In Terms Of

Tag: Gulf Labor

  • 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).

    Watch

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

  • How the Ruling Class Stole the Idea of Contemporary Art—and How to Get It Back

    9.5 Theses on Art and Class with Ben Davis and Special Guests
    Thursday, September 5, 2013
    Housing Works Bookstore Café, New York

    Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013)

    At the end of the first chapter of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, the New York–based art critic and editor Ben Davis writes that a “theory of class might provide the missing center of the debate about art.” Indeed, the use, value, and status of art—especially in relation to politics and economics—have been the subject of a constantly flailing conversation since the Occupy moment, since the Great Recession, since the Bush years, since the rise of the biennial, since the Culture Wars, since Reagan, since Conceptual art, since Duchamp—okay, you get the point. It’s exactly this kind of exasperating, roundabout conversation that Davis wants to displace, and his new book does exactly that with resounding success.

    Much of this success comes not from confrontation and agitation but rather through reason, logic, and clear thinking, which is perhaps why the book launch with a five-person panel last week was such a cordial affair. After giving a brief autobiography, Davis declared that the book comes from a new place, without the usual art vocabulary, and that he wants to bring together the art and activist communities. (The left-leaning Haymarket Books, known for titles on radicals and revolutionaries, published 9.5 Theses on Art and Class.) Many of its thirteen chapters had appeared over the years, in rougher forms, at Artnet.com, but the material also came from vigorous conversations with artists, dealers, critics, and activists. A significant moment for the author was #class, an exhibition cum seminar cum think tank cum rant room that was held in early 2010 at Winkleman Gallery. Davis’s contribution to the event was the enumerated “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” a cumulative list of Marxist-informed positions that illuminates much of what is wrong—and what could be right—about the contemporary world of art. “So you’re calling for a Reformation?” the art dealer Edward Winkleman asked him at the time. Apparently so, and it’s about time.

    In his talk, Davis summarized the distinctions and misconceptions among proper definitions of working, middle, and capitalist classes, which are elegantly covered in the first chapter. It’s not quite accurate to identify the middle class as based on income, education, or culture, but instead by the nature of a worker’s relationship to his or her labor. A middle-class person, Davis said, has agency, independence, and the ability to be one’s own boss. As an example he selected the mother of a Chicago-based activist and friend who runs her own cleaning business and employs two workers. Despite the type of work she does—maid service, really—this woman is middle class when compared to someone else in the same job at, for example, a hotel.

    Taking the subject of a chapter in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011), Davis provided a second anecdote of class perception in art. For his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, Robert Morris turned the museum into a construction site, bossing around the workers who moved large pieces of timber, concrete, and steel. Despite an intention to appear as a working-class construction worker, he actually became a supervisor—a middle- or even ruling-class position—of a process piece involving forklifts, cranes, and pulleys, burning through hours of hired manpower. (Later on Davis proclaimed that blue-chip stars like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have exited art and become company floor managers.) Last, the author described a tension between the middle-class, noncommercial artist who fears of selling out (i.e., making money) compared to the working class, which purposefully fights for a bigger piece of the pie. This dual identity, hyperbolically described by some as schizophrenic, was a strong undercurrent for the panelists.

    The class of 2013 (from left): Blithe Riley, Jennifer Dalton, William Powhida, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Starting the discussion, Blithe Riley, an artist, activist, and member of a collective that founded Interference Archive in Brooklyn, considered 9.5 Theses on Art and Class to be inspirational while raising important questions. The book, she felt, unwittingly presented the identity of artist as totalizing; it also doesn’t reflect the experiences of the museum and gallery workforce. Art is an “opaque economy,” Davis responded, acknowledging that a primary problem is that an artist, whose creative labor is middle class, must sometimes identify simultaneously with the working class through a day job (that dualism again). With New York in mind I thought immediately of artists working as art handlers and in entry-level positions and internships at commercial galleries and nonprofit organizations.

    Jennifer Dalton, an artist whose work addresses sexism in the art world and an organizer of #class, had a problem with thesis 2.8: “Another role for art is a symbolic escape valve for radical impulses, to serve as a place to isolate and contain social energy that runs counter to the dominant ideology.” Not all art is radical, said Davis, whose observations in theses 2.0 to 2.9 explicate the roles of art for the ruling class, which of course do not foreclose other possibilities for creative labor. Dalton wanted to know about the political responsibility of artists and how it affects their practices: “When is an artist a citizen?” A better question, I think, would be “When is a person an artist and when is he or she a citizen?

    William Powhida, How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, 2009, graphite on paper, dimensions not known (artwork © William Powhida)

    A veteran instructor for New York City public schools, the artist and #class conspirator William Powhida had started teaching this week and grumbled about the excessive time spent on administrative and evaluative duties that inevitably come with the position. He then conveyed his experiences as an artist with limited capital, which can be strained when studio accidents break expensive materials. With a corporate credit card for his practice—which is smartly registered as a limited liability company—Powhida has become that artist who produces work for art fairs, yet the majority of his income, he said, is derived not by selling his work with a gallery but through part-time teaching.

    Powhida is well known for creating art that is abrasive to the upper echelons of the art world but wonders about the effect his work has on this elite. For instance, what is he supposed to do when the Greek shipping magnate and art collector Dakis Joannou buys a print of a drawing called How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality that he designed for the cover of the November 2009 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, which satirized a decision by the downtown institution, on whose board Joannou serves, to let Koons organize an exhibition comprising only his holdings? After laboring in his studio throughout the early days of Occupy Wall Street in fall 2011, Powhida later attended meetings of the Arts & Labor working group but after a couple months decided that his satirical and parodic approach didn’t fit in with it. Undeterred, he has recently partnered with a few Bushwick artists and scenesters to investigate purchasing a commercial building to provide affordable studios for artists in an effort to slow down gentrification.

    Like Dalton, Naeem Mohaiemen, an artist, activist, and member of Gulf Labor, found thesis 9.0, which states that “The sphere of the visual arts is an important symbolic site of struggle; however, because of its middle-class character, it has relatively little effective social power,” to be contentious—if only as a call to arms to prove it wrong. He said that even a struggling artist has cultural capital and reiterated the evening’s recurrent notion of a person with multiple identities that cross class lines. To which group does an artist have a natural affinity, he asked, working or middle class? The answer is hard to produce here, but in other countries, he continued, divisions among classes are clear cut. Gulf Labor focuses on working conditions for migrant labor in the Middle East, that is, the ones who build the physical structures that house the institutions in which the art world works, such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. People [in America] dismiss the subject, Mohaiemen said, because they believe that it is too complicated and that workers should be happy to have jobs. To people over there, a New York artist is part of an aloof elite.

    52 Weeks of Gulf Labor announced at the Venice Biennale

    Everyone seemed to agree that artists have tremendous amounts of symbolic power but not enough to mitigate rapidly growing inequality. What is the centralized institution against which to strike, Davis asked. Artists will keep making art, he proceeded, whether they sell it or not. Dalton contended that artists should boycott, not strike: “Don’t participate in what you don’t believe in.” The power of saying no is certainly one implicit goal of a group like Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Similarly, Mohaiemen offered this advice to artists: “withhold and engage.”

    Circling back to the gentrification issue, a man in the audience with a British accent propounded that artists never exercise community power in their neighborhoods, like immigrants do. It is true that certain cultures have roots while others don’t. Powhida reminded him that his current interest—collectively buying and operating a studio building—would not displace residents; it’s an endeavor that aims to take advantage of underused commercial property—and therefore give the participants an important stake in the community. The questioning continued: Would the artists sequester themselves from the community? Should they teach computer classes to their neighbors? To me, these lines of thought obscure the larger picture, and Powhida has the right idea. Gentrification in New York can generally be mitigated in two ways: by owning property and through rent stabilization. The focus of advocacy efforts should be on education and action, in particular, guiding residents through the legal, financial, and governmental landscape of property ownership while helping enforce the rights of those facing eviction and displacement. The encroachment of hipster bars and restaurants, and galleries and boutiques, is consequential but beside the point. We need lawyers and social workers, teachers and those with political connections, not artists.

    One audience member contented that 9.5 Theses on Art and Class collapses politics into activism. “Professional revolutionaries” like Leon Trotsky or Hannah Arendt, he argued, would not think of themselves as activists. “Is activism your ultimate goal?” he finally asked. Davis briefly discussed his involvement with anti-racist, anti-prison, and anti-death-penalty groups, which he admitted has a narrow, limited scope. Yet helping people on a case-by-case basis, he hoped that this activity would have a larger impact. Powhida observed that Occupy Wall Street started large and fractured into working groups. The movement no longer has a discernible physical presence, amplified by the media and through confrontations with police, like it did in 2011, but instead operates on a smaller scale. I was reminded how Occupy Sandy mobilized relief efforts much quicker than established charities following the November 2012 hurricane.

    Looking beyond New York, Riley has noticed, through conducting professional-development workshops with Creative Capital across the country, that people all over have different solutions. The “professional art world,” she implored, needs to “think bigger.” She also encouraged people to step away from the art world and get involved in social-justice issues. “There are a lot of wins,” she said, that just “may not be visible” to someone with a passing interest in activism and politics. Dalton wanted people to “hesitate less” and “pick up a shovel.” Ultimately, Davis’s book makes its readers dig deeper, asking them—us—what they value in art and in life.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

    Read

    Carol De Pasquale, “And Then We’ll Dissolve the State,” In Terms Of, September 8, 2013.

    Edward Winkleman, “The Paradox of the Artist Activist,” Ed_ Winkleman, September 6, 2013.