This essay is the second of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, third,fourth, and fifth texts.
Exhibiting Experiments Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
A view of Daniel Spoerri’s room in Dylaby
“Exhibiting Experiments,” the first session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” comprised two graduate students and a fresh PhD recipient and was moderated by Grant Johnson, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center. Each speaker presented research on a single case study: unrealized projects by the Swiss curator Harald Szeemann and two group exhibitions from the 1960s, Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum and Art by Telephone at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
First was Caitlin Burkhart, an artist and writer earning a master’s degree in curatorial practice at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, who spoke on “Dynamisch Labyrinth: Deconstructing the ‘White Cube’ through Dynamic Environments.” Her focus was Dylaby, a 1962 exhibition in Amsterdam in which the curator, Willem Sandberg, gave free reign to six artists—Niki de Saint Phalle, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Per Olof Ultvedt—to create interactive room-sized installations. A designer and typographer by trade, Sandberg directed the Stedelijk from 1945 to 1963, and Dylaby was the last show he organized for the museum. De Saint Phalle’s room contained a shotgun for visitors to shoot bags of paint, for example, and Spoerri hung artworks from the permanent collection in a room designed at a ninety-degree angle. Rauschenberg’s room, Burkhardt noted, wasn’t interactive with visitors despite the kinetic nature of his sculptures.
Because the exhibition was laid out sequentially, with the final room being the only way to escape from the labyrinth (unless you retreated through the galleries backward), the audience was obliged to participate to some degree with each artist’s installation—a situation that resembles the “curatorial dictatorship” described by Boris Groys in his keynote address. On several occasions Burkhardt described the rooms as “disorientating,” but I imagine that viewers found them amusing and delightful. Szeemann was influenced by Dylaby, Burkhardt noted, so I look forward to learning more about how significant museum exhibitions during the 1960s have shaped the curatorial landscape of today.
Lucy Hunter recalls the exhibition Art by Telephone (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Lucy Hunter, a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, delivered a paper, “Static on the Line: Art by Telephone and Its Technocratic Dilemma,” that examined a 1969 exhibition in Chicago organized by Jan van der Marck, for which an international group of mostly Conceptual artists provided verbal descriptions of works that museum staffers would build or execute in the galleries. The Dutch-born curator, Hunter said, had purposefully minimized written and photographic documentation, and the catalogue took the form not of a book but rather a long-playing phonographic record that offered excerpts from artists’ phone calls.
In addition to art-historical facts, Hunter construed Art by Telephone through communications theory, using Claude E. Shannon’s diagram from a book called The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948) as her theoretical crux. In that diagram, an information source transmits a message to a receiver, but sometimes that message was disrupted by what Shannon called noise. Hunter postulated that documentation was van der Marck’s noise but didn’t quite establish if the receiver was the curator, the fabricator, or the museum visitor, or if the destination was the transcription of the instructions or the galleries. I’m not suggesting that she devise a formula but instead clarify the stakeholders in the equations and why they matter. Hunter felt that van der Marck hadn’t sufficiently exploited the medium of the telephone itself—certainly a lost opportunity to make a complex curatorial statement—but admitted that he was interested in using hardware and software to create a “wholly verbal exchange.”
Claude E. Shannon’s general schematic of a general communications system
Hunter also presented intriguing details about corporate sponsorship of the museum during the 1960s, which should eventually find an appropriate place in her narrative. I’m curious to know how she would respond to Art by Telephone Recalled, a recent investigation of the 1969 exhibition by the French curators Sébastien Pluot and Fabien Vallos, who have restaged works from the original Art by Telephone in several venues, including the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York in 2012, might fit into her chronicle.
“Failure as a Poetic Dimension: Harald Szeemann’s Unrealized Projects” was the title of a presentation by Pietro Rigolo, who works for the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as the subject expert on a team processing the Szeemann’s archive and library. Rigolo discussed the curator’s Museum of Obsessions (1973) and other projects, such as one that would have explored the four elements. For fire, Szeemann would have presented materials on pyromaniacs and bonfires as well as Yves Klein’s fire paintings.
Pietro Rigolo realizes a paper on unrealized projects by Harald Szeeman (photograph by Christopher Howard)
I was intrigued that Rigolo found documentation of exhibitions that Szeemann had left off his CV, but several times during his talk he jumped from projects that took place, those in planning stages, and those which were sketches and ideas. Did Bachelor Machines, which took the male characters in the lower half of Marcel Duchamp’s The Large Glass (1915–23) as its subject, manifest in physical form, or was La Mamma, an exhibition on the subject of motherhood that didn’t have any art, the project that didn’t happen? What was the comment about an exhibition of outsider art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1988? And did visitors to the World Expo 2000 come across Szeemann’s exploration of sex and the holy Christian trinity, with sections on prostitution, birth control, cross-dressing, and masturbation? There is not much difference, Rigolo said, between Szeemann’s thinking for realized and unrealized projects, but this talk would have been coherent with clear divisions among the two groups.
“Exhibiting Experiments” confirmed my past experiences with similar sessions of occasionally affectless speakers presenting early drafts of essays on topics needing more research and further narrative development. But these shortcomings, typical of emerging scholars responding to a call for papers, didn’t distract from the appealing subjects on which the three presenters spoke.
This essay is the first of five that reviews a recent conference at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the second, third,fourth, and fifth texts.
The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Boris Groys poses for photographs during his keynote address (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Boris Groys presented a keynote address called “The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk” to kick off a daylong conference, “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” that explored historical and contemporary approaches to organizing exhibitions. An interdisciplinary scholar and occasional curator, Groys is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. A few years back he wrote an excellent book called Art Power (2008).
Groys’s accent made it difficult for me to concentrate on his words, and he repeatedly chuckled at what seemed like minor disciplinary quibbles between himself and other theorists (hardly anyone laughed with him). Reading a prepared paper, he relayed that “the artist of the future must be radically indifferent,” according to the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner. He also boldly claimed that “dictatorship is a curatorial project” and that documentation of such projects invokes nostalgia for the ephemeral event. I think he also made a quick reference to the experience of watching live sports (that is, in a stadium or arena) without hearing the play-by-play analysis and color commentary from a radio or television broadcast.
Since Groys’s keynote contained significant chunks of a previously published essay, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” I was able to grasp several of his ideas afterward—and they are good ones.1 First he establishes that art museums traditionally removed works of art from the flow of time “to resist material destruction and historical oblivion,” which are precarious, unstable, and finite things that happen to humans or to things not saved in archives. Groys’s cumulative argument elaborates on Wagner’s notion of an author’s self-sacrifice in the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he likens to suicide, and how the kind of curatorial project popularized by the Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann—something Groys calls a “temporary curatorial dictatorship”—has displaced the traditional art display and transforms into a new Gesamtkunstwerk that returns to art its provisional status. An exhibition goes on view for two or three months, he said of the typical institutional calendar, and then is dismantled. The art museum has consequently responded, as written in the essay, by becoming “a stage for the flow of art events … which include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth.”
What’s novel about the précis is how Groys postulates that the internet doesn’t embody the flow of time but rather, with its innate characteristics of surveillance and traceability, halts that flow. The documentation of museum events, he argues, whether a catalogue, film, or website—or streaming video, as his keynote was broadcast live online—is absorbed into the artwork. (Oh, process.) One crucial function for art museums, Groys concludes in the essay, will be to provide a space for an encounter to both take place and be “thematized and critically theorized.” The published text expresses a few more good ideas, but I’m not sure how to understand my experience of listening to Groys speak—during which I took few written notes because of his illegibility—to the written documentation I read later and can more easily remember.
Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun using mirrors, light, and mist for The Weather Project (2003), which he said was the basis for exploring ideas about experience and mediation. Within two months the installation at Tate Modern in London had attracted more than one million visitors
After his talk Groys was joined by the art historian Claire Bishop for a brief conversation and audience Q&A. She pressed him to talk more about the “suicidal dictator,” but he deflected the question, instead focusing on linking important curators to political leaders. “When you speak about Szeemann,” he mused, “you talk about Caeser, Alexander the Great.” Is reenactment a form of documentation? No, Groys said to Bishop, marking the former as a kind of fiction that the latter lacks. Curiously, Bishop told Groys that his writing has a polemical quality but does not advocate or criticize, which may reflect the lack of a straightforward position on the entertainment-industrial complex described in his essay.
From his chair in the audience Dieter Roelstraete, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was pleased that Groys identified visitors as the most interesting objects in an exhibition (a statement absent from the published essay). What about wall labels, asked Roelstraete. What about exhibitions without visitors? “It’s good,” Groys smiled while regarding the second inquiry. With a show that no one sees, he suggested, the curator becomes a legend, which corresponds to his idea of the suicidal curator as discontinuous and immortal. Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center (and also one of three organizers of the conference), asked Groys if he had a similar term for the artist? The artist has the ability to subvert the curator, he responded obliquely, and also become a curator. I’m not sure Groys answered the question—perhaps he is saving his thoughts for another essay on the subject.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal 50 (December 2013). The author had presented the essay as a lecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, on November 8, 2013.
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.
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.
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.
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.
