In Terms Of

Tag: Brooklyn Museum

  • Make American Art Great Again

    “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art” with James Little
    Wednesday, November 15, 2017
    Lunchtime Lecture Series, Art Students League, Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, New York

    James Little (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience gathered in the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery of the Art Students League, a midtown Manhattan art school founded in 1875, was mostly middle-aged folks and senior citizens, with a scattering of younger people who were probably students. They arrived to see and hear James Little, an abstract painter and professor, give a lunchtime talk. I was unaware of him prior to the event—I did not know if he was a critic, an artist, or some other art professional before showing up. Born in Tennessee in 1952, Little earned his BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art in 1974 and two years later received an MFA from Syracuse University. June Kelly Gallery has shown his work since the late 1980s.

    Today’s wordily titled topic, “The Lack of Constructive Analytical Criticism and the Proliferation of Descriptive Analysis in Contemporary Art,” felt like a time warp—meaning Little’s complaint was decades old. He characterized the current situation of contemporary art critics as a decline of quality that he likened to an “unedited book.” Critical debate, he claimed, has diminished since Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), Hilton Kramer (1928–2012), and Robert Hughes (1938–2012) were actively writing. An attitude of confusion was manifest in the most recent Whitney Biennial, he said, which included a 2016 artwork by Dana Schutz, whom he referred to as “Schultz,” that caused a controversy. Protesters accused Schutz, a white woman, of playing around with—and profiting from—the suffering of African Americans. “There was a big uproar about the fact that she did a painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket,” Little said. “The whole time, nobody said anything about the quality of the work. It was never mentioned…. What I recognized was that the critics weren’t stepping up, the artists weren’t stepping up, and we were just accepting this, accepting what they were feeding us, with no debate, with no criticism.” Little’s speaking style avoided complete sentences or thoughts. The supporting arguments behind his statements lacked substance.

    Dana Schutz, Open Casket, 2016, oil on canvas, 39 x 53 in. (artwork © Dana Schutz)

    I was puzzled and wondered how much reading Little had done on the controversy. Coco Fusco avoided the topic of quality in a Hyperallergic essay, focusing instead on censorship. Calvin Tomkins, though, noted the “deftly brushed colors at the top” of the painting in his New Yorker profile last April. Elsewhere in the long read Tomkins wrote, “The horror is conveyed in painterly ways that, to me, make it seem more tragic than the photograph, because the viewer is drawn in, not repelled.” A New Republic piece by Josephine Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye compared the painting’s formalism with its subject matter; it also contextualized Open Casket within Schutz’s oeuvre, noting the artist is not known for her solemnity. These three examples are the first ones I read while writing this review. If I had followed up with dozens more articles on the subject, I’d surely uncover further discussion of the painting’s formal qualities. Little declared that criticism is essential, that it improves art, provides direction for artists, and even offers them something to resist. Criticism can only do these things if a person reads it, which Little seems not to have done. I wondered if he actually saw Schutz’s painting in person instead of online.

    Chris Ofili’s painting Holy Virgin Mary (1996), in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, provoked New York’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani to call for censorship and defunding. “Nobody talked about the quality of that painting,” Little exclaimed. “Nobody said whether it was a good painting or a bad painting. Or if it was despicable. They didn’t say that. He made the guy famous. And that’s my point.” Later during the Q&A, Little agreed with an audience member that if Schutz had the skills, fewer people would have complained. “Dana Schultz was one of shock value. And she got it. She was in the right place to get shock value, and she got it in the Whitney. If she was a better painter, it could have been different. If it had been something, a personal experience of hers, it could have been different.”

    The matter of a white woman painting a lynched black boy had little to do with the work. For Little, closeness to the subject matter is important. That an artist needs to experience his or her subject matter firsthand is an odd stance to take, considering that few painters in the Italian Renaissance witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus Christ or the beheading of John the Baptist. Maybe Little meant that an artist depicting current or recent events should bear witness to them, implicating an early text-based work by the artist Glenn Ligon, who riffed on the “I am a man” posters created in the wake of the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, which Little lived through as a teenager—though his recollection of basic facts of the event were faulty in several important ways. Nevertheless, Little was there but the appropriator was not, and therefore Ligon trivialized the situation.

    Edouard Manet, The Dead Toreador, probably 1864, oil on canvas, 29 7/8 x 60 3/8 in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Little paired a slide of Open Casket with a work by Mary Cassatt—the first in a series of comparisons of art influenced by pop culture, the media, consumerism, and novelty (which was bad) with art connected to tradition (definitely a good thing). Contrasted here next were Paul Cézanne’s apples and Carl Andre’s bricks, then Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador (1864). Little showed an installation of rocks by Joseph Beuys called The End of the Twentieth Century (1983–85) and a painting from Claude Monet’s Haystacks series (1890–91). Little wondered how we got from one to the other without any critical debate, positive or negative. Once again, I was perplexed about this alleged dearth of debate. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the evolution modern art. Bringing this specific painting by Manet was confusing. The artist had painted a bull in the picture, but critics wrote that it looked like a rat. Manet cut down the canvas and saved only the bullfighter. Does Little support critics having the power to force an artist drastically alter even a finished and exhibited painting?

    Little periodically read passages from the writings of Greenberg, Kramer, and Hughes—critics whom the art world generally recognizes as having conservative views. The quotes were meant to buttress the artist’s “I am not a Duchampian” stance. Fair enough. Not every artist should embrace the readymade. Little further articulated his position: “I don’t think idea is enough to constitute art. I think art has to have vision, content—emotive content. It has to serve a purpose to humanity. It’s essential for our spiritual and mental health.” For Little, Andre is minor art, and “minor art is not major art.” Minor art that proliferates today is evidence of a cultural decline. “When art gets better, everything else gets better.” In other words, the relationship of art to life is a matter of trickle-up economics.

    Jacob Lawrence, panel 35 of The Migration Series: They left the South in great numbers. They arrived in the North in great numbers, 1940–41, casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18 in. (artwork © Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation)

    Little said he felt nothing upon seeing Duchamp’s urinal or Beuys’s Felt Suit in a museum, but he marveled at Manet’s fallen bullfighter. “I had an aesthetic experience,” he said of his episode. “What I mean by aesthetic experience is the experience that you have when you see a great piece of art. It’s a life-changing thing.” Little’s definition of the aesthetic experience was wholly subjective, even tautological. You not only know it when you see it, but it’s completely explains itself. “Rembrandt is Rembrandt” was what Little stated to demonstrate the self-evidence of greatness. Art “has to offer something,” he continued. “It has to enrich my life and my experience in order for it to be art. It has to give me something I didn’t have in the first place. It has to take me further along in this journey.”

    The three photographs comprising Ai Weiwei’s action Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) fail to meet his criteria for art, but paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1941) do. Lawrence’s paintings speak for themselves as art, Little said, through a connection to the past, their color and composition, and their narrative. “An idea alone does not create an aesthetic experience,” Little reiterated. “An idea alone does not create art.” Little was agog at why Ai would drop a two-thousand-year-old Chinese vase, when a quick Google search would have turned up the answer. Sometimes an artwork doesn’t reveal itself immediately. Don’t we check the museum wall label to see who the subject of a portrait is? Does the iconography of ancient sculpture of Egypt or the Americas reveal itself to a nonspecialist? It needs interpretation.

    Cady Noland, Industry Park, 1991, zinc-plated steel chain link fence, 100¼ x 216 x 3 in. (artwork © Cady Noland; photographer unknown)

    I sympathize with Little’s disbelief that a destructive act can be creative. I agree that rigorous formal training is a necessary precursor for a certain kind of artist—but not all artists. What puzzles me is how Little started the lecture by lamenting critical discourse, but then began condemning art he doesn’t like and pleading for a return to reason. I understood where he was coming from but failed to grasp a coherent argument. A photograph of Cady Noland’s Industry Park (1991), which consists of an unaltered chain-linked fence displayed in a gallery, was projected onto the screen beside him. People don’t see their lives improved by this art, he said. Art needs rigor to make. “We can no longer allow for the public to feed us stuff that we don’t understand, or don’t really matter to us in our daily lives.” Description, novelty, and consumerism has infiltrated criticism, and Little finds the writing of Robert C. Morgan, Karen Wilkin, Mario Naves, and James Panero to alleviate this. Is it because they praise art he likes and denounce art he hates?

    A chain-linked fence does not reach the masses, Little remarked during the Q&A. Noland’s work does not provide an aesthetic experience. It’s only utilitarian. The Art Students League has provided traditional artistic training for decades, he reminded the audience, educating Jackson Pollock, Louis Nevelson, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg. “We can’t throw this [tradition] out the window, you know, because somebody decides they want to go out here and take a chain-linked fence and put it up in the Museum of Modern Art. And we look at it like it’s some, you know, revelation. No, it’s not a revelation! That’s what I’m saying! I’m gonna go get me a chain-linked fence when I leave here, and I’m gonna put it in my backyard. Is there any difference? Well maybe it’s Earth art.” Little has seen art exhibitions of trash swept into a corner—a clichéd insult that is ironically based on real life—and a room full of grocery carts. (Could the latter show be Josh Kline’s recent solo outing at 47 Canal?) Little admitted he was a conservative formalist, which he confidently understands as meaning “I know what I’m doing.” He obviously demands high craft and skill from artists, who make their work by hand, with a vision, and a sense of history. Further, Little feels he belongs more to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to the twenty-first. He does not make art for himself but rather is concerned what others think and feel about it, including his fellow artists.

    An audience member speaks during the Q&A (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the Q&A an audience member asked about the connection between Rembrandt and Pollock. Thomas Hart Benton, Little replied, served as the lineage of formal training, which includes studying classical art and knowing the figure. “Where [Pollock] took it was another place.” Pollock had “developed a relationship with the medium” of paint and expressed himself through paint. Rembrandt was connected to Titian, El Greco, and Leonardo. “Look, if you gonna built a house, would you build it without a foundation? I guess not.” Someone else argued that Duchamp and Beuys attempted a dialogue with the past. “What you just said is right on,” replied Little. “They were trying to do that. I’m saying that they didn’t do it…. The others, they weren’t trying to do it—they did it.” Little returned to Beuys’s Felt Suit. “When I walk past this suit, at the Walker Art Center, it did not do anything for me. That’s just the way it is. It just didn’t do anything for me.” The work presented a conundrum. “Why is this here?” he wondered. “Why is there not an outcry against this art? Critics have failed us. I pray for another Clement Greenberg, and Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes. I pray for it because we don’t get that.” Little contented that we have failed to uphold standards. That “we” includes artists, scholars, curators, museum professionals, and the public. Little was not surprised that art mocking middle-class values has found an audience among the wealthy elite who fund art museums and serve on their boards. One attendee remarked, “Whose interest does that serve?” The lecture thankfully ended before a discussion of collecting practices began.

    Earlier this year Bomb interviewed Little for the magazine’s Oral History Project. “His paintings are guided by intuitive responses to form, color, and feeling,” LeRonn P. Brooks wrote in his introduction to the piece. “This approach is not overly calculated, though its complexity may suggest so.” Little was interviewed by the Brooklyn Rail in 2009 and profiled by ARTnews in 2011. In the latter, he described his process in detail, describing how he applies layers of paint (made from powdered pigment and mixed with varnish and beeswax) to his surfaces to produce a high sheen. Though I disagree with most of what he said, Little’s views did not put me off. In fact, I am curious to see his paintings in person, to understand why he believes the things he does and how his vision for art manifests itself in his own production. I don’t wish to persuade him of accepting the value of Duchamp, Beuys, and Noland. How he feels about his own art is of greater interest and importance.

    In Terms Of count: coming soon.

  • 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

  • Hand Washers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In Terms Of count: 6.

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

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

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

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

    Read

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

    Watch

  • The Carnival That Mocks the King

    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 The Artist’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.

    In Terms Of count: 4.

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  • Curatorial Assistance

    Here and Now: Biennials in the Twenty-First Century
    Friday, March 7, 2014
    Armory Show, Open Forum, Pier 94, New York

    Michelle Grabner counts the beans (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “I’ve been thinking a lot about biennials,” mused the artist Michelle Grabner, seemingly without irony. No kidding—she’s one of three curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, which opened to the public on the day of this panel, held at the Armory Show. “Here and Now: Biennials in the Twenty-First Century,” moderated by the curator and scholar Lynne Cooke, assessed not so much the current state of biennials—of which the Whitney’s signature exhibition is a leading example—but rather demonstrated how she and two other panelists have shaken off what some call “biennial fatigue” to reinvent the form and scope of these large-scale, super-hyped exhibitions that take place around the world every two, three, or more years.

    Cooke had asked her three participants to present on his or her recent projects before opening a conversation among the group. Dan Byers, a curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and cocurator of the 2013 Carnegie International, described the origins of his institution’s showcase as conservative and Western but with a widening scope over the years. He and his two cocurators, Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, approached the task with a group of concerns, a “constellation of ideas,” he called them: the exhibition of artists and an exploration of the museum’s collection, of course, but also a close engagement with the host city and a nutty idea about playgrounds.

    The team started their work, Byers said, two years before opening day, with a blog, Tumblr, and Pinterest that featured scanned photographs of past iterations of the international along with press clippings and other archival material. The curators also rented an apartment in Pittsburgh for hosting dozens of diverse events “to create a community of conversation” in addition to the show, which he said always “lands like a UFO” in Pittsburgh and “leaves for four years.” Byers showed installation photographs and described artists’ works, which made me wish that I had seen the show, which came across as innovative, thoughtful, and dynamic. I couldn’t help but think, though, how many insatiable curators have cannibalized other parts of the museum—public programming, community outreach, digital publishing—that have typically been the purview of specialists in the education department. Yet I appreciate how Byers emphasized the importance of civic space, whether that’s a private museum or a public library, which is conservative position of a different kind.

    Dan Byers discusses biennial politics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Next to speak was Grabner, an artist and occasional curator who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She claimed responsibility for the Whitney Biennial’s fourth floor and, in fact, relayed that the curatorial team for this year, which included Stuart Comer and Anthony Elms, did not collaborate on anything except on the catalogue design. Each person organized his or her own floor at the museum, and for her space Grabner wanted to establish the idea of building a curriculum for a classroom. Many schools hung portraits of presidents in classrooms, so she put up Dawoud Bey’s portrait of Senator Barack Obama, which the Chicago photographer took in 2008 as a fundraiser for the politician’s presidential run.1 Grabner quickly contrasted Bey’s donation to a political cause to the blurring of aesthetics and activism as seen in social-practice art, hinting that the latter pursuit might be self-indulgent or even misguided. One focus for her floor is abstract painting by women, another is materiality and affect theory, another is criticality—though not, she pointed out, critique shot through appropriation and irony. “By the hour the reviews are coming in,” Grabner said, “and they’re not good.” Self-conscious joking aside, the Whitney Biennial “is a structure that never yields positive criticism.” Just like, she added, how President Obama is relentlessly thwarted by Congress.

    Grabner ran through a slide show of her chosen work. One apparent theme is nesting, a type of collaboration that can be either parasitic or symbiotic. The artist Gaylen Gerber, for example, is a “platformist” who makes backdrops to support other people’s work. He will first hang paintings by Trevor Shimizu in his allotted wall space and later present pieces by David Hammons and Sherrie Levine. Elsewhere, Philip Vanderhyden reconstructs People in Pain (1988), a sculpture by Gretchen Bender that fell apart and was discarded after her death in 2004. The Whitney’s Replication Committee, Grabner revealed, had a difficult time accepting the fact that an artist was doing their work. And of Joe Scanlan’s fictional black female artist Donelle Woolford: “Uh, oh. Super problematic!” Grabner exclaimed, this time ironically. The actor playing Woolford is touring across the United States doing a Richard Pryor comedy routine but hasn’t been warmly welcomed everywhere. Thelma Golden, for instance, refused a request for the Studio Museum in Harlem, which she directs, to host a performance. The artist Theaster Gates, though, accepted an invitation for Woolford to perform at Dorchester Projects in Chicago.

    Gaylen Gerber with Trevor Shimizu, Backdrop/Untitled, n.d., Untitled, n.d., n.d., latex on canvas, oil on canvas, and oil on canvas, 208 × 528 in. (artworks © Gaylen Gerber and Trevor Shimizu; photograph by Bill Orcutt)

    Franklin Sirmans, a curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and artistic director of Prospect.3, said that the third iteration of the New Orleans–centered exhibition will open in October 2014. He expressed a desire to make his show the opposite of Mithra, the Hurricane Katrina–inspired ark that the artist Mark Bradford set in the city’s devastated Lower Ninth Ward for the first Prospect, in 2008—a bold claim for sure. Sirmans didn’t provide many details about his show, mainly because the list of fifty-five artists won’t be announced until May. Instead the curator underscored several important concepts for the exhibition. A historical slant of Prospect.3 looks at Paul Gauguin finding himself in the “exoticized Other” of late-nineteenth-century Tahiti, as well as the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibal Manifesto” from 1928, which proposed a new Brazilian identity based on cannibalizing other cultures, particularly European ones.2

    Franklin Sirmans on the mic (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Sirmans borrowed his title for Prospect.3, Notes for Now: Somewhere and Not Anywhere, from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961), “a small but quiet book that rose to a degree of prestige and prominence,” he said, most notably by besting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, among other novels, to win the 1962 National Book Award. The Moviegoer will serve as a form and an outline for the exhibition, whose twelve to fifteen venues will be scattered across New Orleans, but Sirmans stressed that the show could happen elsewhere, too. And it doesn’t have to reference Katrina, either. Rather, he wanted to know, how we can bridge the gap between an adult boxing gym and the contemporary art center.

    The open conversation among the panelists circled around three primary issues: audience, curatorial ethics, and rescuing neglected artists. Grabner said she took the “absolutely selfish” route, organizing an exhibition that she would want to see herself—but also made it for other artists, she conceded. She also wanted to buck the “young new talent myth” that the biennial holds for the art market and highlight artists’ important but often unsung role as teachers. Push back so far, Grabner noted, has been that this year’s biennial is not political enough. Perhaps critics don’t see the right politics, I wondered, or cannot perceive the political nature of artworks that are not overly didactic.

    A portrait of Joseph Yoakum in 1969 taken by an unknown photographer. Whitney B. Halstead papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (copyright status undetermined)

    Cooke questioned Byers about the ethics of exhibiting outsider art, since Joseph E. Yoakum (1890–1972), a self-taught artist from Chicago, was a selection for the 2013 Carnegie International. What does it mean to pick this kind of artist, Cooke wanted to know, and drop him in this context? Well, Byers replied, it’s usually the artists who lead him to other artists and other subjects. Sadie Benning and Vincent Fecteau, both in the International, are interested in Yoakum’s work, which Byers described as incredibly beautiful but rarely seen outside the outsider context.3 He captured the wonder we can’t see, the curator marveled, the wonder of Old Weird America. “The act of sharing is one good reason to do it,” he said.

    Cooke’s line of questioning irritated me, mainly because she uncritically restated the hackneyed position of exploitation without identifying any problematic issues.4 Exhibitions of folk art have been taking place in galleries and museums for decades, going back to the early 1930s at the Museum of Modern Art, an “ethnographic turn” as noted by Sirmans. The museum also hosted surveys of African Negro and Native American art back then. The panelists didn’t challenge Cooke directly on this point but did say they found nothing unusual with exhibiting ceramics by George Ohr (1857–1918), the notebooks of the writer David Foster Wallace in the Whitney Biennial, and other kinds of not-quite-art material in their shows.

    Alma Woodsey Thomas, Untitled, ca. 1974, gouache on paper, 6¼ x 8¾ in. (artwork © Alma Woodsey Thomas)

    Sirmans, who brought up Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978), a female African American artist who was a Color Field painter in Washington, DC, whose work has been infrequently seen and discussed for many years. He rightly wants to ensure that recuperated artists don’t become a three-year wonder, like the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, who were in vogue over ten years ago but have dropped off the art world’s radar. “People should make it stick,” Sirmans said of the trend that the critic Roberta Smith has called “no artist left behind,” with the recovered work being more than just a new commodity to buy and sell.5 The funny thing is, one critic fed up with the dominance of the art market, Holland Cotter, is partly responsible for Thomas’s resurgence, as demonstrated in a New York Times article from 2009 that commented on President Obama’s selections for White House decoration; so is the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

    Melvin Edwards, Some Bright Morning, 1963, welded steel, 14½ x 9¼ x 5 in. (artwork © Melvin Edwards)

    Graber noted that the massive amount of inventory of overlooked artists might be the result of no longer having a monolithic version of art history. “There are huge ethical issues” around inventory, she said, but sadly did not articulate them. Was she referring to how overlooked artists such as Lee Lozano and Steven Parrino now posthumously show in top blue-chip galleries, or that late works by Picasso, previously ? I wonder if all this is an updated version of the old Vincent van Gogh sob story, or Émile Zola’s novel’s The Masterpiece (1886) brought to life?

    Personally, I’m grateful for all these rediscoveries, which significantly help to rewrite art history, even as a little money is made. Jack Whitten has received a small bump in popularity since a few vintage paintings were shown in the Rotating Gallery at MoMA PS1 in 2010 during Greater New York (incidentally a large group show that takes place every five years). Furthermore, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 at the Brooklyn Museum (and elsewhere) was an eye-opener, and an exhibition curated by Katy Siegel called Americanana, held in a small gallery at Hunter College in 2010, introduced me to the painting of a young artist, Josephine Halvorson, as well as an older one, Melvin Edwards, whose Lynch Fragments were subsequently hung at the Museum of Modern Art and included in touring exhibitions.6 But notice that institutional scholars and curators are organizing these exhibitions, not dealers or collectors.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 Grabner claimed the photograph could be had for $100 back then, which differs from Bey’s account.

    2 Some of these facts were published in Charlotte Burns, “A Sneak Peek at Prospect.3,” Art Newspaper, December 5, 2013.

    3 Yoakum had solo exhibitions at several galleries and university museums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972, but not at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, as the Carnegie International curators insist in their webpage for the artist.

    4 One exception is Cooke’s observation that art is everywhere in New Orleans and being made to look like outsider art.

    5 Christopher Bollen, “The Art World: Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz,” Interview 43, no. 10 (December 2013/January 2014): 56.

    6 Siegel resuscitated interested in a previously “lost” generation of abstract painters in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975.

  • Stick to Your Gunns

    In Conversation: Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele
    Thursday, January 30, 2014
    Brooklyn Museum, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Tim Gunn with suit and scissors

    When Tim Gunn was writing his first book, Tim Gunn: A Guide to Quality, Taste, and Style (2007), the designer Diane von Furstenberg told him to never lose his voice as an educator. Gunn, a fashion consultant and the cohost of the television program Project Runway, had been struggling with the assignment of writing a self-help, makeover-oriented book instead of a history of fashion, which he originally wanted to do. He hated books about dressing and body types. Gunn must have taken the advice he often gives to others—trust your gut and your instincts and know who you are—and he pulled through. In other words, he made it work.

    Mentoring and education describe not only Gunn’s role on Project Runway and its spinoff show, Under the Gunn; they also form the bedrock of his entire career. During a freewheeling conversation at the Brooklyn Museum with Valerie Steele, a pioneer of fashion studies, director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the owner of a Akris handbag (which sat by her chair onstage), Gunn recalled how he arrived in New York in the early 1980s to teach at Parson’s School of Fashion. From then until 2007 he “wore a lot of hats,” he said, serving as a teacher, chair, and associate dean. Because the school’s administration didn’t want students to be influenced by anything—an inexplicable position in a highly diverse, interdisciplinary creative field—Parsons offered neither courses in fashion history nor classes in computer design until the late 1990s, when Gunn helped to rewrite the program’s curriculum and change the institutional culture, which hadn’t deviated much in over forty years. At the time, he noted, designers such as Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein had dominated American fashion. Adventurous students must have been starving to innovate, and Gunn helped them burst their seams.

    Steele asked Gunn how he liked the Jean-Paul Gaultier show at the Brooklyn Museum. Gunn delighted in the fine line between fashion and costume, the freaky mannequins, and the sensory enticement (which, he noted, stopped short of sensory assault). Gunn quizzed Steele about her most recent exhibition at the Museum at FIT, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, finding it surprising that no one had done a “gays in fashion” show before. Steele talked about the show’s website, Facebook page, and syllabi for audiences and then relayed a story about giving a talk in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she was told to not speak on gay propaganda. (Her son laughed, saying “You’ll be in jail next to Pussy Riot”; Steele will “hold out for vodka and caviar” instead of bread and water.) Gunn laughed, “If you’re [a man] in the fashion industry, I’m going to assume you’re gay unless told otherwise.” Steele had a full house for her talk in Russia.

    Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele (photograph by the Brooklyn Museum)

    Gunn and Steele’s conversation moved quickly. The rapport between Gunn and Steele was loose and friendly, as if they’ve known each other for years. Sometimes the jokes felt scripted, as if the conversation were taking place on a minimally rehearsed television talk show for which the two played both the host and the guest. Steele editorialized on the trouble of fast fashion: the speed at which trends move from the catwalk to retails stores such as H&M, Forever 21, and Zara. She also declared Fashion Week, during which high-end designers debut their collections, to be dated. Gunn agreed that the event, which is held multiple times a year around the world, is a “dusty anachronism.” Steele would love a turn toward slow fashion, like the trend of slow food, which takes advantage of regional and seasonal varieties of ingredients and their traditional preparation. Gunn noted that we don’t want junk but are still budget minded. After Steele complimented him on his suit, he recommended Suit Supply—“it sounds like Dress Barn,” he said, but is a Dutch company found throughout Europe that makes quality clothes (and that also just opened a store in SoHo).

    Scene from episode four of Under the Gunn

    Gunn begged the audience to watch Under the Gunn, which he described as “Project Runway meets The Voice with scissors,” in order to boost the lower-than-expected ratings. The program cast the latest batch of applicants from Project Runway, which is on hiatus due to the cohost Heidi Klum’s absence. “We have way more content for a one-hour show,” he said. His “world-class problem” is: “What story do you tell?” His advice for the emerging designers runs from warning them about the difficulties of creating menswear to not scrapping a project if something goes wrong. When you quit, he implored, “What have you learned?” Gunn encourages the participants to diagnose the problem and prescribe a solution—which is worlds apart from how the art world fetishizes failure. Learning damage control, he urged, is essential.

    After about thirty minutes of conversation, Gunn and Steele answered prewritten questions from the audience, which covered Brooklyn as brand, three-dimensional printing technology for fashion, and fashion icons from the last ten to fifteen years.1 Steele said Daphne Guinness; Gunn picked Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, and Anne Hathaway. What has been the most transformative era in fashion? Gunn and Steele agreed on the 1960s right away. From Mad Men styles to paper dresses to vinyl to hippies, that decade, Steele informed us, was the most important for clothing. What country has the most captivating fashion? “France!” exclaimed Steele. “Come on, people!” Gunn agreed but declared “We owe great menswear to London.” And Naples, Steele added.

    Someone asked if we can bring back manufacturing to the United States. If that happens, Steele said, people should expect to pay more for those fashion, warning us that we won’t find those $30 jackets anymore. “We’ve created this problem,” Gunn said, blaming the culture of sales, which I took to mean high-low pricing strategies, where the original, sale, and clearance prices of a garment are considered in advance. He, too, would like to see a revitalized Garment District in Manhattan.

    Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele onstage

    Gunn acknowledged Parsons as his greatest success, and his most defining failure was the end of his long-term relationship in 1982. He was cheated on and dumped, experiences that saved his life and made him who he is today. A thoughtful question asked how young designers with limited resources can break into high fashion. “You know what’s harder?” Gunn mused. “Staying in.” He suggested that young designers work for another, more established designer—like Donna Karan worked for Anne Klein before her own career took off—to find opportunities and to learn about sourcing production, marketing, and buyers. Steele said that most failed designers are undercapitalized. The days when four clients could support a couture house, which happened in the 1920s, she said, are over. Gunn reminded us, “The fashion world is very unforgiving.” Adding to Gunn’s suggestion, Steele recommended that a young designer should find a “posse” to work with: a photographer, a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and the like, but stopped short of calling for collective labor practices.

    Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s (photograph by Felix Clay)

    Gunn called out retailers for moving in directions that would squeeze out designers. A store like Macy’s may eventually dissolve brand names, he predicted, and create a private label—it’s cheaper for a retailer to design, create, and sell clothes in house.2 The work of designers wouldn’t disappear from the department store, he continued, but would rent space in them. This latter idea resembles in part the model for art fairs, which typically rent space in convention centers and other large public venues for commercial events to individual galleries, who sell works from their stable of artists. Using Gunn’s forecast, it would not be inconceivable for art fairs to begin representing—or more specifically, selling the work of—artists, cutting out the middle-man dealers entirely, not unlike how Damien Hirst circumvented galleries and dealers to peddle his wares directly with the auction house Sotheby’s, in 2008.

    Unlike painting, sculpture, and photography, clothing designs cannot be copyrighted, which situates fashion designers in a precarious position in which knock-offs plague the high-end market. Advocating a Design Piracy Prohibition Act on Capitol Hill, Gunn believed, might help slow down fast fashion, preventing retail supply chains from replicating haute couture in down-market stores. Yet Americans are a nation of copiers, he said, borrowing looks from French styles through World War II. A bill would “grandfather out” all current design, such as von Furstenberg’s wrap dresses, but I’m not sure if he meant that iconic designs would fall under copyright or be released into the public domain. Another pressing issue, he continued, is counterfeits: a single Asian factory will manufacture a blue Liz Claiborne bag and ship it on the same boat to American as the same purse without the label, each having different destinations. Whether the problem is with trademarks or with identical products sold for radically different prices, he didn’t say. The art world also has issues with authenticity and reproduction that are too numerous to enumerate here.

    1 During her introduction of the event Lisa Small, coordinating curator of The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, asked the audience to write their questions for the speakers on small cards, which were then collected and read to Gunn and Steele. Moderators who wish to upgrade the quality of their Q&A sessions—and eliminate the contribution of panel attendees who ramble for five or ten minutes before ending with the dreaded confession of “I guess that’s more of a comment than a question”—should begin this practice

    2 In an exact quote, Gunn said, “I predict that with a huge, gigantic store like Macy’s, you’re going to see all of the individual designer brands disappear, the whole place is going to be privately owned. It’ll all be designed internally and you will see the private brands return.” David Bologna, “Tim Gunn, Valerie Steele Together in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum,” Washington Square News, January 31, 2014.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Amy Affronti, “Tim Gunn and Superbowl Weekend,” Denim and Dots, February 5, 2014.

    Kristen Bateman, “Tim Gunn on Everything: Highlights of the Brooklyn Museum Talk,” Harper’s Bazaar, January 31, 2014.

    Maria Boblia, “Tim Gunn Promises His New Spinoff Show Will Get Better,” Fashionista, January 31, 2014.

    David Bologna, “Tim Gunn, Valerie Steele Together in Conversation at Brooklyn Museum,” Washington Square News, January 31, 2014.

    Zina Codita, “Jean Paul Gaultier Is ‘Frenchier Than French’,” QT Quoture, February 10, 2014.

    Alexis Morrison-Wynter, “In Conversation: A Conversation with Tim Gunn and Valerie Steele,” Caneva, February 6, 2014.