In Terms Of

Tag: Maurizio Cattelan

  • Pawns in the Game

    Sarah Thornton in Conversation with David Kratz and Peter Drake
    Thursday, May 14, 2015
    Spring Lecture Series
    New York Academy of Art, New York

    The cover of Sarah Thornton’s book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (2014)

    The journalist and sociologist Sarah Thornton was interviewed about her latest book, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), at the New York Academy of Art, where she was also the school’s commencement speaker for this year’s graduating class of MFA students. The book chronicles the upper crust of the contemporary art world—the kind you read about in the Scene and Herd section of Artforum.com—from 2009 to 2013. Benchmarks in conversations and studio visits with the dozens of artists that Thornton interviewed were Jeff Koons, whom she considers to be conservative, and the high-risk Damien Hirst. Other recurring characters include Maurizio Cattelan, Ai Weiwei, and Andrea Fraser, as well as the artist couple Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons and their daughters, Grace and Lena Dunham. The people profiled in 33 Artists in 3 Acts, mostly midcareer professionals who were born in the fifties and sixties, are “all the real deal,” she said, with no authenticity and credibility issues. (She would need to write a separate book for emerging artists.)

    Wearing white jeans, a black blazer, and athletic sandals, Thornton was interviewed by David Kratz, a silver-fox painter and the president of the New York Academy of Art—a small graduate school that specializes in representational and figurative work—and the painter Peter Drake, who is also dean of academic affairs. Kratz inquired about the image of Gabriel Orozco’s chessboard work, Horses Running Endlessly (1995), which illustrates the book’s introduction. “Is that the art world?” he asked. Calling Orozco a “strategic player” (but not explaining what that meant), Thornton disclosed that the art world isn’t as egalitarian as a chessboard occupied only by knights—the punch line of Orozco’s work.1 Instead, the art world has “kings, queens, and pawns,” though I’d argue that the art world has more sacrificial pieces than power players in its own chess game. Success acculturates artists into the art world, she said, and they must figure out their position. Thornton believes that the art market should be part of an art school’s curriculum and warned against early career burnout from success—a future problem that I imagine many wish they would have.

    Gabriel Orozco, Horses Running Endlessly, 1995, wood, 3 3/8 x 34 3/8 x 34 3/8 in. (artwork © Gabriel Orozco; photograph probably by Yugen)

    Kratz asked about artists whose “crazy” works for them, and whose “crazy” doesn’t. In the former category Thornton placed Grayson Perry, famous in Great Britain but not so much here, who is a happily married transvestite potter with a daughter in college. The aging Young British Artists grumbled, she continued, at his winning the 2003 Turner Prize not because he dresses in women’s clothing but because he produces ceramics. Regarding bad crazy, Thornton said that Yayoi Kusama is the only artist whose craziness is acceptable. Yet if Kusama (b. 1929) were in her thirties today, Thornton said, nobody would accept her kooky behavior.

    High art and functional objects apparently have strong class divisions, at least in England. As a writer, Thornton identifies with craft, though it’s not wrong if an artist employs the labor of others to complete a project. She identified Christian Marclay’s breakout video The Clock (2010) as the example: Marclay had teams watching films but edited much of the footage himself. What is the different between art and craft, Thornton was asked. The concept makes it art, she replied, though the lines can blur. It is possible, Thornton continued, for artists to become craftsmen of their own work, if it becomes slickly produced. Perry, she said, claimed to be able to teach others to make his work, but they cannot make the art he is about to make.

    Drake directed attention back to 33 Artists in 3 Acts, asking Thornton if artists have their own view of success. She recounted how one thread in the book follows Laurie Simmons and Cindy Sherman, two photographers from the Pictures Generation, whom Thornton called “artist soul mates.” While Sherman’s career has certainly been larger than Simmons’s, the disparity hasn’t affected either their creativity or their friendship.

    Damien Hirst, The Crow, 2009, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 in. each (photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates; artwork © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd.)

    Thornton reiterated the importance of Hirst in her narrative, which makes sense for a journalist covering the economic side of the art world. Her profile on the bad-boy artist in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2009 was positive. She changed her tune in a 2010 article in the Economist, for which she researched Hirst’s direct-to-auction sale of his work in fall 2008. Bypassing the traditional dealer/gallery system and heading straight to the deep-pocketed collectors was a move that netted him $200 million. Thornton’s personal access to Hirst ended there, at least until 2013, when she cornered him in Qatar during a press preview for his retrospective Relics. “I don’t know how he feels about the book,” Thornton remarked, “and I don’t know if he reads.” The snark didn’t stop there. Thornton finds Hirst’s recent paintings to be “diabolical,” especially considering that he gave up painting at age 16 and took it up again in his forties. His spot paintings, which were shown in every Gagosian Gallery worldwide in 2012, are the “diffusion line of brand name.” “He lost faith in his practice,” she added, calling him an “interesting sculptor and an opportunistic painter.”

    An audience member asked if any of the artists she wrote about have overcome adversity. They all have, she said, emphasizing that the Chinese Ai and the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn have been challenged on political and governmental levels. Another person inquired about the art-world game, which Thornton described as soccer, because it’s always changing. She advised the audience member to “choose your game, be good at it, and make others play it.” She also advised artists to understand social dynamics and etiquette and to not get duped. Some well-established dealers are notorious for not paying artists, Thornton revealed, and advocated banning them from art fairs.

    Someone asked if it is true that the most successful artists have great self-doubt. Yes, she replied, and artists such as Cattelan embrace it. She also implied that Hirst is insecure. The final question from the audience addressed artists and suffering. Thornton’s unexpected, thoughtful response concerned motherhood: artists such as Sherman and Marina Abramović sacrificed having children for their careers. Yet having children, Thornton appended, is not the credibility killer for women artists under 55 that it once was.

    I sensed that Thornton presented herself as outsider to the art world. In her writing, she said, she watches the dynamics of opinion rather than passes judgment. I also sensed disconnect between her and the audience, which routinely failed to respond—with laughter or applause—to her stories at the right moments. A few times Thornton was the only person laughing at her remarks. The setting at the New York Academy of Art was informal, and the attendees seemed to be made up of young artists—the pawns of the art world. This made Thornton’s jet-setting glamor something of a mismatch, but not glaringly so. I was left to wonder what she offered to the school’s graduate students.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 More positively, Thornton interpreted Horses Running Endlessly as a “dance floor in a multicultural club.”

  • 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.”

  • The Well-Hung Show

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

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

    Dieter Roelstraete on the left and David Joselit on his left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    To conclude the conference “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” two speakers—a curator and an art historian—offered their thoughts on the day’s events. Dieter Roelstraete, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, spoke polemically about the conference theme, wanting his remarks to be “a case and a plea” for a curatorial attitude that “shouldn’t be ashamed of its aesthetic ambitions and its aesthetic aspirations.” Roelstraete first declared that conversations regarding antagonistic tensions between artists and curators, and regarding questions of power, fatigue him. “For me,” he boldly stated, “the practice of exhibition making is really an artistic endeavor.” As a curator coming to the profession through writing (after being trained as a philosopher), Roelstraete thinks of exhibitions as essays, and he considers group exhibitions as “spatial writing—not with ink, not with computers—but with objects.” It is easy for artists to be curators, he said, but it’s still taboo for curators to be artists. He wants to challenge this taboo.

    Thankfully he stopped short of calling himself an artist. While I agree that curatorial work is highly creative labor and that the essay format for it is a productive conceit, organizing exhibitions is not art. Curatorial work and artistic labor share many aesthetic elements, such as rhythm and symmetry, as Roelstraete pointed out. Further, he said, curatorial work involves building “an aesthetically compelling argument,” which curators “attempt to master by trial and error.” His observation that “curating is the art of hanging pictures,” however, earned a hiss from an audience member. In fact, this same person—I think it was a he—kept hissing at comments throughout the conference’s final session. Maybe this hiss was intended to be a laugh.

    In contrast to Roelstraete’s passionate approach, his session colleague, David Joselit, professor of art history at the Graduate Center, commented briefly on several points raised during the conference. Like many in the art world, he has noticed that curating is everywhere, from the interiors of co-op buildings to products in upscale grocery stores. He defined curatorial work as “adding value through the assembly of a group of things” and “the convergence of production and display.” Joselit offered a notion of “curating in the expanded field,” which consisted of “aggregating, assembling, curating.” Selection, he continued, has become an aesthetic skill, which creates what he called a condition—not a turn. Joselit also observed that embedded curatorial activities with artists—such as Lynne Cooke’s rapport with Rosemarie Trockel and how Josh Kline includes his friends in his shows—may combat the scale of an overwhelmingly expansive art world. The practice, he noted, is not without ethical dilemmas and intellectual contradictions.

    Dieter Roelstraete with a two-finger muse; David Joselit with palms-down authority

    Though Joselit felt that “the idea of an artist’s career as an object is very interesting,” he approved of Carol Bove’s objection to the attitude that everything an artist does is the work. Suggesting that the impresario curator is a European cultural model, Joselit posited that American curators are caught between the goals of museum public relations (to draw audiences) and the needs of an institution’s funders, trustees, and, to a lesser extent, corporations and public funding. Like several other conference speakers, Joselit rubber-stamped the idea that artists are delegated to do what regular curators cannot or will not do.

    Roelstraete felt it is routine for the “curatoriate” (his term for the professional class) to renovate, reinterpret, reinvigorate, and rejuvenate their institutions’ permanent collection. He agreed with the conference’s keynote speaker, Boris Groys, that everyone—artists, dealers, collectors, museum directors, and even installers—instrumentalizes art in some fashion.

    Throughout the duration of the 7th Berlin Biennale, representatives from Occupy and M15 practiced their forms of protest and strategies of involvement on the ground floor of KW

    As an example Roelstraete discussed the seventh Berlin Biennial (2012). Even though it was the first one organized by an artist (Artur Żmijewski), the show was reviled and panned, especially by Berlin-based artists. A chief complaint, Roelstraete recalled, was that Żmijewski instrumentalized the art. Reflecting on his own practice, Roelstraete said that he doesn’t conceal his intentions when approaching artists, directly asking them if he can instrumentalize their work. “Maybe they like the idea,” he wondered aloud, “or the museum.” Or maybe artists are desperate for a high-profile exhibition to help boost their careers.

    Noting that of the thirty exhibitions listed in the September previews in Artforum, only two were group shows, Roelstraete wondered if the group show is an endangered species.1 Even though he specializes in the thematic exhibition with multiple artists, such as the recently closed The Way of the Shovel (2013–14) at his home institution, the curator acknowledged that his preferred genre presents fundraising and communications troubles; group shows, he added, are also hard to travel. Such anecdotal claims cannot be easily proven, of course, but decisions in the curatorial world are often based on personal experiences. That said, Roelstraete relayed that his first attempt at organizing a solo exhibition (for Chantel Ackerman) was tough and his most difficult project. Later on he offered a tantalizing idea of having six curators organize a solo exhibition.

    Toward the end of the session the conversation bounced from topic to topic, with each speaker making brief declarations on this and that. After proclaiming that “writing is the bedrock of curatorial thinking,” Roelstraete asked Joselit for an opinion. “Some arguments can only be made with objects,” the historian replied, which he misses from his academic life. (He was a curator in the 1980s.) Joselit was thankful that academia has provided him with time to write but then tried to explain something called the “counterexhibition,” using Philip Parreno, Rirkirt Tiravanija, and Maurizio Cattelan as examples His concept was not clear.

    “I don’t think you can curate a menu,” exclaimed Roelstraete twice, urging that the term only applies to exhibition making. Joselit felt that curators should not withdraw into a defensive “I’m an expert” model. Action and dialogue in contemporary art, he noted, has moved from three-dimensional space but also virtual—and that you cannot have one without the other. You cannot assume that bloggers are amateurs, Joselit let slip.

    From the audience Chelsea Haines, a PhD student in art history at the Graduate Center and a conference organizer, reminded the panelists how curators need only posses a generalized knowledge of art, which lessens the dependence on a doctorate or a curatorial-studies degree. People in the art world are nimble, she said, and can learn stuff in bits and pieces. If a curator, Haines continued, wants to bring an outside interest into the museum—here thinking of Roelstraete’s The Way of the Shovel—he or she does not need a PhD in archaeology. Joselit agreed and disagreed with this suggestion: the curatorial rhetoric of constructing an argument in space and with objects, he said, can be learned and developed—it’s not always intuitive.

    In his opening remarks Roelstraete observed that no conference speaker had discussed curatorial roles at art fairs, a gap that I also noticed and wished was addressed. In the previous session Kline talked about organizing do-it-yourself exhibitions in unconventional spaces, but the conference largely addressed curatorial roles in traditional art institutions. Haines’s comments about education struck me as particularly interesting: while I agree with her that formal training isn’t always needed, my unscientific observations of employment classifieds for open curatorial positions tell another story—museums and university galleries “prefer” an applicant with a PhD, which is to say that those without one may be unduly overlooked. Even a master’s degree in curatorial studies at Bard College will only get you so far. If a doctorate becomes the baseline standard, the curatorial profession may become out of reach for “outsiders” (such as Robert Nickas or Joshua Decter, to name two from an older generation) seeking institutional positions. To break from convention, a museum can always call on artists to provide an unconventional approach to exhibition making. To have only these two options—academic and artist—precludes a wide realm of curatorial viewpoints.

    In Terms Of count: 1½.

    1 Discounting the introductory section that lists seven biennials, the seasonal preview in the September 2013 issue of Artforum listed nine group shows among the forty-four selected for the section.

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  • 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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