In Terms Of

Tag: Los Angeles

  • 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.

  • The Punch in the Face That a Poster Can Have

    Curating Social Movements
    Tuesday, August 19, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    An Occupy Wall Street poster from 2011 by the artist Lalo Alcaraz

    Weeks after the Occupy Movement started, in September 2011, museums began racing to collect the posters, flyers, and other materials from the protests. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History dispatched archivists from Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York sent representatives downtown, as reported by Artinfo, the Washington Times, and the New York Daily News. As an explanation, the Smithsonian released a statement on October 19 that read: “The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.” In an editorial for CNN published in November, Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, wrote, “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and ‘hippie.’” Academics, museums, and the media clearly recognized the importance of both Occupy and its visual culture in American history.

    Though squatting in Zuccotti Park ended permanently by mid-November 2011, activists and artists kept the movement alive in myriad other ways. So did the institutions. In summer 2012, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco contextualized contemporary materials with those from the region’s storied past of political dissent in Occupy Bay Area. In spring 2013, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, organized Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today, an exhibition of posters and ephemera from Occupy, some of which were borrowed from the Smithsonian. In that same year, the Museum of Modern Art added the Occuprint Portfolio, consisting of thirty-one screen prints (including work by Molly Crabapple, John Emerson, and Katherine Ball) from the Booklyn Artists Alliance, to its permanent collection.

    At the beginning of “Curating Social Movements,” the curator Ryan Wong claimed that the topic of curating social movements is underdiscussed. “Social-movement stuff,” he said, “falls through the cracks.” Wong rightly identified curators as political actors—negotiation among parties of various backgrounds and competing interests is implicit in the job. He also correctly proposed that examining the visual culture of social movements help us to better understand their history. But considering the kinds of activity mentioned above, Wong’s notion that “art institutions are threatened by this kind of work, these objects,” felt off the mark. Which institutions are threatened, and what exactly is the threat?

    A view of “Curating Social Movements” at the ICI Curatorial Hub

    Wong’s fellow panelist, the artist and activist Josh MacPhee, grew up as a punk-rock kid in Massachusetts, where he graduated from making flyers for bands to designing posters for housing struggles, bridging music and politics with cultural production. With Dara Greenwald, he organized Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now at Exit Art in 2008, an exhibition that served as a visual introduction to social movements around the world. (The show traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University a year later). MacPhee argued that the works of art, which were borrowed from eighty-two institutions, were integral to each movement’s political aspirations. Picking a bone with academia, he said that scholars tend to review what others have written (e.g., in journalistic accounts) and overlook the primary visual documents. I, too, find it odd that authors and historians could be so sloppy and wondered with scholars MacPhee had in mind.

    MacPhee represented Interference Archive, a collectively run group that acquires and houses materials and objects from social movements from the 1960s to the present, stages exhibitions of them, and makes them available for study. Based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the archive offers public programming, workshops, and events in a social space—just like many other libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centers. With a hands-on policy, he said, Interference Archive is not a quiet library.

    MacPhee offered seven ideas to distinguish cultural production, which I understood as useful materials for a particular purpose, from political art, a genre that operates in the world of so-called fine art. The first notion was autonomy. If I understand him correctly, the visual culture of social movements does not have autonomy—background information beyond a caption is needed for comprehending the full message of an image. To demonstrate, MacPhee showed a 1963 photograph by Charles Moore, depicting four American civil-rights activists sprayed by water hoses. The underlying significance to the image, not readily apparent, is not that these people are protestors, but that they’re protestors who are organized. I liked this point of view very much, but overall MacPhee’s logic regarding autonomy was unclear, since context is hugely critical for untangling the meaning of much contemporary art.

    charlesmoore
    A Charles Moore photograph of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963

    The social forms of cultural production (MacPhee’s second idea) are important. He also emphasized the movement as producer (idea three), for which creative roles are flexible—teachers become television broadcasters. He also pointed out how arpilleras quilts were smuggled from Chile through the Catholic Church to raise funds for resistance efforts against a dictatorship. The stakes of visual material from social movements (idea four) are also vital: what are the intended goals apart from the individual concern? Prints depicting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising (by Hong Sung-dam and others) illustrated what was banned from television because, MacPhee said, journalists couldn’t work the right angle and the American government forced CBS not to broadcast footage. (Since I am not familiar with this history, I’ll take his word for it.) At this point MacPhee noted how Independent Curators International had recently been caught in crossfire with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a country that, he noted, pays three to four times the regular fee for visiting speakers.1

    Since upheaval generates cultural production, MacPhee identified cacophony as a fifth quality. In 1968 France, the Atelier Populaire generated thousands of revolutionary posters after protesters took over the equipment in the occupied École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He also mentioned a Nicaraguan artist “known for [his] Marlboro Man cowboy style,” whose images alluding to the wide-brimmed hat of the national hero Augusto César Sandino were adopted by the Sandinistas during the 1980s as a symbol of resistance. (Was Róger Pérez de la Rocha the name of this artist?)

    The White Bike Plan in Amsterdam was organized by a counterculture group called Provo

    Marginal ideas transform the world, which MacPhee called prefiguration (his sixth notion), referring to prefigurative politics, for which people imagine a better society before trying to realize it. The mid-1960s White Bike Plan in Amsterdam would have given free access to bicycles in the Dutch capital, he told us, but the CitiBike idea for New York was seized by sinister venture capitalists, just like portions of the code on which Twitter was built came from the open-sourced TXTMOB in 2004. It would be interesting to read a comparative analysis between the reception of the White Bike Plan and CitiBike—perhaps something has already been written?

    momalibrary
    Cataloger’s note from the Museum of Modern Art Library (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    MacPhee’s seventh and final idea argued that the art of social movements does not fit comfortably in museums and archives. Instead, he claimed, it often stays within the common—which probably means with private individuals who I imagine do not think of themselves as collectors or archivists. He showed a snapshot of a ten-year-old note referencing an unidentified collection of posters deemed “not cool enough” for initial cataloging by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which demonstrated a worker’s delightful sense of humor when prioritizing his or her work. Museums and institutions with different missions, though, happily collect social-movement ephemera, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this review. Nevertheless, I wonder if the creators of political posters aspire to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—or to any institution that desires to preserve and present them—or if such fetishization is antithetical to revolution.

    Wong organized Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive in 2013–14, presenting the work of numerous activists in the 1970s. Early on, Wong noticed that the movement did not have a Wikipedia page, and only a handful of academic books deal with the subject. “Google searches turn up little,” he said. His exhibition focused on the Basement Workshop in Chinatown, which he said was a place to talk, hang out, and make posters. Photographs from the era are banal but offer the energy of the moment, Wong said, which sounded like a contradiction to my ears. But no matter—this was the “first time,” he said, “where Asian Americans are controlling their own image.”

    Ryan Wong talks about his exhibition Serve the People (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Serve the People incorporated diverse media: graphic works from the artist Tomie Arai; music from the folk record A Grain of Sand (1973) and by the jazz baritone saxophonist Fred Ho; copies of a newsletter called Getting Together; and posters for workshops, street fairs, and basic medical services; and more. The curator also included documentary photographs by Corky Lee of a Peter Yew protest against police brutality, during which twenty thousand people marched from Chinatown to City Hall. Wong said that didn’t know this kind of show was possible before [seeing] Signs of Change. When organizing Serve the People, Wong faced skeptics who asked him “Why now? Why you? What do you know about my history?” These are fair questions, but ones that a good curator will know how to answer.

    Conversation during the audience Q&A covered measuring success, intergenerational communication, and exhibitions at Interference Archive, such as reconciling participant’s recollections against material evidence and maintaining community after a show ends. Though the two speakers didn’t offer a satisfactory answer to that last point—Wong even said that exhibitions “do violence” to the memories of the movement—it seems as if a good presentation should sufficiently inspire or agitate people to organize on their own (while including the institution, if they so choose). An exhibition space shouldn’t be relied on to be the only group that can effect social change.

    Installation view of Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive

    Interference Archive is staffed by volunteers, which come to the group out of desire. The organization minimizes hierarchy, MacPhee said, though he suggested that board members should be movement activists. He also said that 95 percent of funding comes from visitors via memberships, passing the jar at events, and selling works, which makes organizational sustainability an issue, especially regarding digital issues in archival work.

    Digitization isn’t a solution to accessibility, MacPhee explained, noting the time, money, and labor that goes into the effort—not to mention the difficulties of conducting additional research, assessing impact, and giving materials proper frames of reference in the face of the internet’s decontextualizing force. It’s better to set up archives in other communities, he recommended, and Wong noted that cultural production for the Asian American Movement is spread across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Each city can build its own Interference Archive. Someone suggested forcing big museums to do this work, but anyone who has spent time in a nonprofit knows that even the most prominent institutions suffer from an overburdened workforce. There is hope: Interference Archive has a Born Digital Working Group assessing the situation of storing and facilitating the migration of electronic material for future accessibility. But alas, “There’s no funding stream for an archive,” MacPhee resigned.

    An audience member asked about discernment when collecting objects, especially with movements whose political beliefs (such as white power or the Tea Party) may not align with the left-oriented Interference Archive. MacPhee said his group collects material from all kinds of movements and has accumulated right-wing stuff from what he called “counterintelligence” collections, not from the movements themselves. He explained that right-wing activists have typically favored television talk shows over printed matter—remember all those skinheads on Donahue and Geraldo? MacPhee clarified that even people on the left espouse violence, homophobia, and a naïve understanding of revolution.

    “Are kids still doing this?” someone asked regarding cultural production for social movements. “Yes, all over the place,” MacPhee responded positively. That was good to hear.

    In Terms Of count: 6½.

    1 See Mostafa Heddaya, “Creative Time Reneges on Promise to BDS Artists with Israel Exhibition, Artist Withdraws,” Hyperallergic, June 5, 2014; and Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, “Creative Time Responds to BDS Arts Coalition Petition” Creative Time, June 13, 2014.