Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).
For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).
Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).
Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.
Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.
Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.
Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.
In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.
Fads in Art
November 1983
New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product,” Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22
Although they may seem like opposites to the casual observer, Carter Ratcliff has some things in common with Hilton Kramer: both can talk and write marvelously about art-and-the-culture, and I’m probably not going to like the art either of them likes. This is, of course, not the Hilton Kramer of the postmodernism panel, the one who arrogantly slaps down a serious question, but the Kramer who fulminates so engagingly against the “advanced” political thinkers in art’s infrastructure that we applaud those shysters for inspiring him.
Carter Ratcliff, on the other hand, analyzes art’s moves from a more detached and, as a rule, more tolerant position. He nearly always sharpens our view of what we have only sensed or supplies an aspect we have entirely missed—in some cases the defining one. Here the focus is on “art image,” always an issue in modern art, now, Ratcliff says, a “junkie addiction.”
Speaker: Carter Ratcliff
Carter Ratcliff, art critic, author, and lecturer, spoke at the New Museum on “Fads in Art.” His diagnosis, delivered in a dryly clinical manner, depicted a horrendous condition with tinges of sin, damnation, and guilt. Art faddism is like a “junkie addiction” in which neurotic need meshes with the market forces of our consumer society, he said. Stressing neurosis as explanatory structure, he touched only briefly on economics that encourage such phenomena.
“The endless need of the art faddist for a new style is like the need of a junkie for another high,” he said. The faddist has the junkie’s concentration on the next fix and functions in a shallow reductive way to this end. “Politics has turned into advertising and food marketing into image shopping…. It was wrongly thought that the art world was different. But it has succumbed to the metaphysical trading of art images. They have become a consumer product you can put in the market basket.” Moreover, “It is not necessary to buy a painting to do this.”
Among Ratcliff’s other observations were the following:
“The ways that people present themselves, certain atmospheres, are not just unpleasant but profoundly dubious. Art reflects this. Consumer extremism, defining oneself in terms of an image, is junkie faddist behavior. The image addict thinks fads are avant-garde, a way of knowing what’s going on so he can get ‘ahead of the game’ (a market term). This is what the Village Voice is all about, a weekly report on the state of fads, which have begun to refer to themselves, rather than the world future they’re supposed to be predicting. Movie and drama critics talk to each other through their columns.
“Pop art shed a revealing light on images that tend to become objects of addiction in a consumer society…. ‘Fast evolution’ is [an] addiction to images of art. Fads are reductive and rescue the insecure personality from ambiguity and ambivalence, removing any sense of the passage of time…. To take oneself out of the context of the world is to remove oneself from the flow of history. Faddists on a fad high claim the justification that they’re in touch with the future. But fads have no predictive power other than to indicate the next fad in the many subcultures that cluster around. In the center of the faddist aura, meaning and value reside in rigid form.
“There is an obsession with ‘the best.’ The way people construct the world, clothes, wine, home furnishings, all make consumerism a source of redemption and justification for lacking a strong sense of self. Fads are an addiction to glamor, the high of glamor, which relieves one of the necessity to be conscious of what one is doing. Glamor is directive, projecting desires about oneself.
“In modern culture, art found itself adrift. Art is actualizing consciousness, defining the self. Serious art is a tissue of ambiguities—that’s what makes it great. To ‘worship’ is not to serve the authentic truth of a work of art. It can only be the object of a fad. The seeming dedication of the faddist to greatness becomes its destruction. Fads are not accidental. They are unconsciously intended to dampen and destroy the ambiguity and richness of meaning that give serious art its value.
“People say, ‘Manet’s time is now,’ ‘Leon Golub’s time is now.’ Is Golub’s time Manet’s time? Will the next time be the next blockbuster show at the Met? The need to see Manet as the vehicle of some absolute value requires one to take him out of time. This saves one from all complexities, such as the upsetting one of comparing Manet with Fantin-Latour—if you think Manet is radical.
Édouard Manet is the center of attention in Henri Fantin-Latour, A Studio at Les Batignolles, 1870, oil on canvas, 80.31 x 107.48 in. (artwork in the public domain)
“There are other kinds of fads that can develop in the vicinity of art. Faddists rewrite the past in a reductive way, so that art history becomes the history of one artist. Thus the deification of Turner. The Minimalists saw only Piero della Francesca and referred to him in an intimate tone as ‘Piero,’ like ‘Frank, Chairman of the Board.’ In the late ’50s, people talked like de Kooning or Ted Berrigan talked. And around the offices of Artforum, people sounded like the Reader’s Digest’s ‘Building for World Power.’ Everyone was polysyllabic.
“The unpleasant part is, we are all implicated. New fads work. We need them because they provide certainty for those who feel uncertain. The desire for authority is projected onto the image, where it is abstracted to the realm where nothing can question it.
“In the ’60s, magazines focused on fads, because of the rigid style divisions in the art world. In this situation, artists must position themselves so they will be seen. Everybody, including critics, wants to get into the line of sight.
“My favorite artists are marginal. This is not something trivial. Faddish feelings, insecure perceptions that judge so many to be marginal and only a few of dubious quality to be central, make the whole notion of ‘mainstream’ dubious. It is a bludgeoning word, a very cruel notion … flaunting oneself as being dedicated to images of absolute quality.
“In a fad, seriousness is reduced to an image. I do make a distinction between kinds of seriousness. The fad is not grappling, coming to terms, pushing further, [avoiding] risks or confrontations. Something is awry. The art world is being flooded with inauthentic images.”
In Terms Of count: 1.
Source
Written by Gladys Osterman, “Art Image as Consumer Product” was originally published in Women Artists News 9, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 22; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 225–26. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
Bruce Nauman in the doorway of his San Francisco studio in 1966 (photograph by Jack Fulton)
Is Bruce Nauman psychedelic? Though his early work is generally considered formally and conceptually apolitical, one wonders how much the culture in San Francisco in the mid-1960s—from the Free Speech Movement to the Summer of Love—influenced his mindset at the time. After Nauman graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1966, he established a studio in a storefront in the Mission District, where he spent several years realizing a now-seminal body of work that drew from the city’s tradition of Funk art as well as Minimalism from New York and Finish Fetish from Los Angeles. Though the artist has only admitted to drinking a lot of coffee in the studio, might have he sweetened his beverage with special sugar cubes?
“Nauman had a lot of time on his hands,” wrote Constance M. Lewallen in a recent exhibition catalogue, “and very little money.”1 Though the artist taught one class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he didn’t fraternize much with his fellow professors and spent many hours in the studio. In his Mission District space Nauman underwent intense self-examination and self-exploration, as the story goes, and made a monumental shift from making objects to foregrounding process. He contrasted the ephemeral nature of physical senses by casting his body parts—arm, ear, mouth, armpit, knees, hands, back, shoulder, and feet—in solid materials. He also explored language, especially the profound nature of jokes and puns, and documented loosely choreographed, seemingly absurd performances on camera.
Let’s look at a few of these works. One film depicted Nauman, dressed in a light t-shirt and dark jeans, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68); for another, Art Make-Up (1967–68), he filmed himself covering his face and torso with white, pink, green, and black paint. Nauman also hung a neon sign in his studio’s front window—the well-known The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)—whose words must have both baffled and delighted passersby, which would have included stoned hippies. Another neon sculpture, My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), spelled out “bbbbbbrrrrrruuuuuucccccceeeeee” in lowercase cursive script, referencing the lower gravity on the Moon’s surface but also the slower sense of time that a drug user purportedly experiences.
Traditional scholarship on Nauman’s work at this time focuses on his interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as to contemporaneous avant-garde dance groups (Anna Halprin) and underground film (Kenneth Anger) then flourishing in San Francisco. But what about psychedelia? After all, Nauman’s studio was located only three miles from Haight-Ashbury—the heart of American counterculture—and his work at the time was pretty far out, man.
The art critic Ken Johnson offers a theory of psychedelic art in his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (New York: Prestel, 2011), which considers work that was previously understood as embracing psychedelic characteristics (Fred Tomaselli, Robert Crumb) to those that didn’t (Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper, Kay Rosen and Kara Walker). It’s fair to ask how the boxes of Donald Judd might look to a stoned viewer? How might the implausible or impossible works of Conceptual art correspond to the root of the word psychedelic, “mind manifesting”? Johnson makes a compelling argument for seeing twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in a new way.
Rethinking the influence and potential of psychedelics is happening across culture, into business and science. The artist Emily Segal, the host for tonight’s event and a cofounder of a trend-forecasting company named after a drug experience, asked: “Is K-HOLE art influenced by psychedelia in a different way?” While recently browsing the shelves of a bookstore, Segal came across a Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The book, written by the handsome and youthful-looking Nicolas Langlitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, attempts to reconcile mysticism with materialism through a historical, anthropological, and philosophical analysis of his subject. Segal invited Langlitz to give a presentation at the Swiss Institute, in conjunction with its summer exhibition, The St. Petersburg Paradox.
Nicolas Langlitz and Emily Segal (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During his talk Langlitz surveyed the history of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States and explored how mainstream society and the counterculture have found common ground, especially over the last twenty-five years, since President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” which initiated a federal campaign to raise awareness for neurological research. The history goes back further, though, to the mid-twentieth century. Langlitz reminded us that pharmocological breakthroughs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics were discovered, refined, and produced in the same era as LSD. From Albert Hoffman to Timothy Leary to Richard Nixon, Langlitz traced the decline of scientific research up to the 1970s. (Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] in 1973.) After that time the occasional rogue scientist operated on the fringes, such as the Californian scientist Alexander Shulgin, who created about two hundred varieties of psychedelic substances and tested them on himself with a government-approved license that was revoked in 1994 after self-publishing what were essentially drug cookbooks. Since then knowledge about psychedelic use has permeated the internet, notably through anecdotes on the website Erowid.
Today there are two groups advocating psychedelic research. The first is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a group based in Santa Cruz, California, that frames its work to mollify—I mean, appeal to—the establishment by addressing such conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety for the terminally ill. “Nancy Reagan,” Langlitz joked, “would not say no to a drug that would alleviate anxiety.” The second group is the Heffter Research Institute, an institution based in Zurich, Switzerland, that Langlitz said has a “less activist brouhaha.” Advocates for psychedelic research have come from unusual places, such as the “Silicon Valley gods.” Bob Wallace of Microsoft funded Swiss research in the 1990s, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a longtime activist. Based on his positive recollections of psychedelic experimentation, Steve Jobs was approached for money—directly from Hoffman, it turns out—but the Apple cofounder declined to get involved.
Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012)
Switzerland has a liberal drug policy that dates to the 1910s, Langlitz stated, perhaps not unrelated to a large chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the famously neutral country. The 1990s saw a loosening of state policy: government-run clinics began supplying heroin to addicts, and scientists were permitted to run a mobile drug-testing lab in a popular Zurich techno club. When people come to find out what their still-illegal purchases are made of, they talk to social workers and take surveys, generating data that helps researchers to determine patterns of drug use and dosage, to monitor black-market products, and to educate club goers about current substances. Scientists also recruit, via the mobile unit, human test subjects for laboratory experiments.
The lively Q&A session with the audience revolved around three issues: differences and contradictions between physical and spiritual experiences; the authenticity of mystical experiences, hallucinogenic or otherwise; and the aesthetics of psychedelic art. Indignant with the term “spiritual,” one audience member asked Langlitz to produce an objective term. The psychedelic “experience is material through and through,” he responded, calling attention to the chemical nature of all brain activity. Like many, though, Langlitz is curious about what does the subjective experience opens, especially regarding the shared qualities of oneness, loss of ego, and being neither subject nor object that drugs offer. Aldous Huxley believed that all religions are built around “unitative technologies,” Langlitz said, which were achieved through practices such as fasting, meditation, chanting, and flagellation (ouch!).
Theologians may claim that hallucinogenic drugs provide an inauthentic, valueless experience, Langlitz continued, and prefer prayer and meditation. But Huxley had trouble obtaining elevating experiences the old-fashioned way, he continued. We shouldn’t limit the influence of chemicals on behavior to psychedelics. What does an authentic experience mean, Langlitz wanted to know, for a person taking Prozac? Is he or she experiencing real or false happiness? Similarly, he mentioned that anthropological research on psychedelics—especially in the 1970s—has focused too much on the shamanistic (and presumably authentic) use, in contrast to studies of how everyday people might find transcendence.
And what about psychedelic aesthetics, which Langlitz characterized as “the ugly and off-putting art of the 1960s.” You know the type—the wavy lines and bright colors found on posters for acid-rock concerts and in the earnest paintings of Alex Grey. Langlitz acknowledged that modernist abstraction was generally objective and cold, with Pop, ornamental Islamic forms, and East Asian traditions offering alternative formal models. He accepted the physiological aspect of psychedelic tropes—the cobwebs and other patterns—but pleaded, “What exactly does it have to do with psychedelics, anyway?”
Langlitz finds that large-scale photographs by the German artist Andreas Gursky better represent the psychedelic experience, especially with the simultaneous macro- and microscopic perspectives in his busy images of hotels, stock exchanges, sporting events, raves, and commercial retail stores. As an art student, Gursky was influenced not only by his famous teachers—the straight photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—but also by his LSD experiences. Today Gursky is too famous or too concerned with his professional image, Langlitz conjectured, to talk openly about psychedelics, like he did early in his career.
The art world has embraced the drug-inflected work of painters like Fred Tomaselli, as Ken Johnson has noted, but typically shuns the earnest spiritualism in the work of Alex Grey and others. Yet perceived shame of associating artistic output with drugs wasn’t adopted by everyone in the Swiss Institute audience. At one point a man stood up to describe his incredible personal experience on DMT at great length—cool story, bro—and an aging white-bearded hippie type proselytized the transcendent experiences that art environments by James Turrell and Robert Irwin offer, labeling the swirly stuff as kitsch. “So Alex Grey is the Norman Rockwell of psychedelics?” someone else asked, to much laughter. “Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough drugs,” joked Langlitz. “Everything reminds you of drugs.”
In Terms Of count: 1 (an audience member broke the seal toward the end of the Q&A).
In her opening remarks for “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” at the art fair Frieze New York, the panel’s moderator Orit Gat remarked that conversation about net neutrality has changed in recent years. Indeed, public awareness regarding the controlling forces behind the delivery infrastructure of the web has risen sharply after two pieces of federal legislation introduced in 2011—the House of Representatives’ Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Senate’s PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—failed to develop, along with the “internet blackout” protest on January 28, 2012, and the onslaught of related op-ed pieces over the last couple years.
Reducing the information superhighway to fast and slow lanes would no doubt pave the way to chaos on the roads on which millions of ordinary Americans travel daily. We would witness terrible bottlenecks and breakdowns, insufferable congestion and gridlock, and relentless construction work and impossible detours. If the internet behemoths have their way, Gat warned, “you will stream Netflix faster than you read the New York Times, if Netflix chooses to pay for it.” And the start-ups, the nonprofits, and all those individually maintained websites would presumably stall into obscurity. I wonder, though, how significant net neutrality is for contemporary artists, especially those who work closely with digital media. Based on this panel discussion, the issue doesn’t seem that important, but related topics—such as how the corporatization of the internet affects artists and the definition of postinternet art—are of particular interest.
Oblique view of “The World Wide Web at 25: Terms and Conditions” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Gat, a writer and editor for Rhizome and WdW Review, quickly gave a chronological history of the web as it intersected with digital art. While working at CERN in Switzerland, the British engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext transfer protocol (http) in 1989. Internet art grew in the early 1990s, she continued, helped along when US Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which greatly expanded online access for many citizens and businesses. Artists have influenced the web’s look and feel as we know it today much more than we realize, Gat said, and that internet and postinternet art developed simultaneously. This makes sense—thinking about Web 2.0, you can’t theorize the massive influence of Facebook and OkCupid, which launched in 2004 and run at full steam today, without considering LiveJournal and the Makeout Club, both founded in 1999 (but now puttering along). Despite the term “post,” Gat insisted, there is no art after the internet. Rather, postinternet art is a product of, and a response to, the changing digital landscape.
The first speaker was Gene McHugh, a writer and curator known for the blog Post Internet, who spoke biographically. The mainstream migration of people to the web, he said, took place in the late 1990s, when he was in high school. “I was an internet addict,” he said. “My identity was as much online as it was a body sitting there typing.” I was relieved McHugh advocated a synthetic view of a person’s relationship to digital culture, instead of trotting out the clichéd internet/IRL divide.
The cover of the print book edition of Gene McHugh’s Post Internet: Notes on the Internet and Art (2011)
McHugh intended Post Internet to explore and connect modes of digital production to modernism and the Pictures Generation—a pretentious approach, he admitted. Modernist terms, he came to realize as the project evolved, are not useful when describing the banal behavior of checking Gmail and social networks and watching cat videos. “The writing was rough, in retrospect,” he said, and also full of young fervor. For Post Internet McHugh deliberately chose the default blog settings, a kind of readymade design that he said created an awareness of the self-publication format. That sounds suspiciously like self-reflexive modernism, like Jean-Luc Godard foregrounding the act of making and watching films. The blog’s domain name contained a short string of numbers (122909a.com), and the posts contained only writing—no embedded links or photos.1 “It’s a certain way to approach the internet” that he said was characteristic of the late 2000s. “If you push it far into this banal realm, it works in an interesting way.”
McHugh explained Guthrie Lonergan’s term “internet aware art” as meaning offline art made with the internet in mind, or art made with an eye toward how it will look online. Considering time as an element, McHugh theorized that multiauthor projects such as the Jogging and Dump.fm, as well as surfing clubs, can be understood as performance, since you can follow this activity online but in real time. He also identified Marisa Olson, Cory Arcangel, and Michael Bell-Smith as artists exploring this kind of art in different ways.
The second speaker, the artist and writer Tyler Coburn, wanted to define postinternet, and especially that nagging prefix “post.” Instead, he read a formal, polemical, and somewhat difficult-to-follow artist’s statement that addressed the art market and art history. “The current market for postinternet art,” Coburn claimed, “is nothing if not robust.” He was less optimistic about periodization, which constricts some artists and renders others illegible. I don’t, however, find it unreasonable to group together similar artists and their work for the sake of convenience, acknowledging, of course, that such categorization doesn’t always make sense at a granular level. As problematic as they might be, terms like Cubism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism simply work. As much the term postinternet makes its supporters anxious, it still allows them to slide their work into a relevant discourse.
Regarding his own critical practice, Coburn firmly stated: “My work attempts to disenchant the dominant metaphors and mindsets at work in contemporary technology.” The reflexivity and opacity of digital infrastructure concern him greatly, as do finding a digital space outside Facebook and exploring emerging methods and practices, whatever those may be. He named Benjamin H. Bratton and Ann Hirsch as people doing critical work and cited his own project, I’m That Angel (2012–13), which took the form of a physical book and several readings inside data farms around the world, as another example.
Readings of Tyler Coburn’s I’m That Angel at EvoSwitch in Haarlem, the Netherlands, took place June 6–7, 2013
Christiane Paul, a professor and program director at the New School for Social Research and an adjunct curator of new media arts for the Whitney Museum of American Art, ran through highlights of a previous talk called “The Network Space,” which chronicles the transition from web 1.0 and web 2.0—in particular the move from publishing (e.g., personal websites) to participation and broadcasting (blogging)—through works of art. She mentioned Mark Napier’s browser mash-up Riot (1999/2000); Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico’s Lovely Faces (2011), a fictitious dating website created from scraped Facebook profiles; projects such as Jennifer Ringley’s JenniCam (1996–2003) and its commercially oriented spawn, lonelygirl15 (2006–8); and Aaron Koblin’s crowd-sourced drawings for The Sheep Market (2006).
According to Paul, “There’s nothing post in postinternet” art, which she described as work that is “deeply informed by networked technology” and is digitally aware but takes the form of material objects. Paul’s canon of postinternet artists includes Rafaël Rozendaal, Clement Valla, Petra Cortright, John Raffman, Evan Roth, and Katie Torn—artists who have emerged in the past few years. For me, some of the best work about the internet (using Paul’s formulation) came even earlier and often took offline forms. Seth Price’s ongoing explorations of digital distribution (since 2000), Adam McEwen’s drawings of text messages from a Nokia phone (ca. 2006–8?), Shane Hope’s rickety laptops built from painted wood scraps (2006) and his paintings of imaginary digital-device screens (2007), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s bizarre videos (2006–present), and even Dana Schutz’s Google (2006), where she sits in her studio entranced by the offerings of the almighty company’s Image Search—these artworks, made by fairly traditional and post-Conceptual artists (and not necessarily creators of digitally sophisticated forms), explore the condition of interacting with digital networks and technologies.2 On a side note, one of the most brilliant artworks of the George W. Bush era was Ramsay Stirling’s animated GIF, Enduring Freedom (2008).
Anyway, postinternet art takes on a physical form, Paul reminded us, but whether or not a viewer understands the concept of the form (or its subject matter) is another issue. Like Gat before her, Paul noticed the increasing corporatization of the internet during the 1990s but, in slight contrast to Coburn’s celebration of sales of postinternet art, stated that the market for internet art hasn’t changed since the 1990s. How do these observations square with Rachel Greene, who ten years ago wrote that “as yet, there exists no viable or stable market for net art.”3 Furthermore, Paul vaguely described an antimarket attitude among postinternet artists, who are “savvier” in some undisclosed way. It’s not clear to me how artists working in the digital realm are making money—or not—based on these three assessments.
Christiane Paul (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)
The conversation among the panelists after their individual presentations progressed productively. McHugh argued that first-generation net artists, who had trained academically, were happy working in the margins, and that younger artists would have used paintbrushes, too, if they hadn’t grown up digital. Nevertheless, he said, those younger artists still want the white-cube experience.
Gat complained that much digital art ends up looking the same, aggravated by the ubiquitous use of Facebook and products from Google (and Google Earth in particular). She wondered if artists are problematizing the operations of these corporations or are complicit with them. I sympathize with her wariness of the dependence on proprietary corporate platforms. If Tumblr, which allows people to use their own domain names for their microblog but doesn’t offer back-end programming access, pulled the plug tomorrow, the content for every site would likely disappear with it. Conversely, platforms are occasionally abandoned en masse by their users. Remember all those indie bands that created MySpace pages instead designing their own stand-alone websites? Well, they’re on Soundcloud and Bandcamp now, because that’s where the audience is. The question is, how much self-sufficiency should an artist relinquish to reach that audience? McHugh said that postinternet art aims for a larger audience beyond the art world. Paul doesn’t see Google taking over art with a nonexclusive right, and there are ways to combat marketing, such as, for example, by “liking” everything.
I agree with Gat in that postinternet artists often produce consumer-friendly work which anyone can make, and that using a popular, deskilled digital process does make things homogenous. But Coburn reminded us that, whether it’s art that conforms to the New Aesthetic, a term used by the writer James Bridle to describe a certain kind of visuality, or automatic, personless photography taken by drones and satellites and affiliated with corporations and governments, this is how we view the world now. Besides, Paul added, it’s easy to argue that any style or moment can appear homogenous. For her it’s Abstract Expressionism, but for me the black-and-white photographs, typewritten texts, and maps of Conceptual art and Earthworks readily come to mind. While artists in the late 1960s were emulating science and industry—what Benjamin H. D. Buchloh called the aesthetic of administration—postinternet artists are making user-end art, based not on programming and hand coding, skills the first generation of net artist learned, but rather on out-of-the-box applications. Postinternet artists—who Coburn proposed are targeting nonart audiences but needing art-world legitimation—want to have their cake and eat it too. Paul said that criticality comes from within the medium, an awkward position of which artists are aware. A curator (like herself) looks at both critical work and the stuff “riding the wave of flashiness.”
The idea of audience intrigued me. I wondered how much contemporary digital art—especially the stuff using Google Maps or Twitter—would be interesting to your typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur? What would highly skilled programmers and designers make of work by all the artists mentioned during this panel? Probably with the same kind of amusement that a 1970s Hollywood filmmaker would have when viewing early video art by William Wegman and Vito Acconci. Similarly, what kind of distinctions would contemporary programmers and designers make between an art-gallery video and an amateur YouTube clip? We’re now fully immersed in the world in which the gap between art and life has ceased to exist. Would avant-garde artists who championed that notion one hundred years ago be horrified or pleased with early-twenty-first-century practices?
Tyler Coburn (photograph by Michael Stewart/Getty Images North America)
An audience member had the same idea and queried the panelists about differences between avant-garde or critical artists and the general public when both use the same digital tools. The gap has collapsed, McHugh said, but artists are examining issues other than these products, such as the physical and environmental impact of cloud computing. But that is also an important topic for mainstream media, especially in states such as North Carolina, where Apple has built several solar-powered data farms. Paul said that while some artists produce interesting work from behind the curve, most of them are “by nature and statistically” ahead of the curve, waiting for the technologies to be invented for their use. Char Davies, she recalled, was a frustrated painter who in the 1980s helped create Softimage, a software application for three-dimensional image creation that was later acquired by Microsoft in the 1990s. That happened twenty years ago—which artists have done something like this recently?
Another audience member linked the web’s founding in 1989 to the fall of communism and then asked about digital natives of technology and of “markets as the only way of organizing the world.” Is postinternet a condition, he wanted to know, and not a subgenre? “I would say absolutely, yes,” said Paul. “It’s not an art movement. It’s not an art genre.” She acknowledged that (art-historical) acceptance comes from the market, and that museums look to the market for validation. For her, artists and critical practitioners must therefore denaturalize the present condition and create suspicion, whatever that might be. McHugh wondered about the critical role of writers and curators, of articles and exhibitions. I’d say all of that is highly important to the development of both internet and postinternet art, which is still very much up in the cloud, I mean, in the air.
In Terms Of count: 12.
1 Funded in part by a grant from the Arts Writers Grant Program, Post Internet published regularly for most of 2010 but was then taken offline. McHugh’s collected posts can be read online or downloaded as a PDF for free, or purchased as a print-on-demand book from Lulu.
2 For a superb essay on Schutz’s painting Google, see Steven Stern, “Image Search,” Frieze 106 (April 2007): 136–41.
3 Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 31.
Listen
Frieze Projects New York has posted an audio recording of this panel.
Jeffrey Weiss with Clare Davies, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (2014)
The legendary artist Robert Morris doesn’t often participate in live interviews, whether in public, in person, or on the phone, so a recent appearance by him at the New York Public Library was a rare treat. Indeed, as the scholar and curator Jeffrey Weiss noted at the outset, “Agreeing to speak is not something he does too freely.” But when Morris, Weiss, and the art historian Julia Robinson gathered in celebration of Weiss and Clare Davies’s new book, Robert Morris: Object Sculpture, 1960–1965 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), the ensuing conversation was a frustrating affair.
How could such an experienced crew bungle this rare opportunity? It certainly wasn’t the fault of the articulate, soft-spoken Morris. Rather it was the disorganized and unprepared Weiss and Robinson, whose cluttered thoughts belied the sharp focus of the book. Weiss, a senior curator for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, fumbled with his faulty microphone for several minutes as the conversation began and demonstrated a serious “um” and “uh” problem throughout the event.1
What’s worse, though, is that he and Robinson, an assistant professor in the Department of Art at New York University, had great difficulty asking a simple, straightforward question, as both were plagued with the malaise of offering a garbled comment in place of a question. When a question finally did come out they immediately tried to answer it themselves, offering several possibilities before Morris could even respond. Furthermore, the pair constantly stumbled when describing and interpreting the images of the artist’s work projected on the screen behind them. This was all a pitiful shame considering Weiss’s excellent, insightful articles recently published in Artforum on the refabrication of Morris’s classic 1960s work and on the value of damaged and destroyed art objects through the lens of two recent exhibitions of them.2
Despite the obfuscating efforts of Weiss and Robinson, Morris told entertaining and informative stories about his early career, the period covered by Weiss’s book. The artist confirmed with Simone Forti, a dancer, choreographer, and his wife at the time (who was sitting in the front row of the audience), that they had arrived in New York in late 1960. Even though he had been painting through the late 1950s, Morris didn’t consider himself to be an artist during his initial time in New York, when he was studying art history at Hunter College. “I spent a lot of time reading,” he said. It was inexpensive to exist in Manhattan back then. Living in large lofts with no heat and hot water, Morris said he was poor but comfortable.
Julia Robinson gestures wildly at Robert Morris (photograph by Christopher Howard)
At Weiss’s prompting, Morris talked about the first two works he made in New York—Box with the Sound of Its Own Making and Column—both created in January 1961. The former is a nearly 10-inch-cubed wooden container that encloses an audio recording of Morris building the work with carpentry tools. The latter was an eight-foot-tall rectangular box built with plywood salvaged from the street and stored uncomfortably in his room, whose ceiling reached only seven feet high. “This might have given me the idea of permuting this work,” he joked of the decision to re-create the piece several times from the lost or discarded original. A garbled comment-question from Weiss attempted to address the size of, and process involved in making, the two works, and the curator seemed astounded that Morris could simultaneously produce large and small works (and unrelated ones at that). “Just literally making them,” the curator gushed, “in and of itself, reflects a certain level of…” before trailing off.3 Did the two bodies of work intersect, the curator asked? “I never felt obliged to think much about the connection,” Morris responded, who went on to say something about the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s concepts regarding the self that was not picked up by Weiss. In fact, Morris’s deep knowledge of Western philosophy was an area that Weiss and Robinson should have fervently pursued but, sadly, did not.
Robinson mumbled something about how the Box with the Sound of Its Own Making performed or demonstrated temporality and also literalized time. Painting was static then, she claimed, but process brought time back. This may have been a cue for Morris to describe his processed-based works from the 1950s, for which he spread a canvas on the floor and moved across it while sprawled on a short scaffold. “I was just using oil paint,” he said, “putting it on with my hands.” (Does this work still exist?) Robinson stated her interest in Hans Namuth’s famous photographs of the action painter as well as Allan Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” She knows her book art history. “Activating work with time was a way out,” Morris said to appease Robinson. Because he didn’t resolve the issue of time, he quit making this work. Among other reasons, Pollock had succeeded where he had not. While Morris failed to recognize these paintings as performance, he did acknowledge a “temporal involvement.”
Weiss asked Morris if he had a series in mind when making Box and Column. Not yet, the artist replied. “The large works had a kind of apparent continuity … in form,” he continued, “whereas the small objects didn’t.” (Weiss and Davies’s book presumably gives the smaller pieces, which Weiss calls “object sculpture” but Morris identified as “process type objects,” that missing continuity.) Box for Standing—or was it Column?—was a leftover from a Forti performance. “I had this box,” Morris slyly recalled. “It kept getting in the way. I kept moving it around the studio. Finally I decided I would expropriate it and make a sculpture. It was really very easy because it was already there.” The works from the early 1960s “were much more contingent than they appear today,” he mused.4
Morris, Robinson, and Weiss talked about the avant-garde milieu in San Francisco and New York, which featured characters such as Forti, Anna Halprin, Henry Flynt, and LaMonte Young. Robinson simultaneously asked and told Morris about his own history—while offering her own interpretations of it—a strategy that resulted in a confused, fragmented chronology. Moving on, Morris told the story of when the radical composer John Cage visited his Upper West Side apartment, where he asked to listen to the entire three-and-a-half-hour recording of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making. Robinson commented to Morris: “Did you ever ask him later, ‘What the heck was that?’” Did she truly find it incredulous that Cage would want to listen to the complete tape?
Morris recollected several experimental dance performances in which he took part. For one Forti piece he pretended to be a rock. For another he was directed to remain on the floor (“Whatever happens,” Forti had told him, “you gotta lay flat on the floor”), while another performer, Robert Huot—a man twice Morris’s size—was instructed to tie him to the wall. “A battle occurred,” Morris declared, “and that was the movement…. A fight with a rope, two guys—I mean, there wasn’t any expression there at all, just defense and scratches and bumps.”
The conversation dragged when Robinson pressed Morris about the mysterious, nefarious controllers of a bifurcated Fluxus scene of artists, dancers, and musicians surrounding Young in New York. Morris admitted that he had written texts for the group that are not widely read because he pulled out of the scene. “I find it really hard to give a reason for that,” Morris mused. “I must have been feeling especially hostile.” Regarding the writing, he explained, “I was using language to make drawings.” The nature of this discussion wasn’t clear, but the three speakers seemed to be in the know. Maybe it was all just gossip.
“You became a pretty serious critic pretty fast,” Robinson noted. She also noticed a difference between Morris’s private writing in notebooks and his published words in the 1960s. “The need to go on record became important,” the artist said. And he liked doing it, even though he considered himself to be a lazy writer who didn’t produce articles often enough. In fact, his advisor at Hunter College, William Rubin, kept bugging him to finish his thesis on the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brancusi, even after the professor had left the school for a curatorial position at the Museum of Modern Art. “I usually wrote about things after finishing a body of work,” Morris said.
Three views of Venus of Willendorf, ca. 28,000–25,000 BCE, limestone, 4¼ in. tall (artwork in the public domain)
Halfway through the conversation Morris loosened up, while Weiss and Robinson continued to grope erratically. The artist recalled the artist Ad Reinhardt’s famous class on Japanese art at Hunter, which he said didn’t follow typical chronological or geographic lines. Instead, Reinhardt showed slides from different eras, periods, and locations, saying “That’s classic. That’s baroque. That’s early classic.” Reinhardt would show “five hundred slides a night,” Morris remembered. When showing an image of the Venus of Willendorf, Reinhardt deadpanned “That’s really primitive.” A student exclaimed, “That’s not primitive—that’s pregnant!” The professor, Morris punchlined, did not reply. Morris also recalled that Reinhardt’s slides of monuments and artworks from foreign lands—once a year he traveled to another country, by himself—were frontal and bilateral. Many students, Morris said, declared these photographs so well taken that they depicted the actual sites better than seeing them in person.
In the early 1960s Morris worked in the Art Office of the New York Public Library, in room 313, where he answered mail, filed things, and used the card catalogue. It was during this time when he conceived of Card File (1962), while drinking coffee one day in the library. Weiss felt Card File is neglected, misrepresented, and singularly understood as a form of categorization—perhaps because we never can actually read the cards filed into it. (Weiss read a few of them aloud; his book publishes transcriptions of each one.) “It’s unending, theoretically,” Morris said of the work, but “it has a narrative.” It’s also, Robinson added, “indeterminate.”
Robert Morris speaks, as Simone Forti listens attentively (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The influence of narrative, Morris revealed, came from Marcel Duchamp, in particular the focus on text and language found in Robert Lebel’s 1959 book on the French-born artist.5 For Morris, Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) represents process—materials and their transformation—through a puerile story about the proverbial bride and nine bachelors, a metaphor, Morris said, of the Artist screwing Art to become Famous. Morris also admitted the influence of Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) when creating works like Three Rulers (1962), for which he estimated imperial measurements by eye. The hand-drawn inch was intentionally a “mistake,” Morris said, claiming that Duchamp had become the “new standard of measurement” for artists.
The classic gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964, Morris said, “were competently made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhibitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some point there are no originals of these,” he noted. “There are only reproductions. Nobody [back then] wanted to hear that.” One time he sent assembly instructions for the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offended me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” These sculptures presented preexisting forms in the world, Morris explained, such as columns, benches, and gates; he also used materials other than wood. Although fiberglass works well for the curves of a boat, the artist said he was disappointed with the material’s response to edges, which became frayed. “It was a mistake” to use the material, he said, “but it has a certain quality that’s different from plywood.”
For a private exhibition at SurroundArt in Brooklyn in 2012 and a public exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in Manhattan in 2014, Morris instructed fabricators to use quality woods such as walnut, cherry, oak, poplar, European beach, and maple when making replicas of older work—or in his words, “recent work that recollects earlier objects.” For example, Box for Standing went from pine in 1961 to walnut in 2011, and Wheels (2012), first made in 1963 with street lumber, was reconstructed in cherry wood at a slightly larger scale. These fabrications are obviously salable pieces for private collectors and museums, but Weiss and Robinson didn’t engage Morris about these cash cows. Instead, the artist offered an alternative view: “I have a compulsion to revisit some of these things.”
New York Art Strike, 1970
During the audience Q&A, a woman sitting behind me pestered Morris with several questions about Duchamp, which the artist answered with good nature. “Did Duchamp really smoke a cigar?” was the last one she got in before the library’s representative, Arezoo Moseni, judiciously cut her off. When an artist stood to lament (in a kind of calm hysteria) the state of the New York art world today—the dispersion of artistic centers, the lack of easy living, and finding a voice in an art world in which everything has seemingly been done—Morris recanted a story about the New York Art Strike, which took place outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 22, 1970, when approximately five hundred people sat on the steps to protest war, racism, and repression. After the ten-hour event ended, a few stragglers remained to clean up the steps. While sweeping up cigarette butts, the artist Carl Andre remarked to Morris, “You never know how good an artist you are, but you always know how good a sweeper you are.” Morris said that life was hard back then but leisurely so: you could see your friends and think about things. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, the artist declared, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” It’s certainly unfortunate we don’t have that kind of time today. And although this story sidestepped the audience member’s concerns, Morris seemed to suggest that she work at her own pace and within her own competencies.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Similarly, speakers at any level of experience must simply get over their fear of amplification. Likewise, academics should be required to learn about microphones, projectors, and PowerPoint as an integral part of their jobs.
3 During this time Morris also made what he called performance switches. A fourth body of work was the set of boxy plywood structures first exhibited at Richard Bellamy’s Green Gallery in 1964.
4 From the audience, Forti recalled that Morris had made two boxes; he only remembered making one.
5 Lebel’s book was translated into English by George Heard Hamilton in that same year. Duchamp’s notes from The Green Box were published in 1960.
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.
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.
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).
