In Terms Of

Tag: Kirsten Swenson

  • The Money Pit

    Collecting the “Uncollectible”: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture
    Thursday, May 23, 2019
    Center for the History of Collecting, Frick Art Reference Library, Frick Collection, New York

    In November 1973, Walter De Maria wrote to his former dealer, Virginia Dwan, seeking funds to create a second, larger version of 35-Pole Lightning Field, a work of Land art that he had erected near Flagstaff, Arizona, earlier that year with Dwan’s financing but later dismantled. During her keynote lecture at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’: Earth and Site-Specific Sculpture,” a half-day symposium held at the Frick Collection, New York, on May 23, art historian Suzaan Boettger quoted from the letter: “I have come to realize that the land or earth movement as a whole is best advanced through fewer major statements rather than a profusion of smaller ones.”

    Dwan turned De Maria down, but he eventually found another patron—the Dia Art Foundation—for The Lightning Field (1977), his monumental artwork in the western New Mexico desert. The artist also got his wish. As Kirsten Swenson noted in a 2012 essay in Art in America, any survey of twentieth-century American art will likely represent the movement with the same set of works: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), and De Maria’s The Lightning Field, a triumvirate of “major statements” that have become synonymous with Land art as a whole. The symposium, which addressed the commissioning, collecting, and maintenance of large-scale outdoor sculpture, did not stray far from De Maria’s conceit, reducing the wide-ranging Land art movement to a few consequential practitioners and patrons.

    Dia, which now administers two of these three sites (the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, oversees Double Negative), as well as other monumental works like Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), located in the Great Basin Desert in Utah, and De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), was prominently represented at the symposium, reflecting the institution’s success in positioning itself as virtually synonymous with Land art and its administration. Aside from Boettger and collector Jarl Mohn, all of the speakers had direct ties to Dia: participants included the foundation’s director, Jessica Morgan; two Dia curators, Alexis Lowry and Kelly Kivland; and board chair emeritus Leonard Riggio. Another participant, curator James Meyer of the National Gallery of Art, recently served as Dia’s deputy director and chief curator. The lone artist speaker, Michelle Stuart, currently has a work—Sayreville Strata Quartet (1976), a set of monochromes made by breaking apart rocks from an abandoned quarry and vigorously rubbing the sediment onto muslin-backed paper—on long-term view at Dia:Beacon.

    Since the late 1960s, the conventional narrative around Earthworks has been that they are difficult to access and experience in person because of their remote locations, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to sell. Artists offered documentary materials for gallery display—maps, written descriptions, photographs—but these were considered poor substitutes for actual work. This notion went largely unchallenged during the symposium: The Earthwork was ordinarily bound to its place, Meyer said during his talk. “It was unmovable and therefore unexchangeable. It could not take on what Marx called exchange-value—it couldn’t be moved around, bought and sold.”

    However, the land on which an Earthwork is situated can be sold in a real-estate transaction. Because Meyer and his fellow symposium participants focused narrowly on access and patronage, they sidestepped thornier issues of control. Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), for instance, constructed in a sand quarry in the Netherlands as part of an outdoor sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek ’71, remains in private hands. The quarry’s owner, Gerard de Boer, whose father agreed to host (and pay for) the work nearly fifty years ago, told the New York Times in 2017 that he wants to sell the business but also find a custodian for the artwork. The buyer of one may not be interested in the other.

    Other works have even more complex ownership structures. Smithson’s estate gifted Spiral Jetty to Dia in 1999 but retains the copyright to the work. Neither institution owns the physical land, which the foundation leases from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire, and State Lands. Meanwhile, Heizer executed his series Nine Nevada Depressions (1968) on government property near the Nevada-California border. Since Heizer created the works without permission, could he have been prosecuted for trespassing and vandalism? Do the “depressions” belong to the heirs of collector Robert Scull, who financed them, or, since federal land is publicly owned, to all Americans?

    If their works couldn’t be easily sold, how did Land artists make a living? Someone had to fork over cash for the machinery and materials necessary to create these works. Two names came up repeatedly: Virginia Dwan, who was scheduled to speak at the symposium but ultimately didn’t appear, and Scull, who died in 1985. Whereas Dwan’s position as an independently wealthy gallery owner enabled her artists to operate on a grand scale, Smithson’s next dealer, John Weber, was a man of lesser means who, in Boettger’s words, “did not give grubstakes for Earthworks.” Though none of the speakers at “Collecting the ‘Uncollectible’” admitted it, their presentations clearly privileged subsidized, completed works over proposals. Artists unaffiliated with Dwan or Scull—such as Dennis Oppenheim, Will Insley, and Terry Fugate-Wilcox, among others—devised plans and built scale models for outdoor sculptures that, due to a lack of funding, were never fully realized.

    During her conversation with Dia curator Kelly Kivland, Michelle Stuart said that although her German dealer connected her with collectors, she scraped by on public grants and private fellowships throughout the 1970s. She depended on voluntary labor to complete Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975) for Artpark in upstate New York and worked with a miniscule $2,000 budget to complete Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1979) in Oregon. In contrast, better-known male artists encountered fewer restrictions and reaped larger rewards. Heizer has worked on City, a massive installation in the Nevada desert, for forty-seven years, accepting millions of dollars from collectors and institutions, including Dia. Boettger noted that James Turrell’s Roden Crater is a “cash cow” that, since the mid-1970s, “has received funding from the NEA, every major foundation, [and] many private collectors such as Count Panza.” Kanye West gave $10 million to Turrell last December. Despite this lavish support, both City and Roden Crater remain unfinished.

    Even when artists managed to find sufficient funding to execute their plans, these works require ongoing maintenance, as conservator Rosa Lowinger made clear when describing her firm’s efforts to preserve concrete boxes by Donald Judd in Marfa, public sculptures by Roy Lichtenstein and Ann Norton in Miami, and Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Whereas Holt consulted a team of experts in various fields (including astronomy, construction, and engineering) when planning her work, other artists were less concerned with longevity, making efforts to preserve them more complicated. Sabato “Simon” Rodia, for instance, erected his Watts Towers between 1921 and the mid-1950s idiosyncratically, with no central plan or style. The City of Los Angeles now owns the work and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is its steward. “They have a permanent team onsite,” Lowinger said, “just to do constant maintenance” on a work that cannot be brought “to a state of equilibrium.”

    Many works of Land art, such as Stuart’s Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns, were never intended to last. For others one must ask: when does the perpetual cost of care exceed an artwork’s value? In other words, when does an Earthwork become a money pit? Though patrons like Dwan and Scull helped artists to realize ambitious projects, Land art also encompassed many other smaller-scale gestures that lasted for hours or days, not for decades. Because the symposium focused so narrowly on these Dia-approved figures, it felt more like a consolidation of the foundation’s influence over the movement’s history than a diligent exploration of collecting difficult art.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    Source

    This review was originally published by Art in America on June 28, 2019.

    Read

    Andy Battaglia, “‘The Story of Our Civilization’: Land Art Symposium Explores Earthy Tales of ‘Uncollectibility,’” ARTnews, May 29, 2019.

    Brian Boucher, “‘We Shouldn’t Own These Things’: Five Takeaways from a Landmark Conference on Collecting Land Art,” Artnet News, May 27, 2019.

    Scott Indrisek, “The Market for Land Art Challenges Us to Think about Collecting Differently,” Artsy, June 20, 2019.

    Watch

    The Frick Collection has posted video from the symposium.

  • Not So Disappearing Anymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

    Read

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