In Terms Of

Tag: College Art Association

  • Using Fair Use

    Putting the Fair Use Code to Work: Case Studies from Year One
    Friday, February 5, 2016
    Committee on Intellectual Property
    104th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Delaware Suite B, Washington, DC

    Under my capacity as managing editor for the College Art Association, I live-tweeted a session at the 2016 CAA Annual Conference in Washington, DC. It was the first time I had attempted to write about an event as it was taking place. Sponsored by CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, the session addressed how the organization’s Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, published in February 2015, has been used by artists, publishers, and museum administrators.

    The names of the speakers, their affiliations, and the titles of their presentations were:

    • Betty Leigh Hutcheson, Director of Publications, College Art Association, “Contract Changes at CAA”
    • Patricia J. Fidler, Publisher, Art and Architecture, Yale University Press, “New Fair Use Guidelines for Art and Architecture Books at Yale University Press”
    • Rebekah Modrak, Associate Professor, Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, “Re-Made Co.: Meeting Legal and Publishing Challenges with Help from CAA’s Code”
    • Joseph N. Newland, Director of Publishing, Menil Collection, Houston, “One Museum’s Fair Use Policy: Adapting CAA Guidelines for Internal Criteria”
    • Susan Higman Larsen, Director of Publishing and Collections Information, Detroit Institute of Arts, “Second Time Around: Remembering to Bring Fair Use into Play”
    • Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor, School of Communication, American University, “Looking Both Ways: Reviewing Year One and Projections for Year Two”
    • Peter Jaszi, Professor, Washington College of Law, American University, “Looking Both Ways: Reviewing Year One and Projections for Year Two”

    The live tweets follow, in chronological order.

    In Terms Of count: unknown (I did not keep track).

    Read

    Janet Landay, “CAA Celebrates Fair Use Week,” College Art Association, February 22, 2016.

    Mayra Linares, “Fair Use Successes in the Visual Arts at #CAA2016,” Center for Media and Social Impact, February 5, 2016.

  • Good Ol’ Boys of the Appalachian Connection

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim
    Friday, February 2, 1979
    67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, Monroe Room, Washington, DC

    Moderator: William R. Dunlap
    Panelists: John Alexander, John Canaday, William Christenberry, Larry Edwards, Jim Roche, and James Surls

    Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Southern Rim” Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11

    John Canaday, for those of you too young to remember, used to be senior art critic on the New York Times, and hence, some felt, the most powerful art critic in the country. I remember a Sunday column of his about a woman in the art department of Appalachian [State] University who had put together an exhibition so fine that he praised it unstintingly. This was particularly impressive to a New Yorker because at the time the very name of the university conjured up an isolated pocket of insularity where it was hardly expected art would be taught, let alone exhibited—and abstract art at that. Canaday’s Appalachian connection appeared again at College Art [Association], as we saw him on the panel, “Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim.” (The title came from an earlier conference of the same name.)

    Moderator William R. Dunlap of Appalachian [State] University acted like a suave cosmopolitan—that is, until he exhibited all the worst characteristics the rest of the country might attribute to New Yorkers. He was rude, egotistical, insulting, arrogant, uncaring, and crude. He also made a great show of swilling bourbon from a prominently displayed bottle. Typical of this Southern gentleman’s behavior was his reply to Elsa Fine’s question from the floor about the absence of women, or even one good ol’ girl, on the panel with the good ol’ boys. It was OK, Dunlap said, because there were two homosexuals on the panel.

    Having arrived late, I missed the opening presentation of slides, but I was in time to hear John Alexander entertain the audience with anecdotes from the past year which he had spent traveling the country in the role of famous artist, accepting recognition and success. He declared himself on the side of minority artists (Chicanos) but definitely against New York lady art critics with briefcases. (One had spent no more than three minutes scanning his show before writing a several-page magazine article.) He was bemused by Lions Club audiences who, in Lions Club tradition, roared approval of his witticisms rather than applauding. His other adventures ranged the country both sociologically and geographically. Alexander enchanted the CAA audience in general, the women less so.

    James Surls, apparently the only member of the panel concerned with human values, was generous in crediting the Dallas Women’s Co-op with opening up the art scene there. They did all the work, he said—politicking, letter writing, and the rest—that made it possible to exhibit art in Dallas outside the museum. He said he himself “rode in on the coat tails.”

    Discussion continued as, by and large, a series of rambling non sequiturs. Members of the audience seemed to feel compelled to make statements themselves, like at a revival meeting, and their random statements, usually irrelevant to the discussion, prompted other remotely connected observations. One item surfacing in this manner was the moderator’s statement that New York had “closed down for young artists.” He attributed that to Marcia Tucker’s departure from the Whitney. (Maybe it was the bourbon.)

    This profundity was followed by an editor of Art Voices South—an expensively glossy magazine dedicated to praise of Southern artists—who got to his feet in the audience to say that the magazine covers twenty-two Southern states and is trying to attract an audience not accustomed to going to galleries. The panel responded very warmly to this and the subject of regional art came up—whether the South was producing any, whether any Southern state had ever produced any. Washington, DC, got some credit here, specifically the Washington Color School, but that was quickly dismissed by a panelist—Canaday perhaps—as a “suburban” expression of New York Abstract Expressionism.

    Well, things just moved along. Soon Alexander spoke in recognition of the people of Iran—he felt they should be honored for “standing up and getting rid of a cancerous tyrant.” (This was the week of street riots in Iran.) Dunlap even managed an insulting joke on the subject. Then Margaret Gorove, chairperson of the art department at the University of Mississippi—and former teacher of moderator Dunlap—got to her feet to say, first, that a proper grad of Ole Miss would have kept the bottle in a paper bag, and second, to describe the very real problems of women artists in the South. She pointed out that, as is well known, women do well in blind-juried shows but aren’t included in invitationals, not having had the exposure or experience.

    Moderator Dunlap’s response to this serious and impassioned statement was, “Let me say, I love your hair, and the color of your dress.” Gorove, resigned, even gentle, replied, “You haven’t changed a bit.” Dunlap then felt it necessary to go on record with, “I make no apology for the sexual make-up of this panel.”

    Alexander added quickly that he himself is concerned with the problems of women artists and is aware of prejudice against them and minorities. But, he claimed, the previous night’s panel. “Modern Art and Economics,” had been “all big names, all men, and no one brought the issue up there.” Aggrieved at what he saw as discrimination against the Southern panel, Alexander wanted to pursue the topic. “I recommend we continue and go for the throat” (which throat he didn’t say).

    Surls mentioned that, having found the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston without a director, curator, or scheduled exhibition, he had grabbed the free slot to do a show of one hundred Texas artists (Fire!). He may have intended to say women as well as men were included, but never got to it, because next came Robert Pincus-Witten from the audience.

    Bitingly sarcastic about Art Voices South’s self-congratulatory tone and self-serving ways, Pincus-Witten said that “without a critical voice for the Southern Rim you’ll be back on this panel continuing this conversation for the rest of your lives.” Only the development of a critical voice can bring Southern artists recognition from the rest of the country, he said.

    Canaday didn’t see it that way. “American art would have been better off without all the known critics,” said the former known critic. He quoted from an essay by Harold Rosenberg: “Artists are faced with a wall of opinion—a formulated taste dictating the direction of art.” Canaday advised us that “what is really needed is a buying public for the arts.” (An exemplary opinion, certainly.)

    Next it was Irving Sandler’s turn. Sandler said from the audience that there was “more energy, more wit in this panel” than any he had heard in New York. That seemed like a good time to leave.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Appalachian Connection” was originally published in Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 120–21. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

     

  • Real People as Art

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Artists and Community in the Context of Social Change
    Friday, February 2, 1979
    Caucus for Marxism and Art
    67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, Lincoln Room, Washington, DC

    Moderators: Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula
    Panelists: Mel Rosenthal, Suzanne Lacy, and Fred Lonidier

    Leslie Satin, “Artists and Community in the Context of Social Change,” Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 8

    Because the Caucus [for Marxism and Art] had been granted a very brief time slot, only three artists were scheduled to speak, each to discuss her/his work in the context of social change. Martha Rosler noted in her introduction that each of them dealt with violence—physical or social. Later she addressed the need of political artists to gain control of language, to move away from the media definition of “violence.”

    Photographer Mel Rosenthal described his discomfort when audiences skim over the political content of his photographs, responding only to the form of the work. In his photographs of the South Bronx he has insisted, not only on political meanings of the subject, but on the relationship between the art and the subject—the people of the area. His original idea was to make portraits of everyone living on the street where he works at a health center. It became apparent that many of these people, with whom Rosenthal became very involved over the course of a year, had never seen accurate photos of themselves. The photographs show them as real people in real poverty—not just another burned-out South Bronx scene from media.

    Suzanne Lacy presented material she’d covered in a previous panel on performance and environmental art from a somewhat different perspective. She and Leslie Labowitz cofounded Ariadne to work against violence against women.1 Discussing several projects on rape, murder, and violence in the record industry, Lacy explained their approach, which involves, not just getting the personal cooperation of local government officials and journalists, but actually setting up performances and exhibits for media. This follows Ariadne’s analysis of the role played by media in preventing or allowing political change.

    Fred Lonidier spoke about reaching a labor-union audience. Believing that the structure of the workplace must be changed to affect occupational health problems in a major way, he created an exhibit of photographs showing results of work-related diseases and added a text giving the historical context. The exhibit did attract many union members. At the panel, he spoke of the difficulties of reaching such “nonart” audiences.

    When our time in the Lincoln Room ran out, we were in mid-discussion, but discovered another spot available unofficially. Perhaps forty of us sat in a circle there and continued to talk and talk about the role media play for the political artist, the difference between performance art and political activism (is Phyllis Schlafly a performance artist?), political art as a process of self-identification, definitions of “cultural worker,” the exhibit of shopping bag ladies’ art at the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art] organized by Ann Marie Rousseau.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Ariadne, a California woman’s network, produced public art on political issues from 1977 to 1980.

    Source

    Written by Leslie Satin, “Real People as Art” was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 8; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 117. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • New Realism at Museums

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Museums and Present-Day Art
    Friday, February 2, 1979
    67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, International Center, Washington, DC

    Moderator: Hilton Kramer, Art Critic, New York Times
    Panelists: William Lieberman, Museum of Modern Art; and Martin Friedman, Director, Walker Art Center

    Abby Goell, “Museums and Present-Day Art,” Women Artists News 4, no. 10 (April 1979): 2

    Since the original title of this panel was “Museums and the Reality Principle,” the artist-listener might have expected an adrenal in-rousing discourse on exhibition politics, how artists are chosen or ignored, the manipulations of trustees, the perfidy of curators and their lovers, etc. Instead, the Reality Principle at issue quite reasonably concerned the costs of running a museum, the problems of attracting a broad public, and how, having done so, not to go broke being popular. Hilton Kramer described the task of a museum over the past thirty years as changed, from an agency showing classics of modern art to an institution whose function is also to introduce new and emerging artists and movements.

    Martin Friedman said the total exhibition program must be constructed to build a pattern of shows that are “ongoing reportages of art.” A museum must never schedule a series of one-artist shows, he maintained, but alternate single artists with classical modernism and diverse media. He sees “crucial examples” from the past as essential to intelligent shows of classical modernism (such as Cubism, Futurism, or the Cézanne show); these examples are then reinterpreted in the light of today’s taste.

    Friedman noted that there are several museum audiences: first, the continuing audience in the habit of museum-going; second, the specialized audience drawn to certain media such as photography, design, or architecture; and third, the first-time audience, brought by the publicity for a special show, such as King Tut. Even though museums plan shows they think have ongoing significance, he said, the Reality Principle does not allow them to ignore the fact of these separate audiences.

    Kramer asked the others how seriously “box office” considerations affect choice of museum shows. William Lieberman (the most soigné, detached, and ironic of the three) said box office has become more important, “because more corporations are funding the shows and they see popularity as the yardstick of success.” MoMA doesn’t have the money today to do shows without large-audience appeal. And, “titles are important for shows.” Friedman, who was conscious of speaking to an audience of, after all, CAA members, insisted, “We cannot limit programming to the popular.”

    A member of the audience, referring to Kramer’s article about art museums run as businesses, asked him, “What about the businessman as top director, over the curator?” Kramer responded by paraphrasing Alan Shestack of Yale’s statement that every decision made in a museum, including the collection of garbage, is an aesthetic decision.1

    Lieberman thought the divided leadership running the Metropolitan Museum seemed to be working, but Friedman objected, declaring that the chief officer of a museum must absolutely be a scholar and art historian, and that the core of a museum must be “artistic.” Artists and art historians, he said, “are not necessarily financial morons.” However, Friedman conceded that very large museums involved in big investment funds and city politics would be exceptions to the rule of scholars.

    Kramer finds museum trustees failing in their responsibilities today. They ought to worry more, not less, he said. He also suggested that trustees prefer financial types at the helm because it’s less work for them when the administration belongs to the “world of money” rather than scholarship. He pointed out drily that we should view with alarm the fact that America’s leading universities, publishing houses, and newspapers are now run by “administrators,” not scholars, men of letters [sic], or journalists. We should not let museums go the same way, he said.

    The panel then took up the question of corporate support, and what that means to new artists. Lieberman conceded that it’s very hard to raise funds to show contemporary work. Most corporations prefer art of the past. It’s safer, attracts a larger audience, and causes less controversy. The British Council, he pointed out, gives MoMA funds to show, not just any artists, but British artists, and the few private donors left are nervous about the new and unknown.

    All three panelists pointed out several times that art is a commodity, vying for the leisure time of audiences in competition with movies, theater, and sports, and that the need to attract mass audiences brings unending new problems.

    To a question from the floor about the profitability of MoMA’s Cézanne show, Lieberman said MoMA loses $2 for each person who walks in and buys a ticket. The extra attendance at a show like Cézanne is offset by the expense of extra guards and other personnel. In fact, MoMA closes one day a week to save money. He agreed that boards of trustees today still view themselves as a “club” of art sponsors, but that museums get public money and must justify their activities to the community at large.

    Kramer asked to what extent this affects aesthetic decisions. Or, as one audience member put it, “Isn’t this concern for the mass audience making the art museum a media event, rather than an art event?” Friedman conceded that this was largely so, but said he hoped to find ways to solve the problem. One answer might be to schedule a “younger artist” show at the same time as a Cézanne blockbuster to catch the larger audience.

    The panel also addressed questions of catalogue expenses [and] the trend toward elaborate labeling, extended graphics, and long cassettes, and acknowledged the difficulty of looking at art along with so many other people at the popular hours—in short, educational “overkill.” Popularity of the museum experience could carry the seeds of its own destruction, and newer artists might one day have no place to show. Friedman saw university museums and alternative spaces as a possible answer for lesser-known artists.

    The panel ended all too briskly just as this last topic ripened for discussion, participants having to catch their planes to continue their appointed rounds. One thing is certain: artists may rise and fall and rise again, but the institutionalization of art is here to stay.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Alan Shestack was director of the Yale University Gallery of Art from 1971 to 1985, after starting work there as a curator in 1967.

    Source

    Written by Abby Goell, “New Realism at Museums” was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 10 (April 1979): 2; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 119–20. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Sublime Leftovers

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art
    Tuesday, January 30, 1979
    Women’s Caucus for Art Conference, Embassy Row Hotel, Washington, DC

    The topic of folk art appears on a College Art [Association] panel, apparently for the first time. Original research provides a scholarly framework for talk that also pieces in craft, feminism, history, decoration—and “femmage.”

    Moderator: Judith Stein, University of Pennsylvania

    Panelists: Betty MacDowell, Michigan State University; Rachel Maines, Center for the History of American Needlework, Pittsburgh; Pat Ferraro, San Francisco State University; Miriam Schapiro, Amherst College; and Melissa Meyer, New York City

    Barbara Aubin, “Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art” Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 12

    “Folk Art and Neo-Folk Art” was both exhilarating and illuminating. Panelists touched on important points of original research, while much new territory was explored. However, a cloud of doubt may still linger as to where and when folk art and naïveté give way to professionalism. Betty MacDowell and Rachel Maines asserted that training is the key, but their fellow panelists freely interspersed untrained artists’ work without distinctions. One was left to make one’s own deductions.

    In her introduction, Judith Stein said folk art was “discovered” in the 1920s, but that this panel was the first on the topic for either College Art or the Women’s Caucus [for Art]. She suggested this might be because art historians have trouble dealing with folk art as art. Now feminism makes us aware that women have long studied, collected, and documented (primarily for themselves and their families) artifacts and objects of folk art by other women. Then again, much of this art is made with relatively cheap materials and/or discards, so perhaps art historians really had difficulty understanding and appraising it. Now there appears to be a growing revolution in taste allowing us to begin, at last, to evaluate and document the work.

    Betty MacDowell, whose new book is Artists and Aprons, pointed out that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s folk art was shaped by American culture. Rigid roles in marriage and parenthood meant that women’s lives were filled with domestic responsibility. Their education stressed needlework, penmanship, and watercolor, along with the “social graces.” Entering the “fine” arts was discouraged for women, who were not allowed to study the live male nude, so they channeled their creativity into the domestic scene. Portraiture was popular, because familiar and available faces of family and friends could be done quickly in pastels or watercolors, between chores. Women also took the scissors of domesticity to cut paper profiles. MacDowell said repeatedly that the art had to fit into accepted patterns of a woman’s life; it rarely even approached a full-time activity.

    By the mid-1800s, with the advent of the camera, demand for portraits by self-taught artists lessened. People preferred the likeness of photographs for recording friends and family, and the naïve artist began to disappear.

    Rachel Maines, author of “The Designer and Artisan: The Ancient Contract,” traced these professional relationships. Little has been written about the division of labor between the creator of an idea and the maker-constructor, a division that in Europe and America may be made according to class and sex, with the designer reigning over the technician. Mechanization of textile-making reduced the artisan’s role to mere machine tender and began the producer-consumer division.

    In early times, embroiderers often had a higher status. In wealthy households, the designer was part of the staff and devised patterns for linens, curtains, rugs, and furniture, besides intricate details of clothing. Folk embroidery, however, borrowed and combined motifs freely from many sources. Samplers, the work of students learning stitchery, held even more incongruities.

    The earliest commercial needlepoint used hand-painted charts. Later they were printed, when thread and yarn manufacturers hired women to draft patterns derived from popular magazines and pamphlets. After 1870, charts were available for beadwork, filet lace, crochet, and counted cross-stitch. Various forms of these are still available in the hobby or home craft market, but needle workers and textile artisans often want concept and design wed together.

    Pat Ferrero … traced the life transitions of women folk artists through their quilts. Baby quilts could be utilitarian or elaborate or both. Quilting skills were passed from generation to generation, women teaching young children. The engagement party was often the occasion for quilting, while the “masterpiece” was usually the wedding quilt—carefully conceived and painstakingly rendered during the engagement. The widow’s quilt drew on a rich store of memories. Ferrero showed a quilt made from a Victorian mourning coat which had been opened up to become ground for both quilting and embroidery. A coffin in the center was surrounded by vignettes of the quilter’s life.

    Several of Ferrero’s slides showed Grace Earl, a transplanted Chicagoan now working in San Francisco, with an incredible array of patterned fabrics which she pieces into intricate coverlets of exquisite skill and conception in her crowded one-room apartment. (Ferrero has also made a film on Earl.)

    Mimi Schapiro and Melissa Meyer distributed a document to the audience with their definitions of collage, assemblage, découpage, and photomontage as background for their jointly coined phrase, “femmage.” Their premise is that “leftovers” are essential to a woman’s experience. Schapiro pointed out that most of the classic written works on collage refer to male artists. She and Meyer developed “femmage” to mean the form made solely by women.

    Meyer and Schapiro listed several criteria for “femmage” but were careful to state that not every one need appear in each object. But for the work to be “appreciated” as “femmage” at least half the criteria must be met. These include being made by a woman, recycling of scraps, saving and collecting, themes related to life contexts, covert imagery, diaristic nature, celebration of private or public events, expectation of an intimate audience, drawing or handwriting “sewn” in, silhouetted images fixed on other material, inclusion of photographs or printed matter, recognizable images in narrative sequence, abstract pattern elements, and the possibility of a functional, as well as an aesthetic, life for the work.

    In Terms Of count: unknown

    Read

    Norma Broude, “Womens Caucus Report,” Art Journal 38, no. 4 (Summer, 1979), 283–85.

    Source

    Written by Barbara Aubin, “Sublime Leftovers” was originally published in Women Artists News 4, no. 9 (March 1979): 12; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 115–16. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • End of Bohemianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Assorted Quotes and Choice Lines from the Panel

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Unanswered Questions from the Audience

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

    And Answered Questions

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

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

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

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

    Gossip

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

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

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

    Source

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

  • Value Added

    The Idea of the Moral Imperative in Contemporary Art
    Friday, February 17, 1989
    77th Annual Conference    , College Art Association, Hilton San Francisco, Continental 7, 8, 9, San Francisco

    Future generations researching the good old days at College Art [Association’s Annual Conference] may take this panel for a distillation of its moment, as it casually splices ideals, philosophy, jargon, celebrity, and non sequitur with talk of art-as-money. We see also the intense longings, the search for uplift, the demands for salvation that are increasingly deposited in art. (The most interesting discussion of the panel addressed whether they belong there.)

    Nine years earlier, in what was for me one of the most poignant moments in this book, a student in the audience at a “postmodernism” panel told how artists were making art to oppose nuclear annihilation. A panelist then explained gently—very gently, given the ironic, even caustic, tone of the evening—that such real-world activism would in fact be the opposite of postmodernism in art. Now, at the “Moral Imperative” panel, a speaker tells us “a new link” has been established between postmodernism and ethics—but then fails to explain what that link might be, indeed, in some uncommonly elusive passages, seems to prove the opposite.

    Well, clearly there’s room for argument.

    Moderator: Mel Pekarsky

    Panelists: Amy Baker Sandback, John Baldessari, Luis Camnitzer, Suzi Gablik, Jeff Koons, Robert Storr

    The heartening part was that this high-sounding title, having nothing to do with how to get your work shown or reviewed, had possibly the biggest turnout of any session at this year’s College Art.

    Moderator Mel Pekarsky noted that:

    The words “art” and “morality” have been aimed at each other for a very long time, but never so much as now, and never with such broad multiple definitions of each. Both words are seen often in good and bad company in this postmodern, pluralist unsacred end of the twentieth century—or “McSacred,” as Peter Plagens has called it. And I wonder if either of these words had even the same meaning in, say, Rembrandt’s time; art’s meaning is now perhaps as multiple as its varieties, and the definitions of “moral” laid at art’s doorstep are equally myriad and provocative.

    For example, Paul Goldberger discusses the “morality” of Michael Graves’s designs for the Whitney Museum addition in consideration of Marcel Breuer’s original (assumedly moral) structure.1

    Names themselves—like Richard Serra, and in different ways Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Jesse Helms, too—are touchstones for any number of serious and complicated considerations.

    And the relationships between artist, critic, dealer, collector, patron—everyone in postmodern capitalism’s changed art world—have provoked shelves of articles and books on “art and money” and “art and business” [while] James Rosenquist says of art money: “it’s become like drug money.”

    Then, too, it seems fashionable to call the personal as well as aesthetic morality of the artist into question.… Cellini never had it so tough from Vasari!

    And the current relationships between the art community and the rest of humankind have frequently and rightfully been questioned…. Andrew Kagan writes of the “moral emptiness of [contemporary] art” and says, “But what is becoming increasingly disturbing is the tact that we have for so long lacked even the climate, the attitudes of high seriousness and commitment in art.”… Donald Kuspit considers the artist as activist, weighing “the human and political potential of activist art” to which many have indeed turned, while Alberto Moravia states categorically, “Art cannot politicize itself without committing suicide; in politics, terrorism is always anticultural, and in art, the avant-garde is always terrorist.”

    And William H. Gass in his essay “Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” subtitled “In Search of a Worthy No,” [says] “There is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did…. To live is to defend a form.… It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, every dance were danced in the dark. That would be a worthy no—but it will never be uttered.”

    This panel will begin with the premise that the first decision an artist makes when starting to work in this postmodern, pluralist end of the twentieth century is a moral one; that is, if you can paint whatever you want—since nobody cares what you paint or if you paint at all until you’re a commodity—the first decision is what to paint. This is diametrically opposed to premodern art, which was preceded by “need” and “commission” with the style usually universal and content preordained….

    To show that Abstract Expressionism had been a movement of moral strength and conviction, Pekarsky quoted Barnett Newman recalling the ’40s in the ’60s:

    We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.2

    Pekarsky then quoted John Baldessari as talking of “trying to get back to bedrock in his work, trying to strip away all the nonessential and thereby arrive at choice through this reductivist approach; choice, which seems such a fundamental issue of contemporary art. In his own work, Pekarsky said:

    I have “risked,” I suppose, a large number of embarrassing paintings in trying to arrive at an iconography I could believe in—and believe worth painting. In the process, format as well as form became a concern for a while, in addition to subject or content, and led me into an involvement with public art: trying to make art that belonged to everyone but was nobody’s property … to not make tradable objects; to play with the idea of large landscapes on walls in the real, urban landscape…. These concerns immersed me in the questions we’re here to discuss today.

    Then he quoted British sculptor William Turnbull on public sculpture commissions: “The problem with public sculpture is with the public, not with sculpture. The idea of designing a sculpture for a particular site, even if chosen oneself, seems to me a gross limitation on the sculptor’s freedom of action.”

    Pekarsky ended his introduction with, “If you can paint whatever you want, what do you paint? Does it matter? … If you can paint whatever you want, isn’t there implicit in your decision great power? … And no small byway—what should the critic be doing these days? What’s the critic’s responsibility, moral or otherwise? I have yet to see a critical program equal to facing the millennium with honor.”

    Amy Baker Sandback’s opening was not promising: “There’s no such thing as moral art, just moral artists. Words are only symbols for ideas, not fixtures of thought. Their powerful meanings are shaped by public and private perceptions and fine-tuned by considerations … more down-to-earth than the spiritual…. ‘Moral’ and ‘Art’ are both valid symbols of important contemporary concerns—the first has to do with the maker and the second with what is made.”

    Sandback said that [when] preparing for the panel she had consulted her dictionary. In the ten-volume New Century she found six columns of tiny print for the word moral. The words aesthetic and art took up one column, and imperative a quarter of a column. Moral was followed by morass, a swamp. Sandback concluded that “moral is a noun related to ethics, pertaining to right and wrong, manners and custom; to the mind as opposed to the physical; part of a truly developed healthy intellect.”

    She then said in a tone of great authority that she is “all for moral persons who happen to be artists, and for moral viewers,” which she and the audience seemed to feel was a valuable insight. However, she went on with a sharp, cogent, and honest (albeit unfashionable) commentary:

    The role of the contemporary artist as new-wave guru, and the perception that art making provides an inside track to a special truth denied the rest of humankind, is a dangerous role for all concerned. Artists are as flawed and sometimes as brilliant as academics, doctors, or bricklayers. No style is necessarily moral, no subject matter is necessarily correct, no political message or religious symbol necessarily renders great art. Piggybacking an aesthetic to a cause may indicate an important aspect of a personality or maybe marketing or simply a stylish ideological trick. Bad artists can produce masterpieces as well as the obverse. If morality is an imperative of art, how do you approach an erotic Shunga image of strange sexual contortion or the photographs of artists such as Mapplethorpe, Witkin, or any other sometimes disagreeable talent [or how do you enjoy] a lyrical Matisse knowing it was done during the Occupation?3 … I believe in art and its ability to make magic even when it’s ugly or anguished or performed as an intellectual exercise and even when it’s dumb and lovely. Morality is a judgment that serves no aesthetic purpose.”

    Sandback’s final comment was, “Being able to speak well of your work is good for business.”

    John Baldessari told an anecdote about running into Jeff Koons in New York and mentioning a profile on Koons in a recent Los Angeles Times, in which a critic who ordinarily writes on rock and roll criticized Koons’s work, applying different standards of morality to it than would be applied to music. Koons’s comment was, “Gee, you’d think she thought I was Mark Kostabi or somebody.” (The audience found this retort hilarious; it brought the house down—perhaps something about the word “Kostabi.”) Baldessari took this as evidence that “art is the last bastion of morality.”

    He continued, free-associating:

    When I think of morality I think of money. [T]here was a period when poster sizes got smaller until you just had little cards being mailed out with discreet type and you’d go into a gallery or museum and it would be hard to see the work, and, as Lucy Lippard has said, “It’s hard to read things on the wall when you’ve got a screaming baby under your arm.” Now they’re getting bigger again; people like to have stuff [posters]—stuff sells. Sculpture went from ephemeral materials in the ’60s and ’70s to where now everything is in bronze—it’s durable and can be handed down. Your investment is protected; it won’t disintegrate in twenty years.

    Art is now equated with money, and they all want to have all the news on art. You can’t even get into a panel anymore. Art is reaching a point where it may be interchangeable with money—art as a medium of exchange. [But] if art didn’t sell we wouldn’t worry about it so much. If Schnabel’s paintings didn’t sell, they might be more interesting. They are less serious because they sell for so much money. Anselm Kiefer seems to be very moral and serious, but with his prices going up, we start to question his seriousness. When money comes in, it starts to cast doubt. I had an argument in a New York bar with a friend who said, “Koons’s art caters to the lowest common denominator,” but [Koons] seems to perfectly reflect our culture. I’m very suspicious of anyone who tells anybody what kind of art they should do. An old dealer friend in Germany said art should have no message. I feel I should do what the culture needs, but I’m bored with the idea. I’m paralyzed in front of the question of what is the right art to do…. Do what one does best—like athletes. Find out what your weaknesses and strengths are and work on the strengths.

    Baldessari said with students he works on strengths and tells them to forget their weaknesses. He believes moral purpose is “using all the strengths you have.”

    Luis Camnitzer, an artist originally from Germany who has lived in Uruguay, said a friend, after reading the paper he was about to present, warned that it was very pious, but it was too late to change it:

    We live believing we are artists, but we are actually ethical beings sifting right from wrong. To survive ethically we need a political awareness to understand our environment…. Packaging is all. Thoughtless substitution can create the same havoc as when detergent is packaged as perfume. “Manipulation” of the viewer has negative connotations [so] we always avoid it when describing art processes, using euphemisms like “composition” and “design.” The shift of the action from ethics into aesthetics allows for the delusion that only those decisions pertaining to content have an ethical quality. [But] most of our art is socially muddled, even when it functions in the market. The explicit wish of most artists is to live off their art production, but they have mixed feelings regarding the question of money as unethical.

    Lately a new link has been established between ethics and postmodernism. The postmodern label serves to co-opt and unify some artistic expressions. Postmodernism can be seen as a demoralization of some antiformalist tendencies, [a] replacement of some conservative contexts, and a reinternationalization of what threatens to become a nationalist fragmentation in art. Art is still far from being an ethical affair. We rarely challenge in depth the parameters which define art or the technical constraints offered by art history.

    Surely the “parameters which define art” are challenged six times a day by every MFA student in America. But this paper seems less “pious” than murky, or let’s say overly succinct, leaving us to wonder what “reinternationalization” does, what “the technical constraints of art history” are, how one would “challenge” them, in depth or not, how such technical constraints become moral issues, etc., etc., etc.

    Suzi Gablik said that as a critic in the late ’80s she is concerned with understanding our cultural myths and how they evolve, what it means to be a “successful” artist working in the world today, and whether the image that comes to mind is one we can support and believe in:

    Dominance and mastery are crucial to our notion of success…. The art industry is inseparable from the giant web of our cultural addictions to work, money, possessions, prestige, materialism, and technology. Unless efforts are made to reassess our relationship to the present framework and its practices, new patterns won’t take hold. Vested interests will ensure that they are maintained as before. If we want change, we need to evolve new ground rules for the future. The moral task before us is to identify which approaches to art make sense in today’s world, Aesthetics views art as something autonomous and separate, as socially nonfunctional, existing for its own sake, The best art is made for no good reason and is valuable for its own sake. Ortega y Gasset said, “A work of art is nothing but a work of art, a thing of no transcendency or consequence.” Once fully conscious of how we’ve been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of these cultural images and role models as personal ideals and the possibility then opens for actually modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.

    Gablik described the project of Dominique Mazeaud, an artist friend living in Santa Fe [called] The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River. Once a month she and other friends meet to clean pollution out of the river. Gablik showed slides of the work and read excerpts from a diary of the ongoing project. One entry records picking up as much as 103 pounds of broken glass in a single day; others ponder how the strange miscellany of objects finds its way into the river. The artist calls her journal entries her “riveries.”

    Gablik quoted Caroline Casey: “Nothing which is not socially and ecologically responsible will make it out of this decade alive.” [Gablik] concluded, “Moving away from the competitive modes of institutionalized aesthetics is one way of not perpetrating the dominator system. Forgoing its rites of production and consumption, its mythology of professionalism, and its power archetype of success, only then can we begin to evolve a different set of ground rules for the future. But the willingness to make this systems shift is the beginning of recovery.”

    Jeff Koons, who showed a history of his work from 1978 to the present, said there is a great shuffling and shifting of power now in the art world, but that he’s an optimist and believes things beneficial to humankind will be “absorbed into evolution” and “things that are negative will be destroyed.” Koons said he has always been “at the service of his art,” explaining that his work on Wall Street was to finance his art. White middle-class kids use art for social mobility as some ethnic groups use basketball for social mobility, he said, and, “just as basketball players become front men, so do artists.” Koons was very funny and appealing, despite intermittently feigning modesty and becoming sanctimonious over his slides.

    Robert Storr, a contributing editor to Art in America, started to paint because he needed a hobby, and found it was fun.4 He quoted Picasso that “the best art is always fiction,” adding that “the religion of art is not religion, the spirituality of art is not spirituality, the humanism of art is not humanism, and between those terms, in that negation, is the reasonable place to start.” As for morality:

    The consciousness of artifice is the one thing for which the artist is morally responsible, not to be a sucker for his/her own ideas and sincerity and not to ask anyone else to be one either…. Rather than commandments, I would put forth two propositions for the audience: never trust anybody who say he’s telling it straight from the shoulder [and] never trust a kidder.

    For the question period, Pekarsky gave the usual warning (“No manifestos, only questions”) but, beginning by recognizing his friends in the audience or those whose names he knew, he was rewarded mostly with manifestos. Then came questions like, “Can you maintain your morality in New York’s glitzy art world?” Gablik responded, “Transformation of one’s own consciousness and the place where that transformation is most important is New York, and anyone undergoing such a change should get to New York fast.”

    Another statement-question was, “Careerism is related to morality and Koons said on Wall Street he faced a daily handling of moral issues, and that he felt free when he left the business world for the art world, because it was free of those issues, and yet here we are discussing it.” The response to that was, “Careerism is meaningless until given meaning by the speaker,” which seemed to satisfy the questioner. Someone asked why the person “cleansing” the Rio Grande didn’t work with local governing agencies, such as environmental protection; another started with, “An artist is one who produces masterpieces.” That question and several others were rejected outright by the panelists, who said they couldn’t deal with them.

    Perhaps I’m the only one who found much of these talks (transcribed practically verbatim above) or their relation to the issues baffling. The standing-room-only audience was rapt throughout, and at conclusion couldn’t stop applauding.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 See Paul Goldberger, “The Whitney Paradox: To Add Is To Subtract,” New York Times, January 8, 1989.

    2 See Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Mathews,” in John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writing and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 287.

    3 Sandback could be referring to either the painter Jerome Witken or his twin brother, the photographer Joel Peter Witken.

    4 As of 1990, [Robert Storr was] curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Value Added” was originally published in Women Artists News 14, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1989); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 287–90. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Not So Disappearing Anymore

    Identity Politics: Then and Now
    Wednesday, February 12, 2014
    102nd Annual Conference, College Art Association, Hilton Chicago, Lake Erie Room, Chicago, IL

    Hamza Walker speaks, with Dieter Roelstraete (left) and Gregg Bordowitz (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Drop “identity politics” into any art-world conversation now and you’re likely to get an eye roll—“so unfashionable.” This wasn’t the case twenty years ago, a time when the art museum—whether showing controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe or hosting the contentious 1993 Whitney Biennial—was a primary battleground.

    With its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, identity politics addressed how a dominant culture abused, oppressed, and colonized other cultures, nearly always divided by race, sex, ethnicity, and class. Although often aligned with aesthetics, identity politics surpassed art to embrace solidarity movements of underprivileged populations and neglected communities of all kinds. Identity politics also became a punching bag for its detractors, who tended to gloss over the complexities of particular situations with the pejorative term “political correctness.” At least that’s how I understand it. Since I arrived to “Identity Politics: Then and Now” a few minutes late, I missed an introduction from a representative from the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, the group sponsoring the session.

    The session’s four participants passed the microphone for brief opening comments before a free-form conversation began. A senior curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, since 2011, Dieter Roelstraete identified himself as European, Old World, Catholic, and northern (he hails from Belgium) and also in relation to his critics. To one reviewer he is the museum’s “resident thinker”; to another he is cold and heartless.1 “It’s just a muscle,” he said of the heart, underplaying the huge importance of this blood-pumping, life-giving organ.

    Jack Whitten, Black Table Setting (Homage to Duke Ellington), 1974, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 60 in. (artwork © Jack Whitten)

    Next was Hamza Walker, a curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, who described three recent exhibitions that could be understood as the progeny of identity politics. The curator of Blues for Smoke, Bennett Simpson, had initially proposed a rehanging of a permanent collection that would depose the dominant movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism from the modernist narrative; the blues, Walker continued, was a leitmotif to accomplish this. He also interpreted the exhibition as 1980s in spirit more than in object, which he contrasted with actual works from the decade in This Will Have Been: Art, Love, and Politics in the 1980s, organized by Helen Molesworth. The third exhibition, Kellie Jones’s Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, examined the historical 1960s and 1970s, a time of the “disappearing black artist,” according to the photographer Dawoud Bey.2 Multiculturalism from the 1990s, Walker explained, had passed over older black artists—abstract painters in particular—in favor of upstart post-Conceptualists., which Now Dig This! aimed to correct. Now, he said, artists now are “not so disappearing anymore.”

    Gregg Bordowitz, an artist, activist, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said that identity politics today embrace transgender politics, that is, who you are and how others perceive you. Now, he said, we see a confounding or refusal of identity: “Identity is turned on and off like a faucet.” This fragmentation is different from the past, when the AIDS crisis—with which Bordowitz was involved—necessitated a single dominant position.

    Joan Kee, an attorney and art historian who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has observed a shift from choice to consent. Twenty years ago, she said, identity politics was preoccupied with laws about protection, denial, and exclusion, with disability and immigrant issues, and with the Equal Rights Amendment. A intentional disaffiliation with the nation-state was embraced by the nomad artist and curator in the 1990s, Kee continued, which I would argue was a lovely, feel-good myth that conveniently overlooked the harsh realities experienced by people living in abusive regimes. Now, she relayed, we are concerned about property, personal data, and the erosion of consent. She also brought up DNA fashioning and asked of the present moment: “What is the object of critique?”

    The panel’s moderator, Kirsten Swenson, an art historian at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, proposed a conversation about institutional role formation. “I practice being black at home,” joked Walker before declaring that today “the rhetoric doesn’t feel as defensive.” While I certainly agree, I couldn’t help but think of what hasn’t changed in the twenty-one years between Rodney King and Trayvon Martin.

    Hamza Walker continues to speak, with Gregg Bordowitz (center) and Joan Kee (right) looking on (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The discussion bounced around in productive, enlightening ways. Starting with the dandies of Charles Baudelaire, Bordowitz argued that choice is modern: to identify or disidentify, he said, is a bid for freedom. He also acknowledged how a person’s role changes from moment to moment, such as when, for example, he leaves the classroom and gets in line at Starbucks. Somehow I don’t think this what an artist like Ryan Trecartin, whose videos bend and contort identities into unrecognizable states, has in mind. Theorists assert that subjecthood is produced through structured, contextual encounters, something that Yvonne Rainer called “privileged” from her seat in the audience. Kee acknowledged that identity politics typically has a US-centric model, and Roelstraete admitted that the emphasis on economics in his current show, The Way of the Shovel, is North American.

    Bordowitz described how AIDS figured prominently in his art and activism over the last twenty-five years. Now he is concerned with “drugs in people’s bodies.” What does choice mean in different places, he asked, where having clean water is more crucial than obtaining advanced drugs? Walker was intrigued by how the artist Paul Chan negotiates art and activism. Like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial, no clear distinctions divide the two: “There’s peanut butter in my chocolate,” he said, “and chocolate in my peanut butter.” Walker considered the importance of mobilizing bodies, whether that’s Chan’s on-the-ground involvement with Voices of America in Iraq or the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s protestation of the US Navy’s longtime occupation of the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico.

    Recognizing activism as art or vice versa is indeed an important topic that has been discussed passionately in recent years, most notably by the folks at Creative Time and A Blade of Grass. What is called social practice in the United States, Roelstraete said, is Relational Aesthetics in Europe. What about an asocial or antisocial practice, he muttered out loud, but the answer is painfully obvious: there isn’t an opposite of social practice, just different levels of engagement between art and viewers, or artists and other people. Roelstraete was quick to point out that European countries have ministries of culture, which take care of the public good, but in America artists become activists because of a governmental vacuum. Participation culture has thrived but painfully so, as the state becomes dismantled.

    Bordowitz complained about labels and reiterated his choice of the term “freedom” over “liberation.” He also gets irked when asked by his students about what makes a radical today. “Stop privileging ‘radicality’ as a term,” he implored. “People do radical things out of necessity.” Back in the day he was arrested, but now he writes poetry. It would be an “arrogant illusion,” he said, to consider his most radical work was when he went to jail. Roelstraete recalled that the French Realist painter and occasional revolutionary Gustave Courbet painted apples and fish while imprisoned for anti-Commune offenses. The Belgian curator nicely offered a simply stated observation: if people are still asking what radical is, there is still dissatisfaction in the world.

    Kee agreed with Bordowitz about the younger generation: “The same questions get asked over and over again.” Like Bordowitz’s pupils, her students want to know how artists can be radical now, but at the same time, she said, they shy away from discussions of identity politics. Issues of connoisseurship and quality, strangely enough, really get their blood pumping. If that’s misguided politics, then at least, one would hope, these students are resisting the authority of experts. In her classes, Kee takes a comparative look, using concrete examples such as Manuel Ocampo’s Untitled (Map of Los Angeles), a painting from 1987 that her class once discussed for three hours, to steer clear of complacency in the classroom. An audience member invariably asked why this is and what can we do about it. Kee blamed institutional repetition and intellectual laziness. Because we know the identity-politics canon, she lamented, we can repeat it.

    Manuel Ocampo, detail of Untitled (Map of Los Angeles), 1987, oil on canvas, 74½ x 67½ in. (artwork © Manuel Ocampo)

    An audience member sitting next to me who was a generation older than the panelists said that identity politics were actually liberal, not radical. People in the 1990s, she claimed, had misunderstood the 1970s. Further, she continued, identity politics in the US formed in collusion with the nation-state, a notion that opposed Kee’s view about disaffiliation. Although subjectivity and figuration in art had returned—as if these trends ever went away—the body’s appearance in Neoexpressionist painting usually meant something different that that in identity-politics art. Finally, she asked, what about feminism?

    Bordowitz questioned the authority who would say such a thing, arguing that identity politics in the 1990s was not a misunderstanding of the 1970s but rather a blossoming of the earlier decade’s ideas. Besides, there’s “no inherent, pure, and honest good of identity politics,” he reminded us. In fact, he suggested, identity politics had trouble gaining traction in certain academic circles. During the Socialists Scholars Conference in the 1990s, for instance, proposals of panels on gay and lesbian topics were either declined by the selection committee or, if accepted, had only three people in the audience.

    Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (2005)

    Roelstraete stated that gays and lesbians still face problems in Sochi and in Russia, among other places around the world, but Walker sees engagement more than frustration when considering diversity in mainstream American entertainment, citing James Franco’s weird white rapper in Spring Breakers and the interracial lesbian couple with a daughter on the television program Under the Dome. In academia, Walker wants people to look at the faculty numbers: “How many blacks are there in your department?” We must look at identity politics at the structural level, he urged, in addition to institutional atmosphere. He said this, with a sea of white faces behind me.

    An audience member asked about the choice of anonymity. It’s a double-edged sword, Kee responded. Are we aligned to the global, she asked, or do we disengaged or opt out? Roelstraete noted that artists work individually, not collectively, and that the art market doesn’t know what to do with things like Occupy and theories about the “multitude.” Smart curators like him should reject these commonly held attitudes that, with a little analysis, turn out to be false—they’re the type of “institutional repetition and intellectual laziness” that Kee resists. Bordowitz mentioned several collectives that have done interesting work, such the Bernadette Corporation and the Critical Art Ensemble, as well as collectively written novels and net art from the late 1990s. Is being anonymous a refusal, he wondered, or does it result from the lack of a better term to get at the problems?

    In Terms Of count: 26 (during a ninety-minute panel, no less).

    1 See Lori Waxman, “Compare and Contrast: Ceramics at the MCA,” Chicago Tribune, February 6, 2014; and Sam Worley, “The Way of the Shovel Could Dig a Little Deeper,” Chicago Reader, November 12, 2013. The latter complaint, however, was not levied at him but rather at his exhibitions.

    2 Dawoud Bey, “The Ironies of Diversity, or the Disappearing Black Artist,” Artnet Magazine, April 8, 2004.

    Read

    Jason Foumberg, “It Takes Practice,” Artforum.com, February 25, 2014.