This text is the third of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and second reports.
Can and Should Artists Group Together for Their Mutual Benefit? Monday, October 28, 1974 New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
Moderator: Rubin L. Gorewitz
Panelists: Susan Bush, Sandy Relis, and George Segal, artists; Barbara Nessim, illustrator; Ed Cramer, president, Broadcast Music; Joshua Cahn, former counsel, Artists Equity; and Robert Wade, general counsel, National Endowment for the Arts
George Segal said a certain amount of “cruelty” in the art world is necessary for the making of good art, although one could reply that sufficient cruelty would exist in the art world even if artists got 15 percent residuals.
Susan Bush, an organizer of the Boston Visual Artists Union, said Boston artists have done it, and, with totally open membership, now run the largest gallery in New England.
Sandy Relis, board member of the Foundation for the Community of Artists, said artists don’t organize well. However, he noted that today we have allies—lawyers, accountants, and organizers—prepared to give time and energy to our cause.
Unfortunately, the single issue of the 15 percent royalty was too narrow for nearly three and a half hours of talk, mostly by lawyers. Participation from the floor, which might have enlivened [the] proceedings, was not encouraged.
Since so much of the vitality of the artists’ rights movement now comes from women’s groups, it was strange that no panelists represented the women artists’ view. Beyond that, residual rights is not an issue that will seriously concern many artists. Most of us have more immediate problems.
The attendant publicity is raising public consciousness, however. Both Time magazine and Esquire have recently had major articles on artists’ rights. As Nathaniel Katz said, “Artists, like Mozart, are tired of coming in at the servants’ entrance.”
This text is the second of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the first and third reports.
Residual Rights—Can the Concept Be Implemented?
Monday, October 28, 1974
New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
Moderator: Gerald S. Hobbs, publisher, American Artist
Panelists: Michael Botwinick, director, Brooklyn Museum; Martin Bressler, attorney; Herman Finkelstein, attorney, former general counsel, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); Rubin Gorewitz, financial consultant; Carl Zanger, attorney, Committee on the Arts; and Jeff London and James Rosenquist, artists
Rubin Gorewitz, coauthor of an artists’ rights bill under study by Congress, noted that the mafia is now buying art for profit and that his bill would discourage them. He also said it would deter thieves. (This reporter doesn’t see how a thief would be prevented from selling to a secret buyer who wants the work only for himself. Moreover, work could still be held for ransom, a common purpose of art theft.) Gorewitz said the law would work well because it would be administered by the Internal Revenue Service.
Herman Finkelstein cited ASCAP, which has been extremely effective in controlling royalties for composers. Gorewitz described a system of “follow-up” payments in Europe. Since the 1920s, France has had a droit de suite law, returning 3 percent on resale to the artist, whether prices go up or down. It apparently isn’t working too well, because the amount actually collected is very low compared to sales.
Robert Projansky, lawyer and author of the best-known transfer agreement, was invited up from the floor. He disagreed with panelists about government policing. Government intervention in the arts would be damaging, he said, while a voluntary transfer agreement would be effective if most artists used it.
Projansky pointed out that transfer agreements are used in real estate all the time, adding that artists could give up their royalty if they wished, keeping other provisions. He feels strongly that artists should maintain some control over their works after they are sold, even after their death. (The recent alteration of work in the David Smith estate by [his] executor Clement Greenberg makes a strong case for this point.)
This text is the first of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the second and third reports.
Residual Rights for the Visual Artist—Are They Desirable?
Monday, October 28, 1974
New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
An array of worthies in and about the art world met at Loeb Student Center for three panels on the question of “rights” for the visual artist. The principal topic, the controversial 15 percent residual payment to the artist on resale of his or her work, is nothing new. However, last year’s historic Sotheby Parke Bernet auction dramatized the issue.
That was when a Rauschenberg painting, originally bought by collector Robert Scull for $900, was resold by him for $95,000 [actually $85,000]. Rauschenberg was enraged, publicly scrapped with Scull [legend has it fisticuffs were exchanged], and, with his accountant Rubin Gorewitz (“the artist’s accountant”), formed a foundation and went to Washington to lobby for an artists’ rights bill.
The public had been invited to hear the pros and cons discussed. According to a show of hands, the audience consisted of perhaps 85 percent artists; they came and went in large numbers during the marathon event.
Moderator: S. Spencer Grin, publisher of the Saturday Review
Panelists: Paula Cooper, Paula Cooper Gallery; Lawrence Fleischman, director, Kennedy Gallery; Robert Scull, collector; and Ron Gorchov, Nathaniel Katz, Jacob Landau, Peter Max, and Robert Rauschenberg, artists
Then Lawrence Fleischman opened by objecting to the residual agreement, a not-unexpected position for a dealer. Artists would be more hurt than helped, he said; anyway, “90 percent of artworks go down in value.” Paula Cooper was in favor of the 15 percent, but pessimistic about implementation. She has one artist who uses the voluntary contract, but says she meets buyer opposition.
Jacob Landau thought the only artists to benefit would be the ones who have already benefited from the art boom, the elite few. Rauschenberg was succinct. He was in favor, “and I don’t want to argue about it.” Scull, charming and soft-spoken, had apparently had a change of heart. He now favors some sort of royalty for the artist and said he doesn’t believe it will slow the art market.
Landau felt it would. He sees a world depression coming [in] which little art will be sold. Rauschenberg countered, “No artist can afford that kind of pessimism.” As for size of the royalty, panelists either agreed on 15 percent or hedged, except Ron Gorchov, who insisted on 50 percent. “Fifteen percent is like a tip!”
Frances Stark on Robert Ryman
Monday, June 16, 2014
Artists on Artists Lecture Series
Dia:Chelsea, Dia Foundation for the Arts, New York
Frances Stark performs a lecture, maybe (photograph by Christopher Howard)
If I understand her convoluted comment-question correctly, an elderly woman in the audience wanted to know, during the Q&A session, if the speaker, Frances Stark, had just done a performance. Based on Stark’s zigzag lecture on her relationship to the artist Robert Ryman, I had wondered the same thing. For about an hour the Los Angeles–based artist covered a range of topics, which seems typical of her multidisciplinary practice that embraces expository and confessional writing as well as visual art in diverse media (drawing, collage, photography, video, and performance). By the end it became clear that Stark’s talk was among the most bewildering and cryptic that I’ve ever attended, and I can’t decide if my frustration is justified—that Stark meandered without having anything substantial to say—or if I just didn’t get it. For the record, the artist did not disclose to the audience that a performance had taken place.
Such confusion shouldn’t be surprising, since the work of both artists often perplexes and befuddles, from Stark’s rambling online conversations turned into video to the oblique materialism of Ryman’s career-long exploration of the color white. Tonight she emphasized tenuous connections between her and Ryman, comparing, for instance, the square shape of his paintings to her Instagram feed. Throughout the event Stark read from her “Scared to Death” essay, published in an exhibition catalogue in 2001, which includes a brief, humorous comment on Ryman. Perhaps for this reason Dia invited her to speak on him for its Artists on Artists Lecture Series.
Robert Ryman guarding his own art (source of photograph not known)
In the passage Stark recounts the plot of a novel that takes place in a museum, in which a guard was a central character, and retells the story of when Ryman decided to become a painter while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid-1950s. “[H]is first ambition was not to be a cop but a musician,” Stark read aloud, “and now, of course, he is known for his paintings not for his style of guarding them.…”1 Three of her artist friends in California—Jason Meadows, Richard Hawkins, and Morgan Fisher—all “were enamored of Ryman’s paintings, and I, too, am enamored of Ryman’s paintings. I struggled to speak of this fascination with Ryman’s work, and, embarrassingly enough, found myself asking, Is this some kind of mysticism?”2
Stark’s stated aim tonight was to share, not to theorize, as well as to demonstrate overlaps and rhymes between her and Ryman. “That’s a concept I learned from Emily Dickinson at age fifteen,” she said. As a humanities student at San Francisco State University, where she studied art history, “I came to art as a reader,” Stark told us, “with aspirations to be a writer.” In the early 1990s she identified as a visual artist and attended graduate school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, though she felt that people favored her writing to her art as the decade commenced. As an MFA student Stark was exposed to Ryman after others had recommended him to her. At the time “the work didn’t turn the lights on,” but she eventually warmed up to it. After being asked to participate in an exhibition of favorite books, she recalled offering Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and a book about Ryman.
Stark’s narrative slipped in and out of consciousness, with seemingly unscripted observations based on her prepared digital slide show. One pair of images juxtaposed Henri Matisse’s Red Room (1908) with Studio View (1959), a black-and-white photograph that Ryman had painted red. Stark then dwelt on a 1964 Ryman painting next to a photograph of his studio and uttered something about their mutual project of “creating vehicles for methodical making,” but the synthesis of these pairings didn’t produce a clear meaning for me. The head-scratching continued when Stark announced that “people love people to stand in front of things and explain” before playing a recent video interview of herself, filmed at the Museum of Modern Art, on the screen behind her—but without any sound.
Perhaps Stark was suffering from a fatigue of speaking engagements. She admitted that she talked herself out in early May through participation on a panel on Sigmar Polke, who has a retrospective at MoMA, and at Rhizome’s Seven on Seven conference, where she was paired with the technologist David Kravitz from Snapchat to create a new project. Her assessment of Polke’s work was that it looks like splooge and therefore resembles the universe. “Where is the artist in the universe, literally?” she asked before declaring, “Art is where you commune with the dead.”
The language of Frances Stark (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Stark talked about the role of artists as educators in a university, telling her students who say “I want to make a style and get famous” that, in stark contrast, “being an artist is to fall in love with another artist.” Paraphrasing Alighiero e Boetti, she identified the artist as both a shaman and showman, fake yet sincere. “The fake being in the service of the real,” she explained, “not as a sham but as an inescapable condition.” Stark concluded her lecture by adducing “fake texts” and “ghost texts”—if “Greeky Lorem Ipsum” isn’t the title of a work by Stark, then it should be—and remarked that “the mutter reveals something else that you can’t see.” If poetry is language free from utility, then Stark’s use of language is often free from meaning. I’m not sure if the non-sense of her Dia lecture was liberating or hindering, but the ride was bewildering.
In Terms Of count: 3.
1 Frances Stark, “Scared to Death,” in Painting at the Edge of the World, ed. Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2001), 209.
Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, introduces the speakers (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)
The twenty-five-year-old artist Amalia Ulman announced that she just had plastic surgery while spending time in California for her recent solo exhibition, Used & New, at LTD Los Angeles. The before-and-after pictures of her profile, projected onscreen above her, showed nearly imperceptibly minor work on her nose, straightening a slight bend. Ulman also revealed that she had Botox fillers injected under her eyes. According to comments in an Art in Americainterview published a day before this event, Ulman considers the eye fillers and the nose job to be art.
“We thought it was too good to be true,” said Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, for his organization to pair a young artist who thrives on beauty and appearance with the world-renowned cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt, famous for his contributions to the New New Face, a term used to describe his and others’ medical practice in a 2008 article in New York magazine. It was, in Castet’s words, “a match made in heaven.”
Castet introduced Ulman’s work—in photography, sculpture, and installation—as concerning value creation, wealth, game theory, and 89plus, a project on artists born in 1989 or later, on which he and the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist work. She understands her art as analyzing class and addressing social and power relations, especially in representations of the second world—she has singled out Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece—through dollar/euro/pound stores as well as on lifestyle blogs such as Apartment Therapy, where it’s hard to tell if an object is well or poorly made based on a digital photograph. Ulman’s work, which deals with beauty, consumerism, and social media and takes both digital and physical forms, has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Criticism on her is hard to find via a Google search, as writers are inclined to publish Q&A interviews with the artist rather than analyses of her work.
Amalia Ulman, before and after her recent body modifications
Born in Argentina, raised in Spain, and educated at Central Saint Martins in London, Ulman regularly posts photographs to Instagram that seem to have a gauzy soft focus like television shows from the 1960s. The whites and pale pinks in her aesthetic palette are, coincidentally or not, the same hues generally ascribed to the Caucasian race and the color of its skin. Her postinternet worldview is typical of a newer generation in which the older Marxist critiques of society do not apply, or at least not as much. Ulman has admitted to reading theory, but her work is quite different from that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, and that of Nikki S. Lee and Laurel Nakadate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ulman’s criticality is questionable, since she’s seemingly complicit with existing power structures in supporting the elegantly bland (or blandly elegant) qualities of life. But don’t hate her because she’s beautiful.
Ulman began the evening’s conversation by reading a prepared artist’s statement from printed pages, while the audience of largely twentysomethings followed along, craning their necks to take in a projected PowerPoint presentation. Ulman recalled being introduced to art at a young age—8 to be exact—by a television program on Orlan, the artist whose career-long project is to transform herself via plastic surgery. The Australian performance artist Stelarc and the photographer David LaChapelle were also formative influences, she said. While speaking, the carefree Ulman casually tossed her just-read pages onto the floor between her and Brandt, as if she were lackadaisically scrolling a website, and asked the doctor about his work.
Fredric Brandt preaches his aesthetic gospel (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)
With whitish-blond hair, Brandt bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Warhol. The sixty-four-year-old cosmetic dermatologist also possessed a face that had obviously undergone extensive work. (An article in the New York Times noted that he experiments on himself.) The old medical tools and processes such as peeling and collagen injections, Brandt said, were developed a long time ago. Collagen injections, for example, are no longer available. People in their forties and fifties made appointments with him in the old days; now he gets younger first-time clients. With the language of a benevolent, confident self-help guru, Brandt used phrases such as “subtly refreshed” and “continuity of youth” and revealed that few patients have expectations to fix an aged face. “We can improve on Mother Nature,” he professed. “I’m not going to make you look like a porn star—unless you want to.” Not many people do.
“We understand the age and face better,” Brandt said, saying how doctors can separate and empty fat pockets to affect the reflection of light. His clients “don’t want to look young” but instead “don’t want to look tired.” Besides feeling better, they also express a desire to “extend their life in the workforce,” an honorable motive that may not do enough to combat institutional or structural biases against older employees. Making a distinction between a person’s chronological age and his or her biological age, Brandt encourages his patients improve their looks for themselves, not for their husbands—the implication here that women, not men, receive treatment from him. Brandt made two points I agree with: that people shouldn’t impose their beliefs on others, and that you should criticize yourself before criticizing others.
“Botox is the most amazing drug that came along in the mid-nineties,” Brandt continued what essentially had become a monologue, “and it really changed the course of cosmetic dermatology.” Botox replaced collagen injections and works by shrinking lines, lifting the eyebrows, and changing the shape of the face, he said. Is it all necessary? “People come in and they’ll point out these flaws in themselves that nobody can see. And I say, ‘I can fix that little scar or line but that’s not going to affect your appearance to anybody else but yourself.’” Brandt points out other areas for work—he called it educating his patients—that could improve their face, making them beautiful.
Putting science aside, Brandt talked about other matters, such as routine. He does yoga. “I do have a spiritual side,” he said. What about diet, Ulman asked the doctor. He minimizes sugar intake and doesn’t east red meat, which has inflammatory qualities that can accelerate aging. And because he is gluten free, he avoids filling up on bread when dining at restaurants.
Although Brandt stopped short of calling himself an artist, he strongly emphasized the aesthetic nature of his work and touted his great eye for facial improvements, citing the golden ratio and the rule of thirds as tools in his kit. His instincts are so refined, he bragged, that he can look at someone and know exactly how make them look better. The face, Brandt said later in the talk, is a painting that he creates.
Amalia Ulman and Fredric Brandt at the Swiss Institute (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)
Ulman and Brandt briefly discussed insurance issues, with the doctor favoring private-pay systems and urging healthcare companies to stay out of plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, which would introduce chaos and make costs skyrocket. In an interview in Kaleidoscope, Ulman expressed interest in getting Korean plastic surgery, which I understood to mean that she wanted to look more Asian. She prodded Brandt to talk about “corrective” surgery for Asians to look more Western, but the doctor didn’t bite, though he did acknowledge that Asians may desire a Western-looking eye. What about patients who don’t really need work, Ulman asked. “Your perception of yourself is the hardest thing to change,” he responded. Brandt also emphasized that his work is reversible: “If you don’t like it, it goes away.”
During the audience Q&A, someone brought up Michael Jackson, who Brandt said was “a very extreme transformation.” “You can’t have ten rhinoplasties,” snipped the doctor, “and expect your nose to look good.” Where does the desire for change come from, someone else asked. “Within us there’s an innate sense to want to look good,” he answered, which for him explains why things like mirrors and hair salons exist in our world. The role of the media, he continued, is to educate, to provide tools and information on procedures that weren’t available twenty years ago. “Obviously the media, all the images out there affect you, but they’re educating you, and probably … it’s not like they’re forcing you [to do] anything you didn’t want to do. They’re reinforcing your own thoughts of what can be done.”
A young man in the audience described how the technology for antilock brakes, originally developed for Formula One racing cars, has become a standard feature for even the cheapest car. Has social good, he asked, come from Brandt’s work? Obviously prepared, the doctor said that scars, accidents, and birth defects all benefit from reparative surgery. Botox, he said, helps with migraines, bladder dysfunctions, prostate problems, and eye spasms. (Remember that Viagra was developed to alleviate symptoms of pulmonary arterial hypertension.) Someone else asked about new and old standards of beauty. Brandt wants to democratize beauty: “We’re taking typical standards of beauty and applying them to more people … like photocopies.” But at the same time, he said, “I would hate for every one of my patients to look the same.”
A noted collector of contemporary art, Brandt first acquired a Monochromatic Joke painting by Richard Prince—the one about the psychiatrist stealing his patient’s act—in the 1980s. He also owns one of Yayoi Kusama’s white Infinity Net paintings, which he described as “ethereal.” Brandt enjoys how John Baldessari masks the identity of people in his artworks with colored dots, changing our perception of their faces. In sum, he said that he like feel-good art.
It was odd that Brandt showed no interest in Ulman’s work, not even asking her once about her own practice. At one point she even asked him “What do you think of my nose?” and he responded with “I think you’re a pretty woman,” eventually conceding with “Good, it looks good.” I was amused with how one narcissist out-narcissized the other. What was even more surprising, though, was the dull affect of the audience throughout the event. I expected the crowd to be, by default, deeply skeptical of Brandt’s line of work, with its impossible standards of beauty and synthetic body transformation by a wealthy elite. (What, with all the concern over genetically modified foods and an obsession with all things organic and artisanal.) Then I realized that’s the old way of thinking. Lifestyle drugs and unnecessary medical surgery are more popular than ever and much less controversial than in the past. Plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, as common and unobtrusive as wearing contact lenses, are no longer garish procedures, if handled by the right doctors; they also allow people to happily and blissfully maintain their personal brand. Who could possibly object to that?
Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014)
The legendary artist Robert Morris doesn’t often participate in live interviews, whether in public, in person, or on the phone, so a recent appearance by him at the New York Public Library was a rare treat. Indeed, as the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss noted at the outset, “Agreeing to speak is not something he does too freely.” But when Morris, Weiss, and the art historian Julia Robinson gathered in celebration of Weiss and Clare Davies’s new book, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the ensuing conversation was a frustrating affair.
How could such an experienced crew bungle this rare opportunity? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the articulate, soft-spoken Morris. Rather it was the disorganized and unprepared Weiss and Robinson, whose cluttered thoughts belied the sharp focus of the book. Weiss, a senior curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, fumbled with his faulty microphone for several minutes as the conversation began and demonstrated a serious “um” and “uh” problem throughout the event.1
What’s worse, though, is that he and Robinson, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at New York University, had great difficulty asking a simple, straightforward question, as both were plagued with the malaise of offering a garbled comment in place of a question. When a question finally did come out they immediately tried to answer it themselves, offering several possibilities before Morris could even respond. Furthermore, the pair constantly stumbled when describing and interpreting the images of the artist’s work projected on the screen behind them. This was all a pitiful shame considering Weiss’s excellent, insightful articles recently published in Artforum on the refabrication of Morris’s classic 1960s work and on the value of damaged and destroyed art objects through the lens of two recent exhibitions of them.2
Despite the obfuscating efforts of Weiss and Robinson, Morris told entertaining and informative stories about his early career, the period covered by Weiss’s book. The artist confirmed with Simone Forti, a dancer, choreographer, and his wife at the time (who was sitting in the front row of the audience), that they had arrived in New York in late 1960. Even though he had been painting through the late 1950s, Morris didn’t consider himself to be an artist during his initial time in New York, when he was studying art history at Hunter College. “I spent a lot of time reading,” he said. It was inexpensive to exist in Manhattan back then. Living in large lofts with no heat and hot water, Morris said he was poor but comfortable.
Julia Robinson gestures wildly at Robert Morris (photograph by Christopher Howard)
At Weiss’s prompting, Morris talked about the first two works he made in New York—Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Column—both created in January 1961. The former is a nearly 10-inch-cubed wooden container that encloses an audio recording of Morris building the work with carpentry tools. The latter was an eight-foot-tall rectangular box built with plywood salvaged from the street and stored uncomfortably in his room, whose ceiling reached only seven feet high. “This might have given me the idea of permuting this work,” he joked of the decision to re-create the piece several times from the lost or discarded original. A garbled comment-question from Weiss attempted to address the size of, and process involved in making, the two works, and the curator seemed astounded that Morris could simultaneously produce large and small works (and unrelated ones at that). “Just literally making them,” the curator gushed, “in and of itself, reflects a certain level of…” before trailing off.3 Did the two bodies of work intersect, the curator asked? “I never felt obliged to think much about the connection,” Morris responded, who went on to say something about the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s concepts regarding the self that was not picked up by Weiss. In fact, Morris’s deep knowledge of Western philosophy was an area that Weiss and Robinson should have fervently pursued but, sadly, did not.
Robinson mumbled something about how the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making performed or demonstrated temporality and also literalized time. Painting was static then, she claimed, but process brought time back. This may have been a cue for Morris to describe his processed-based works from the 1950s, for which he spread a canvas on the floor and moved across it while sprawled on a short scaffold. “I was just using oil paint,” he said, “putting it on with my hands.” (Does this work still exist?) Robinson stated her interest in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the action painter as well as Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” She knows her book art history. “Activating work with time was a way out,” Morris said to appease Robinson. Because he didn’t resolve the issue of time, he quit making this work. Among other reasons, Pollock had succeeded where he had not. While Morris failed to recognize these paintings as performance, he did acknowledge a “temporal involvement.”
Weiss asked Morris if he had a series in mind when making Box and Column. Not yet, the artist replied. “The large works had a kind of apparent continuity … in form,” he continued, “whereas the small objects didn’t.” (Weiss and Davies’s book presumably gives the smaller pieces, which Weiss calls “object sculpture” but Morris identified as “process type objects,” that missing continuity.) Box for Standing—or was it Column?—was a leftover from a Forti performance. “I had this box,” Morris slyly recalled. “It kept getting in the way. I kept moving it around the studio. Finally I decided I would expropriate it and make a sculpture. It was really very easy because it was already there.” The works from the early 1960s “were much more contingent than they appear today,” he mused.4
Morris, Robinson, and Weiss talked about the avant-garde milieu in San Francisco and New York, which featured characters such as Forti, Anna Halprin, Henry Flynt, and LaMonte Young. Robinson simultaneously asked and told Morris about his own history—while offering her own interpretations of it—a strategy that resulted in a confused, fragmented chronology. Moving on, Morris told the story of when the radical composer John Cage visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he asked to listen to the entire three-and-a-half-hour recording of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Robinson commented to Morris: “Did you ever ask him later, ‘What the heck was that?’” Did she truly find it incredulous that Cage would want to listen to the complete tape?
Morris recollected several experimental dance performances in which he took part. For one Forti piece he pretended to be a rock. For another he was directed to remain on the floor (“Whatever happens,” Forti had told him, “you gotta lay flat on the floor”), while another performer, Robert Huot—a man twice Morris’s size—was instructed to tie him to the wall. “A battle occurred,” Morris declared, “and that was the movement…. A fight with a rope, two guys—I mean, there wasn’t any expression there at all, just defense and scratches and bumps.”
The conversation dragged when Robinson pressed Morris about the mysterious, nefarious controllers of a bifurcated Fluxus scene of artists, dancers, and musicians surrounding Young in New York. Morris admitted that he had written texts for the group that are not widely read because he pulled out of the scene. “I find it really hard to give a reason for that,” Morris mused. “I must have been feeling especially hostile.” Regarding the writing, he explained, “I was using language to make drawings.” The nature of this discussion wasn’t clear, but the three speakers seemed to be in the know. Maybe it was all just gossip.
“You became a pretty serious critic pretty fast,” Robinson noted. She also noticed a difference between Morris’s private writing in notebooks and his published words in the 1960s. “The need to go on record became important,” the artist said. And he liked doing it, even though he considered himself to be a lazy writer who didn’t produce articles often enough. In fact, his advisor at Hunter College, William Rubin, kept bugging him to finish his thesis on the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, even after the professor had left the school for a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. “I usually wrote about things after finishing a body of work,” Morris said.
Three views of Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000–25,000 BCE, limestone, 4¼ in. tall (artwork in the public domain)
Halfway through the conversation Morris loosened up, while Weiss and Robinson continued to grope erratically. The artist recalled the artist Ad Reinhardt’s famous class on Japanese art at Hunter, which he said didn’t follow typical chronological or geographic lines. Instead, Reinhardt showed slides from different eras, periods, and locations, saying “That’s classic. That’s baroque. That’s early classic.” Reinhardt would show “five hundred slides a night,” Morris remembered. When showing an image of the Venus of Willendorf, Reinhardt deadpanned “That’s really primitive.” A student exclaimed, “That’s not primitive—that’s pregnant!” The professor, Morris punchlined, did not reply. Morris also recalled that Reinhardt’s slides of monuments and artworks from foreign lands—once a year he traveled to another country, by himself—were frontal and bilateral. Many students, Morris said, declared these photographs so well taken that they depicted the actual sites better than seeing them in person.
In the early 1960s Morris worked in the Art Office of the New York Public Library, in room 313, where he answered mail, filed things, and used the card catalogue. It was during this time when he conceived of Card File (1962), while drinking coffee one day in the library. Weiss felt Card File is neglected, misrepresented, and singularly understood as a form of categorization—perhaps because we never can actually read the cards filed into it. (Weiss read a few of them aloud; his book publishes transcriptions of each one.) “It’s unending, theoretically,” Morris said of the work, but “it has a narrative.” It’s also, Robinson added, “indeterminate.”
Robert Morris speaks, as Simone Forti listens attentively (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The influence of narrative, Morris revealed, came from Marcel Duchamp, in particular the focus on text and language found in Robert Lebel’s 1959 book on the French-born artist.5 For Morris, Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) represents process—materials and their transformation—through a puerile story about the proverbial bride and nine bachelors, a metaphor, Morris said, of the Artist screwing Art to become Famous. Morris also admitted the influence of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) when creating works like Three Rulers (1962), for which he estimated imperial measurements by eye. The hand-drawn inch was intentionally a “mistake,” Morris said, claiming that Duchamp had become the “new standard of measurement” for artists.
The classic gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964, Morris said, “were competently made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhibitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some point there are no originals of these,” he noted. “There are only reproductions. Nobody [back then] wanted to hear that.” One time he sent assembly instructions for the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offended me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” These sculptures presented preexisting forms in the world, Morris explained, such as columns, benches, and gates; he also used materials other than wood. Although fiberglass works well for the curves of a boat, the artist said he was disappointed with the material’s response to edges, which became frayed. “It was a mistake” to use the material, he said, “but it has a certain quality that’s different from plywood.”
For a private exhibition at SurroundArt in Brooklyn in 2012 and a public exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Manhattan in 2014, Morris instructed fabricators to use quality woods such as walnut, cherry, oak, poplar, European beach, and maple when making replicas of older work—or in his words, “recent work that recollects earlier objects.” For example, Box for Standing went from pine in 1961 to walnut in 2011, and Wheels (2012), first made in 1963 with street lumber, was reconstructed in cherry wood at a slightly larger scale. These fabrications are obviously salable pieces for private collectors and museums, but Weiss and Robinson didn’t engage Morris about these cash cows. Instead, the artist offered an alternative view: “I have a compulsion to revisit some of these things.”
New York Art Strike, 1970
During the audience Q&A, a woman sitting behind me pestered Morris with several questions about Duchamp, which the artist answered with good nature. “Did Duchamp really smoke a cigar?” was the last one she got in before the library’s representative, Arezoo Moseni, judiciously cut her off. When an artist stood to lament (in a kind of calm hysteria) the state of the New York art world today—the dispersion of artistic centers, the lack of easy living, and finding a voice in an art world in which everything has seemingly been done—Morris recanted a story about the New York Art Strike, which took place outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 22, 1970, when approximately five hundred people sat on the steps to protest war, racism, and repression. After the ten-hour event ended, a few stragglers remained to clean up the steps. While sweeping up cigarette butts, the artist Carl Andre remarked to Morris, “You never know how good an artist you are, but you always know how good a sweeper you are.” Morris said that life was hard back then but leisurely so: you could see your friends and think about things. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the artist declared, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” It’s certainly unfortunate we don’t have that kind of time today. And although this story sidestepped the audience member’s concerns, Morris seemed to suggest that she work at her own pace and within her own competencies.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Similarly, speakers at any level of experience must simply get over their fear of amplification. Likewise, academics should be required to learn about microphones, projectors, and PowerPoint as an integral part of their jobs.
3 During this time Morris also made what he called performance switches. A fourth body of work was the set of boxy plywood structures first exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1964.
4 From the audience, Forti recalled that Morris had made two boxes; he only remembered making one.
5 Lebel’s book was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton in that same year. Duchamp’s notes from The Green Box were published in 1960.
Christopher Howard, founder and chief critic for In Terms Of, delivered the following untitled talk on a panel at the 2014 Open Engagement conference. The discussion, which was moderated by Chelsea Haines and included presentations by Sandra de la Loza and Juliana Driever, looked at new directions in writing about social practice from diverse perspectives.
Writing for Socially Engaged Art Friday, May 16, 2014 Open A.I.R. Workshops 2014 Open Engagement
Queens Museum, New York City Building, Queens Museum Theater, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, New York
Artists, writers, and curators discuss socially engaged art in Creative Time Reports and on several blogs hosted by the nonprofit organization A Blade of Grass. Over the past two months, the blog for Open Engagement has published daily responses to questions about social practice, and I’m sure we will read more about what happens at this three-day conference in the coming weeks, adding to the growing body of literature on socially engaged art.
One could argue that participatory art probably generates more passionate debate than other form of art—although flipping through any art magazine or browsing any art blog would indicate otherwise. Traditional genres such as painting, sculpture, photography, and video still grab the lion’s share of attention, and reviews of socially engaged art rarely appear in the reviews section proper.
Still, socially engaged art is totally mainstream. Last fall, for example, Artforum magazine, generally accepted as the pinnacle of art writing, published several major essays, including “Limits of Control,” Felicity Scott’s text on Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (2012) and other immersive environments, followed by several pieces on Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) and a reassessment of Andrea Fraser’s untitled sex video from 2003, which isn’t quite social practice as we generally understand it but which embodies many of the same issues confronting the field.1
A view of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument (2013) at Forest Houses in Bronx, New York (photograph by the New York Observer)
Last month ARTnews published major exposés on social practice, Carolina A. Miranda’s “How the Art of Social Practice Is Changing the World, One Row House at a Time,” and this month’s Art in America has a pair of essays on the genre: on the artist Pedro Reyes and three architectural firms that involve communities in their process. The academic journal October has published several of Bishop’s key essays and devoted its Fall 2012 issue to Occupy Wall Street. In the popular press, articles have been published in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and many other news websites that aren’t art-oriented.
Considering all this activity, important questions arise: Are we content with the writing? Are we satisfied with the level of discourse? It depends on whom you ask. Many articles fret about documentation, about aesthetics, about experience, fussing over whether or not social practice is capital A art. Personally, I find such conversations to be uninteresting and unhelpful. My definition of art is elastic, expansive, and inclusive. Maybe I’m easy to please. But I fully recognize the need to keep having these conversations.
The result has been a series of largely unproductive debates over the epistemological status of this work, most of which entails variations of the same simplistic opposition between a naïve social art practice, associated with the evils of humanism or pastoral sentimentality, and a theoretically rigorous, politically sophisticated avant-garde artistic practice.
Often the conversation revolves around the ethical and political position of the artist, and how much the artist seizes or relinquishes power. I’ve found too much finger pointing and hair splitting in this strain of writing, which can be intensely puritanical.
So how do writers sort out the good from the bad, or the worthwhile from the inconsequential? Where does a critic—or a viewer or a participant—draw the line and evaluate a project? “Does it work?” offers one person. “Is it useful?” states another. These are two possible directions, but there are many more. A writer can discuss socially engaged art—or any form of art—through many lenses: the history of art, contemporaneous art practices, literature, music, politics, the social sciences, economics, religion—through anything, really, and that’s what great about art, and what’s fun writing about art. The only prescriptions I would suggest for a writer is: research your subject thoroughly, try to say something new, and always question received wisdom.
In the same e-flux Journal article, Kester encouraged writers to take a long view of social practice. He described a “field-based approach, in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic, and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there…. When does the work begin and when does it end?”
This is a good approach that is typical of historians and certain kinds of journalists writing long-form articles, but not really the methods of critics, reporters, and bloggers, whose publications require fresh content daily. When writing about a work of socially engaged art, it’s important to talk to the artist, the participants, the passers-by, the institutional organizers, the funders—whoever might have been involved in or witnessed a project. Consult the published record. Consult as many sources as you can. Don’t just rely on your reactions.
Participants in Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Street (2013) in Brooklyn, New York (photograph by Nicola Goode)
The history of art is far from static—it changes when new discoveries and connections are made. Moreover, a single review is a discrete piece of writing, never the final word, and one response at a given point in time. Would you get a sense of the 2014 Whitney Biennial if you just read one New York Times review and nothing else? Of course not. But read five, ten, twenty pieces—published over many months—and you’d get a good really sense of the reaction to the exhibition. The same goes for Suzanne Lacy’s Between the Door and the Stoop (2013) and Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, which generated many written responses in print and online. It would be fantastic if writers would return to Forest Houses in the South Bronx, where the monument was sited, and talk to people who had been there last summer. Or talk to the attendees who live elsewhere, or to Dia Art Foundation employees. I’m hopeful this will be done, and we’ll eventually get a better understanding of long-term implications of the work.
I’ve been a practicing art critic in New York for ten years, reviewing exhibitions for print and online publications and also writing the occasional essay, but I haven’t written much on socially engaged art. Perhaps a parallel project is something that I’ve been engaged with for a few years.
A self-published blog called In Terms Of publishes criticism of live speaking engagements such as lectures, panels, conversations, symposia, and the like, concentrating on events in New York City (but not exclusively). Public programs have existed for decades, yet the rapid increase of such events over the past ten years, as well as their standing in the art world, is astounding. An art exhibition today is inconceivable without an attendant calendar of events. Furthermore, live speaking engagements constitute a core part of the mission of libraries, bookstores, universities, and cultural centers. Since much contemporary art—not just social practice—depends on dialogue and conversation, the need for informed commentary on lectures and panels is tremendous but underdeveloped.
In Terms Of has examined talks with a wide range of players: artists, art historians, curators, critics, and students, as well as scholars in the related disciplines of literature, philosophy, architecture, and design. One recent post examined the intersection of aesthetics and politics generated from a panel of artists and activists that was moderated by the author of a book called 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. Another five-part series covered a one-day conference on curatorial authorship in art exhibitions, which featured historians, curators, and artists from around the United States. A third post explored the notion of critique in contemporary art through an analysis of a lecture by the installation artist Mika Tajima. Events outside the art world are also important: I’ve written about the contributors to an anthology of feminist comics, the author of a book that historicizes the Riot Grrrl movement, a former New York Times columnist on ethics, and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, as well as the occasional forays into economics, politics, and law.
I consider texts in In Terms Of to be experimental, not in the avant-garde sense but rather because I’m drawing from multiple genres: basic reporting, investigative journalism, art criticism, newspaper editorials, polemical prose, book reviews, art-historical research, and so on. Most of the time I follow the chronological presentation of the speaker or panelists, but not always, and that’s one thing with which I constantly struggle. After attending an event and taking scrupulous notes, I conduct research and interject my own responses into the written narrative. If the event was recorded and the video posted online, I’ll watch parts or all of it.
I don’t approach live speaking engagements as art and would have a good laugh if you tried to convince me that a panel is a “performance of language.” I have no problem, though, stating that the overall goal for In Terms Of is to publish “socially engaged writing.”
What kind of writing do social-practice artists want, if they want it at all? Do they need a fatter CV and bigger portfolio to establish professional credentials for job applications? Do they need publicity that will help them get a grant to fund the next project? How about clips to show mom and dad to justify the frivolous and expensive master’s degree? It still feels good to see your name in print, right? In a larger sense, are social-practice artists looking for a silver-bullet treatise, a text that defines and validates their work, something like Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” or Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”? You tell me.
I would assume that any artist would want feedback on his or her work, something that acknowledges their effort and legitimizes their work. Not as approval—after all, an artist doesn’t work for his or her critics. But the work cannot exist by itself. It must be supported by an audience and by participants, through spoken and written words, through memories and feelings, with some level of intellectual satisfaction and aesthetic fulfillment. Will there be good writing about socially engaged art? Most emphatically yes. Will there be bad writing? Without a doubt. Will some writers miss the point? Sure, but others will get certainly get it.
In Terms Of count: 0 (naturally).
1 See the table of contents of the November 2013 issue of Artforum for links to the articles on Hirschhorn and Fraser.
This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fourth texts.
Discussion and Response
Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
Center for the Humanities
Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Dieter Roelstraete on the left and David Joselit on his left (photograph by Christopher Howard)
To conclude the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” two speakers—a curator and an art historian—offered their thoughts on the day’s events. Dieter Roelstraete, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, spoke polemically about the conference theme, wanting his remarks to be “a case and a plea” for a curatorial attitude that “shouldn’t be ashamed of its aesthetic ambitions and its aesthetic aspirations.” Roelstraete first declared that conversations regarding antagonistic tensions between artists and curators, and regarding questions of power, fatigue him. “For me,” he boldly stated, “the practice of exhibition making is really an artistic endeavor.” As a curator coming to the profession through writing (after being trained as a philosopher), Roelstraete thinks of exhibitions as essays, and he considers group exhibitions as “spatial writing—not with ink, not with computers—but with objects.” It is easy for artists to be curators, he said, but it’s still taboo for curators to be artists. He wants to challenge this taboo.
Thankfully he stopped short of calling himself an artist. While I agree that curatorial work is highly creative labor and that the essay format for it is a productive conceit, organizing exhibitions is not art. Curatorial work and artistic labor share many aesthetic elements, such as rhythm and symmetry, as Roelstraete pointed out. Further, he said, curatorial work involves building “an aesthetically compelling argument,” which curators “attempt to master by trial and error.” His observation that “curating is the art of hanging pictures,” however, earned a hiss from an audience member. In fact, this same person—I think it was a he—kept hissing at comments throughout the conference’s final session. Maybe this hiss was intended to be a laugh.
In contrast to Roelstraete’s passionate approach, his session colleague, David Joselit, professor of art history at the Graduate Center, commented briefly on several points raised during the conference. Like many in the art world, he has noticed that curating is everywhere, from the interiors of co-op buildings to products in upscale grocery stores. He defined curatorial work as “adding value through the assembly of a group of things” and “the convergence of production and display.” Joselit offered a notion of “curating in the expanded field,” which consisted of “aggregating, assembling, curating.” Selection, he continued, has become an aesthetic skill, which creates what he called a condition—not a turn. Joselit also observed that embedded curatorial activities with artists—such as Lynne Cooke’s rapport with Rosemarie Trockel and how Josh Kline includes his friends in his shows—may combat the scale of an overwhelmingly expansive art world. The practice, he noted, is not without ethical dilemmas and intellectual contradictions.
Dieter Roelstraete with a two-finger muse; David Joselit with palms-down authority
Though Joselit felt that “the idea of an artist’s career as an object is very interesting,” he approved of Carol Bove’s objection to the attitude that everything an artist does is the work. Suggesting that the impresario curator is a European cultural model, Joselit posited that American curators are caught between the goals of museum public relations (to draw audiences) and the needs of an institution’s funders, trustees, and, to a lesser extent, corporations and public funding. Like several other conference speakers, Joselit rubber-stamped the idea that artists are delegated to do what regular curators cannot or will not do.
Roelstraete felt it is routine for the “curatoriate” (his term for the professional class) to renovate, reinterpret, reinvigorate, and rejuvenate their institutions’ permanent collection. He agreed with the conference’s keynote speaker, Boris Groys, that everyone—artists, dealers, collectors, museum directors, and even installers—instrumentalizes art in some fashion.
Throughout the duration of the 7th Berlin Biennale, representatives from Occupy and M15 practiced their forms of protest and strategies of involvement on the ground floor of KW
As an example Roelstraete discussed the seventh Berlin Biennial (2012). Even though it was the first one organized by an artist (Artur Żmijewski), the show was reviled and panned, especially by Berlin-based artists. A chief complaint, Roelstraete recalled, was that Żmijewski instrumentalized the art. Reflecting on his own practice, Roelstraete said that he doesn’t conceal his intentions when approaching artists, directly asking them if he can instrumentalize their work. “Maybe they like the idea,” he wondered aloud, “or the museum.” Or maybe artists are desperate for a high-profile exhibition to help boost their careers.
Noting that of the thirty exhibitions listed in the September previews in Artforum, only two were group shows, Roelstraete wondered if the group show is an endangered species.1 Even though he specializes in the thematic exhibition with multiple artists, such as the recently closed The Way of the Shovel (2013–14) at his home institution, the curator acknowledged that his preferred genre presents fundraising and communications troubles; group shows, he added, are also hard to travel. Such anecdotal claims cannot be easily proven, of course, but decisions in the curatorial world are often based on personal experiences. That said, Roelstraete relayed that his first attempt at organizing a solo exhibition (for Chantel Ackerman) was tough and his most difficult project. Later on he offered a tantalizing idea of having six curators organize a solo exhibition.
Toward the end of the session the conversation bounced from topic to topic, with each speaker making brief declarations on this and that. After proclaiming that “writing is the bedrock of curatorial thinking,” Roelstraete asked Joselit for an opinion. “Some arguments can only be made with objects,” the historian replied, which he misses from his academic life. (He was a curator in the 1980s.) Joselit was thankful that academia has provided him with time to write but then tried to explain something called the “counterexhibition,” using Philip Parreno, Rirkirt Tiravanija, and Maurizio Cattelan as examples His concept was not clear.
“I don’t think you can curate a menu,” exclaimed Roelstraete twice, urging that the term only applies to exhibition making. Joselit felt that curators should not withdraw into a defensive “I’m an expert” model. Action and dialogue in contemporary art, he noted, has moved from three-dimensional space but also virtual—and that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot assume that bloggers are amateurs, Joselit let slip.
From the audience Chelsea Haines, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center and a conference organizer, reminded the panelists how curators need only posses a generalized knowledge of art, which lessens the dependence on a doctorate or a curatorial-studies degree. People in the art world are nimble, she said, and can learn stuff in bits and pieces. If a curator, Haines continued, wants to bring an outside interest into the museum—here thinking of Roelstraete’s The Way of the Shovel—he or she does not need a PhD in archaeology. Joselit agreed and disagreed with this suggestion: the curatorial rhetoric of constructing an argument in space and with objects, he said, can be learned and developed—it’s not always intuitive.
In his opening remarks Roelstraete observed that no conference speaker had discussed curatorial roles at art fairs, a gap that I also noticed and wished was addressed. In the previous session Kline talked about organizing do-it-yourself exhibitions in unconventional spaces, but the conference largely addressed curatorial roles in traditional art institutions. Haines’s comments about education struck me as particularly interesting: while I agree with her that formal training isn’t always needed, my unscientific observations of employment classifieds for open curatorial positions tell another story—museums and university galleries “prefer” an applicant with a PhD, which is to say that those without one may be unduly overlooked. Even a master’s degree in curatorial studies at Bard College will only get you so far. If a doctorate becomes the baseline standard, the curatorial profession may become out of reach for “outsiders” (such as Robert Nickas or Joshua Decter, to name two from an older generation) seeking institutional positions. To break from convention, a museum can always call on artists to provide an unconventional approach to exhibition making. To have only these two options—academic and artist—precludes a wide realm of curatorial viewpoints.
In Terms Of count: 1½.
1 Discounting the introductory section that lists seven biennials, the seasonal preview in the September 2013 issue of Artforum listed nine group shows among the forty-four selected for the section.
This essay is the fourth of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, third, and fifth texts.
The Artist-Curator Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Installation view of Kazimir Malevich’s work in 0.10 (1915)
What happens when artists act as curators, organizing exhibitions for museums, commercial galleries, and other venues? Well, they become curators, if for one show only. Is this new? Is it a trend? What advantages and complications result when an artist takes on a different professional role? The third session for the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” simply titled “The Artist-Curator,” explored these ideas and more.
In some ways, the artist as curator is as old as the curatorial professional itself, which developed in tandem with the rise of the modern public museum. Or so I imagine, since someone had to work in the Louvre and at the British Museum two hundred years ago. As the previous session demonstrated, artists organized exhibitions—usually of their own work—in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it seems little research has been conducted on curators from that time.
The current session’s moderator, Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center, named a handful of significant artist-curated exhibitions from the last one hundred years: 0.10 in Russia, which featured works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Lyubov Popova (1915–16); an exhibition of Surrealist objects in the Parisian gallery of Charles Ratton, a dealer of so-called primitive art (1936); Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox, held in several museums across the United States (1969–70); Richard Hamilton’s TheArtist’s Eye in London (1978); the Artist’s Choice series at the Museum of Modern Art, whose inaugural event was a curatorial contribution from Scott Burton (1989); Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable at the Brooklyn Museum (1990); and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which features an artist, Michelle Grabner, among the three curators.
Installation view of Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox at the RISD Museum in 1970
A talk by the curator Florence Ostende titled “Exhibitions by Artists: Another Occupation?” added another exhibition to Musteata’s list, the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1938. Ostende then explained how a demand by the Art Workers’ Coalition in 1969 for a committee of artists with curatorial responsibilities at MoMA was realized (in part) twenty years later through Artist’s Choice; she also noted two exhibitions by the artist Philippe Parreno, Snow Dancing (1995) and Alien Seasons (2002) as being projects that combined aesthetic and curatorial practices. For an important group show called The Uncanny (1993), the artist Mike Kelley rigorously researched his subject and used art-historical methodology, she said. Ostende also cited Jean-Luc Godard’s self-directed installation of Travel(s) in Utopia, Jean-Luc Godard 1946–2006, In Search of a Lost Theorem (2006) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and its abandoned predecessor, Collage(s) de France: Archaeology of the Cinema, as well as the Museum of American Art in Berlin, as examples of curatorial projects by creative types.
Acting as curators, Ostende told us, artists can subvert rules, turn things upside down, and present a “carnival that mocks the king.” While that may be generally true, and artists having a voice in an institution as powerful as MoMA is certainly important, it’s wrong to assume an artist curator would by nature resist conservative and safe approaches to exhibitions and challenge established categories and histories. After all, think about how often artists, when invited to give a lecture, follow a standard chronological method of presenting their work. It’s not that artists are inherently more imaginative and have more freedom than professional curators. I would expect an art exhibition organized by a lawyer, a plumber, or a biologist to be just as unconventional, even radically so. (Or not, considering the professional basketball player Shaquille O’Neal’s Size DOES Matter in 2010.) Rather, I would argue, institutional conventions, constraints, and inflexibility are factors that inhibit the organizer of an exhibition.
Ostende dated what she called the “decay of the empowerment of the curator” to the 1990s, which is, oddly enough, the decade in which the art world witnessed the rise of empowered curator, if we are to believe the traditional narrative. Perhaps Ostende referred to scholarly minded, museum-based curators in dusty institutions, not to roving agents such as Harald Szeeman and Walter Hopps or globetrotting stars like Okwui Enwezor and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
In a talk titled “Gossip and Ridicule,” the sculptor Carol Bove positioned the artist’s career as a game to be played but wholeheartedly objected to the growing myth of a career as a single project, most crassly realized through the idea that everything an artist does is an artwork, based on the fact that he or she is an artist. In this situation, Bove said, the artist’s life is colonized by the career. “When the going gets professional,” she remarked, “the weird go away.” Her thoughts were especially provocative considering the erosion taking place between Americans’ work and personal lives, many are increasingly expected to be reachable after hours, in addition to the daily nine-to-five schedule.
Bove also said that “lying”—which I interpreted as withholding the truth rather than deliberate deception—is something that artists are allowed to do. Curators, on the other hand, with their budgets, boards, scholarship, and facts, lack this luxury. Nevertheless, she continued, curators lust after the looseness, personality, and potential for abuse that an artist can give to an artwork. Like Ostende, Bove articulated certain qualities that an artist curator can bring to an exhibition, but I reiterate that if a professional curator wants to organize more interesting exhibitions, he or she should closely examine his or her institutional situation and precipitate ways in which that situation can be changed, in both the short and long term.
Installation view of Carol Bove’s restaging of a 1993 gallery exhibition of work by Felix González-Torres
Bove’s sculpture, comprising wall-mounted shelves with decades-old books and small objects (stones, feathers) or composed of subdued, elegant juxtapositions of sizable pieces of wood, steel, and concrete, could be described as having a curatorial nature. Her intent with these works, however, is making art, but she was recently involved with selections for Felix González-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form (2010–11), a retrospective of work by the late Cuban American artist held at museums in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. The lead curator Elena Filipovic had organized the show at all three venues but, halfway through its duration, invited three artists—Bove, Danh Vo, and Tino Sehgal—to reinstall the works according to their own ideas. At Bove’s venue, the Fondation Beyeler, she restaged González-Torres’s 1991 show at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Every Week There Is Something Different, in which he switched out the works once a week. González-Torres was not the first to produce a solo show that resembled a group outing, Bove acknowledged, but he provided a template for it. And the result? “It looks exactly like curating,” she said.
Installation view of The Jewel Thief at the Tang Museum in 2010
For his talk, Ian Berry, curator of Skidmore College’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, declared that authorial roles shift even within a single project. A few years ago he worked with the artist Jessica Stockholder—an artist whose sculpture and installation are as much curated as they are constructed and painted—on The Jewel Thief (2010–11). This group exhibition of abstract painting, half of which came from the museum’s permanent collection and most of which was contemporary, was built from their in-the-studio conversations about the genre; it also emphasized the intersection of art with architecture and decoration. Berry said that he and Stockholder had fun choosing “hot and cold” artists, and works were grouped, hung, and installed in unconventional and playful ways. For her contribution, Stockholder created a multipurpose plywood platform that was used as an event space, a viewing space, and seating. You could say that she literalized the metaphoric “platform” fetishized by so many curators.
Josh Kline said he was asked to discuss ProBio (2013), a group exhibition on art, biology, and technology that he organized for MoMA PS1 last summer, but he hijacked his own talk to sort through the challenges emerging artists face, in particular those who curate. Artists today, he said, must become artist curators—which he explained through his own experiences. Working a day job at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)—where he was director of public programs—Kline perceived himself as a curator who secretly made art. At one point he wondered if he would leave EAI for an institutional job or to open his own space, but was discouraged after the Great Recession began in 2008, when many galleries had either closed or become less experimental.
Installation view of Josh Kline’s work in ProBio (2013) at MoMA PS1
Kline was also suspicious of trajectory of emerging artists in the twenty-first century: gaining visibility at MFA degree shows, getting discovered, participating in group shows, getting a two-person show, and earning that coveted solo show in a gallery before moving onto art fairs and the “biennial circuit.” Prior models of career building didn’t cross his mind as a viable option. “Artist-run spaces,” Kline commented, “were something that happened in the seventies,” and he didn’t identify similar activities in New York—including Apartment Show, Real Fine Arts, Soloway, and Cleopatra’s—with that history. In 2009 he curated the inaugural exhibition (Nobodies New York) at 179 Canal, a space run by the artist, curator, and dealer Margaret Lee, whose initial idea was to throw art parties as an effort to help the landlord find tenants for the building in a bad real-estate market. (Lee’s studio was in the building.) During 179 Canal’s year programming, a scene developed, and other shows, such as Skin So Soft (2011) at Gresham’s Ghost, followed. Several of these artists, including Kline, now show at Lee’s critically acclaimed commercial gallery, 47 Canal.
The young artist-curators that Kline knows have worked as arts administrators, artist’s assistants, and art handlers or on gallery staffs—they have experience that comes from the real world, not expensive MFA programs. Those in his group include their own work in their curated shows, a common practice that some still find controversial or unethical. For ProBio, Kline gathered work by like-minded artists—including his own—exploring the dismembered, distributed, posthuman body through ergonomics, bacteria, depictions of the insides of the body, and use of nonarchival materials. (He also noted that this work differs from art about the body from the 1970s, which he described as dematerialized and antimarket.) Concluding his remarks, Kline finally explained that the title of his presentation, “Conservative Curation,” came from a traditional view of organizing exhibitions based on visits to artist’s studios, the interests of artists, and the “discovery of works that speak to our times.” He also believes that curation is a “tool to be used by artists” to present their work “on their own terms.”
DIS, Emerging Artist, 2013, video with color and sound, 1:04
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about a difference between an artist-curated exhibition and an artist’s installation work? The Kabakovs make a distinction, Ostende replied, but the lines are blurry elsewhere. The answer can be found, I think, not with a silver-bullet answer—which so many seem to want—but rather on a case-by-case basis. Kline does not consider his curatorial work to be art but acknowledges that Lee absorbs works of art by others into her exhibitions. Regarding The Jewel Thief, Berry affirmed that Stockholder was clear about what was and wasn’t her art.
The panelists discussed the curator as the primary creative force in an exhibition, eclipsing the roles of artists. Kline faulted graduates from curatorial-studies programs (like Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies) as those coming up with curator-centered exhibitions. He and his peers, he reemphasized, work in a different way, generating ideas from conversations in the studio. Berry said we learn interesting things from auteur curators, just like we find value in chronologically oriented shows. From the audience João Ribas suggested another curatorial genealogy—the collecting strategies of Alfred Barnes and Isabella Stewart Gardner—which derive from the nineteenth-century model of the connoisseur. This notion was off topic—Barnes and Gardner are not artists.
The panelists, from left: Natalie Musteata, Josh Kline, Ian Berry, Carol Bove, and Florence Ostende
A man in the audience said that he knows an artist who works as an institutional curator, and his dealers are telling him to stop. Another man suggested that artists become curators if they can’t find jobs. Someone asked a question about power, transparency, cronyism, and the decisions that lead to the work on the walls. The level of transparency, Berry replied, depends on the institution. Thankfully someone asked a positive question, about the pleasures of curating, to which Bove happily responded: “I feel like my entire MO is ‘look what I found!’”
As the session concluded, I thought about the anxiety many people have over what is and isn’t art, or what’s art and what’s curatorial work. It’s the intent of the artists, the panelists would probably agree. And it’s not too strenuous to make a distinction between roles. Reading and hearing about the debates covered in this session (and the overall conference) for many years has made me realized that scholars—not artists—are typically the ones who fret about creating categories, which is understandable considering their role as arbiters of history. What is strange is that these same scholars consistently often avoid challenging received wisdom regarding the authorial role of curators. When you break things down with case studies, as this and the other sessions did, you realize that generalizations many hold to be true are proved false again and again.
This text is the third of three that reviews the first World Art Market Conference, held in 1976. Read the first and second reports.
First World Art Market Conference Friday and Saturday, October 29–30, 1976 New School of Social Research, New York
Artworkers News also covered the Art Market Conference. Its report [from Gerald Marzorati] featured other speakers and issues, while showing that what seems witty to one reporter may appear distraught to another—although a bounder is still a bounder.
Speakers: Milton Esterow, Thomas Hoving, Thomas Messer, Clyde Newhouse, Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, Ruth Braunstein, George LeMaistre, Rubin Gorewitz, Deborah Remington, Robert Indiana, and others
“Works of art of course cannot be compared to stocks and bonds,” warned Milton Esterow as he opened the first day’s events.
The keynote address, delivered by Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bounded quickly across the history of museum art buying in the United States and settled on the future role of the art museum. According to Hoving, whose own museum has escaped the financial crunch plaguing art institutions in the 1970s (the Met budget showed a modest surplus this year), all is changing for the better. He foresees an emerging “technotronic era” which will not, as Orwell warned, snuff out creativity, but enhance it.
“Our Western artistic manifestations will tend to diminish in importance, and we will begin to recognize a multiplicity of centers and styles,” he said, adding that the tastes of a few critics and a small group of curators won’t wield the power they do today. Hoving, whose cry for a larger art public and “museum without walls” seemed to leave many in the audience cold, concluded by predicting a greater role for art museums, proclaiming that art could become “the broadest and most powerful communicator” in history.
His exuberant optimism was countered later in the day by the somewhat distraught remarks of Thomas Messer, director of the Guggenheim Museum, who noted that if the economy remains in its present condition, museums might have to forego collecting and concentrate their energies on conservation. “Museum directors may well be institutionalized dealers in the future, trading and deaccessioning to get new works and funds,” Messer said. He has guided all buying and selling at the Guggenheim since the early ’60s and promised to remain “an activist,” seeking services and funds from all available sources.
For the remainder of the opening-day session, two panels discussed specifics of the art market. Though all the dealers agreed that the boom in art buying of the 1960s is over, most hastened to add that the present mood of the market is a healthy one. Members of the panel, who collectively make up what one reporter termed “the sheiks of the oil-on-canvas market,” emphasized the importance of the quality dealer (usually pointing to each other), the seller with a good reputation, and the importance of the dealer to the history of art. “Every great collection has been formed by a dealer,” boasted Clyde Newhouse, president of the Art Dealers Association and third-generation gallery owner.
“They’re a monopoly—it’s that simple,” commented a young art consultant attending the conference as a reporter for Wall Street Weekly. “Price fixing is a given and 100 percent profits are commonplace.”
At the afternoon panel, “What’s Happening in Contemporary Art,” discussion once again centered on the difference between the market of the 1960s and 1970s. “I’m pessimistic,” offered Leo Castelli, who amassed a fortune over the last decade through the sale of works by such contemporary heavyweights as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. “There is art activity,” he added, ignoring the audience’s mock sympathy, “but no art business.”
Ivan Karp, calling himself the only “downtown” gallery owner on the panel, accused fellow dealers of ignoring the surge of creativity among younger, lesser-known artists, whose work Karp claimed to spend “four hours a day” examining. The most outspoken member of the panel, Karp also denounced the auctioning of art (“the process distorts prices”), the role of critics, and the validity of the conference itself, since, in his words “there is no art market—my artists don’t sell a thing.” Karp, unlike many of his peers, didn’t reap a fortune in Abstract Expressionism and Pop art and therefore had no reason to bemoan the current scene.
The four out-of-town dealers from Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and San Francisco made few comments, as talk centered on New York gossip. The one issue which finally involved the entire group stemmed from Castelli’s assertion that it remains “essential” for all artists who take their work seriously to come to Manhattan.
“Nonsense. I just don’t believe that,” snapped Ruth Braunstein of San Francisco, who had drawn applause for noting the lack of women speakers. “If an artist feels he should be in New York, then he should be. If not, that’s fine too.”
The audience seemed more interested in hot tips and inside information than discussion of trends and comparisons. “What’s the best buy in modern American Art?” read one question put to Castelli, who refused to respond to that and others he said could only be answered speculatively. Most dealers noted, however, that such advice is usually given to customers as part of the rationale for buying a particular work.
“Let’s face it,” said a young Parsons art student working as an usher. “These characters paid a couple hundred bucks to learn how to make more. It’s no different from buying a scratch sheet at the racetrack.”
The second day began with an address by George A. LeMaistre, director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Outlining the expanding role of banks in the art market, he said most banks remain hesitant to loan money for purchasing art. He listed some ways bankers’ fears might be assuaged. For instance, one Chicago bank, rather than lending exclusively to collectors, extends credit to artists themselves, usually to sculptors for cost of materials.
In the afternoon panel on artists’ rights, discussion, heated at times, focused on recent legislation in California guaranteeing artists a 5 percent royalty on work resold for over $1,000. Rubin Gorewitz, accountant and adviser to artists and art groups, said the law, which he helped draft, “will help the artist and help everyone else five times more.”
Artist Deborah Remington doubted this, pointing out that there is no mechanism for enforcement. ‘‘I’d have to sue for my money,” she said, adding angrily, “It’s an elitist law anyway.” Only artists of great stature, “the Chagalls and Mirós,” would benefit, because only they have “secondary markets.” “Where we need help is when the artist is young and struggling,” Remington said, “not after he’s getting six figures.”
Robert Indiana, who spoke little during the royalty law discussion, emphasized that the real issue is the status of the artist in America. “An artist is a nonperson, a nonentity—just look at a museum board and see if you can find an artist. They’re not even accepted by those in the art world.” Indiana also was critical of American copyright laws, which, he said, are the primary hazard for visual artists. “The copyright laws have been the tragedy of my own life,” he lamented, referring to his LOVE painting, which was reproduced in thousands of posters without his permission and without royalties.
Both artists agreed that the country needs a federal “cabinet level” department of cultural affairs to give art a higher priority in the national life.
In Terms Of count: unknown
Source
Written by Gerald Marzorati, this review appeared in Artworkers News 6, no. 7 (November 1976); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 49–50. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
