In Terms Of

Tag: Guggenheim

  • Landscape Surveyors

    The Changing Landscape of Museums Today
    Thursday, January 29, 2015
    Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, New York

    Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)

    A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.

    The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.

    Building and Expansion

    Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.

    Richard Armstrong oversees the Guggenheim Museum franchise (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.

    Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.

    Melissa Chiu explains how artists have used the Hirshhorn Museum building in creative ways (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)
    Diversity and Inclusivity

    Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”

    Tom Finkelpearl laments the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on museums staffs in New York (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.

    From the Ground Up

    Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1

    Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.

    Peggy Loar interviews the panelists (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.

    Locations and Audience

    While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?

    Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”

    Education and Experience

    Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.

    Tom Finkelpearl explains Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fill New York City schools with art teachers (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2

    For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.

    Concluding Thoughts

    While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.

    Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

    1 See Colin Moyniham, “Protests Resume at Guggenheim over Abu Dhabi Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 2014; and ongoing coverage by various authors for Hyperallergic.

    2 See Michelle Jubin, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” Artwrit (Summer 2011); Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6 (Summer 2007); and Helen Reed, “A Bad Education: Helen Reed Interviews Pablo Helguera,” Pedagogical Impulse (publication date unknown).

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    The Asia Society has posted the video of “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today.”

  • I Don’t Want No Retro Spective

    This essay is the third of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, fourth, and fifth texts.

    The Retrospective
    Monday, April 7, 2014
    Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
    Center for the Humanities
    Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

    Ed Ruscha, I Dont Want No Retro Spective, 1979, pastel on paper, 23 x 29 in. (artwork © Ed Ruscha)

    For artists, the solo exhibition reigns supreme. For curators, it’s the group show. From major events such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Whitney Biennial to curator-driven institutions like the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Witte de With in Rotterdam, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the authorial curator’s name has typically transcended the artworks on view (or so the story goes). While the art-publishing industry ceaselessly cranks out new books on curatorial issues—nearly always an edited, multiauthored tome—few critical studies have considered the theory and practice of showing the work of a single artist, which is perhaps the bread and butter of art museums worldwide. For the second session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” titled “The Retrospective,” one panelist presented a brief investigation into the history of the solo exhibition while two more offered case studies on atypical exhibitions of a contemporary artist.

    Exhibitions are generally categorized as solo, group, and collection, explained João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation in Portugal, and scholars have typically historicized the group show. He cited key studies such as Ian Dunlop’s classic The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art (1972) and Bruce Altshuler’s massive two-book set, Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (2008) and Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 2: 1962–2002 (2013), as providing concise histories of the form.1 For curators, Ribas said, group exhibitions contribute to economies of reputation and curatorial prestige. Nevertheless, the “one-man show,” he acknowledged, has formats, methodologies, and conventions of its own: chronology, biography, connoisseurship, evaluation, and mediation (e.g., the purity of the artist’s voice, curatorial self-effacement). Ribas didn’t discuss collection shows, though I imagine that museum handbooks and guidebooks follow a conventional scholarly logic of highlighting the greatest hits of an institution.

    Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855, oil on canvas, 142 × 235 in (artwork in the public domain)

    Ribas’s preliminary research into the history of solo exhibitions started with Nathaniel Hone, an Irish artist who independently presented a satirical painting called The Pictorial Conjuror after the work’s rejection from the Royal Academy’s annual exposition in London in 1775. Ribas pinpointed the names of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists who had important solo and single-painting shows in public and private locations: John Singleton Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, among others. William Blake’s solo showing in 1809 had a visual and theoretical system, Ribas said, and Joshua Reynolds’s 1813 exhibition in London was organized for general symmetry and an overall pleasing effect. Further, Ribas noted that James Abbott McNeill Whistler designed interiors for his paintings and Paul Signac had formulated ideas about the ideal display of his work.

    Various nineteenth-century accounts described one-person exhibitions as commercial and career advancing, which was certainly true of Gustave Courbet, whom Ribas said purposefully identified a solo presentation of his work—housed in a temporary structure near the official Exposition Universelle of 1855, which featured more of his paintings—as an “exhibition,” not an “exposition,” to enhance the term’s arrogant commercial connotation. (The Painter’s Studio, pictured above, was among the highlights of Courbet’s independently produced exhibition, which he called The Pavilion of Realism.) Ribas reported that other sales tactics involved concepts of a good picture and the importance of an artist’s late work. He also mentioned how a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work in Beijing in 1985 was highly influential to Chinese artists.

    Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald)

    Lewis Kachur, an art historian at Kean University and the author of the excellent book Displaying the Marvelous (2001), discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s “un-retrospective” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011–12, which Kachur characterized as a witty engagement with the career survey. The Italian artist was horrified, Kachur said, when the Guggenheim offered him a show. Cattelan proposed an all-or-nothing gambit: the museum had to display every work he has ever made. Despite his usurping of the curatorial role—the selection of objects would already be determined—the museum’s senior curator Nancy Spector agreed to the novel format. The show, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, had no chronology, theme, or choice: “It’s everything, it’s all,” Kachur said.

    As Cattelan “sweeps his work into the immediate present,” the overall effect of his oeuvre, which hung from the skylight down the center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, circumvented the individual contemplation of objects. Kachur enumerated various precedents of artists engaging the museum’s central atrium and surrounding architecture. Alexander Calder was the first to suspend work in the museum’s open space, in 1964, followed by various types of presentations by Jenny Holzer (1989), Dan Flavin (1992), Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1995), Nam June Paik (2000), Matthew Barney (2003), and Cai Guo-Qiang (2006). Cattelan claimed to have seen every show at the Guggenheim since 1993, when he moved to New York, and would have been aware of these installations. Kachur’s research into the subject, he admitted during the session’s Q&A, was limited to the published material on the exhibition—he hasn’t conducted visits to archives or interviews yet. Even so, the scholar’s trajectory looks promising.

    Installation view of Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (photograph by Benoit Pailley)

    Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, described her experiences planning a retrospective for Rosemarie Trockel. Allergic to the white box, this German artist prefers to show in institutions that challenge her. And because she values her studio time and wanted to spend less on exhibition administration, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos was conceived as a traveling show for multiple venues. Each iteration of the exhibition, though, did feature new and different elements. Cooke and Trockel elected to include art by her peers and objects important to the artist, as well as works by so-called outsider artists like James Castle, Manuel Montalvo, and Judith Scott. The Madrid show included eighteenth-century botanical drawings—and also their late-nineteenth-century transformations into exquisitely crafted glass objects—that all Spaniards know, Cooke said, just like they know the paintings of Diego Velázquez and El Greco.

    The two also took field trips together and considered past work, unfinished projects, and new projects. They didn’t write a list or set of goals—at least not at first. The show, Cooke said, developed organically, in an associative way. Despite such close collaboration, Cooke relayed that Trockel did not want to be identified as a cocurator for the show, but the Reina Sofía’s website credits both women as organizers. When A Cosmos landed at the New Museum in New York in 2012, my strongest reaction was that the show looked heavily curated, which may relate to Cooke’s discussion of the art historian Svetlana Alpers’s concept of the “museum effect” and of the differences between visual distinction and cultural significance.

    Lynne Cooke, Lewis Kachur, João Ribas, and Chelsea Haines survey the retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience Q&A, adeptly moderated by Chelsea Haines, a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, touched on concerns ranging from practical to absurd. Someone asked about a hypothetical exhibition that has neither artist nor curator, which Kachur called a “riderless horse.” Someone else brought up the idea of a curator’s “portfolio artist.” Sometimes our reception of individual artists, Ribas said, is shaped by their exhibitions, giving credit to Cooke’s past work with  Hannah Darboven and to the 1960s dealer Richard Bellamy’s framing of his artists.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    1 I would add Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994) and Jens Hoffmann’s Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) to this list, though I’m sure there are many others.

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  • Certificates of Authenticity

    This essay is the third of three that reviews a recent symposium at the Jewish Museum. Read the first and second texts.

    Panel Two
    Who Is Jack Goldstein?
    Sunday, September 22, 2013
    Jewish Museum, New York

    Kathryn Andrews, The Eighties, 2008 rented neon sign and fabricated neon sign, 64 x 60 x 6 in. (artwork © Kathryn Andrews)

    The second and final panel on the symposium for the Jewish Museum’s exhibition Jack Goldstein x 10,000 featured presentations by two artists—Kathryn Andrews and Paul Pfeiffer—who emerged a couple generations after Jack Goldstein (1945–2003). Neither artist was directly influenced by Goldstein, as they arrived at their aesthetic approach prior to gaining knowledge of the elder artist’s work. One of two moderators, Claire Bishop, professor of contemporary art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, described the situation as “reverse engineering.” While hers was certainly a clever use of the phrase, the concept is standard operating procedure for scholars making connections between the art of different decades. That doesn’t mean artists don’t have a say, and here is what they said about Goldstein and influence.

    Andrews, an artist based in Los Angeles who earned her MFA at Art Center College of Design, presented several examples of recent work. Though she did not frame her practice as being influenced by Goldstein, one can detect similar interests: Hollywood film, found objects, and the aura of authorship expressed through mixed media. Using the gestures of others as her own, Andrews made her wall sculpture The Eighties (2008) by renting a neon sign from a prop shop, having it reproduced, and hanging that piece upside down and underneath the rented one, which she returned to the prop shop after the exhibition it was shown had concluded. The shop’s secretary, Andrews revealed, had designed the original neon sign. For another work, she asked another person to make a piece for her; she ended up with a wooden sawhorse covered with butterfly stickers that spelled out her first name. To her, a temporary work like The Eighties or Ashton (2010), a stainless-steel coat rack and hanger accompanied by a ring worn by Ashton Kutcher in the movie The Killers, is a “performance.”

    Kathryn Andrews, detail of Ashton, 2010, cast stainless steel and certified film prop, 70 x 32 x 24 in. (artwork © Kathryn Andrews)

    Andrews has a ninety-nine-year lease on a prop in her work. These rentals, she said, come with certificates of authenticity that “guarantee” the original use or owner of the object. This fact reminded me of an essay I read a few years ago, “Dust to Dust” by Matthew Bown, that compared the obscene prices of contemporary art sold at auction to the adoration of medieval Christian relics. There was probably enough wood from Jesus’s cross floating around Europe to build a hundred crucifixes. I also found it interesting that the Pictures Generation did not traffic in certificates, as the previous generation of Conceptual artists had done.

    Paul Pfeiffer, The Long Count (I Shook Up the World), 2000, video loop (artwork © Paul Pfeiffer)

    Pfeiffer said he had first heard about Jack Goldstein from a collector, in response to his award-winning contribution to the 2000 Whitney Biennial, a disturbing video loop of Tom Cruise gyrating face down on a couch, taken from Risky Business (the 1998 work is called The Pure Products Go Crazy). He learned more about Goldstein through the Scott Rothkopf article in the October 2001 issue of Artforum, whose cover image was the barking dog from Shane (1975), and also through a performance of Two Boxers (1979) that he saw in 2002. Discovering Goldstein’s work was “like finding long-lost relatives,” Pfeiffer said, but he strangely didn’t mention his own videos involving boxing, including The Long Count (I Shook Up the World) from 2000, shown at the Project in Harlem, in which he digitally erased the figures of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston from the ring, leaving ghostly traces of their moving bodies. For Pfeiffer, Goldstein’s work defies and transgresses binaries such as inside/outside, self/other, performance/film, black/white, and public/private. This, he said, might be the central mission or content of the work.

    During the open discussion with Bishop and Julia Robinson, assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art at New York University, Pfeiffer commented on the mythology of Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition and essay. “Influences retell history,” he said. Andrews found it hard to track Goldstein’s influence in her work. An artist such as Robert Longo has more shows in spaces to which she has access. She also wondered about the contexts in which Goldstein might be placed, such as Light and Space, instead of the Pictures Generation, in which he is always understood. I liked that she questioned the received wisdom of art history. After all, Goldstein did spend most of his career in California, not in New York.

    Robinson asserted that Goldstein’s work defines the Pictures Generation but transcends it. She also called Pictures “the last generation” of artists, meaning a coherent group that can be categorized largely without opposition. I’m not sure that’s a fair argument, as one can identify numerous artistic cliques from the last thirty years that could be generational, such as the one revolving around Kelley Walker, Wade Guyton, and Seth Price, or the scene at Deitch Projects as chronicled in the book Live through This (2005), or the Relational Aesthetics crowd, as grouped by Nicolas Bourriaud and canonized in the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition theanyspacewhatever. The contemporary art world is indeed too plural, too diverse for any one scene to lead the pack—but there are movements, even if no one uses that term. Relatedly, the 2000s and early 2010s will probably be remembered as the decades of the mega gallery, with dealers like Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner having the most influence.

    Bishop noticed that today’s artist is interested in the celebrity aura and the proper name. Robinson said that Goldstein had evacuated proper names, but Andrews countered, arguing that Longo had brought them back (with his use of stills from Fassbinder films). The roaring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, she said, is a proper name. “That’s not a star—that’s a brand,” Pfeiffer retorted. To him, Kutcher’s ring has the aura of a coat rack—it’s not special at all to him. But what is valuable to one person may not be important to another: does anyone remember the Carl Andre bricks scandal in the 1970s? The panelists agreed that the aura of celebrities, now on Twitter and appearing in reality television shows that are about themselves, has now become mundane.

    The panelists, from left: Kathryn Andrews, Julia Robinson, Claire Bishop, and Paul Pfeiffer (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    One panelist called Goldstein a cross between Peter Fonda and Keith Richards—maybe it was Pfeiffer. Andrews talked about the “symbolic presence of the artist’s body,” and Bishop mentioned the “curatorial paradigm” that was Goldstein’s class at CalArts in which students reconfigured stuff instead of making new art objects. Andrews related this to collecting art as a leisure activity, and Robinson compared the film director to the curator and asked “Does that mean the stakes of dematerialized object are evacuated?” Pfeiffer said that we move between material and immaterial now. To me this was an instance in which the form of one generation (Pictures) becomes the content of another, as Longo stated in the first panel.

    During his Rhizome Seven on Seven collaboration in 2013, Pfeiffer worked with Alex Chung, the inventor of Giphy, a microblog website for animated GIFs. Eyes like this kind of vibration, he said. “The loop is vision.” He had the idea to create a company that could hypnotize people with animated GIFs. But that’s the TV news, he laughed. Bishop noted how audiences’ attention spans have shortened since the 1970s. Goldstein’s film Shane is three minutes long, but animated GIFs last three seconds.

    A man in the audience wanted to clarify the difference between influence and copying. He recalled how his exposure to the singer and musician Jonathan Richman inspired him to play music, not to copy him but because he thought, “I can do that.” (Richman was a Velvet Underground groupie whose own band, the Modern Lovers, took the delivery of his idol Lou Reed into new directions, such as comedy.) The audience member was also impressed by Goldstein’s work in writing and graphic design from the 1990s—as was I—and never thought the artist would do something like that. He also considered the paintings from the 1980s to be sellout stuff, and that the films from the 1970s came out of nowhere. Matt Mullican, also speaking from the audience, said that Goldstein didn’t come out of nowhere but from a group of twenty people in New York’s downtown scene. The influence of those twenty people continues to reverberate today.

    In Terms Of count: 4.

  • Affective Technologies

    An Evening with Hal Foster
    “The Art-Architecture Complex and The First Pop Age”
    Monday, November 28, 2011
    The Kitchen, New York

    The Kitchen invited Hal Foster, a historian, critic, and professor of art at Princeton University, to discuss his two recently published books. After an introduction by Tim Griffin, director and chief curator of the venerable institution, the soft-spoken Foster established the evening’s agenda: he would read from the books before being joined by Griffin (and then the audience) for a Q&A. The following narrative draws from both parts.

    The Art-Architecture Complex, Foster instructed, considers the relationship of image to building, of Pop design to the postmodern built environment. One might immediately think of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, as the quintessential convergence of image and art, but I immediately thought of how Milwaukee’s identity has been inextricably subsumed by Santiago Calatrava’s addition to the city’s art museum. The book’s first section examines three starchitects of the new global style—Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, and Richard Rogers—whose work promotes a “banal cosmopolitanism.” In its second part, the book looks at architects such as Zaha Hadid and Diller Scofidio + Renfro who are influenced by artists and by art history, and how their approach dovetails with the contemporary art museum. The third area explores how art has been transformed by the built environment, using figures like Richard Serra, Anthony McCall, Robert Irwin, and others responding to architecture. This final section, Foster revealed, revises his 1986 essay on “The Crux of Minimalism,” which appears in the excellent collection The Return of the Real (1996), which I read as an undergraduate.

    Hal Foster, Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, consecrates his two new books (photograph by Ben Duhac)

    The preface to The Art-Architecture Complex, which Foster read from while interjecting extemporaneous commentary, begins to explain two key concepts for the book: affect and phenomenology. Affect, sometimes called atmosphere, is an imposed feeling coming from elsewhere, whereas phenomenology concerns a body moving through a space that is having its own, unscripted experience. Recent architecture uses affect to seize experience from the person inside a structure, according to the author, while also warping the transparency of modernism, from its lofty ideals to its lightweight and glass building materials, into an obfuscatory encounter. During the Q&A an audience member accused Foster of creating essentialist categories—polarities also questioned by Rowan Moore in his book review in the Guardian—but Foster categorically denied her claim. Instead the schism is a “thought experiment,” a way to bracket or frame his arguments. Affect, he continued, imposes an emotional ideology that crosses class, racial, and other social divisions, not unlike, observed my companion to the talk, attempts at emotional manipulation as seen in Hollywood action or romance movies.1

    Richard Serra’s sculptures in the Grand Palais in Paris grace the cover of Hal Foster’s The Art-Architecture Complex

    These notions of images and affect—or at least the struggle between people and the larger cultural sphere surrounding them—connected the first book to the second, The First Pop Age, in which Foster positions five Pop painters who upheld the tableau tradition (Richard Hamilton, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter) as both canny experts and dialectical theorists, and not as “dupes of the media, its zombies in art,” as their detractors would have it. Consumer society conflates the fetishisms of commodities, sex, and semiotics, which Pop artists picked apart and handed back. Like the impatient fan of a mystery novel, the author read the last pages of The First Pop Age to the audience at the Kitchen.

    Foster said he came to art through Pop and Minimalism, both of which interested him because the former movement dissolved the body, and the latter called for its presence. At the time, he admitted, Pop was too close, especially since it mightily informed the work of the Pictures generation.2 Now he feels there’s more distance to study it. Though “committed to the Minimalist trajectory” for a long time, Foster began to understand elements of Pop in areas he had not considered before: in body art, installation, institutional critique, and other genres that traditionally sprang from the sculptural side of 1960s art. About Donald Judd he said: “I read the criticism but didn’t look too hard at the work.” Now he sees illusionism writ large, a pictorial unbound. “Pop has weirdly become the primary term.” Griffin and Foster mentioned the recent Judd show at David Zwirner Gallery, which had a correspondence with new media in the sense that both art and the internet alter our sense of space.

    No one, not even Robert Fraser and Mick Jagger, can escape the barrage of new Hal Foster books

    The reasons to become a critic or historian, Foster explained, are the same for an artist or architect: a discontent with the status quo.3 He sees the aesthetic of Dia:Beacon or the Museum of Modern Art, which opened new buildings in 2003 and 2004 respectively, abandoned their original commitment to modernism in favor of affect. Dia:Beacon is a new sublime, he said, a new Hudson River School. The old attitude has evaporated in art, too, and the perversion in its place needs criticism and history to counter the spell of artists such as James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, who reverse the terms of Minimalism. Thus the pessimistic but hopeful Foster still insists on criticality as a value, but, he said.

    Foster described The First Pop Age as an homage of sorts to Reyner Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), a text that took on the postwar image world through not only classic twentieth-century architects such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, but also Futurist and Expressionist architects whom the modernist march of progress had previously cast aside. In this way Foster elucidated, Banham’s revision was a form of periodizing, distinct from historicizing. By looking backward, the older author posited that the postwar period had been experiencing a second machine age, using an approach not dissimilar, I think, from George Orwell’s commentary on his own era through a story set fifty years in the future. This second machine age was the world Foster was born into, one in which, he laughed, people optimistically believed that they might never die. Ars longa, vita brevis.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

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    Benjamin Sutton wrote a review, “Art Historian Hal Foster at the Kitchen: ‘We Live in the Age of Trauma,’” of the same panel for the L Magazine.

    1 Under the guise of their gallery, Famous Accountants, the New York–based artists Kevin Regan and Ellen Letcher recently experimented with what they called “affective technologies” with a similar idea in mind. Earlier this summer, at NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn, Regan and Letcher led five days of encounter groups based on exercises from Will Schutz’s posthippie, pre–New Age book Joy in order to automatically trigger emotional responses from participants. The program, a word that, not coincidentally, plays on the notion of “programming” in the nefarious sense, was called More Joy.

    2 Students come to Foster, he said, thinking he is an expert on Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and the rest. Even though he lived through the Pictures generation, he learns more about that art from his students, who can identify his blockages and assess the work to be done.

    3 In an amusing twist, Foster claimed that an artist’s value depends on his or her use by other artists, not unlike the important criterion for academics: the more other scholars cite your journal articles, the better your chances for tenure and promotion.