In Terms Of

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  • The Butcher, the Baker, the Exhibition Maker

    Theater of Exhibitions with Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann
    Wednesday, August 5, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Jens Hoffmann, Theater of Exhibitions (2015)

    Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).

    For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).

    Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).

    Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.

    Museums front and center (elevation illustrations by A Practice for Everyday Life)

    Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.

    Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.

    Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.

    In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.

    In Terms Of count: 4⅔.

  • Where All the Action Is

    Lee Lozano Drawings and Paintings: A Conversation with Jacqueline Humphries, Jutta Koether, and Bob Nickas
    Wednesday, July 22, 2015
    Hauser and Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York

    In her notebooks, Lee Lozano asks herself, “WILL I ‘GO BACK’ TO ‘JUST PAINTING’?”

    I first discovered the work of Lee Lozano (1930–1999) in 1997, when reading the reprint of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The descriptions of Lozano’s experientially based art from the late 1960s, including Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, and Grass Piece, were among the most compelling in the book. Because of the radical nature of these works—making art from talking, from art-world protest, and from the desire to “stay high all day, every day”—I thought everyone knew about her.1 So when Lozano was rediscovered in the early 2000s, having left the art world for good thirty years earlier in her infamous Dropout Piece (initiated in the early 1970s), I was surprised. But upon reviewing the artist’s slender exhibition history and bibliography during the eighties and nineties, her omission from the historical record was clear.2

    The first question posed by Robert Nickas, the moderator of tonight’s conversation at Hauser and Wirth, was this: When were you first exposed to Lozano? The painter Jacqueline Humphries said she first saw Lozano’s work in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed, at the National Academy Museum in 2007. Humphries had also read Siegel and Reed’s conversation about the artist, published in Artforum in 2001. The conversation’s third participant, the artist Jutta Koether, became acquainted with Lozano’s work “as a concept, as an idea” in the 1990s—through Nickas, actually. Strangely, based on her words and expressions, it seemed as if Koether had never actually seen Lozano’s work in person before tonight.

    The painter Jacqueline Humphries (center), flanked by Robert Nickas and Jutta Koether (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tonight’s conversation was held in conjunction with an exhibition of five large paintings and numerous tiny drawings from 1964 to 1966, Lozano’s fourth solo show with the gallery since 2007. Despite Nickas’s unconventional approach to curatorial work and criticism, and despite his longtime support of Lozano’s work—he organized Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961–1971 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004—he framed the discussion around clichés: the death of painting, the artist as outlaw, the inadequacy of categorization, the goodness of failure, the performative turn, and, of course, the rediscovery of forgotten artists. Doing so produced a mostly stilted, directionless talk—the speakers missed the mark, and not positively so. Maybe they just didn’t prepare ahead of time. In spite of these obstacles, the talk had numerous moments of interest.

    Koether is attracted to Lozano’s multifarious practice: her process, her being female, and her “antagonistic propositions about failure and rejuvenance [sic] of painting.” Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition created a “highly problematic proposition about Lozano” that interrupts her unified idea of the artist. “There’s not one Lee Lozano,” Nickas reminded her, briefly describing each of her five periods, such as the Tools works, the Wave paintings, and the written conceptual pieces, which came quickly over her ten-year career. Humphries said that museums often misrepresent an artist’s diverse body of work with an authoritative, streamlined version, and most artists she knows do a bunch of stuff. Well, duh.

    Why did Lozano paint, Nickas asked, when she could have done anything? “Is painting acquainted with winning [more] than any other practice?” he wondered. Looking around the room, Humphries saw something unique in the paintings that viewers, both then and now, can’t come to grips with. “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” she said. “They do something else.” Lozano wasn’t reliant on anyone, Koether conjectured. “She would want to paint because people told her not to.” Koether then launched into a meandering filibuster that barely made sense, followed by a similar monologue from Humphries. The group was at its weakest when discussing the physical qualities of the paintings in the room, yet Nickas didn’t bring the conversation back to earth.

    Jutta Koether (right) talks about rough sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In the late 1960s, Nickas claimed that Lozano interacted with sculptors and artists who worked with language—Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Graham—rather than with painters. He also positioned Lozano’s work (e.g., depictions of hammers and drills and of shapes with volumetric forms) as masculine—a gendered view that Humphries challenged. “I never knew what that meant,” she firmly stated, noting that nobody calls out men who paint pictures of women for being feminine. Nickas fumbled with a definition of masculinity as portraying toughness and violence and mentioned that Lozano, in her art and writing, had a man’s voice. Koether explained this observation as a symptom of the time. “It’s like really rough sex … all the time,” she said. “It’s brutal—it’s very hard and super desperate.” While Humphries recognizes the “unbelievable force” in Lozano’s work, the artist is also cheeky and, formally speaking, was addressing mainstream issues in American painting at the time, such as mass and scale, in spite of the radical qualities that people usually ascribe to her work.

    Nickas was refreshingly skeptical about the performative aspect of contemporary art—he said “there’s not a lot behind it”—but Lozano is the real deal, especially regarding her Wave series of paintings, one of which was completed after fifty-two consecutive hours of work. The real topic of discussion, however, was Lozano’s social relationship to the New York art world and how she integrated social performance into her studio work, which Humphries attributed to the emancipatory politics of the 1960s. Representative works are Dialogue Piece (1969), for which Lozano invited people to her SoHo loft for a conversation whose content would remain private, and Drop Out Piece, for which Lozano withdrew from the art world and eventually left New York, later settling in Dallas to live the life of an acid casualty.

    Most contentious was Lozano’s Boycott Piece (1971), which comprised her refusal to speak to women for two months—though apparently the work continued until her death. Tonight’s speakers felt uncomfortable with this resolution, which the curator Helen Molesworth has called “consummately pathological” and “incredibly disturbing,” though they understood how Lozano was critiquing institutional sexism, both within and outside the art world.3 Koether identified the problem of Lozano trying to be more revolutionary than the revolution, and Boycott Piece has affected the way she understands the artist’s entire oeuvre.

    Though Koether finds Lozano’s position to be “nonreconcilable,” I can’t help but think of other controversial artists who push moral and aesthetic boundaries, such as Santiago Sierra and Adel Abdessemed. Though their strategies and results are questionable, it’s generally a good thing to see artists like them working with contentious subject matter and pushing liberal attitudes. After all, it was Lozano who wrote “‘SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS.’”4 Nickas more or less accepted that testing limits pushed Lozano beyond painting, and beyond the art world. Humphries said we will never know her reasons for dropping out—especially since, Nickas added, “it’s a world people want to drop into.” Koether postulated that acting crazy and aggressive might be the only way out of an enduring problem of sexism.

    “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” Jacqueline Humphries said of the paintings on view (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Nickas detected rage, not anger, in Lozano’s work, based on her written statement: “I am not angry at anyone or anything but I feel rage.”5 Koether agreed, seeing rage in the tight control of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around her. Moments later, during the audience Q&A, an attendee refuted that idea. “One person’s rage is another person’s tranquility,” he shrugged, adding that, when considering the brownish-orange color in one painting, “rust isn’t rage—it’s slow deoxidization.” Koether was unmoved: “I still think they’re very angsty.” Humphries called the paintings austere, not minimal, and Nickas compared Lozano to contemporaneous Californian artists, calling her “the Light and Space artist of darkness.” Humphries concurred, stating that the works on view contain neither air nor figure-ground. Lozano had a sensibility, she continued, not a style; Humphries believes Lozano made works that she wanted to see for herself. Nickas said that one of Lozano’s goals was to “picture time and space, expanding and contracting. It’s improbable, but you just have to accept it.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101.

    2 The Lee Lozano revival can be traced back to an exhibition of her work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998.

    3 Helen Molesworth, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 65, 70.

    4 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, April 24, 1969, in Lee Lozano: Notebooks, 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2009), unpaginated.

    5 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, Book #5, December 29, 1969, in Barry Rosen and Jaap van Liere, Lee Lozano: Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Hauser and Wirth, 2006), unpaginated.

    Watch

  • Next Question: Is Art Dead?

    Is Painting Dead?
    Friday, May 16, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This early painting panel was one of the best—real feeling on urgent issues expressed to an audience of peers. Today we may smile complacently at the title question. At the time, art’s higher authorities had declared painting dead and buried. Perhaps it was only some sense of a coming rebirth that gave painters courage to ask the question out loud. But when Nicholas Krushenick says “I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS!” we hear the voice of the votary since the Renaissance. (Will video artists some day say how they love clicking in that cassette and watching the little light come on?)

    One other note: artists reading this report in 1975 would have known that “The Article” referred to “The Painted Word,” an article by Tom Wolfe which had recently missed the point about painting in Harper’s Magazine. Shortly thereafter it was published as a book, achieving wide notoriety, if not acclaim. Today I had to think a moment to identify it.

    Moderator: Burt Chernow
    Panelists: Nicholas Krushenick, Stuart Shedletsky, Shirlann Smith, and Robert Wiegand

    Judy Seigel, “Is Painting Dead? Artists Talk on Art May 16,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3

    The subtitle of this panel, “Is Jerking Off Getting Out of Hand?,” could mean anything from, “Once you’ve seen one jerk-off in an art context, you’ve seen them all, so a painting renaissance is inevitable,” to “Painting itself is the equivalent of jerking off, so why paint?” In either case, if you’ve been waiting tensely for the verdict, the panelists agreed that painting is not now, nor is it likely in the foreseeable future to be dead. In fact, one assumes that the four painters convened exactly in order to reach that conclusion. It did, however, take them three-quarters of the evening to start to explain why.

    For openers, the now-infamous query was projected onto the screen: “Artforum wishes to ask you as a painter what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. [T]hose understood to be making the ‘inevitable next step’ now work with any material but paint….” A show of panelists’ slides with commentary by each was followed by talk of The Letter, The Article, The Critics, Other Painters, and The Situation.

    The Letter

    Shirlann Smith: It’s a love letter from Artforum—the kind you’d write at the end of a long marriage. But the language is so literary—intellectual, not words I’ve ever heard artists use.1

    Robert Wiegand: Is Artforum dead? They never had to fish before. They came on Bang! Bang!

    The Article

    Stuart Shedletsky: It’s a tantrum by an essentially literary person who doesn’t “get” art.

    Wiegand: There was a bit of truth on some levels and that made everybody a little uncomfortable, but he stretched it.

    Nicholas Krushenick: I have never been to a party at Ethel Scull’s.

    The Critics

    Krushenick: I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of honesty from Harold Rosenberg. He admitted the critic is finished. Greenberg [apologetic tone] has been a constant champion of die abstract idea in art.

    Shedletsky: The critics can tie up Brice Marden with Fragonard.

    Wiegand: Rosenberg said, “It may be time to abandon, not art, but art criticism, which has become little more than a shopping list.”

    Other Painters

    Burt Chernow: Who are the painters today that keep painting alive?

    Krushenick: Jasper Johns hasn’t given us a new image in years. (My wife will kill me for saying this.) Stella is still about making art, and I respect him tremendously for that, whether it succeeds or fails. A lot of people just give us bricks and bunny rabbits. Noland is still making a fantastic try at making art…. Richard Lindner, Alfred Jensen, Yrisarry, Jo Baer.

    Wiegand: D’Arcangelo, Chuck Hinman.

    Audience: I don’t hear any names of new people keeping painting alive.

    Wiegand: There doesn’t have to be something new every week.

    Shedletsky: Heroes don’t come along as often as Artforum would have us think. They change geniuses every week.

    Krushenick: Work today is all intellect, no passion. Anyway, all artists are not created equal.

    The Situation

    Chernow: Will new technology replace painting, or coexist?

    Wiegand: No one got excited when Rauschenberg got involved with dance. No one’s going to get excited when I get into video.

    Smith: There’s a tendency to want to perform, to go where the action is.

    Shedletsky: I sit in front of all those tapes and get terribly bored. I want to go home and watch television.

    Audience: If painting is dead, it’s dead in the colleges.

    Krushenick: On 50 percent of any given faculty you have this meatball who makes a (lousy) watercolor every two years. And he has an enormous amount of power.

    Audience Q&A

    Audience A: Is art dead?

    Audience B: That’s next week!

    Audience C: Art has never been more alive. It’s traveling in all directions. They’re waiting for that one direction, but we don’t have to offer it to them.

    Shedletsky: The impulse to make art is a very primal, basic human impulse, since the caves at Lascaux.

    Audience: Is the idea all important? Are the hands that produce the idea interchangeable, or does art lose in translation?

    Krushenick: They had assistants four hundred years ago. BUT I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS! I even stretch and prime the canvases myself. There’s a delicious, beautiful factor to running a brush across a surface. I don’t want to relegate that to someone else. If I did, I’d be standing around all day watching the schmuck.

    Shedletsky: Works of a certain type, for example, Judd’s, don’t suffer from fabrication. But you couldn’t imagine getting someone else to do a de Kooning.

    About here a bona fide screaming match between Krushenick and a fellow in the audience who seemed not to care for abstract art attested to the success of the panel and the vigor of feelings about art.

    Krushenick and Fellow: (Incoherent)

    Krushenick: Fuck you.

    Fellow: Your art lacks passion. It’s an intellectual color exercise. It’s like wrapping paper.

    Chernow [calmly]: Do any of you ever sneak off into a room a do a little still life, or something?

    Krushenick: Figurative painting outsells abstract painting six to one. I turned from it and never looked back. I want to die with my finger on the pulse of the twenty-first century. In a strange way it’s the most delectable life style I’ve ever encountered. If you never get any success in your life, you could say on your deathbed, “I’ve had a wonderful life!”

    Conclusion

    Artforum can’t be dead because artists hate it so much and read it so much and painting can’t be dead because it gets reborn about every fifteen minutes.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 The full text of the letter appears below. The responses from artists were published in the September 1975 issue.

    Artforum wishes to ask you, as a painter, what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. It appears that painting has ceased to be the dominant artistic medium at the moment. And we assume that the debates between its two major ideologies, abstract and representational, have outlived their usefulness to the current scene. Our thinking here refers to the fact that neither side has triumphed over the other in a historical verdict to which both had appealed. On the contrary, those understood to be making “the next inevitable step” now work with any material but paint.

    1. How do you think this has affected the need to do painting today and the general morale in the field?

    2. What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?

    3. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why?

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Next Question: Is Art Dead?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 13–15. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

    Gendered Expectations: The Representation of “Girls” in Contemporary Art
    Sunday, June 7, 2015
    NEWD Art Show, Brooklyn, NY

    Cindy Hinant, Celebrity Grid (The Rich Kid), 2013, ink, Mylar, and magazine page, 11 x 8½ in (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    The artists Alex McQuilkin and Cindy Hinant and Kathy Battista, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and senior research fellow at the University of Southampton in England, met at the NEWD Art Show, a small art fair that coincided with Bushwick Open Studios, to discuss art that deals with “girly” aesthetics. The panel’s teaser offered this: “From makeup to celebrity culture, these artists mine “girly” motifs—often ignored or dismissed as flippant and unserious by the art world—to explore issues of gendered expectations and pressures women face through representations of women in the media and culture at large.”

    But what exactly is a “girly” aesthetic, anyway? On a casual level, Hello Kitty and Holly Hobbie come to my mind, as do princesses, pink dresses, tea parties, heart-shaped cupcakes, fruity cocktails, playing dress-up—and actually dressing up. I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Yet for a panel that implicitly set out to challenge stereotypes, the speakers didn’t try hard to debunk this aesthetic ghetto or even define it. It would have been enlightening if they had pointed out when images of stereotypes are innocuous or dangerous, but they didn’t I suppose we can use Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s helpful rule of thumb of “I know it when I see it,” but such an approach can reinforce faulty preconceptions. Instead, McQuilkin and Hinant gave brief presentations of their work, followed by a discussion about feminism with Battista.

    Alex McQuilkin, Sweet Sixteen, 2003, C-print, 20 x 24 in. (artwork © Alex McQuilkin)

    McQuilkin made her video Fucked (2000), a three-minute clip of the face of a young woman—the artist herself at age 19—putting on makeup while (apparently) being fucked from behind. The work caused a sensation when the gallery Modern Culture showed it at the 2002 Armory Show. (I was among those who saw it there.). Explaining the piece, the artist said that Fucked demonstrates how physical appearances alienate a person from the world, and how an image can be greater than the experience. Ironically, she always gets asked if the sex in Fucked is real or simulated, a fact that for me is ancillary, and not integral, to the work’s meaning. That didn’t matter when Fucked was pulled from an exhibition in the Netherlands for being child pornography. The edition sold well at the Armory, McQuilkin said, and one creepy collector even permanently installed it in his bedroom. She knows this because he showed her the room.

    Alex McQuilkin describes the motivations behind her work (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    More recently McQuilkin has been drawing the likenesses of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve in their prime, but with blank spaces where their faces should be. “They’re made for us to project ourselves onto,” she explained. McQuilkin noted that Bardot felt that she had scored her first serious role as an actor when cast for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, but the American trailers pimped her babeness instead her professional chops, offering sexy shots of Bardot that were not in the film.

    Another recent work is Magic Moments (Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl) (2013), a video comprising appropriated clips of young, white fashion models from television commercials and online advertisements, moving in slow motion to the soundtrack a woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”1 We are comfortable looking at the women, McQuilkin observed, adding that she gets the “feeling of ‘I want what they have.’” It’s the classic male gaze. Combining ubiquitous images with national pride and naturalizing both, Magic Moments is not dissimilar from what you might see on a billboard-sized television screen in Times Square or in a display in a retail clothing store—delightfully blurring the division between art and commerce. The lack of a clear position—critical or complicit—seems to be McQuilkin’s point.

    Hinant admitted having a love/hate relationship with popular culture and cosmetics. For The Sephora Project (2012), she visited branches of the cosmetic-and-perfume chain store across Manhattan, filling out comment cards that detailed her interactions with staff and other shoppers. Her exhibition Aesthetic Relations at Joe Sheftel Gallery in 2012 addressed the right of publicity and agency: celebrity sex tapes, up-skirt photography, and revenge porn—what Hinant succinctly called the “aesthetics of violation.” Another body of her work reacts to paparazzi photos and Instagram feeds that show celebrities without makeup, with the former genre mocking their looks and the latter resisting the beauty myth. She explained that “‘without make-up’ is code language for ugly,” though it seems as if the famous are trying to dispel that thought. Inherent in Hinant’s conception of celebrity is a process of identification with, and rejection of, both yourself and the object of your fascination. Whether or not this experience is just part of growing up, she didn’t say.

    Hinant screened an early work, The Kissy Girls (2006), a kind of home movie that interviews her 11-year-old sister, who admitted to kissing at least ten boys. The video also showed Hinant’s sister—who perhaps exemplifies the sexually precocious “knowing child”—teaching the artist how to dance to a Missy Elliot song. In another series of works, Hinant overlaid grids of ink and Mylar on pages taken from trashy magazines like Us Weekly, pages that show photographs of the former child stars Tori Spelling, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Amanda Bynes, as well as the those of television personalities Kourtney and Khloé Kardashian. “The grid is a utopic space,” Hinant said mysteriously, “where one line does not have more value than another.”

    Cindy Hinant, one image from Women, 2011, C-print, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    As moderator, Battista tried to create a conversation around art, gender, and fashion, and on the body as a site for consumption. In the mass media “we see images not of girls,” she said, “but of capitalism.” McQuilkin’s students at New York University believe that we live in a postgender time, but she still finds images as problems, which she attributed to being older and wiser. Hinant pointed out sexism in measures of artistic success: “If Carolee Schneemann wasn’t a babe, she wouldn’t have made it in the art world.” (In 2011 Hinant made C-prints of cropped appropriated images of the bare breasts of artists such as Schneemann, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke.) Battista argued that male artists Richard Phillips and Richard Prince make work about female celebrity and noted that the singer and producer Pharrell Williams organized an exhibition called G I R L for Galerie Perrotin in Paris, on view when his “date rapey” song with Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines,” became a smash hit. Though Williams publicly calls himself a feminist, Battista said, he practices “strategic misogyny” elsewhere.

    Kathy Battista (left) moderates the conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, someone said that, when understanding feminism, some take a strictly economic view, which demonizes mothers who stay at home to raise children. An audience member made a comment that I interpreted as “It’s 2015—what the fuck.” Battista said that having children takes years off the lives of artists and academics, based on anecdotal, personal experience. Both artists recoiled at the term “girl” when asked to participate on today’s panel, but in 2006 interview McQuilkin was much more forthcoming with her attraction to adolescence—but she also said that she has moved on.2 The only time the “girl versus women” debate surfaced what when McQuilkin said she had no problem referring to a male-dominated art world as a “boy’s club” because the power dynamic is different.

    If I were moderating the discussion, I’d ask the artists about authenticity, imaginative play, and feelings of immortality, among other topics. For instance, can older men to portray girls in contemporary art without being total creeps? Are depictions of girls by women the only acceptable kind of representation? Growing up, McQuilkin lived in a bedroom “curated “by her mother, like a dollhouse. By contrast, her brother taped Metallica posters to his walls. “The maid didn’t go in there,” she said, without irony. How are gender roles inscribed across race, class, and nations?

    Adolescent studies in disciplines like psychology and sociology are rich, and so is literature—Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) are touchstones. But the subject has been little examined in visual art apart from a collection of essays in Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011), edited by Catharine Grant and Lori Waxman. The book argues that the art world’s fascination in girls peaked in 1999, the year in which a photography exhibition called Another Girl, Another Planet took place at the gallery Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren, yet interest in young women in popular culture—from songs by the Beatles (“I Saw Her Standing There”) and the Rolling Stones (“Stray Cat Blues”) to the Larry Clark film Kids (1996) to Lena Dunham’s television show Girls—is decades old and continues to grow.

    Anna Gaskell, untitled #26 (override), from the series wonder, 1997, chromogenic print, 19 3/8 x 23 ⅝ in (artwork © Anna Gaskell)

    I would argue that the same is true in the art world, but the panelists neglected to discuss other artists making work about girls, such as Anna Gaskell (who once assisted Sally Mann), Laurel Nakadate, Collier Schorr, and Sue de Beer (for whom McQuilkin has worked). There’s something repulsive in how Erin M. Riley cranks out tapestries of scantily clad teen girls taking selfies in the bathroom mirror, but images of them are hugely popular on Instagram. What about historical figures such as Balthus and Edgar Degas, or contemporaries like Ryan McGinley and Richard Kern? As an artist who specializes in nude pictures of young (but legal) women, Kern practically lives Matthew McConaughey’s famous line in the movie Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” Should why is the representation of “girls” in contemporary art a subject stuck in perennial adolescence?

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 McQuilkin cited the book Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999), written by a collective of French artists and activists under the name Tiqqun, as an influence.

    2 Ana Finel Honigman, “Overwhelming Life,” Artnet Magazine, March 29, 2006.

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum,     Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

    Watch

  • 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.

  • Hot or Not

    “Aesthetics” of “Female” “Attractiveness”
    Friday, May 15, 2015
    Frieze Talks
    Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    “I sense some confusion,” observed Casey Jane Ellison, an artist and comedian who hosted a panel called “‘Aesthetics’ of ‘Female’ ‘Attractiveness’” at Frieze New York. Like a daytime talk-show host, she began with a monologue of observational humor—which included a fear of going bald and the dating scene for bulimics—but the audience didn’t laugh. Full of disconnects in timing, diction, and subject matter, her introduction desperately need an applause sign, if not a laugh track. Ellison placed the blame on us: “Art audiences are just kind of like—don’t touch me—you know what I mean?” No, I don’t. “It’s like, get involved,” she implored. “This is about all of us.” Ellison’s awkward monologue made me appreciate the jump-cut edits in her online television programs such as What the F*shion? The non sequiturs were making things slightly better: “Does the truth set you free? No, it will set you on fire.” And, closer to the panel’s topic: “We live in a postmodern world. Are we posthot?”

    Casey Jane Ellison speaks

    Ellison introduced the speakers one by one, as they took the stage: the artist, activist, and filmmaker Leilah Weinraub; the writer and activist Grace Dunham; the activist and writer Reina Gossett; and the blogger Karley Sciortino. The host’s first questions to them were “Are you feeling safe?” and “How fat do you feel today?” The speakers answered stiffly, probably feeling like the audience did during the monologue. Her next question was more promising: “What was the first object or product you bought that propagated your own objectivity?” Ellison got the conversation rolling with her own experience. As a little girl, she faced with a snack choice at a 7-11 convenience store, choosing a protein bar over candy—even though the caloric intake was (presumably) the same. Perhaps misunderstanding Ellison’s question, Gossett said that paying for school defined her objecthood, and Weinraub came to a similar realization when she “became a vaccinated citizen of the world.” (Her hippie parents apparently didn’t get her shots for mumps and scarlet fever.) Understanding the question way too literally, Dunham said she was born an object and argued that culture objectifies us. Fortunately, Sullivan played the game, describing how she intentionally dressed provocatively in her late teens to early twenties to make herself a sex object, for validation.

    The panelists’ responses set the tone for the next hour, with the four guests dodging Ellison’s seemingly random inquiries. “Are you earning enough, as a woman,” Ellison asked. Dunham replied, “Nobody actually asked me my gender identity,” and the host responded, “Can I explain? It doesn’t matter—do you know what I mean?” Weinraub was thankful for her access to resources; Sciortino mentioned something about making money peeing on submissive men. For a while Gossett tepidly criticized economic sexism and enforced gender binaries. It didn’t seem like the conversation was going anywhere until Sciortino cited studies revealing that physically attractive people—the hyper feminine and masculine kind—are perceived by many as better at doing their taxes, more honest, and able to get better rates on loans.

    Ellison segued into a segment called “Do You Trust This Face?” for which the panelists responded to images projected on the screen behind them. Weinraub compared a photograph of young Hillary Clinton with the female robot from the film Ex Machina and and riffed on artificial intelligence. While she looks forward to machine realizing a mind of its own, Ellison was skeptical and offered ways to fight malevolent machines: “You just unplug the thing,” she interjected. “They’re battery powered … then you don’t charge the battery.” Ellison then asked the panelists to rate their hotness on a scale of one to ten. While Dunham unsurprisingly resisted the notion of “setting yourself up for a system you don’t want to be in,” Gossett admitted to wanting to be told she looks good. Sciortino considered herself an 8.5 in Manhattan’s East Village, which she said translates to 9.5 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Dunham eventually gave herself a zero—a number lower than the scale’s minimum—because she wanted to choose an extreme. Despite her nonparticipation, she brought up an excellent point: many individuals are less than desirable and invisible in culture, such as the disabled, people with AIDS, prisoners, homeless people, transgendered people, and other gender-nonconforming people. Weinraub likewise disagreed with Ellison’s game and awarded herself a zero; she got a high five from Dunham.

    Casey Jane Ellison asks the important questions

    The blonde, busty, and leggy Sciortino observed that appealing bodies are changing. During her high school years in the early 2000s, the “super pro ano” body type of Calista Flockhart, the Olsen twins, and Mischa Barton reigned. “You could see everyone’s backbone on the red carpet,” Sciortino commented. In pornography, though, she has observed a trend toward natural, flat-chested, confident women actors, identifying Sasha Grey, Stoya, and Tori Black as owners of slim bodies that aren’t blonde and busty, which contrasts the norm. Watching porn, Sciortino admitted, has helped her with own body image. “Things bounced around. I was like, that’s hot.” For Sciortino, the newest wave of feminism is defined by individuality. Since there are no more magazines to emulate, she said, women should be the best “you” they can be. Instead of appearing masculine intentionally, as feminists did in the 1970s, women are free to be whatever they want, including wearing “the sluttiest microdress you can find.” Sciortino joked: “No matter what we look like, someone wants to watch you have sex.”

    Agreeing with Sciortino’s views on porn, Gossett identified a “trans moment” in which fashion models appear in editorial spreads, though she noted that murder rates for this population are still high. Sciortino noted members of this group are sacrificing their privacy and safety to become accepted into mainstream culture, not unlike how gay men in the 1950s came out and were harassed, a move that slowly led toward their acceptance into straight society decades later. Dunham warned against outsiders assimilating into a culture that had previously rejected you. It was curious that no one mentioned the recent announcement of the former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner revealing himself as a woman, Caitlyn.

    “What is a whore?” Ellison inquired, but no one responded, so she moved onto a game called “There’s Suffering in That,” for which the panelists briefly responded to seemingly random photographs pulled from the internet. Everyone missed the crass American patriotism in an image of a woman’s hand, wrapped in red, white, and blue beads and holding up her index finger in a “We’re Number 1” way. Weinraub said the image made her happy, but I couldn’t help but picture a crowd of drunken bros at a sports bar chanting USA! USA! USA! The panelists somehow found suffering in two photos of cute dogs wearing sweaters. Weinraub experienced numbness and deep pain in a photo of a cake pop, but a seaside resort photo appealed to her “maximalist nature.”

    A family with fame and success: Carroll Dunham, Grace Dunham, Lena Dunham, and Laurie Simmons

    With time running out, Dunham read a short text that she and Gossett wrote together (read the transcript at Slutever). Being hot means having value, the statement began, which can be marketed, assessed, and branded. It can also reflect power and capital. Dunham acknowledged her privileges and advantages: being white, being relatively famous (her parents are artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and her sister is Lena Dunham), possessing a vagina but having sex with women, and having power through association, via her relationship with black trans man. This relationship to power, fame, identity, and marginal authority, she said, makes her critique legitimate. “Those are the reasons why I’m hot,” she concluded. “That’s how hot I am.” The way Dunham reconciled contradictions of value and power without irony or haughtiness impressed me. But she dug deeper, saying that everyone longs for feelings of being known or being loved—which doesn’t necessarily mean being hot physically or aesthetically—and that compliments from the dominant system can make us feel good. An important distinction should be made, Dunham continued, between the self and the evaluated market value of the self. Further, fame can isolate people and push intimacy away, and a longing for fame can be harmful.

    Dunham said that people complain about art fairs and culture—“This fucking art fair,” she hilariously quipped—but at least at Frieze New York the financial aspects, the “economies of evaluation” in her words, are laid bare. (She declared that she was paid $500 for her panel appearance.) Art fairs, Dunham continued, allow people to fill the holes in their hearts, to reproduce the culture of evaluation, for better or worse. What is it about dealing art that makes you feel better or worth something,” she asked art dealers rhetorically. And of others: “Why am I valuable? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be loved?” After hearing this, I felt that we didn’t need Ellison’s faux talk show. Dunham could have read this piece onstage and left it at that.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    Read

    Zoë Lescaze, “On Porn and Poodles: Casey Jane Ellison, Grace Dunham and Company Talk Sex, Gender, Art,” ARTnews, May 18, 2015.

    Listen

    http://friezeprojectsny.org/talks/aesthetics-of-female-attractiveness/

  • Interview in Art Practical

    In the newest issue of the online journal Art Practical, the artist, critic, and publisher Dushko Petrovich conducts an email interview with Christopher Howard about his experiences publishing In Terms Of. The interview joins other essays and interviews that address the theme of “Free Speech in the Art World.”

  • Pawns in the Game

    Sarah Thornton in Conversation with David Kratz and Peter Drake
    Thursday, May 14, 2015
    Spring Lecture Series
    New York Academy of Art, New York

    The cover of Sarah Thornton’s book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014)

    The journalist and sociologist Sarah Thornton was interviewed about her latest book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), at the New York Academy of Art, where she was also the school’s commencement speaker for this year’s graduating class of MFA students. The book chronicles the upper crust of the contemporary art world—the kind you read about in the Scene and Herd section of Artforum.com—from 2009 to 2013. Benchmarks in conversations and studio visits with the dozens of artists that Thornton interviewed were Jeff Koons, whom she considers to be conservative, and the high-risk Damien Hirst. Other recurring characters include Maurizio Cattelan, Ai Weiwei, and Andrea Fraser, as well as the artist couple Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons and their daughters, Grace and Lena Dunham. The people profiled in 33 Artists in 3 Acts, mostly midcareer professionals who were born in the fifties and sixties, are “all the real deal,” she said, with no authenticity and credibility issues. (She would need to write a separate book for emerging artists.)

    Wearing white jeans, a black blazer, and athletic sandals, Thornton was interviewed by David Kratz, a silver-fox painter and the president of the New York Academy of Art—a small graduate school that specializes in representational and figurative work—and the painter Peter Drake, who is also dean of academic affairs. Kratz inquired about the image of Gabriel Orozco’s chessboard work, Horses Running Endlessly (1995), which illustrates the book’s introduction. “Is that the art world?” he asked. Calling Orozco a “strategic player” (but not explaining what that meant), Thornton disclosed that the art world isn’t as egalitarian as a chessboard occupied only by knights—the punch line of Orozco’s work.1 Instead, the art world has “kings, queens, and pawns,” though I’d argue that the art world has more sacrificial pieces than power players in its own chess game. Success acculturates artists into the art world, she said, and they must figure out their position. Thornton believes that the art market should be part of an art school’s curriculum and warned against early career burnout from success—a future problem that I imagine many wish they would have.

    Gabriel Orozco, Horses Running Endlessly, 1995, wood, 3 3/8 x 34 3/8 x 34 3/8 in. (artwork © Gabriel Orozco; photograph probably by Yugen)

    Kratz asked about artists whose “crazy” works for them, and whose “crazy” doesn’t. In the former category Thornton placed Grayson Perry, famous in Great Britain but not so much here, who is a happily married transvestite potter with a daughter in college. The aging Young British Artists grumbled, she continued, at his winning the 2003 Turner Prize not because he dresses in women’s clothing but because he produces ceramics. Regarding bad crazy, Thornton said that Yayoi Kusama is the only artist whose craziness is acceptable. Yet if Kusama (b. 1929) were in her thirties today, Thornton said, nobody would accept her kooky behavior.

    High art and functional objects apparently have strong class divisions, at least in England. As a writer, Thornton identifies with craft, though it’s not wrong if an artist employs the labor of others to complete a project. She identified Christian Marclay’s breakout video The Clock (2010) as the example: Marclay had teams watching films but edited much of the footage himself. What is the different between art and craft, Thornton was asked. The concept makes it art, she replied, though the lines can blur. It is possible, Thornton continued, for artists to become craftsmen of their own work, if it becomes slickly produced. Perry, she said, claimed to be able to teach others to make his work, but they cannot make the art he is about to make.

    Drake directed attention back to 33 Artists in 3 Acts, asking Thornton if artists have their own view of success. She recounted how one thread in the book follows Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman, two photographers from the Pictures Generation, whom Thornton called “artist soul mates.” While Sherman’s career has certainly been larger than Simmons’s, the disparity hasn’t affected either their creativity or their friendship.

    Damien Hirst, The Crow, 2009, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 in. each (photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates; artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.)

    Thornton reiterated the importance of Hirst in her narrative, which makes sense for a journalist covering the economic side of the art world. Her profile on the bad-boy artist in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2009 was positive. She changed her tune in a 2010 article in the Economist, for which she researched Hirst’s direct-to-auction sale of his work in fall 2008. Bypassing the traditional dealer/gallery system and heading straight to the deep-pocketed collectors was a move that netted him $200 million. Thornton’s personal access to Hirst ended there, at least until 2013, when she cornered him in Qatar during a press preview for his retrospective Relics. “I don’t know how he feels about the book,” Thornton remarked, “and I don’t know if he reads.” The snark didn’t stop there. Thornton finds Hirst’s recent paintings to be “diabolical,” especially considering that he gave up painting at age 16 and took it up again in his forties. His spot paintings, which were shown in every Gagosian Gallery worldwide in 2012, are the “diffusion line of brand name.” “He lost faith in his practice,” she added, calling him an “interesting sculptor and an opportunistic painter.”

    An audience member asked if any of the artists she wrote about have overcome adversity. They all have, she said, emphasizing that the Chinese Ai and the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn have been challenged on political and governmental levels. Another person inquired about the art-world game, which Thornton described as soccer, because it’s always changing. She advised the audience member to “choose your game, be good at it, and make others play it.” She also advised artists to understand social dynamics and etiquette and to not get duped. Some well-established dealers are notorious for not paying artists, Thornton revealed, and advocated banning them from art fairs.

    Someone asked if it is true that the most successful artists have great self-doubt. Yes, she replied, and artists such as Cattelan embrace it. She also implied that Hirst is insecure. The final question from the audience addressed artists and suffering. Thornton’s unexpected, thoughtful response concerned motherhood: artists such as Sherman and Marina Abramović sacrificed having children for their careers. Yet having children, Thornton appended, is not the credibility killer for women artists under 55 that it once was.

    I sensed that Thornton presented herself as outsider to the art world. In her writing, she said, she watches the dynamics of opinion rather than passes judgment. I also sensed disconnect between her and the audience, which routinely failed to respond—with laughter or applause—to her stories at the right moments. A few times Thornton was the only person laughing at her remarks. The setting at the New York Academy of Art was informal, and the attendees seemed to be made up of young artists—the pawns of the art world. This made Thornton’s jet-setting glamor something of a mismatch, but not glaringly so. I was left to wonder what she offered to the school’s graduate students.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 More positively, Thornton interpreted Horses Running Endlessly as a “dance floor in a multicultural club.”

  • 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.