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  • Personal Branding with Hank Willis Thomas

    Hank Willis Thomas
    Thursday, April 16, 2015
    Art + Design Agency Series
    Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Auditorium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Poster for a lecture by Hank Willis Thomas at the Krannert Art Museum

    “Would you say your biggest source of inspiration is other people?” an audience member asked Hank Willis Thomas, who had just finished giving a presentation on his work in the basement auditorium of the Krannert Art Museum. The artist replied with a smile: “I’d say.” Indeed, early on Thomas stated that art is about people and connections, and he even began his talk by quizzing the audience, asking who was a student, a faculty member, a first-time visitor. He also asked who in the room had tattoos—there were several students with visibly more than a few—and playfully harassed a few latecomers. Thomas also joshed a reticent audience member halfway through the lecture: “This talk can’t go if you don’t talk.”

    If people were the primary inspiration for Thomas’s work, personal biography and American cultural history came a close second and third. He spoke of his mother, Deborah Willis, an accomplished professor, photographer, curator, author, and a specialist in African American photography. “I used to be Deb’s son,” he joked. “Now she’s Hank’s mom.” Thomas said that Willis’s investigation into black photographers, who had been making pictures professionally by the mid-nineteenth century, rewrote his notion of American history, along with the recognition of blacks working in chemistry, physics, and other respected fields. Thomas ran through several images from the twentieth century, from a distinguished photograph of Bert Williams, a Bahamian-born vaudeville star who was “paid to perform blackness” in blackface, to ones of Mike Tyson, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.

    Thomas showed a range of his own projects, series, and singular images, comprising mostly photography and sculpture. He played the first couple minutes of a video called A person is more important than anything else… (2014), commissioned by New York Live Arts for a citywide program on James Baldwin. The work features an audio recording of the black author speaking on the artist’s struggle with integrity; Thomas supplied the visuals. After listening intently to Baldwin’s first few sentences, I began focusing on the moving images, unconsciously tuning out the words. When quizzed by Thomas to recall the content of the piece, Eli Craven, an MFA student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said he “got lost in the visual.” I wasn’t alone.

    Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003, lambda photograph, 40 x 30 in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    As an artist, Thomas emerged in the mid-2000s with a provocative series of work, called Branded, which showed Nike’s swoosh logo emblazoned not on clothing but seared directly onto athletic black male bodies. The artist understands corporate logos as hieroglyphs: “You don’t have to use the language to understand the ad.” He also connects them to both slave ownership and consumerism. “Bodies are treated differently at different times,” Thomas said.

    Thomas’s photographs read quickly, like advertisements. One work in particular, Priceless #1 (2004), parodies the phrasing of MasterCard’s “priceless” campaign but with deadly serious intentions. The photograph depicts the artist’s own family at the funeral of his cousin, who was shot to death outside a Philadelphia nightclub. (Thomas was a witness.) The text read: “3-piece suit: $250; new socks: $2; gold chain: $400; 9mm pistol: $79 (changed here to $80); bullet: $.60.” The punch line of “Picking the perfect casket for your son: priceless” highlights the “affordability guilt” of burials. Do higher price points for caskets, Thomas wanted to know, reflect how much you love a loved one? In 2005 he said, “My aunt is not a rich woman…. I don’t know how much she paid for the casket she picked, but I guarantee you it went on a credit card.’”1

    Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1, 2004, lambda photograph, 32 x 40 in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    The interest of Priceless #1 goes beyond that. The question always asked of Thomas is “How did you family feel about the image, in mourning?” The artist asked himself that, too, as well as questions such as: Why show it? Do I take the logo off? Is this an exploitative situation? “That’s where the question of integrity comes back,” said Thomas, referring back to the Baldwin speech.

    Some viewers find the work offensive to blacks, as one white woman did during the local Fox news story when, in 2007, the photograph was enlarged to billboard size and hung on the exterior wall of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. The museum faces the jail, so the local crowd read this fact into the image. Though museum curators spoke for him on television, Thomas had to defend the work in the Birmingham newspaper—and then realized how things get dumbed down in public discourse. Was it insensitive to use his grieving family as the subject of his art? “I think I made the right decision,” Thomas said, referencing the same white woman interviewed on television, who understood the artist’s decision to either get revenge or make art.

    Thomas then discussed a Reebok advertising campaign from 2005, called “I Am What I Am. Lacking any reference to sports gear, the image for one ad portrays 50 Cent as survivor, rapper, entrepreneur, actor, and criminal—a white man’s idea of black values that in turn reflect black values. You know the image is an ad, Thomas said, because of the logo. The campaign also featured the tennis player Andy Roddick as a white guy who is a champion but feels guilty, the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming with a slew of Asian visual references (rising sun, the year of the monkey), and the actor Lucy Liu as a docile female. “They’re playing off of some crazy stereotypes,” Thomas remarked, adding that the ads have nothing to do with the products Reebok are trying to sell. “We’re doing the work to make the ads work,” he said as he involved the audience once again in a discussion of the images.

    Hank Willis Thomas, The Mandingo of Sandwiches, 1977/2007, lambda photograph, 36 x 34¾ in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    In a work from a series called Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008 (ca. 2006–10), an advertisement with the boxer Joe Frazier isn’t promoting Aunt Jemima syrup but rather margarine—that’s why he is wearing a Blue Bonnet. The Manwich ad, he said, couldn’t have existed ten years earlier, because working-class white and black men wouldn’t be sitting at the same lunch counter—and certainly the white fellow wouldn’t be craving the “dark meat” of the other. A Chevrolet ad depicts the long history of blacks but curiously erases their status as slaves. (Thomas discusses these same examples in his other artist’s lectures, as a quick perusal of YouTube tells us.) The Unbranded series displaces meaning, the artist said, by showing an “undressed image.” His removal and erasure of text and commercial logos reveals the not-so-hidden meaning of the images. It’s a classic John Berger analysis. Thomas strives to present universal ideas through abstraction of historical photographs.

    Thomas talked about some sculptural and mixed-media work, noting that the phrases “I am a man” indicates a collective, and “I am the man” is self-centered. His bronze sculpture Raise Up (2014), based on a historical photograph from apartheid South Africa, depicts a row of male heads turned against the wall, arms raised in the air. The art historian and critic Kerr Houston explained the source: “In Raise Up, Thomas gives us the heads and arms of ten of the thirteen black miners pictured by [Ernest] Cole as they undergo a humiliating medical examination, in the nude.”2 The work was shown at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in June 2014. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spawned the protest phrase “Hands up, don’t shoot,” took place two months later. The piece took on an unanticipated meaning.

    Hank Willis Thomas, Raise Up, 2014, bronze, 25 x 285 x 10 cm (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    Thomas talked about his collaboration with Ryan Alexiev and Jim Ricks on a public-art project called In Search of the Truth (also known as Truth Booth), in which participants enter a structure shaped like a caption balloon and record a two-minute video during which they riff on the phrase “The truth is….” Truth Booth was first presented in Ireland in 2011 and has since traveled to South Africa, the United States, and Afghanistan. This work represents the artist’s interest in what other people think—sometimes being an artist involves listening more than anything else.

    Since many artists are typically excited about their most recent projects, I found it odd that Thomas didn’t present the work in Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915–2015, his most recent exhibition at Jack Shainmain Gallery in New York. For this new series Thomas removed the copy and logos from one hundred magazine advertisements depicting women, taking the suffrage era as a starting point.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Janpim Wolf, “Artist Lecture #2: Hank Willis Thomas,” Janpim Wolf Senior Portfolio, February 17, 2010.

    1 Meredith Goldsmith, “Artist Parodies Ads to Bring Awareness,” Oakland Tribune, August 1, 2005.

    2 Kerr Houston, “Recasting the Past: Hank Willis Thomas in South Africa,” Bmore Art, July 10, 2014.

  • 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

  • Tell Me What You Know

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

    Robert BarryWednesday, March 11, 2015
    Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture
    205 Hudson Street Gallery, Hunter College, City University of New York, MFA Campus, New York

    You know how lyrics from pop songs look trite and sometimes embarrassing when written down, but come alive convincingly when performed? It’s the same for artist’s talks. Some excel when presenting in public. If an artist is charismatic, unremarkable work becomes good and good work becomes great. The opposite is also true: interesting work can come across as ordinary.

    The renowned first-generation Conceptualist Robert Barry is one of those artists whose work—which explores speech, memory, light, time, belief, anticipation, fragility, making connections, and states of flux and change—shines when interpretations are expanded on by others. It’s not that he’s inarticulate. Far from it—the artist speaks clearly, in a straightforward manner. But there was a lack of excitement to his reflections on a six-decade career during a lecture at the Hunter College Art Galleries, held in conjunction with the retrospective Robert Barry: All the things I know … 1962 to the present. His discussion about old and new works revealed no earthshaking revelations but offered plenty to remind you of the humanity behind the brainy work you read about in art-history books.

    Born in the Bronx in 1936—and he still has the accent to prove it—Barry received two degrees at Hunter College, earning a BFA in 1957 and an MA in 1963.1 As a student, he took classes with the renowned scholar and curator William Rubin; the artist Robert Motherwell was his advisor. The art department was impressive: William Baziotes taught watercolor, Ray Parker taught oil painting, and Tony Smith taught in a three-piece suit. After Barry obtained his terminal degree, he was hired as a professor at Hunter by Eugene C. Goossen, an art critic, historian, and curator who was the department chair. Barry taught there from 1964 to 1979, a job he admitted made it easy for him to avoid producing art commodities to support his practice.

    Robert Barry speaks to an audience at Hunter College (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Like many Conceptualists, Barry started out as a painter, and the exhibition’s oldest work is a painting of gridded red and black squares, a student piece from 1962. By the end of the decade, his attitude toward art changed, and he began working with ephemeral, invisible, and nonart materials, such as typewritten statements like “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 p.m.; June 15, 1969.” He also experimented with electromagnetic waves, with pieces that triggered metaphysical thoughts from scientific concepts. “The most powerful things in the world were invisible,” Barry said regarding Electromagnetic Energy Field (1968), which is “a battery-powered transmitter encased in a nondescript metal box [that] sends out waves of energy, filling the gallery space with an invisible, immeasurable, but nonetheless real force.”2 With a sound “kind of like a whistle,” Electromagnetic Energy Field was as large as its audible range. Carrier Wave (1968–69), Barry said, blots out all other signals in the area. The artist’s father, who was an electrical engineer (and a disk jockey in the 1940s, using his own equipment), made the radio-wave boxes for his son’s art projects.3 At the time, the artist revealed, a telekinetic institute operated near the 57th Street galleries in Manhattan where he first showed these pieces, so he knew he was in the right area.

    “I used to call galleries ‘cemeteries,’” Barry said confidently, and several classic works examined art-world mechanics. When dealers contacted him for shows, he told them, “Well, right now I’m closing galleries.” His Closed Gallery (1969) was first done at Eugenia Butler’s space in Los Angeles, and also in Amsterdam and Turin. “Lock the door,” he joked. “Don’t let anybody in.” The public was notified of the negated exhibitions by postcard.

    Before the lecture, the Hunter professor Joachim Pissarro discussed Robert Barry’s exhibition in the galleries; Robert Barry is on the far left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Conceptual artists notoriously pillaged spheres of knowledge outside the domain of fine art. Barry noticed the beautiful Greek names of the noble gases, which are elements on the periodic table that rarely interact with other elements or change chemically. For one his best-known works, Inert Gas Series: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, from a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (1969), Barry purchased glass containers of these gases from a distributor that worked with schools and, with his dealer Seth Siegelaub, drove a rented Mercedes convertible into the Mohave Desert, where he laid the containers on newspaper and smashed them with a hammer. He smashed more bottles of gas at a Beverly Hills hotel. Siegelaub wanted to document things—these works are typically shown as typeset text and black-and-white photographs in frames—but Barry did not. Nearly fifty years later, the many cubic feet of neon, xenon, and other gases that he released are still floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, somewhere.

    “Barry does not work with words; he communicates conditions.” So wrote the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard. One of these conditions, based on trust and agreement, is evident a class assignment for students that Barry sent to David Askevold at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1969:

    The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.

    It’s true—nobody is sure if the secret was revealed immediately, as one account goes, or forgotten, as goes another. In a way, misinformation is part of the piece. “I’m not even sure this is a piece,” Barry conceded. “It’s about the fragility of ideas…. It’s life. That’s what life is about.” Two older works received attention during tonight’s lecture: Robert Barry Presents Three Shows and a Review by Lucy R. Lippard (1971) and Marcus Piece (1970). For the former, Lippard wrote a short essay about Barry’s work that, with a collection of index cards that described other pieces she included in other exhibitions, formed a show at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Another text-based piece quoted the philosopher Herbert Marcuse: “A place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’” Barry’s strategy was “to plagiarize his idea and make art from it.”

    Installation view of Robert Barry’s Red Cross (2008) at Yvon Lambert Gallery in 2009

    Barry’s work since the 1970s has been more oblique: collections of words that are read out loud, drawn or stickered directly on walls, appear in paintings, are cast in acrylic, or projected onto the floor. The words he chooses typically express states of being and abstract actions—and he rarely employs nouns. In the Hunter College exhibition, Barry placed transparent vinyl letters on the windows facing Canal Street. His videos are likewise impressionistic, such as one he filmed on a train and in the Centre Pompidou–Metz in France. It’s easy to understand how critics and historians tend to focus on Barry’s early work, because his production from the last thirty years requires viewers to engage more, to be active participants in shaping meaning.

    If I were conducting an interview with Barry, I would ask him about these more recent works, skipping over the 1960s stuff that many people know.4 But that is not what Max Weintraub, an adjunct professor at Hunter and the exhibition’s cocurator, did when he joined the artist onstage for a lackluster dialogue. Weintraub asked about topics already covered in Barry’s lecture, such as the mechanics of the art world, so maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. The professor asked an asinine question about blurred authorship of Three Shows and a Review: “Did it occur to you that [Lippard] was doing a Robert Barry?” “No,” the artist responded. Barry and Lippard had conversations, and her writing contribution was perfect. Weintraub did get Barry to talk more about the Closed Gallery pieces, including the one in Los Angeles that employed two old ladies from a telephone answering service in a little office on Sunset Boulevard.

    Max Weinberg and Robert Barry talk (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    An audience member asked about the difference between a serious work of Conceptual art and a joke—a great question but one left answered. Barry said he needed specific works to compare because he doesn’t like generalities. (The questioner did not give examples.) “‘Conceptual’ is a bad word,” another attendee commented. “Is there one you prefer?” “No,” Barry responded. There’s always something physical about art, he said, though using the term is a convenience and valuable because “you get into shows.” It is rare that an artist cites the benefits of labels and categories. Conceptual art is tangible in other ways. Barry urged artists in the audience that “you should get something for your labor” and “you can’t give it away.” He got over that attitude. His work is valuable.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 According to a 2010 Archives of American Art interview with Robert Barry, what is now Lehman College in the Bronx was part of Hunter College.

    2 Steven Stern, “The Quick and the Dead,” Frieze 125 (September 2009).

    3 Barry explained: “My dad gave me a hand, making up these little transmitters that sent out a signal. If you put one in the gallery, and also had a portable radio turned to that frequency, it gave off a whistle. I don’t think my dad had any idea how this connected to art or my drawing, but he had fun doing it.” Barry, quoted in Benjamin Genocchio, “A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art,” New York Times, November 30, 2003.

    3 For criticism on his recent work, see my Artforum.com review of Barry’s 2009 exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York.

  • Life Is Changed

    Tehching Hsieh
    Tuesday, March 3, 2015
    Artists at the Institute
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House, New York

    Tehching Hsieh speaks at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tehching Hsieh created among the most radical, strenuous, and bizarre bodies of work in all of art history. Only prisoners with life sentences or captured soldiers could ever relate to the parameters Hsieh set for himself for his five One Year Performances, which he described in chronological order during his lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts. Prisoners of crime or war rarely elect to put themselves in a position that isolated themselves, mentally and physically, for long periods of time.

    Speaking broken English in a thick Asian accent, Hsieh told his life story as an artist. Born and raised in Taiwan, he “jumped ship” in Philadelphia on July 13, 1974, while serving with the Taiwanese Merchant Marine (and after his compulsory three-year military service). Hsieh headed for New York, where he lived for fourteen years as an illegal immigrant as he tried to establish himself in the downtown art scene. In fact, he even made an artwork resembling a US Immigration Service “wanted poster” four years after surreptitiously slipping into the country.

    Poster for Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance (1978–79) (artwork © Tehching Hsieh)

    For his first One Year Performance (1978–79), also known as Cage Piece, Hsieh (using the first name Sam) built a mock jail cell, about one hundred square feet, in his TriBeCa loft, where he lived without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for an entire year.1 After reading the brief explanation of the piece from the digital image of a typewritten manuscript projected onscreen, Hsieh explained how he rationalized his cramped quarters: “Space—I try to create bigger…. I try to make so this corner become my home. Opposite corner become outside. So every day I can go out, take a walk, and come home.” He held visiting hours, but not many people came to visit this human zoo. For his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, he reconstructed the cell, which was displayed with documentation of the project.2

    Presenting his career chronologically, Hsieh described the second One Year Performance (1980–81), also known as Time Clock Piece, in which the artist set a goal to punch a time clock on the hour, every hour, for 365 consecutive days. Hsieh screened a video of the film he made at the time—a six-and-a-half-minute succession of single 16mm film frames taken every time he punched the clock. As the hours and days progressed, the hair on Hsieh’s shaved head grew out, and he looked considerably tired toward the end. What struck me the most was how Hsieh just stood there, in the silent room at the institute, with an expressionless look on his face, blinking occasionally as he watched the rapidly changing stills of himself from thirty-five years ago.

    Tehching Hsieh watches himself on film (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    For his third One Year Performance (1981–82), Hsieh—now using his real first name, Tehching—spent the entire year without entering an indoor space. Almost. The New York City police detained him briefly, and a video clip of Outdoor Piece that Hsieh showed included footage from the day when cops dragged him into the station house after a vagrancy arrest. Again, Hsieh’s face was expressionless as he watched his younger self, screaming hysterically.

    The fourth One Year Performance (1983–84) was subtitled Art/Life or Rope Piece. For the project, Hsieh tied himself to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano, with an eight-foot-long rope. “She like to do meditation, but I don’t quite … feeling,” he joked as he showed a photograph—one of several hundred taken during the span of the performance—of a grumpy-looking next to an absorbed Montano. While Hsieh didn’t hold a job for his first three pieces, he did construction work during the fourth to make a little money, and he traveled with Montano to Philadelphia, where she taught. Many of their conversations were audiotaped, Hsieh said, flashing an image of ordinary cassettes sealed in plastic cases—intended never to be heard. Like the previous pieces, the artist never described what it was like in the midst of the performance, providing us only with basic facts—and limited ones at that. What was, for example, the significance of the start and end date of July 4?

    Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, One Year Performance, 1983–84 (artwork © Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano)

    The fifth One Year Performance (1985–86), in which Hsieh did not see, talk, or read about art, but “just go in life,” preceded the sixth, called Thirteen Year Plan or Earth, which lasted from his thirty-sixth to his forty-ninth birthday. From December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999, Hsieh stated that he would make art but not show it. He tried to “disappear” in Alaska but only made it as far as Seattle, working the same kind of jobs he did in New York when fresh off the boat. (He also sold his early paintings for $500,000 and bought a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that housed a residency program for artists.) A poster for each project is the only documentation we have of how Hsieh spent his time. Onscreen he showed digital renditions of his desired retrospective, a timeline of his work in eighteen equally size rooms, one for each year of his performances. In his proposed exhibition, visitors would walk through and become aware their own personal time, thinking about their own life experiences.

    Tehching Hsieh presented a diagram of his ideal retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, an audience member asked Hsieh which performance had the strongest impact for him? Hsieh skirted the question, explicating further his concept of separating “art time” and “life time,” the latter of which happens between performances, and of thinking about present time. “I don’t want people to see my work as document,” he said, considering the documentation as the proverbial tip of an iceberg.

    One audience member quizzed the artist about his reconstruction of Cage Piece at MoMA—some folks get really hung up on originals and re-creations—but what is more interesting to me is if that performance can be restaged under the same conditions. Ten years ago Marina Abramović covered five classic works of 1960s and 1970s performance art—by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman—in Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during the first iteration of Performa, the New York–based biennial of performance art. Can you imagine her or anyone else punching a time clock every hour for a year or staying outdoors for 365 days? Even if someone were crazy enough to redo Cage Piece, that person’s experience would be completely different that Hsieh’s.

    A thoughtful attendee asked Hsieh how he first conceived time as his medium, so Hsieh started from the beginning. Reminiscing about his early days in Taiwan, “I’m very good for abstract painting,” he laughed, “express my emotion.” After college friends who had traveled to the West described Conceptual art to him, he experimented on his own, including a jump from a second-floor window (a la Yves Klein) and exposing one hundred newspapers that were laid on the ground with paint. In New York Hsieh worked as a dishwasher from 1974 to 1978, an experience he considered a “four year wasting time experience,” during which he thought about life. “I don’t go looking for it,” he explained his realization. “I already in the situation. I just repeat wasting time one more year. I will catch it. I just create a form. I did it in a cage.” Hsieh deems himself to be best at wasting time, a time of freedom during which “freethinking” can happen. “Life is difficult, but you’re still freethinking.”

    Hsieh avoided confirming the audience’s interpretations of his work: fear and bureaucracy as form, the legal medium, and so on. Instead, he responded, “I’m more like caveman.” Hsieh’s work may concern Zen Buddhism, the penal system, and political asylum, and the artist is content to let others elucidate its meaning. Critics and historians have done a good job. Colby Chamberlain recently wrote: “By pledging to imprison himself in his studio, or to punch a time-clock at hourly intervals, or to stay outdoors, Hsieh imposed on his own body strictures that reverberated with wider regimes of control: incarceration, labor, homelessness (and, perhaps, in the case of his collaboration with Linda Montano, marriage).”3 And six years ago, Roberta Smith assessed Hsieh’s succession of performances: “For ‘Cage Piece’ Mr. Hsieh deprived himself of nearly all contact with the world. In the next four pieces he eliminated, in succession, concentration, shelter, privacy and finally art itself. In each case he altered the nature of time radically for himself and, retrospectively, us.”4 She is right—he made this work, putting himself through these strenuous activities, so we don’t have to. And neither does he: Hsieh more or less retired from making art on January 1, 2000, after concluding the Thirteen Year Plan.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Ryan Kleiner, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture,” Ryan Kleiner Digital Media Portfolio, May 13, 2015.

    Jake Peck, “Tehching Hsieh Artist Lecture Spring 2015 UNR,” Art 350, May 7, 2015.

    Watch

    1 Hsieh does not consider the scratch marks on the wall for each passing day to be writing.

    2 For more on the MoMA exhibition, see Roberta Smith, “A Year in a Cage: A Life Shrunk to Expand Art,” New York Times, February 18, 2009; and Deborah Sontag, “A Caged Man Breaks Out at Last,” New York Times, March 1, 2009.

    3 Colby Chamberlain, “Barely Legal,” Artforum.com, March 4, 2015.

    4 Smith, “A Year in a Cage.”

  • They’re Still Out to Get You

    They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age
    Monday, March 2, 2015
    New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Cantor Film Center, New York

    The government has no compelling case for mass surveillance, proclaimed Robert Scheer, a longtime journalist and the editor in chief of Truth Dig. In the predigital days of snooping on the bad guys, he said, “All you needed was a half-sober cop to go sit in a car outside their house and figure out what they’re up to.” American authorities, Scheer continued, were already aware of the Boston Marathon bombers and Charlie Hedbo gunmen before their attacks, and preemptive surveillance by the government is “a betrayal of the American tradition,” to the audience’s applause. He defined this tradition as embracing transparency, honesty, open debate, consumer choice, and the ability to defend oneself within a legal system.

    Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You (2015)

    Scheer said that his new book, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy (2015), whose release was being celebrated tonight, doesn’t attack technology but rather highlights how it is liberating and can save democracy. He feels a sense of loss regarding how technology’s marvelous potential is being squandered. Tonight’s panel, “They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age,” cosponsored by the Nation Institute, highlighted how far we have come since the days of stakeouts, wiretaps, and dusty, sloppily transcribed files kept by the Stasi and FBI.

    Noticing a chilling effect on free speech and intellectual inquiry online, Helen Nissenbaum, professor of media, culture, communication, and computer science at New York University, explained how the digital surveillance of the online habits of Americans can predict if someone is a Democrat or Republican—a process known as voter targeting. With this information, marketers can influence a person’s political views. This “highly tailored” message, she said, drowns out conversation in the public sphere.

    Jen Lowe, an independent data scientist and researcher, argued that complex surveillance develops invisibly and so quickly that regular people can hardly keep up. “We are absolutely having fewer and fewer unobserved moments,” Lowe said. “We are being observed in our homes by our devices.” Advocating informed consent, Lowe pleaded for more “froth and dissent in democracy.”

    Edward W. Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, stated that although algorithmic predictors offer customization and personalization, they serve interests that aren’t your own. “Predictors tend to work best if you’re very much like everyone else,” he said. Felton said that we live like public figures, editing our lives and strategizing our behavior in fear of the consequences of making a mistake.

    In an article he wrote in the late 1990s, Scheer remembered observing that “there is no other profit model of any substance” on the internet. “Basically we convinced people that giving up their information would enhance their shopping experience,” he said, “and we didn’t think what it might do to their self-censorship, to their citizenship, and so on.” And until Edward Snowden’s findings were made public, Scheer said, we didn’t know how massive post–September 11 government surveillance had become.

    “Where are the protests?” asked Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker who served as the panel’s moderator. “Is anyone quitting Facebook?” Felten claimed that individuals “feel powerless to change it.” Nissenbaum said the back end of data mining is complex. People might revolt if surveillance becomes more visible, Lowe offered, but she defended Facebook for being good at community: “There’s value that people don’t want to walk away from.”

    Turning back to politics, Felten stated that “we are still far from understanding the implications of the Snowden documents,” many of which, he said, have not been released. He believes the best stuff has yet to come: “That pot will continue to boil for quite a while.” Felten also brought up the recent revelation that American and British forces stole or cracked 2 billion SIM cards, which makes it easy for government agents to listen to calls and rewriting software to turn a smart phone into a recording or tracking device—even when it’s turned off. Scheer argued that technology simultaneously intimidates and seduces the masses. Younger Americans today think the government is benign, he said, but foreign-born students who have personally experienced repressive government regimes see things differently. But, he lamented, “As long as society can disperse the goodies, everything is fine.”

    Lowe doesn’t believe in Google’s rhetoric (“do no evil”), and Nissenbaum doesn’t trust “mammoth” companies more than she does the government. Felten said private companies want fences protecting themselves from government surveillance but noted that the feds can always buy data from companies and piggyback on existing surveillance technologies. Scheer somewhat agreed with the three others: “I hate to be reduced to hoping that Google and Apple and Facebook will do the right thing, but I give them a better shot than I do the NSA.” A misuse of data scandal, he conceded, might cause Facebook to collapse. Nissenbaum weighed the traditional right-to-be-left-alone versus the obligation to share information in a social society, but Felten reminded us that citizens freely give their information to data companies. He also noted that observation by surveillance cameras in public spaces, as well as via smartphone locational devices, is a given in society, not a choice.

    Scheer warned against collusions between business and government, like when privately held companies such as Palantir and In-Q-Tel analyze and sell data to law-enforcement agencies. “A wall has been breached,” he finished, “between the public and the private sector.” Palantir was founded with CIA money, he said, and the federal agency was its only client for three years. Lowe added that the Chicago Police Department has begun predictive policing, identifying criminals by algorithm and knocking on their doors, basically saying “We’re watching you.” The same police department, it was recently discovered, has been operating a black-site prison and interrogation building. “We’re being sold the story that data is unbiased,” Lowe said, “but it’s not magic either.” We shouldn’t forget about human error and bias.

    Schwartz asked about using Tor, PGP, torrents, Tails, and encryption, as well as the judicial system. Nissenbaum reminded us that the government isn’t monolithic; some agencies with good values conduct solid research and take positive action. To help thwart questionable surveillance, she suggested flooding online interactions to obfuscate the system, such as TrackMeNot, which she helped to create. People are more aware of encryption and privacy-enhancing technology, Felten said, and these tools are becoming more practical for ordinary users. “We’re seeing a growth of interest in these things beyond the tin-foil-hat crowd,” he joked. “And that demand is being responded to by, I think, a lot of public-minded researchers who want to try to improve the technical tools.” With hope in the power of the individual, not the corporation, Lowe advocated more education and tutorials for encryption. Deep Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is a new research group that is helping. Scheer said that every government claims to have enemies to justify its actions but implored, “If your cause is right, freedom will serve it.”

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    Watch

  • A Better Everyday Life for the Many People

    Sara Kristoffersson: Design by IKEA
    Tuesday, February 24, 2015
    INSIDE (hi) STORIES Lecture Series
    New School, Glass Corner, Parsons East Building, New York

    “IKEA is huge,” stated Sara Kristoffersson, professor of design history and theory at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden.1 Who could argue with her? Founded in 1943, the immensely popular seller of affordable furniture, utensils, and fabrics for the home has spread across the globe and brings in billions of dollars a year. A more intriguing proposition was this: “IKEA has made Swedishness a virtue in itself.” But scratch deep enough, Kristoffersson warned, and hierarchies begin to appear within a company that many people believe mitigates consumerism and capitalism with an egalitarian touch.

    The slender, stylish Kristoffersson, dressed in the requisite black sweater, skirt, and tights of a European historian of modern design, her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, delivered an hour-long lecture derived from her 2014 book Design by IKEA: A Cultural History. Because IKEA’s brand is synonymous with its mother country, she argued, the company sells abstract notions of modernity, democracy, and social justice, which become problematic when looking closely at its history. According to Kristoffersson, promotional slogans such as “beauty in homes” and “design for everyone” are a “mass-produced version of Swedish design history.”

    The story of IKEA’s ascent is well established. The name is an acronym consisting of the initials of the company’s founder, Ingvar Kamprad; the name of the farm on which he grew up, Elmtaryd; and the name of his hometown, Agunnaryd (in the southern region of Sweden called Småland). Born in 1926 to a family of German immigrants, Kamprad entered business at an early age—he was five—by selling matches. As he grew older he offered fountain pens, Christmas cards, and garden seeds, among other merchandise, in his town and eventually via post. Entering the furniture business, Kamprad developed a mail-order catalogue before opening his first showroom in the small and relatively remote town of Älmhult. People traveled there, saw the products, and ordered what they liked; the manufacturer then shipped the goods directly to them, using a flat pack of unassembled parts to minimize costs.

    A young Ingvar Kamprad in front of the IKEA store in Älmhult

    Operating on the family farm in its early years, IKEA grew tremendously after World War II, becoming known for offering good design at low prices. According to an authorized history of the company by the journalist Bertil Torekull, the Swedish economy grew nearly 4 percent a year, on average, between 1950 and the early 1970s.2 Swedish social democracy also thrived during this time, and the postwar housing boom catapulted IKEA to the upper echelon of the furniture industry, though not without resistance from the national trade associations, which forbid manufacturers from selling materials to Kamprad, and in spite of his absence from industry trade shows, from which he was banned. For many years capitalist competition went toe-to-toe with the planned economy—though Kamprad did order materials from factories in communist Poland.

    In 1973 IKEA opened its first store outside Sweden, in the Swiss town of Spreitenbach, near Zürich. In order to give his company a profile during the European expansion, Kristoffersson said, Kamprad borrowed from the Swedish cultural image bank, using moose and Vikings to strengthen his brand. By the 1980s the national markers disappeared, she told us, which marked a shift from a representational to conceptual association to Sweden. Even though IKEA changed its logotype color from red to the blaring yellow and blue of the Swedish flag, Kristoffersson has detected subtle national visual markers in the company’s visual culture. The arrangement of a dining room in one advertising photograph, for instance, recalls the work of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century painter Carl Larsson. I imagine most people without knowledge of Swedish modern art wouldn’t catch the reference.

    Carl Larsson, Flowers on the Windowsill, ca. 1844, watercolor, 32 x 43 cm (artwork in the public domain)

    Another key decision linking IKEA to its home country, Kristoffersson revealed, was keeping the indigenous names for its products. The Hästveda armchair—named for a small town in southern Sweden—is sold under that title from the United States to Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the scholar continued, IKEA has claimed the traditional food it sells in its restaurant and on its shelves—meatballs with white sauce, mashed potatoes, and lingonberries—as its own. IKEA often sells the romantic idea of nature, Kristoffersson pointed out, with advertising images of beautiful landscapes with red houses. The company has even poked fun at its domestic consumers, acknowledging the stereotype that people from Småland are frugal, “famous for working hard and living on slender means,” Kristoffersson said. IKEA’s promotional strategies have also played on a notion embodied in a hard-to-translate Swedish word, lagom, which means “just enough” and generally emphasizes moderation and equality.

    Kamprad has made a fortune based on the meaning of this concept and on the belief that his management style is not learned but rather just who he is. He favors jeans and sweaters to suits, which give him a folksy, friendly, down-to-earth vibe, and he avoids luxury hotels and flies coach—though he can easily afford both. While Kamprad drove a Porsche as a successful young man, he now gets around in a trusty late-model Volvo. In 1976 he wrote a manifesto, The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, that embodies his business philosophy, explicating nine core ideas for IKEA workers such as “Reaching good results with small means,” “Simplicity is a virtue,” and “Profit gives us resources.” Kristoffersson compared the Testament’s language to religious or political speech. Yes, and I can imagine a union leader, avant-garde artist, or motivational speaker also writing these same words. In keeping with his folksy style, Kristoffersson said, Kamprad kept the awkward Swenglish phrase “the many people” to demonstrate how IKEA is unconcerned with appearing too tight or polished in the formal business world.

    Kristoffersson compared IKEA’s story to that of Apple, whose two founders, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, building an empire out of a garage in California. But IKEA’s narrative positions itself as driven not solely by financial interests but also with a higher purpose, an ideal to fulfill. (IKEA developed its chronicle, Kristoffersson pointed out, before the idea of making a story became a marketing strategy.) Yet the falsification isn’t important, she said. IKEA has successfully risen about mere consumerism, and any bad press—regarding a perceived association with social democracy, embarrassing personal scandals, and questionable business and environmental practices—has failed to negatively impact the company in the long run.

    Images from IKEA catalogues for different Middle Eastern countries (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    So is IKEA beyond critique? Hardly, but Kristoffersson’s list of criticisms against the company felt weak. In politically conservative circles in the United States and Great Britain, she said, IKEA was attacked for its perceived alliance with the nanny state, with a dystopian welfare system in which individuality is relinquished. As evidence, she offered the Swedish financial crisis of 1992, which she claimed eroded the country’s famously cushy lifestyle. IKEA also has a reputation for being a chameleon, Kristoffersson said, using the cultural and political climate to sell products: a 2009 advertising campaign, for instance, exploited the Barack Obama moment with the slogan “Change begins at home.” And in the Middle East, IKEA altered a photograph from its catalogue, digitally removing a woman from a bathroom scene that also showed a man and two children. IKEA’s most damning moment came in 1994, when a journalist uncovered evidence that Kamprad, as a teenager in the 1940s, was affiliated with fascist groups and openly admired the pro-Nazi intellectual Per Engdahl.3

    A diagram of IKEA’s complex business structure (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Comprising two foundations based in the Netherlands and commercial divisions in Denmark, Belgium, and Luxembourg (among other countries), the privately owned IKEA possesses an “extremely complex business structure,” Kristoffersson said, which was designed to avoid taxes. A chapter in Torekull’s book explains this intricate arrangement of power, money, and control, but the structure is nearly impenetrable to those unfamiliar with international trade (like me). Yet, she argued, we don’t view IKEA as a shrewd, parsimonious multinational whose main purpose is to maximize profits—though few would deny this status. I was reminded of people’s surprise when they discover that the cofounder and co–chief executive officer of Whole Foods, John Mackey, is an audacious libertarian capitalist. (He also helped to establish a movement called Conscious Capitalism and, with Raj Sisodia, authored the book Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business (2013).

    So, whether to shop at IKEA or Whole Foods or wherever, or to buy Apple products, is entirely up to the consumer. This is not to diminish the crucial role played by government regulators, nongovernmental organizations, and consumer advocates around the world. We need them to serve as watchdogs, keeping corporations like IKEA from unscrupulous labor-related activities. And multinational corporations have slowly improved their business ethics. In The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, Kamprad emphasized IKEA’s adherence to Möbelfakta standards. Apple has been responsive, perhaps grudgingly so, to improving labor rights and workplace safety for employees of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn.

    Kristoffersson noted a few of IKEA’s positive environmental decisions over the last twenty years, such as minimizing fiberboard products and pushing LED light bulbs.4 IKEA is one of the largest foundations in the world, she said, so a certain percentage of its profits go to good causes—as they should. Yet with low prices that stimulate consumption, yielding throwaway products, Kristoffersson asked rhetorically, “Isn’t it more ecologically friendly to not buy at all?” An audience member agreed, pointing out the low- to no-resale value of IKEA products. For me, the disposable nature of the company’s goods is highly overrated. Looking around my apartment, I see IKEA shelves, cookware, curtains, and more—some bought nearly fifteen years ago—that function well and don’t need replacing.

    A 1948 advertisement for Ford trucks

    “IKEA hardly needs Sweden,” Kristoffersson said as she began concluding her talk. “IKEA hardly needs the image of Sweden and Sweden’s welfare state. It is largely outdated and challenged.” That may be true, but how does her scholarly subject compare to other brands that are inextricably tied to their native origins? Ford trucks, Budweiser beer, Coca-Cola drinks, and McDonalds hamburgers are all products with strong American identities that don’t reflect the diversity of national demographics—we’re not a nation of cowboys, just like Sweden isn’t crawling with blond-haired, blue-eyed babies. Kristoffersson said that Swedish knowledge of American life comes from popular culture, such as the television show House of Cards, but reminded us that such images reflect real standards in society and affect our conception of the world.

    While Kristoffersson’s parallels between brand (IKEA) and country (Sweden) were insightful, and the historical background of the company was interesting, the stakes of the subject of her talk felt low. IKEA appears to be a sensible (but far from perfect) multinational corporation with some degree of social and environmental responsibility that matches its aesthetic ideals and its benevolent reputation. While the firm’s finance and governance structure is far from transparent, IKEA largely delivers on its promise “to create a better everyday life for the many people,” to quote Kamprad’s Testament. Criticisms of the ubiquity of bland knockoff modern design notwithstanding, the biggest issue for your average consumer is having too much IKEA product in your home. After all, you don’t want to live in a showroom.

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 Konstfack is also known as the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design.

    2 See Bertil Torekull, Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (New York: Harper Business, 1999).

    3 Both Kristoffersson and Torekill cover this episode in their books.

    4 For more official information, see IKEA’s annual sustainability reports from 2009 to 2012 and the publication The IKEA Way on Purchasing Products, Materials, and Services.

  • 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.

  • Dubious Relations

    The Relationship between Artists and Museums
    Late 1986
    Kouros Gallery, New York

    Learning that John Bernard Myers, founder and former principal of Tibor de Nagy Gallery, had organized a panel discussion about relations between artists and museums—a topic of major significance in the art universe—and hoping, not necessarily for a revelation, but perhaps for some pointed commentary, we sent a reporter to the event. She was only faintly amused.

    Speakers: David Bourdon, Richard Hennessy, Diane Kelder, Barbara Rose, and Marcia Tucker

    The symposium on “The Relationships between Artists and Museums” was a formal display of sparring and volleying between five panelists, some of whom raised genuine questions. A few presented themselves as ideologues. Only the final speaker attempted answers.

    A stiff academic history of the relationship between museums and artists by Diane Kelder, who quoted Goethe and claimed that Italy destroyed classicism, opened the event. Commencing an extrapolation of the didactic role of museums, Kelder lost her place (she was reading) and quickly closed, just damning the Whitney Museum’s conspicuous relations with corporations and the Morgan Library’s allowing Mobil Oil to sponsor Holbein exhibitions.

    David Bourdon then addressed the overflow audience (mostly of women, mostly of stern and angry visage) and asked a crucial question. Do museums cause people to be artists? And, if so, how bad is the damage? His thesis was that because artists now have easy access to museum exhibitions, relations are casual. He also pointed out that some kind of money has to support the showcases of art. Large corporations, because of governmental tax structures, are logical sponsors. Of course, Bourdon allowed, there is an opinion behind the money, and the corporations want their tastes validated. And, since corporations are innately materialistic, greedy, and commercial, they will not readily accept difficult or controversial artists.

    Barbara Rose floundered on the question of how an artist achieves visibility. By means of “museum patronage,” she decided, then discussed the moral obligations of art-world powers. Museums should not be in the business of certifying artists but should remain neutral, she said, then wrapped her argument into a dead end by repeating the cultural myth that artists are by nature introverted and melancholy (oh Vincent, lend us your ear!) and the belief that corporate backing of museum shows is so narrow and aggressive that most great talents would be passed over in any event.

    After that black vision, Richard Hennessy, in the supporting role of token artist, explained with great flair that the first thing he did upon arriving in New York was to go to the Museum of Modern Art and that made him an artist. A successful artist, albeit hand-made by museum endorsement, he thought it was OK to be in league with the power structure of, behind, and around museums. This seemed a naïve and self-indulgent viewpoint, both compromised and trusting. It reminded me of farmers in the Midwest who endorse Ronald Reagan, while his direct influence is bringing about their economic demise.

    However, Marcia Tucker was on the mark, advocating ways of manipulating corrupt museum power into a more positive result. “Of course there’s corruption. Of course museums favor dead artists like Holbein who provide a predictable, finite career. Of course corporations control museums and museums control aesthetic visibility.” But, Tucker added, there are working solutions that could benefit artist, corporation, and museum. She suggested that museums should have a variety of curatorial standards to expand the tunnel vision of corporate influence, and curators should speak without lying. Meanwhile, she maintains that museums and collectors can engage in truthful discussion of ideas and involve corporations without losing their integrity.

    Panelists then wrestled with the obvious questions, managing, finally, a ray of hope and optimism.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.
    Source

    Written by Cathy Blackwell, “Dubious Relations” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 1 (February/March 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 263. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Back to the Future

    Ross Parry: The Postdigital Museum
    Wednesday, January 28, 2015
    Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York

    Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums”

    In April 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brought together museum professionals, academics, and computer technologists from IBM for a “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums.”1 A postconference report,” said Ross Parry, senior lecturer and college academic director in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, indicated that participants and attendees imagined their technological future in the year 1980. They envisioned a computerized image-search database that would allow a person to pull up any artwork that depicted, for example, “sailing vessels,” or to get information on objects in storage or from other museums. “This was reverie,” said Parry, of these predictions for a digital institution. In 2015 museums have websites, mobile apps, collections databases, email newsletters, games, and myriad forms of communication that facilitate scholarly and professional exchange. “This moment,” Parry stated the obvious, “has arrived.”

    Parry’s current research investigates the tipping point for digital technology in museums, when it evolved from being considered new, different, and even fearsome, to the present, when “it becomes a natural characteristic of the institution.” Whereas curators once conceived the digital aspects of an exhibition much later in their working process, these features are now created concurrently. “The digital creatives are in the room at the beginning,” Parry said. “They’re part of the ideation moment.” From the advanced skill sets of museum staffers and higher expectations from audiences to profound changes in fundamental approaches to design and education, the museum has entered a postdigital phase.

    At the outset of his talk Parry sought to legitimize the term “postdigital,” which he intends to be an economical and precise description of our current moment—just after the digital revolution—and not just a toe-curling neologism. I can accept his designation without resistance, but his explanation about the differences between digital and postdigital being as clear cut as the distinctions between structuralism and poststructuralism, or between modernity and postmodernity, was perplexing, since folks are still debating these divisions. And apparently he’s unfamiliar with the postinternet art debates.

    Technology in museums has become normative, a concept Parry borrowed from political theory and from business and management studies.2 In this context, he explained, normativity refers to shared work ethics and company values—it is considered a positive trait. With frameworks borrowed from disciplines outside museum studies, he can explicate the structures of domination (mission and values, policy and protocols, organizational shape), structures of legitimization (validated behavior and language, allocation of resources, valued skill sets), and structures of signification (strategy, brand) as the prism for analyzing an institution.

    Leaders of digital departments in UK museums consider their future and their possible obsolescence (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While this theoretical background was formally dry, the implications are consequential, especially regarding organizational structuring and people’s jobs. For example, Parry traced digital development in museums: the IT departments that once maintained infrastructure evolved into new-media departments, which grew into teams to build websites and gallery-based features, working alongside the marketing and education departments, among others. Postdigital museums, Parry predicted, will eventually phase out new-media departments because digital activities will be embedded across the museum, in every department. The need for a standalone branch of an institution, a silo to defend, will eventually fade.

    Parry has evidenced the postdigital notion not only through conversations with senior staffers in UK museums but also by scanning job titles in job classifieds. A museum at the digital level might seek to fill a web-designer position, but postdigital museums are searching for digital participation officers, online shop managers, digital marketing officers, and digital learning managers. Moreover, Parry suggested that a postdigital museum won’t need a director to lead a digital strategy; it will instead plan for its traditional roles of engagement, collecting, and exhibiting, which may or may not use digital technology. He also floated the notion that museum staff will work “permanently in beta,” meaning a project is launched, monitored, and constantly tweaked to the extent that, six or twelve months down the line, it will have mutated significantly from the initial public iteration. Goals are regularly redefined and may never actually be reached—something museum workers might find exciting, frightful, or both.

    The distinction between online and offline experiences for audiences has collapsed, Parry argued. A geographically based mobile app for New York architecture isn’t a singularly digital experience, he said, because the user is on the streets, with the sights, sounds, and smells of the city surrounding the person. A museum visitor might use his or her smartphone in tandem with looking at an object, and people walking through a park might receive historical sound clips on their phones relayed from iBeacons. Such hypothetical examples provide “an incredibly visceral, sensual, embodied experience” for the postdigital viewer. Because of resources, cultural context, and professional skill sets, Parry said, not every museum needs to be postdigital. Indeed, I wondered how institutions that are still resistant to digital, that have a poorly developed digital presence, or that—worst of all—lack a sufficient understanding of the importance of digital technology can survive in a postdigital world. Because technology advances rapidly, negligent, clueless, or impoverished organizations may fall too far behind and flirt with irrelevance.

    Ross Parry noted the shift in PhD research toward postdigital topics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A man in the audience asked if digital technology augments human experience, or if it’s incorporated into a person’s full sense of being. “Which impulse is stronger?” he wanted to know. Digital, Parry responded, “has a profound ontological effect” on the way we perceive the world, shaping our community and our expression. He is fond of Lev Manovich’s observation, from 1999, that the database is the symbolic form for our time, just like linear perspective was a way of conceiving knowledge in the Renaissance, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky argued in 1927.3

    One audience member asked about remediation for media, and another questioned the politics of access and disenfranchisement. Parry flipped the question, wanting to consider the consequences of people using digital devices more and more but noticing this behavior less and less. One attendee raised the old “challenge to curatorial authority” chestnut, seemingly incapable of accepting that a populist interpretative experience can coexist with the sovereignty of the anointed expert. Then I realized how few people understand that artists are often the ones who challenge curators and institutions—and even challenge the idea of what art is—with the greatest amount of success.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1For a review of the published conference proceedings, see Edward F. Fry, “The Computer in the Museum,” Computers and the Humanities 4, no. 5 (May 1970): 358–61.

    2One example he gave was James Barham, “Normativity, Agency, and Life,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 92–103.

    3See Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 2 (June 1999): 80–99; and Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

    Watch