion of men.

    Moderator Corinne Robins began by noting that the six women artists “all benefited from the women’s movement, as every woman has. But what happens when ‘The Year of the Woman’ is over? Feminism is getting to be a tired issue to many people.” (Robins’s added, however, that “the abuses are still there.”)

    The six women showed slides of their work and described their artistic concerns, which could have been an evening in itself. The perception of six disparate and developed sensibilities was already a dense experience. The transition from Nancy Spero’s Body Count and Torture in Chile to “How much has the women’s movement influenced the direction of your painting?” was as difficult as Spero could have wished. But then the discussion swung into matters of practical, political and social concern, and the visual experience faded.

    Howardena Pindell: Without the women’s movement I wouldn’t have shown so soon. If I weren’t part of the gallery [A.I.R.], I don’t know if I’d be showing yet.

    Mary Beth Edelson: I was dealing with feminist subject matter before the movement, but I don’t think I understood why. Now I’m dealing in an overt way with feminist subject matter—pulled out and clarified by the movement.

    Phoebe Helman: I think the women’s movement, even though it was helpful in some ways, has nothing to do with my work. I haven’t been affected in the studio at all.

    Zucker: It’s much easier for the work to grow if it’s out there being shown….

    Nancy Spero: The feminist movement won’t fizzle out. We could never go back to the old standards. The new knowledge is too pervasive … it’s in our bones.

    Helman: It took outrageous things like dirty Tampax at the Whitney to get attention—then, hopefully, the pendulum swings.3

    Joyce Kozloff: I can’t imagine what my work or my life would be like if I hadn’t gone through the women’s movement. My work and the movement are very connected—they developed together. I see many feminist women whose work has grown, expressing their own growth and new confidence and sense of themselves as women.

    Robins: Some of the work in the Women Choose Women show [1973] struck me as very timid. Then those women got more exposure. That gave them the guts to take chances—to be less timid, no longer second-hand artists.

    Will there continue to be a need for A.I.R. and women’s galleries?

    Spero: Eventually there will be a reconciliation, but we still need outposts of independence.

    Edelson: I still see a need for A.I.R. and Soho 20, but we need to go on to another plateau. [U]ntil we integrate, we won’t have the main money and the main power.

    Helman: It’s a heterosexual world. There comes a time when this kind of support becomes a crutch.

    Spero: It’s not a heterosexual world. The art world is still male dominated. To join the system is to join the same old stuff. I’d still be excluded from commercial galleries…. There are still under 23 percent women in the Whitney Annual. We still talk about “good artists” according to male standards. Our standards for all artwork are male controlled.

    Robins: As a writer and reviewer, I have more chance to speak and write about women’s art because AI.R. and Soho 20 exist…. In 1973, as a critic, I thought Women Choose Women was a major disaster.

    Zucker: It’s time for a major museum to do a major show of women—not one started and paid for by the women—but started and paid for by the museum. [Quoting Vivian Gornick in the Village Voice]: “No one of us has the truth or the word or the only view or the only way….” It would be very comfortable for me to still be with A.I.R. I feel very fragile now. I left with great difficulty, but it was very important for me to leave.

    Audience: The world is so sick, it seems to me our only hope is bastions of what we’d like it to be—don’t corrupt yourself with that other “reality.”

    Helman: Don’t talk about Utopia! Are you aware of the politics that went on with the Women Choose Women show? That was politics!

    Zucker: It takes a great toll on an artist to always have to do everything yourself, to schlepp, and call, and carry and photograph…. To survive, and do well, a gallery needs a lot of money. We got certain grants at A.I.R., but those were tokens.

    Robins: But that’s part of every cooperative gallery.

    Edelson: I like doing some of the work you object to, but I’d like to have someone do a little of it. I have a dealer too, but he makes so many incredible mistakes…. It’s nice to have a little control.

    Man in Audience: What is women’s art?

    Panel: Art done by a woman.

    Man: Renoir dealt with the subject of women. Is he a woman artist?

    Spero: That’s a male’s view. [W]omen are supposed to conform to his view. We want to see how we see ourselves.

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 2.

    My first comment is that, while the men never seemed to complain about the absence of women during all those years of “men only” galleries, many women found something missing in women’s galleries almost from the start. Is that because it’s a man’s world, or a basic difference in the needs of men and women?

    But the gallery in question, A.I.R., seems to have had a rather remarkable and nearly instantaneous success, considering that it is a cooperative and was initiated without “stars” or powerful patronage. It earned the respect and attention of the art world and the media from its inception and has had consistent review coverage that could be the envy of many a commercial gallery, let alone cooperative. Many of its artists have achieved prominence in the “establishment” and/or moved on from A.I.R. to “important” commercial galleries…. What do women want?

    As for feminism being a “tired issue”—American culture does use up and throwaway issues as rapidly as last week’s TV Guide. But feminism seems to have more than a few twists and turns left before subsiding into its long-prophesied demise.

    A Panelist’s Reply

    Panelist Kozloff wrote a rebuttal to panelist Zucker, which ran in the same issue as the panel report. Aside from reviewing the controversy, which was a most urgent one at the time, Kozloff’s commentary is interesting today for having forecast much art of the ‘80s.

    I felt pained to hear copanelist Barbara Zucker say that “women’s panels are boring,” “women’s shows are boring,” and “women’s galleries are boring.”

    Clearly feminism is not boring and women’s art is not boring—quite the contrary. Then why are these attitudes suddenly around? One reason is that the approaches to talking about and showing women’s art have become repetitious and unimaginative. Why is it that women artists are always expected to talk only about “Is There a Feminine/Feminist Sensibility?” or “Do Women Artists Want to Be Part of the System or Make Alternatives?”—with panels divided between those who say “yes” and those who say “no,” so there is no possibility for the development of ideas and theory?

    I have observed that women who have been through consciousness-raising and the political activities of the last five years have become strong, highly individualized artists. Their work reflects (in many different ways) a sense of personal and group identity. I see new kinds of imagery and content emerging: exploration of female sexuality, reflections on personal history, fresh approaches to materials, new concepts of space, a reexamination of the decorative (and the so-called decorative) arts, a reaching out toward non-Western sources and a nonpaternalistic attitude toward the “primitive,” direct political approaches to art making, and art which consciously parodies male stereotypes.

    These are all vital subjects and none of them precludes the others. What is exciting to me is the diversity of ways in which women’s art is emerging. We should not be confined to generalities and tired rhetoric. Let’s talk about the art and the ideas around the art.

    —Joyce Kozloff

    Letter to the Editor

    Over the years we received a number of angry letters-to-the-editor about such matters as having said a speaker was hard to understand or having run a cover cartoon in the style of a male artist. Therefore Zucker’s letter seemed only mildly contentious. In any event, we duly printed it—and my reply:

    Barbara Zucker, Judy Seigel, and Sylvia Sleigh, “Letters to the Editor: What Do Women Want?,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (December 1975): 2.

    I would like to clarify some points which were not accurately presented in the last issue of Women Artists News [“Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want”]. I was quoted by Judy Seigel as saying “You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected.” Out of context, it sounds absurd. I amplified the remark to explain that (in political circumstances) guerrilla tactics, or constantly changing actions, are often those which produce results. I also said that I feel Feminism in Art has become a safe harbor, not only for the artists themselves, but for those who criticize it, or, even more reprehensibly, dismiss it. It has become an easy, predictable target. I do not believe our strengths will be reinforced by staying in this polarized oasis. Rather, I feel one’s individual tenacity and visibility in the male and female world is more relevant.

    I wish to also bring to light a fact Seigel excluded from her discussion of A.I.R., which is that, as a cofounder of the gallery, I know quite well it did not have the “remarkable and nearly instantaneous success” it allegedly enjoys without one solid year of slavish preparatory ground work and devotion on the part of all twenty women who first comprised its stable. In other words, A.I.R. didn’t “happen,” it was “made.” I do not know what kind of effort women must now make in order to push for continued change and recognition. I do know that in comfortably pursuing the familiar, we talk only to ourselves.

    —Barbara Zucker

    Editor’s Reply

    “You get what you want by surprise, etc.,” doesn’t sound absurd to me, in or out of context. The amplifications Zucker supplies are, I think, implicit. It’s not possible to repeat a two-hour panel verbatim.

    As for her second point, I never meant, and doubt if the reader would think I meant, that A.I.R.’s success was unearned. I meant rather to admire a notable achievement. Obviously a project of this order, whether a gallery or a publication (even, for that matter, dinner-on-the-table), requires endless work, much of which never meets the eye.

    So far as I know, by what I consider the relevant standards, A.I.R. has had an exemplary success. My question was whether Zucker’s expectations for such an endeavor might not be unrealistic. My guess is that a mixed, or men-only gallery of similar provenance, would not have fared so well.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Judy Seigel, “Afterword,” in Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 323–25.

    2 Howardena Pindell, Mary Beth Edelson, and Nancy Spero were members of the women’s co-op gallery, A.I.R. Barbara Zucker was a former member. This statement of Zucker’s was a shocker at the time. It wasn’t just that A.I.R. was getting much attention. [See above.] The love affair between the women artist’s community and A.I.R. was still going strong—much of the sympathetic art world, male and female, convened regularly at A.I.R. panels and openings. In retrospect, Zucker’s remarks suggest that what she had in mind was a larger effect than, so far as I know, has been obtainable in a co-op, whatever its membership.

    3 Lucy Lippard noted in a subsequent letter to Women Artists News that those were clean tampons.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “The Last Woman’s Panel?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 6 (November 1975): 1–2, 5. Barbara Zucker’s letter and Seigel’s response were originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 7 (December 1975): 2. Both texts were reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 18–20. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Male Critics Grilled and Toasted

    Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work
    Monday, June 2, 1975
    A.I.R. Gallery, New York

    This is the first of a pair of panels that well illustrate the dramatic change in attitudes toward “women’s art” that settled in during the next two years. The second event was in a grand institutional setting, and everyone felt as triumphant as, on this June night, they felt frustrated.1

    Moderator: Blythe Bohnen
    Panelists: Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Richard Martin, and Carter Ratcliff

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    The fact that this panel of four male critics and editors drew the largest audience I have seen at any comparable woman’s event tells all about power and the perception of power in the art world today. Intellectual exchange was secondary, the audience being less interested in what the panel had to say than in what it had to say to the panel.

    Moderator Blythe Bohnen, perhaps better called moderator-advocate, was adroit and articulate, deftly catching some finely parsed qualifications on the fly and tossing them back in the same breath, asking point-blank, “What are critics going to do to increase women’s power in the art world? Can the decision-making that goes on be brought to consciousness? Can an equalization in articles and reviews be forced? Why is it that the women who have been developed as full artistic personalities are all dead, out of town, or nonexistent? Many young men have had the critical build-up to super-star status: why not women?”

    A similar insistent questioning came from the audience. May Stevens asked, “Why is there so little critical response to women’s art? This is a movement with tremendous energy and thrust. Do you think it isn’t intellectually or aesthetically significant? How do you justify remaining aside from this issue?”

    May Stevens, The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 1974, acrylic on canvas (artwork © May Stevens)

    Max Kozloff replied, “Feminism can’t be considered a movement in modern art.” Just as ethnic background or place of origin are factors in an artist’s work, sex is a factor which could only have “x” amount of relevance, he said. The feminist movement rightly insists on “the psychic origin of works of art,” but many other factors, including social, biographical, economic, and political ones, have also been slighted. Since they are in the majority, “it seems odd to have a separate category for women.” However, the effect of the movement is evident. “I look around this room and see work proudly exhibited that five years ago would have been called miniscule.” Moreover, “a consciously womanly style or feminine subject can cause an alteration of looking.”

    Perhaps one day, Kozloff suggested, “we’ll find ‘tough’ or ‘virile’ painting ugly, and say ‘what a tough painting—ugh!’’’ But, as he sees the issues, critics are not the ones to obtain “social justice” for women. Critics’ prime concern is “the laborious process of reacting to a work of art.” Look to curators and chairpersons of art departments for justice, he said.

    Carter Ratcliff: “I have shied away from political issues in art and I think feminism is a political issue…. I’ve written about a lot of women artists (e.g., Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, Joan Mitchell) but they were artists before the feminist movement. If women come along with a theory of what significance in women’s art is, it will be in order to get accepted, to get prestige. So far the definitions don’t stand up, but they may gain support and become self-fulfilling prophecies. The problem is to find a good self-fulfilling prophecy for those women who feel that their self-interest or self-fulfillment lies as members of a group…. Specifically feminist conventions may be building, but that would ‘conventionalize’ women’s art, as in art ‘conventions.’”

    Agnes Martin, Untitled #10, 1975 (artwork © Estate of Agnes Martin)

    Those critics who repudiate the old Greenbergian criticism would be more interested in women’s work, which is outside the power structure, than formalist critics, as Ratcliff saw it. “The sensibility that makes one suspect that whole ‘certification’ process would respond to feminist consciousness, which also unhooks one from the power structure. [B]ut I can’t think of any woman who presents herself as a woman artist who presents work that would seem to be of quality to a hardline formalist critic.”

    Richard Martin: “Being a Quaker, I was aware of the women’s movement before I was aware of art criticism.” The feminist movement was instrumental in breaking down the stereotype of the personal in art as “trivial.” However, “I would consider it a mistake to orient the magazine Arts toward one particular point of view. The priorities are to act as medium of record and to discriminate between various forms of art.” It isn’t possible to take a self-conscious equalizing attitude toward women, but “an ardent antifeminist would not be engaged to do reviews.” As Martin sees it, when women are properly represented with exhibitions, “recognition in other areas will follow.”

    Billy Al Bengston, Big Jim McLain, 1967, polyurethane and laquer on aluminum, 60 x 58 in. (artwork © Billy Al Bengston)

    Lawrence Alloway: “I hesitate to formulate general factors common to women’s art, perhaps a theory may come later. There are proposals for a feminist aesthetic, something inherently feminine. That used to be considered sexist—now the women are saying it!” Alloway pointed out that none of the proposed criteria applies to more than a few small groups, but what matters is what’s intended.

    For instance, “Judy Chicago’s painting reminds me of Billy Al Bengston first, and female genitalia second, but there can be specific feminist iconographies if women artists say they are.” In other words, “the circle has been sexualized or politicized, but these things don’t add up to an inherent sensibility.” Of course, “I think of women’s art in sociocultural terms, but I think of everyone’s art in sociocultural terms.” As for power, Alloway said, “I don’t think the writer is so insignificant. Not only does he have the power to write, but the power to withhold. I’m writing four pieces about women now. I’m preoccupied. If I had a brilliant idea about Brice Marden or Richard Serra, I wouldn’t write it.” And, on changing the system: “I’d like to see an expansion of co-ops.”

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    Lucy Lippard’s question-statement from the floor addressed the paradox which haunts these discussions: “Women’s art is used as a synonym for feminist art, but they’re not the same thing…. Can you tell the difference?”

    The answer was not clear. Meanwhile, we see that when the women say, “Write about women’s art,” the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic.” When the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic,” the women say, “But the movement is what’s happening.” And then the men say, “Feminist art is of no formal interest.” So the women say, “Then write about more women artists.”

    Obviously, there’s enormous pressure to make “women’s art” into an aesthetic as well as a political development, and the more useful “women’s art” is as a political configuration, the more likely it is to become an aesthetic one. Some women would benefit enormously, but the rest would be worse off than before, having undertaken the struggle in the first place to escape stereotyping.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 A panel called “Contemporary Women: Consciousness and Content,” took place at the Brooklyn Museum on October 23, 1977.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Grilled and Toasted” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 16–17. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Not Just Another Ism

    Eroticism in Art
    Friday, January 24, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Eroticism, or rather explicit eroticism, was suddenly right out there in high-art country, courtesy in part of the new pluralism—and also of the women artist’s movement. It’s hard to say if Judith Bernstein’s hairy screws would seem erotic in the present day of Mapplethorpiana, but a major charge of the movement was explicit material from women. Joan Semmel, for instance, painted larger-than-life-size photo-realist couplings in phosphor colors. John Kacere’s close-up renderings of the buttocks of young women lying down in silky underpants and garters were, on the other hand, more what you might think of when you thought “erotic art.”

    Pat Passlof says the panel was “reticent.” Perhaps it was the topic. Or perhaps we hadn’t yet learned the spill-everything style of the ‘80s.

    Judith Bernstein, Five Panel Vertical, 1973, charcoal on paper, 150 x 60 in. each (artwork © Judith Bernstein)

    Moderator: Joan Semmel
    Panelists: John Kacere, Judith Bernstein, Bob Stanley, Charles Stark, and Louise Bourgeois

    Slides of everyone’s work and a film of Louise Bourgeois’s were projected on a wall with a provocatively placed protruding pipe.

    Joan Semmel began by citing Lucy Lippard: the more explicit the imagery, the less evocative the erotic work. Response from panelists was poor until John Kacere broke the ice with a meandering monologue on the mediocrity of porn: “If you’re very hungry, it doesn’t take much to turn you on.” Panelists were asked if their own work turned them on; Kacere again. “You can’t be horny for a month.” Panelists agreed that, in effect, their work was not really porn or even erotic—it just referred to a “beautiful human experience.”

    Joan Semmel, Hold, 1972, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 in. (artwork © Joan Semmel)

    Judith Bernstein said the political implications of her work are overlooked. Louise Bourgeois likes good-looking men who don’t know they are—a rarity, says she. Kacere dominated the evening with a series of wry ramblings on his unrequited youth. Semmel described men’s images of women as doll-like sexual objects. She prefers focusing on gestures that reveal the whole person. She told of a couple who found they could not live with her work. Unhappy with the thought of subject matter overwhelming painting, she resolved the issue with the idea that she had achieved the ultimate desire of every artist: disturbance of the viewer. (It has to be said here that the overpowering of the pictorial by subject matter constitutes a perfectly workable definition of pornography.) Semmel’s recent work, however, has taken a leaf from Lippard: less explicit imagery with a brilliant play on exaggerated foreshortenings which flatten surreal perspectives. “When my work changed from abstract to figurative, the emphasis shifted from the drama of paint to that of volume.”

    From the audience, Burt Hasen brought up the biomorphic nature of the species: “Men are women and women men.” Ignored as a drunk raving, Hasen was speaking well to the issue as others kept to popular theories of power role-playing. Semmel deserves credit for carrying a reticent panel virtually single-handed (except for the voluble Kacere).

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Pat Passlof, “Not Just Another Ism” was originally published in WIA Newsletter 2, no. 5 (February 1975); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 8. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Get Off the Internet

    Begun in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism
    Thursday, March 12, 2015
    Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.

    In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”

    Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)

    Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.

    “Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”

    Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.

    Narcissister as Little Red Riding Hood (artwork © Narcissister)

    A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.

    Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.

    Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.

    Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.

    Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress

    Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.

    “For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.

    During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.

    Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)

    An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.

    Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.

    Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”

    Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”

    Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 This band was Beirut Slump.

    2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.

    Read

    Osa Atoe, “I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism,” Shotgun Seamstress, March 24, 2015.

    Emily Colucci, “Big Sexy Noiseless: Lydia Lunch’s Silently Visceral So Real It Hurts,” Filthy Dreams, May 10, 2015.

    Nicole Disser, “Feminist Punk Panel Talks Zines, Radical Politics, and Race,” Bedford and Bowery, March 16, 2015.

    Samantha Spoto, “Punk Rock Needs Feminism,” Breakthru Radio, March 19, 2015.

    Watch

  • Landscape Surveyors

    The Changing Landscape of Museums Today
    Thursday, January 29, 2015
    Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, New York

    Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)

    A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.

    The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.

    Building and Expansion

    Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.

    Richard Armstrong oversees the Guggenheim Museum franchise (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.

    Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.

    Melissa Chiu explains how artists have used the Hirshhorn Museum building in creative ways (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)
    Diversity and Inclusivity

    Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”

    Tom Finkelpearl laments the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on museums staffs in New York (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.

    From the Ground Up

    Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1

    Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.

    Peggy Loar interviews the panelists (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.

    Locations and Audience

    While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?

    Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”

    Education and Experience

    Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.

    Tom Finkelpearl explains Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fill New York City schools with art teachers (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2

    For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.

    Concluding Thoughts

    While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.

    Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

    1 See Colin Moyniham, “Protests Resume at Guggenheim over Abu Dhabi Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 2014; and ongoing coverage by various authors for Hyperallergic.

    2 See Michelle Jubin, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” Artwrit (Summer 2011); Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6 (Summer 2007); and Helen Reed, “A Bad Education: Helen Reed Interviews Pablo Helguera,” Pedagogical Impulse (publication date unknown).

    Watch

    The Asia Society has posted the video of “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today.”

  • End of Bohemianism

    Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?
    February 19, 1987
    College Art Association, 75th Annual Conference
    Marriott Hotel, Salon E, Boston, MA

    The title question of this panel is the sort that rarely gets asked unless the answer is meant to be yes—and the answer for this one did seem to be “Yes, but….” Yes or no, the panel articulated feelings about “success” that had ripened in the ’80s.

    Moderator: Hilton Kramer
    Panelists: William Bailey, Sylvia Mangold, Sidney Tillim, and Robert Pincus-Witten

    The most talked-about art writing of 1987 College Art Association week was Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile of Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum. Hilton Kramer, introducing “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?,” explained how Malcolm found Sischy not “profilable” and so profiled instead a “Cook’s tour of the seamy aspects of the world [Sischy] is obliged to move in.” We, apparently more accustomed than Kramer to the ways and means of artists, thought the scene sounded like just folks and began to wonder anew about Kramer’s sense of the fitness of things.

    From there he segued into a depiction of the runaway art world of the last five to ten years—the proliferation of art critics, the inflation of indifferent art, and the turning of art into a commodity for the moneyed middle class.

    Kramer traced the blame for the decade’s art sickness to his years at the New York Times. Something happened in the ’70s art world that was expressed by his editors: the burning question asked every week at editorial meetings was “What’s New?” But, as Kramer saw it, the impetus for this question, and what changed American journalism, was New York magazine. It was New York that advised readers each week where to buy the ten best hamburgers, see the ten best exhibitions, find the ten best artists, discover the ten newest movements.

    So Kramer’s editor at the Times wanted to know what was new that week in art. The high point of his career at the Times was the week he answered that “no new trend was discernible in the last seven days,” and the editor asked, “Is that a trend?”

    Kramer advised his audience to resist sentimentalizing the “old art world,” reminding us that those now-famous artists were impoverished at the time, had no public, only hostile and ignorant response (if any), no solo exhibitions until they were 40 or 50 years old, and sold at outrageously low prices. Was the American art world a finer place in the “good old days,” he asked, when Willem de Kooning didn’t have an exhibition until he was 42 and Milton Avery sold his paintings for $50?

    William Bailey had pondered the question “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?” and was prepared to say “Yes, in the sense of a spoiled child.” Then, with carefully weighed words, he added that the problems of the art world emanate not from success but from a sense of failure. As the successful get more successful, the unsuccessful get, in comparison, even more unsuccessful. The gap between them widens, rending the art community. Bailey also disdainfully likened today’s success for artists to the success of rock stars and movie stars. (But why not? We have lived to see moments when even women artists were mobbed by fans at openings. We’d like more—more famous women artists, more mob scenes.)

    Bailey said that when he started out, “art” was what came from Europe; he himself had no expectations of “success.” He made the point that most painters today still live marginally and under increasingly difficult conditions, especially in New York. The community of artists has broken up; it is no longer possible even to share poverty. Bailey knows young and old artists who have never had the kind of success heaped today on the art world’s darlings but are instead involved in the daily conflicts of the studio and haunted by a sense of failure. The talk now in SoHo is only about money, while at the old shrines (museums) curators are preoccupied with enticing the fun people, as though to a disco. Bailey asked if all this “presages the decline of the West.” However, it was reassuring to have him tell us this is not just New York, but all over.

    Sylvia Mangold, the only woman on the panel (added, we understand, as token, at the insistence of Natalie Charkow, chair of the conference studio sessions), said success means money. She enjoys being able to live off her art. Though she lives apart from the New York world of careerism, she still faces her own problems in the studio.

    In preparation for the panel, Mangold had read Suzi Gablik’s Has Modernism Failed? and works by Willa Cather. From Cather she came away with the reassurance that success is never as interesting as the struggle (though there might be some argument on that from the strugglers), and that every artist needs to find some motivation other than money. Money brings problems, Mangold observed, expressing her certainty that most artists she knows care more about their work than about making money. But sensitive, gentle Sylvia, doubtless selected because of her friendship with the moderator and the knowledge that she wouldn’t make trouble, was no match for those macho image-makers on the platform—though one wished it were otherwise. A scrappy hard-hitting woman puncturing some of the blather would have been refreshing.

    If Sidney Tillim had some gift as a raconteur, his garrulous drawn-out tales might have been more appreciated. He, too, assured us, in case we didn’t know, that most artists don’t work just for the money, and that he, personally, doesn’t have enough of it. He, too, harked back to the art world of thirty years ago. Asking himself “Why am I here?” (at the panel), he concluded it was for his career. Tillim resumed writing some four years ago, after a lapse of fourteen years, because he wasn’t showing. “I just couldn’t get a dealer.” He was surprised when an article he wrote, “The View from Past 50,” got an enormous response, mostly from people under 30. Then, in an attempt to share his thoughts on the subject, he launched into a soliloquy, “The Art World Today Is Like Baseball,” an extraordinarily boring ramble on his life-long interest in baseball, which may of course have been less boring to a person with a life-long interest in baseball.1

    The passive among us grabbed forty winks, the decision-makers got up and left; the masochists toughed it out. Finally back to the subject at hand, Tillim proposed to document changes in the art world, as, for instance, the evolution of the Whitney Museum of American Art from humble beginnings on Eighth Street to MoMA’s backyard to Madison Avenue and its present postmodernist imbroglio. These changes, showing the movement of money and upward mobility, have occurred, he said, not just in art but throughout modern culture. Then, before relinquishing the mic, Tillim got in yet another personal anecdote. He had sought advice from Robert Pincus-Witten about how to approach the art magazines. His first submitted article was rejected (by an unspecified publication). He next decided to approach Betsy Baker, an old friend who happens to be editor of Art in America. His call was fielded by a young man who asked what he wanted to talk to her about, explaining that it was necessary to “prioritize topics.” Tillim’s topic evidently didn’t make it to the top ten because he didn’t get through. Next he approached Artforum, where he finally got published. Running into Baker at a later date, he described his failure to reach her. She told him, “Next time just say you’re returning my call.”

    Robert Pincus-Witten was introduced by Kramer as “the kid” but admitted to being not much younger than the others present. My neighbor whispered to me that she’d been in his class at art school and they were the same age: 52. Pincus-Witten, simultaneously arch, pleasant, and snide, smiled and demolished all previous nonsense. The basic situation has not changed, he said. All artists want as much as they can get and good-looking lovers, and always have. But this has no effect on art. For example, “Has success spoiled Hilton Kramer?” No, Pincus-Witten assured us. “Whatever he does is not affected by his being a successful man.” Reading from a column by Kramer, he quoted statements about the lack of talent among this year’s famous—David Salle, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and company—can’t draw, can’t paint, etc. He added that success is very revelatory of character; in fact, you can’t tell what a person is until they get what they want.

    Kramer then shifted the discussion to museums and their keepers, describing the enormous pressure on curators and directors to be first with the new stars and to beat the Europeans to it. Mangold questioned who holds the power, and Pincus-Witten said power is in the hands of those who make the newest art—small groups acting in concert. This led to a diatribe against the gang of four: Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, and Mary Boone (speaker unidentified by now-sleepy reporter). Kramer tossed in the fact that MoMA is an ailing museum and no longer representative, quoting Harold Rosenberg’s phrase about “the herd of independent minds.” Everyone, Kramer explained, thinks they’re making “independent decisions,” but they turn out to be identical with all the others.

    Mangold said she found the volume of art being produced frightening, but another panelist reassured her that two kinds of business will surely prosper—storage and conservation.

    Assorted Quotes and Choice Lines from the Panel

    Pincus-Witten: Agnes Martin’s withdrawal can be seen as a strategy for self-promotion.

    Bailey: Critics don’t see very well; that’s part of today’s problem. There is the question of how well Picasso draws and how badly Salle draws. [Bailey added that he regretted having to speak ill of another artist but was driven to it.]

    Kramer: The problem with Salle isn’t that he doesn’t draw well, but that he draws.

    Pincus-Witten: Although we think of certain galleries as central emporia for significant artists, art actually moves into the world as a function of stylistics. Hype doesn’t sell art, stylistics does. Work enters the marketplace because it sells itself, and that’s what the consumer wants. Significant collections are made up of works bought by people who don’t have to have things “sold” to them.

    Kramer: The shift to Neo-Expressionism was the result of a strong sense by a new generation of what was missing in art; something more important than fashion and avarice, a sense that the vitality of art should be restored. Also, there are now so many artists, dealers, museums, curators, and collectors, that it’s tougher for an artist to get a serious review than to sell a picture.

    Unidentified: At least we are finally rid of the mythical bohemianism of the lonely painter living in isolation and neglect.

    Unanswered Questions from the Audience

    Are these phenomena of “success” aspects of some larger cultural decay? Does the success of young artists, like the success of young ballplayers, inspire other young artists? Who markets the artist?

    And Answered Questions

    Audience: Aren’t artists involved in object commodification, as opposed to writers or dancers?
    Kramer: There’s a whole new group of short-story writers similar to the Schnabels of our time.

    Audience: How does one achieve fame and fortune quickly?
    Answer: It’s easier if you start young.

    Audience: Would you prefer to be a successful Picasso or an unsuccessful van Gogh?
    Answer: One lived three times as long as the other.

    Audience [referring to the breakdown of the star system in Hollywood]: Can it happen in the art world?
    Kramer: We all liked it better when the movies had stars, but it’s not a true comparison.

    Gossip

    We heard that the panel originally included Robert Hughes and Alex Katz, with the expectation of a face-off between them. Hughes, it seems, had disparaged Katz in print, and Katz was furious. When Hughes cancelled his panel appearance for a trip to Australia promoting his latest book, Katz cancelled, too. The large sensation-hungry audience was disappointed.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Apparently painter Clyfford Still also had a lifelong interest in baseball and also drew analogies between art and baseball, which he shared with his students in California, but their response is not on record.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “End of Bohemianism” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 266–68. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • The Forever No

    “Zombie Formalism” and Other Recent Speculations in Abstraction
    Wednesday, December 10, 2014
    School of Visual Arts, SVA Theatre, New York

    Last April the painter and critic Walter Robinson wrote an essay for Artspace Magazine on a particular strain of contemporary painting, which he named Zombie Formalism. Others have similarly described work by the same group of mostly artists—among them Lucien Smith, Jacob Kassay, Oscar Murillo, Parker Ito, Fredrik Vaerslev, and Dan Colen—as Crapstraction and MFA-Clever art. Laura Hoptman, in her catalogue for the current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, The Forever Now, used synonyms such as hauntology, retromania, and super hybridity—phrases by an institutional curator aiming to appear hip.

  • The Meet Market

    Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age
    Tuesday, November 19, 2014
    The Art of Sex and Seduction
    French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, New York

    Gerard ter Borch the Younger, The Suitor’s Visit, ca. 1658, oil on canvas, 31½ x 29½ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    The internet was once the “meat market for the undatable,” said the journalist Erica Lumière. Now, meeting people online for dating and sex has nearly become completely normalized in American culture. Which is good news, especially for couples who no longer must make excuses for how they met—“at a party,” “through mutual friends,” or something of the sort—and just say “on OKCupid” without feeling ashamed. In fact, men and women older than fifty is the largest growing segment of online dating (and the market cornered by a company called Our Time).

    The three speakers on the panel “Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age,” hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and moderated by Lumière, offered their experiences as writers, researchers, and professors—and as advocates—and the ensuing discussion culminated in agreement over a moderate, thoughtful approach to modern romance that originates on the web.1

    Swipe Right

    Lumière began the conversation with a few statistics: one out of ten people have used a dating site or app; 66 percent of those users go on a date; and 23 percent of them have met a spouse or started a long-term relationship via the internet. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, praised the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet potential romantic partners, with large cities offering hundreds to thousands of people. But, he warned, a dating website is “only a good tool if you know how to use it.” Backed with statistics from Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey report, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher said that cognitive overload is the biggest problem and that users can become overwhelmed with choices, overweighing trivial aspects of a person’s looks, dress, interests, and personality, gleaned from a person’s profile, at the expense of finding common ground.2 Don’t use a check-off strategy, Reis and Fisher both recommended. My question is, does anyone consider those endless lists of favorite movies, bands, and books that people put in their profiles to be helpful criteria?

    The experience Daniel Jones brought to the panel wasn’t scientific but literary—he is a writer and the editor of the New York Times column Modern Love, for which ordinary people contribute personal essays about their relationships. Dating sites put you in the driver’s seat, “looking for the ideal person,” he said, but you’re thrown into the sea with an “illusion of control.” Sometimes opposites—whether that’s differences in income, religion, politics, or smoking preferences—really do attract. In short, he advised, don’t be too strict with your imagined ideal.

    The sexperts, from left: Daniel Jones, Hellen Fisher, and Harry Reis, with the moderator Erica Lumière at right

    Fisher agreed: the algorithms work of dating websites work, but having a common background—which can be social values, good looks, or the same reproductive goals—is also important. “I don’t think they’re dating services.” Fisher continued. “I think they’re introducing services.” These websites are “changing courtship,” she said, “but [they’re] not changing love.”3 Connections happen in real life, Reis emphasized again. A prospective car buyer can read Consumer Reports cover to cover, his analogy went, but he or she must take a test drive before making a decision. Fisher nodded, stating that 35 percent of people fall in love “down the road,” not instantly, so patience is a virtue for anyone behind the wheel. There’s a joke about rocks songs about cars and girls in here somewhere.

    “Hi” Tech

    Many have declared that technology has killed romance. Jones recounted a story of a woman in Washington, DC, who Googled her date before meeting him. Because she “was able to excavate his entire personal life, and family life, all in advance of the date,” their conversation suffered from stunted communications and even led to an embarrassing mistake: she mentioned his sister before he said he had one. Yet 29 percent of internet users, Lumière stated, have looked up the person they are dating, or are going to date, online. Fisher had different statistics—38 percent of men and 53 percent of women have researched a date on Google and Facebook—and with safety and curiosity in mind and with different statistics said, “I don’t know why 100 percent don’t.” Besides, she explained, from hunter-gatherer era to the small towns of yore, many people already knew the family of the people with whom they might partner. This idea spurred Jones to assert that we’ve experienced a sea change of people dating strangers, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Dating strangers inherently creates suspicion, the panelists concurred, so it’s sensible that a person conduct research in advance. And no, it’s not stalking.

    Technology doesn’t protect people from getting hurt, Jones said. Considering hookup culture (i.e., sex without commitment) in 2008, he observed that things go tragically wrong when the emotional involvement becomes imbalanced. There’s an understanding between partners when hooking up, he said, but “the rules aren’t posted in the dorm walls.” When hooking up, kids feel vulnerable but cannot act vulnerable. On the positive side, the panelists agreed noted that people’s sexual needs are being met this way, despite the anxiety hooking up might cause. Fisher even revealed that 35 percent of one night stands and 47 percent of friends with benefits turn into long-term relationships. The rules are developing now, she said, just like they were developing in other ways a hundred years ago. Later, during the Q&A, an audience member felt that hooking up takes time away from working on a core relationship, but Reis has observed that emotion flows plentifully in hookups, that “it’s following some different norms, to be sure,” and not necessarily a linear courtship progression. Jones, however, has witnessed people struggling with such arrangements but offered the idea that they’re practicing pieces of relationships. Sometimes dealing with a whole relationship while too young, he suggested, can damage a younger person.

    Daniel Jones (left) offered his experience as a writer and editor

    The panelists discussed long-distance relationships that develop online between people who have never met face to face. “It’s completely liberating,” Jones said, and “The flirtation is intense.” The risk for vulnerability is low, he continued, but foibles may develop, such as when one couple worked up to Skyping naked but still preferred typing to speaking. Another couple would fall asleep together online, Jones recalled, but the relationship failed after she drove from Missouri to New York. In real life they were bored by each other and could only get their emotional fix through their electronic devices. Lumière asked if these online relationships can work. “I would say ultimately not,” responded Reis, who again endorsed the primacy of flesh-and-blood connections.

    Deception is built into technology, Jones said. Since people regularly fudge their income, height, weight, and age in their online profiles, he wondered, how should an honest person act when everyone else is enhancing their image? Others might think a person who genuinely lists himself as 45 year old is actually 50, or a 180-pound person actually weighs 200. “Lying and cheating are hardly new inventions,” responded Reis, and the opportunities to both cheat and detect cheating are relatively equal. “It’s a bit of an arms race,” he observed. Jones believes that Facebook helps reignite old flames, but often you’re seeing someone’s curated life, not their actual life, and therefore illusions can develop. What’s more, he said, you must work harder to block people from your life online. Fisher asserted the notion that if you’re not predisposed to cheat, you probably won’t cheat. Dating sites, she concluded, don’t change brain chemistry and personality. After a few weeks, Reis added, you generally know who a person is—unless he or she is a pathological liar.

    It’s All Good?

    One study, Lumière noted, found that internet marriages are three to four times more likely to end in divorce, but Reiss asserted the opposite: “The right science has not been done to answer that question.” People don’t sacrifice their career for a relationship anymore, he continued, which is a positive development, and women need not follow their partners around the country or be told where to attend graduate school. Further, people may now split up romantically and separate geographically but stay together emotionally, which Reis said could develop into a new kind of relationship. Ever ready with her statistics, Fisher stated that 81 percent of lifelong partners would marry the same person again, and 76 percent are still in love with him or her. Now we choose for ourselves, often later in life, and leave bad relationships more readily.

    Harry Reis (center) encourages online daters to meet in person

    Regarding genders, Reis claimed that the similarities between men and women overwhelm the differences. Thus, the perception that single men only want sex, that married men pretend to be single want sex, and that women seek long-term relationships isn’t accurate. Based on her figures, Fisher even proposed that men are more romantic, fall in love easier, suggest moving in together sooner, and want to introduce family members earlier. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, she added, after a romantic snub. Reis stated, again, that there’s no information you can put online that’s better than what you’ll learn from meeting in person. The better dating sites, he said, tell you who is in your geographic area.

    The evening’s conversation completely avoided racial preferences, which were brought up in a 2013 report on interracial communications on a single Facebook-based dating site, Are You Interested. A few findings: black women are the least likely to be contacted, Asian women were the most pursued, and most women wrote to white men. OkCupid found similar results in 2009, including the fact that approximately two out of three whites prefer to date someone with the same skin color and racial background. And I don’t recollect a single mention by the panelists of issues affecting gays and lesbians. It’s inexplicable how the speakers—who were all white and straight—failed to widened their scope for a more inclusive discussion.

    Anna Gensler’s collage of Keith comprising drawing and smart phone screen shot, from November 24, 2014 (artwork © Anna Gensler)

    The panelists barely acknowledged accusations of emotional manipulation on social-media sites, which Facebook and OkCupid both faced earlier this year. And while the speakers discussed online communications between potential mates, they forgot to talk about the severe harassment of women by men—from sexually explicit written invitations to unwanted dick pics—which has become so widespread in the dating community that the aberrant behavior has become expected, in a way. Just ask the artist Anna Gensler, who draws caricatures of the men who contact her on Tinder with sexually explicit messages and publishes them, sometimes with collaged digital images but always showing the man with a hilariously small penis, on Tumblr and Instagram (as well as Granniepants.)

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 Tonight’s event was the third and final panel in the Art de Vivre: Talks series produced by the French Institute Alliance Française in conjunction with its gallery exhibition of fashion photographs by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, titled Seducing the Lens, and a film series.

    2 Fisher is not only a research professor at the Center for Human Evolution Studies in Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology, she is also chief scientific advisor for Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, which colored her comments.

    3 One trend Reis has noticed is that people prefer finding a good provider to finding love. The opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but because divorce is so prevalent, singles are suspicious of intense passion.

    Watch

  • Hand Washers

    Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect
    Tuesday, September 16, 2014
    School of Visual Arts,     MA Curatorial Practice Department, New York

    Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?

    Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?

    The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”

    Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.

    Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.

    Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.

    Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.

    Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.

    Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”

    If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:

    The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.

    His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.

    Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”

    Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.

    Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3

    Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.

    Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.

    Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.

    Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.

    Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.

    The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.

    Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.

    An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?

    A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

    1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?

    2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.

    3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.

    4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.

    Read

    Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).

    Watch

  • It’s Koons’s World—We Just Live in It

    This essay is the first of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the second, third, and fourth texts.

    The Koons Effect Part 1
    Thursday, September 11, 2014
    Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert J. Hurst Family Gallery (Lower Gallery), New York

    koonseffectlauraowens
    Laura Owens is exasperated by the art of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “It was a look of horror … or a smile,” said Scott Rothkopf, curator of the exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective and moderator of a panel discussion called “The Koons Effect Part 1,” regarding the responses he received when telling others of his research for a retrospective on the artist. Artists were interested in Koons, to his surprise, and he noted that Pierre Huyghe is fascinated by the “story that didn’t get made,” and Andrea Fraser enjoys Koonsian economics. Tino Sehgal finds Rabbit (1986) to be an iconic work, the curator continued, and Kara Walker responds to the advertisements for art magazines from 1988–89.1 For this panel, Rothkopf invited four American artists to discuss what Koons’s work means to them and how it has affected contemporary art.

    A striking feature of the individual panelists was generational: Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) was bold and unhinged in a way that was rebellious and irreverent but also smart. Laura Owens (b. 1970) and Carol Bove (b. 1971) were approaching the cusp of Zenlike wisdom attained by the senior artist Stephen Prina (b. 1954), though with a noticeable distinction: Bove was accepting and positive of ideas contained in the work of Jeff Koons, (b. 1955), but Owens still resisted those qualities of which she does not approve. Such polarization is emblematic of many opinions of the artist.

    In a brief presentation, Bove discussed her interest in the sublime and banal, as well as love and democracy. Her fascination with Koons is paradoxical, proposing that our admiration for him is not unlike how the Democrats elected Ronald Reagan as United States president twice. The art world, Bove said, has a taboo regarding mysticism, ignoring or suppressing “direct communication with the godhead.” Art brings powerful experiences in which you lose yourself, she explained, breaking with administrative consciousness. Like many, Bove came to art as a romantic but became a politician who is on high alert for what she called cheesiness, which differs from tackiness, because the concept behind the latter term is cute and forgivable. For her, Koons uses a “high production value to deliver an ecstatic message,” which a thinking art viewer would feel compelled to resist. Bove wondered if hostility to this message—delivered like a Trojan horse—demonstrates a prejudice against new-age spiritualism and even feminism. The art world has turned from poetry to theory, Bove declared, and “the taboo is self-protecting.”

    Jeff Koons, New Sheldon Wet/Dry Tripledecker, 1982 (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Prina ruminated on his early experiences with the artist: “Things were wide open when I first saw Koons’s work.” Prina’s first encounter was a 1982 group exhibition called A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which included Koons’s New Sheldon Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1982), one of the few objects in a gallery full of painting and photography, Prina noted. A year later he came across more work by Koons in a group show, LA–NY Exchange, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and a few years after that confronted the Luxury and Degradation series at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles. Prina said he received the same “wow” sensation that he had experienced in a 1976 exhibition of contemporary European artists at the Art Institute of Chicago, when he stumbled upon an installation by Marcel Broodthaers.2 Koons’s infamous Banality show at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in 1988, Prina recalled, took place a relatively small space, perhaps dangerously so with all the fragile porcelain sculpture. Prina’s main thought after leaving the gallery was: “Does Koons hold his audience in contempt?”

    With time already running behind, Rothkopf jumped to the open conversation among the panelists, but Wolfson hijacked the talk’s direction, reading from notes on his smartphone that he took earlier that week, when visiting the Whitney exhibition. (If Owens had been allowed to speak, I would have received a better feel for her point of view. During the open conversation she came off as a curmudgeon, but certainly her ideas have more depth than her reactions tonight.) Wolfson’s observations centered on distortion, scale, material, and image. One particularly interesting note was: “The work has humor in play but is never actually funny.” Regarding Koons’s Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold) (1994–2006), Wolfson wrote: “Seeing oneself not from reflection but from inner mind—this is very advanced art.” Neverthess, he observed that the piece is cold and dead.

    The open conversation moved rapidly, quickly jumping from topic to topic. Rothkopf compared Koons’s work to Lladró figurines from Spain, a reference he admitted that people younger than fifty probably don’t understand. (It was hilarious to me.) Owens and Bove discussed the latter artist’s Trojan-horse idea, in which a Koons sculpture embodies a particular message, usually that of acceptance, with which Koons distracts you. Bove argued that the allure of the object that holds your attention while something else slips into your mind. For Owens, the production is compelling and full of attention—it is not a distraction. Wolfson refined an idea about two major tenants of Koons’s work—image and material—for which one typically dominates the other within a single piece. Bove characterized a similar notion of images versus picture/graphic. Regarding a work’s message, Wolfson recognized that, through the art, Koons accepts the universe’s indifference.

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    Installation view of Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Jeff Koons, Cake (1995–97) and Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold) (1994–2006) (artwork © Jeff Koons; photograph by Ronald Amstutz)

    Prina had been indifferent to reproductions of several works, such as Cat on a Clothesline (Aqua) (1994–2001), but was impressed by them in person. For some artists, he explained, seeing the rear of the work isn’t necessary, but for Koons all sides of a work are important. I noticed this most strikingly with Rothkopf’s installation of the Banality sculptures at the Whitney, which had ample room in front of and behind the works. Returning to a Bove observation, Prina found it interesting that she chose the terms “cheesy” and “tacky” over “kitsch,” which is how many describe Koons’s appropriation of tchotchkes.

    “We’re all in it,” Owens exclaimed, irritated by the pervasive conversation about Koons and money (such as his high auction prices), which many critics and writers bring up. Koons is a person who has to maintain a certain lifestyle level, Wolfson responded, suggesting that we perceive him as a fallen angel. Otherwise, he continued, one gets preoccupied with formal problems, which he said nearly every artist deals with. “Art goes away,” Wolfson proclaimed, “What stays is intention.” The trouble with Koons’s stated intentions, his never-ending mantra of acceptance, perfection, and the like (as he expressed in his lecture at the New School one day earlier), allows for any interpretative framework of judgment of his work—whether praise or condemnation—is acceptable. In a brilliant move, Koons leaves the ball in the viewer’s court, trusting him or her to offer meaning, and whatever you think of his art reflects who you are and what you think—not who Koons is or what he thinks. If the artist or his work angers a person for whatever reason, it’s on that person, not the artist. Koons accepts all viewers no matter what, like a benevolent Heavenly Father, and this is how he deflects criticism so well—repelling instead of absorbing it and having it shape him.

    Koons is “the artist we deserve” Owens stated. He is also the poster boy for 1980s art—for Reaganomics, the AIDS crisis, and so on—but, as the panelists agreed, he’s also an emblematic artist for every decade since. And Koons’s production continues on and on. Owens said it’s not enough: “We ask the artist, ‘Can we have more?’” Bove agreed: “It’s gone a little hyper mega.” Wolfson claimed that Koons’s work is passive, hinting that it’s us who get riled up over it, for whatever reason. But the work also collapses, has no clarity, and loses agency. “The structure takes over,” Wolfson said, but I’m not sure what he was getting at.

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    Jordan Wolfson discusses the unfunny work of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch observed that the panel didn’t address the issue of celebrity. Koons was well regarded by other artists from the beginning of his career through the early 1990s, Deitch said, but after the artist’s personal and professional involvement with Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-born Italian politician and pornographic actress known as Cicciolina, his peers turned against him.

    Similarly, Rothkopf wondered if Koons has any followers—an odd thought considering the panel’s published aim was to bring together “four artists whose work has variously engaged questions of production, value, affect, taste, and display….” I would argue that many artists share Koons’s various approaches, such as serial production, found objects, and a fascination with mass culture, including Haim Steinbach (b. 1944), whom the panelists briefly discussed. Koons might be exemplary of a certain standard of perfection in his process—it’s often said that his expectations for his sculpture exceed that for aerospace industries and the military—but he is far from being a singular voice his approach to art.

    Nevertheless, Owens gets nothing from the show and is even sickened by it; she moaned that Koons makes her hate to be an artist. I wanted to shout, “He’s not the only artist out there, Laura!” In response to a question about irony and sincerity, Rothkopf responded by asking if it’s a better moral position if Koons is ironic instead of sincere, hinting that it isn’t, that the latter position is more nefarious.

    In Terms Of count: 8.

    1 As a side note, Andrea Fraser and Jeff Koons exhibited together in a group exhibition Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1986.

    2 I could not identify and confirm this exhibition from the Art Institute of Chicago’s online history.

    Read

    Elizabeth Buhe, “Blowing Up the Koons Effect,” IFA Contemporary, September 25, 2014.

    Watch

    The Whitney Museum of American Art has published a video of the panel.