“Language is forced on art,” quipped the artist Rachel Harrison to an audience member during the Q&A session of this event. “We’re just throwing words at art all the time. Is that really best for art? Is that really good for art? Does that make art happy? It might. It employs a lot of people.” Such is Harrison’s self-consciously funny and cynicism-free outlook for giving titles to her works. That outlook is also a good way to understand her art practice over the last twenty years. I lost track of how many times I chuckled to myself during this hour-long talk.
Harrison attached funny stories to a few of her works. A gallery goer stole a Baby Phat handbag fastened to one sculpture, and friends told her that someone had ruffled the blonde wig topping another. “What is that desire, not to mess with hair but to mess with artworks?” Harrison asked during her lecture. “Because I get that sometimes.” The way Harrison recounted taking the photograph she uses for Marilyn with Wall (2004–ongoing) characterized an Andy Warhol museum archivist as a sketchy street drug dealer.1 Yet irony plays no role in her practice: “I work too hard to be ironic,” she told another attendee.
Harrison’s art practice is varied: mostly sculpture and installation but also photography, drawing, and writing. (Artforum has published a few great articles by her, on Andy Warhol’s Empire, Jeff Koons’s Bob Hope, and a parade organized by Paul McCarthy.) She isn’t yet known for a singular masterpiece, for which she could be inextricably linked, but her style is recognizable a mile away. A typical work is larger-than-life-sized, built from construction materials or polystyrene and slathered with cement and paint, with an extra prop or two—a bottle of Mr. Clean, a plastic figurine, or a framed photograph of a celebrity—fastened to it. Sometimes a sculpture rests on a plinth, a pair of milk crates, or a shipping dolly.
Tonight’s event paired Harrison with the music critic Greil Marcus, best known for writing the books Mystery Train (1975) and Lipstick Traces (1989). Marcus was funny, too, in his own way, as he read aloud a short introductory essay peppered with off-the-cuff observations. While in Paris, he visited an art exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a Frank Gehry–designed building in Paris that “from the outside looks like a spaceship just about to take off.” Marcus circled Harrison’s Zombie Rothko (2011) round and round, taking in the bright orange hair of a plastic doll torso placed on the top of a craggy, painted blocky form. “What first might bring a laugh might turn disturbing,” he surmised. “What first might just throw you and not seem to hit is going to end up being the governing principle of the work.” And considering the ways she infuses pop culture—in particular a series of twenty colored-pencil drawings of the British singer Amy Winehouse carousing with characters from paintings by Pablo Picasso, Willem de Kooning, and Martin Kippenberger—he argued, “Not enough has been made of the way that Rachel’s work engages with the world that people actually live in…. That when you see it you’re seeing a distorted, funnier, more gripping version of the life that you actually lead.”
I am embarrassingly late to the Rachel Harrison party. My longstanding impression of her work was that the criticality vibe overpowers all other interpretations, including humor, which I certainly noticed but didn’t take seriously. After all, Greene Naftali, her gallery of eighteen years, shows Very Serious Art by Paul Chan, Michael Krebber, Bernadette Corporation, and others. Over the years I have dutifully seen Harrison’s head-scratching exhibitions—at Greene Naftali, in the Whitney Biennial, at the New Museum—but never considered it in depth, despite my editing an exhibition review of her work in 2005. For years I recognized the work’s shock value—you could never call it beautiful—but never acknowledged its smart value and its terrific sense of humor. To get a better sense of what her work is all about—this is the primary reason why I attended tonight’s event.
Rachel Harrison introduced the front side of Buddha with Wall (2004) as “Buddha Descending a Staircase” (photograph by Christopher Howard)
In a chronological artist’s talk, Harrison presented two principle themes in her work—walls and frames—and how her thinking has has shifted from the former to the latter. Indeed, since the early 1990s she has made use of Sheetrock and metal studs brought into the gallery or taken down existing gallery walls (but never removing them from the exhibition space). The title of Harrison’s first solo exhibition—Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?—came from a New York Times article on building codes after Hurricane Andrew; the show took place in an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Developing this interest in modular and provisional work, the artist filled a gallery with a maze constructed with rectangular sheets of cardboard (Perth Amboy, 2001). “People call this a labyrinth, but you’re not going to get lost,” she joked. For Marilyn with Wall, Harrison took down nonstructural gallery walls and set them aside. “You make more space by cutting up a wall, and you make more space for a body,” she explained, sort of. “And by having more bodies you can have more spaces.” She metaphorically attributes physical space to mental space and to thinking. Harrison notices how people walk through rooms and on the subway—she may be watching you.
After discussing a handful of museum and gallery exhibitions across Europe, Harrison tackled Three Young Framers, a solo outing at Regen Projects in Los Angeles this past summer. With wall studs leftover from shows by Glenn Ligon and Raymond Pettibon, which the gallery saved for her, she demarcated rooms within the hangerlike building, not unlike Michael Asher’s 2008 show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Although her initial idea came from drawing outlines of the gallery’s floor plan on paper, using a ruler, Harrison confessed that she wanted to see the Asher exhibition again, and this was a way to do it. She finds sophisticated humor in his work, from the George Washington statue to the Santa Monica show.
During the conversation, Marcus saw “a scary, lifeless, maximum-security prison” in Three Young Framers, not a reference to Asher (who he may not know). No reviews of the show mentioned the prison angle, which Harrison chalked up to the herd mentality of art criticism. If the press release had mentioned jail, she noted, everyone would have zeroed in on that instead of Asher. There is no single meaning in your work, Marcus continued, adding something about how taking selfies imprisons actually imprisons the vain photographers. “Where they are,” he said, “is much less important than the fact that they are there.” Or maybe people just like documenting their life in photographs, like they’ve done for decades.
Harrison’s 2012 exhibition The Help comprised a handful of sculptures and the Amy Winehouse drawings, which Marcus found to be upsetting and nihilistic, distorted and angry, bitter and self-destructive. Seeing the pictures changed the way he perceives the British singer, who died of drug and alcohol–related causes in 2011. Harrison appreciates her music but did not previously follow her career. The subject of the drawings was chosen randomly, she said, from a magazine cover spotted in a supermarket checkout line—though celebrities certainly play an important role in her work. Harrison admires the way Winehouse turned herself into sculpture, into a pop icon, purely through invention: her hair, singing soul music, and having working-class origins. What if someone looking at the drawings knows very little about Winehouse? If one puts the singer in the wrong place, Harrison and Marcus concluded, we can rethink her career and how she got there instead of repeating platitudes.
Marcus saw the “scrapbook” exhibition Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, which he did not find terribly interesting. Three artists (Harrison, Jennie Ottinger, and Jason Jägel) had work at the same museum in a separate exhibition, called You Know I’m No Good. That presentation, which included Harrison’s Winehouse drawings, was overwrought, disturbing, violent, and mutilated, according to Marcus, not unlike the disturbing images in Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio. There is agency in creative acts, Harrison avowed. Marcus agreed, arguing that pain is an expressive force.
Another audience member—it was the art historian Hal Foster—stated that most people understand Harrison’s work as collage and assemblage. He articulated a different perspective: “You don’t collage things; you collage views, viewpoints. It’s about putting subjects together, not objects together.” Although the same could be said for many artists, his observation is spot on. Harrison seemed pleased with it. She mentioned another description about her work, made by Foster, that she likes: “You take a bad thing and make it worse.”
In Terms Of count: 13.
1 Rachel Harrison said: “They’ll let you make an appointment, and you can go to Andy Warhol’s archives. And you just wear gloves, and they’ll let you touch everything. And there’s a can of hairspray, chewing gum, all the things you know about—fabulous things. And then I was about to leave and the guy was like, ‘Well, don’t you want to see it?’ And I said, ‘What?’ And he said ‘Everyone wants to see it.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Don’t you want to see the source material for Marilyn?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care.’” She ending up taking a 35mm photograph of the publicity still, partially veiled by a glassine sleeve. The image is a key part of a sculpture called Marilyn with Wall, which she has created several times since 2004.
Lise Soskolne, W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, provides an overview of her organization
Based in New York, the six-year-old advocacy group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has supported a single issue: payment to artists working with nonprofit organizations in visual art. Three months ago W.A.G.E. launched a voluntary certification program for institutions that wish to publicly signal their commitment to compensating artists for their work in exhibitions and for speaking engagements and writing, among other things. The group also debuted a fee calculator that establishes a minimum wage, so to speak, for creative labor, as well as a progressively scaled payment schedule based on an institution’s annual operating expenses.
Tonight’s event, organized by Cevan Castle, the Cue Art Foundation’s public programming fellow, featured W.A.G.E.’s core organizer, Lise Soskolne, who gave an overview of her organization’s mission and its past and current activities. The talk had been sold out via an online RSVP, but the room was surprisingly half empty—with an unfortunately high number of no-shows for such an important subject.
Nonprofits are subsidized while the market is not, Soskolne explained, and nonprofits have a moral authority and responsibility. “They are also charities,” she said with seriousness, “but artists are not charity cases.” Museums give value to art, the claim goes, which is capitalized on by the art market and art auctions. Many artists fail to benefit from this value, but institutional barriers aren’t always to blame. Soskolne identified four “irresolvable contradictions” regarding attitudes on remuneration that often come from creators themselves: (1) the conflict between the nonmonetary value of art versus the labor and compensation needed to earn a living; (2) operating outside the system to be critical of it versus selling out; (3) being either an eccentric radical or an agent of gentrification; and (4) building cultural and social capital during an artist’s emerging years versus the diminishing need for it as a career progresses. W.A.G.E. exists to correct these misconceptions.
Lise Soskolne introduced by Cevan Castle
W.A.G.E.’s fee calculator and certification program were based, in part, on feedback from a 2010–11 survey, which collected data from a questionnaire about the payment practices of nonprofits based in New York City. According to the survey report, published in 2012, approximately 58 percent of respondents confirmed that they did not get paid. “We didn’t set out to shame anyone in particular,” Soskolne said, though it’s clear that Performa finds it extremely difficult to recompense the artists who bring this biennial of performance art to life.1 By contrast, the two organizations that pay artists most frequently are the Kitchen and Creative Time, which, along with Performa, are the key players in the interdisciplinary art and performance milieus. “Without content,” Soskolne reminded us, “these institutions would cease to function.”
The venerated institution Artists Space, where Soskolne was a grant writer for many years, partnered early with W.A.G.E. and allowed her access to its financial history. Through this and other research, W.A.G.E. came to recognize that a line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget is an essential characteristic of its cause. In fact, when W.A.G.E. was asked to participate in a 2010–11 exhibition called Free, organized by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the group worked behind the scenes to negotiate payment for all other included artists instead of having a presence in the galleries. The $150 per person was not much, Soskolne said, but was more than just a token gesture. A line item for artist’s fees in a nonprofit’s budget—separate from production or installation costs—is now a required criterion for certification. Later in her talk, Soskolne importantly insisted that W.A.G.E. is not an art project, despite past encouragement by others who think the organization might cash in on grant money to sustain its work. As a 501(c)(3), W.A.G.E. is eligible for different types of funding opportunities, an advantageous position since government agencies are more likely to fund a nonprofit that a collective of artists.
The solo exhibition is the anchor of the fee calculator, Soskolne said, which sets a minimum wage (called a “floor wage”). The calculator also considers an organization’s annual operating expenses to determine progressively higher payments. There is one caveat: what’s called the “Koons ceiling” creates a cap on artist’s fees and ensures, at places like the Guggenheim and Whitney museums, that “artists should not be getting paid more than the curator.” But sometimes modest nonprofits end up shelling out a higher percentage of their budgets for artist’s fees, according to the formula. “The smaller organizations tend to take better care of artists,” Soskolne acknowledged, but firmly stated, “If there’s no minimum, there’s no place to start from.” Larger organizations, she said, spend money on things like conservation, which smaller groups need not consider. But since larger institutions tend to increasingly accumulate more money and power, Soskolne argued that public funders such as the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts should concentrate on subsidizing smaller groups. When asked later about fees from university galleries and museums, Soskolne admitted that it’s hard to extract their allocations from their parent school’s budgets.
W.A.G.E. certification, whether implemented or not, may play a positive role in getting institutions to radically rethink their finances—especially in places like Art in General, for example, where the executive director’s salary comprises 21 percent of its annual operating expenses. Soskolne said that one institution has been certified—Artists Space—and five more are expected to pass through the process by January. But even if institutions are hesitant to undergo the analysis, their staffs can use the fee calculator to determine fair payments. Likewise, artists may negotiate better with institutions, and W.A.G.E. encourages artists to cc them via email during this process. One thing left unresolved by certification and the fee calculator, however, is potential reimbursement of production expenses to an institution from an artist if a work is later sold. Standards for this type of agreement, it seems, would still be mediated individually and privately.
Lise Soskolne discusses the importance of line items for artists’ fee in organizational budgets
Over the past few years I’ve noticed that people have trouble understanding and accepting W.A.G.E.’s specific goal—encouraging payments to artists by nonprofit institutions. During the Q&A, the audience raised other issues of inequity in the art world. What about unpaid interns and low-paid nonprofit employees? What about equal representation of woman in museum shows? What about resale royalties for artists? What about fair-labor practices in social practice art? (“It’s murky,” Soskolne answered, and pointed out that individual artists are not institutions.) What about donating a work to a nonprofit’s benefit auction? What about artists who teach? Can W.A.G.E. certify a festival?
I’d like to see these questions addressed in thoughtful, beneficial ways. To achieve better equity in the art world, it’s clear we need to expand the cause beyond artist’s fees. Until those advocacy groups are formed, or existing groups are mobilized, artists and others must recognize the power in saying no to exploitative situations (among other solutions). “Discourse around labor is trendy in the art world,” Soskolne said, which is a good thing, and several upcoming events in New York this month—including “Parallel Fields: Alternative Economies” at A Blade of Grass on January 14, “The Artist as Debtor: A Conference about the Work of Artists in the Age of Speculative Capitalism” at Cooper Union on January 23, and “The Artists Financial Support Group Speaks Openly about Money and Debt” at the CUE Art Foundation on January 30—will keep the conversation going on a range of economic topics.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 In March 2014, Performa published a call for unpaid writing fellows for its online Performa Magazine. After conceding to pressure from the arts community, Performa agreed to pay honoraria to the fellows but later scrapped the program.
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.
Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?
Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?
The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”
Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.
Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.
Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.
Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.
Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.
Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”
If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:
The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.
His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.
Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”
Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.
Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3
Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.
Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.
Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.
Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.
Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.
The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.
Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.
An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?
A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.
In Terms Of count: 6.
1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?
2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.
3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.
4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.
Read
Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).
This essay is the first of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the second, third, and fourth texts.
The Koons Effect Part 1 Thursday, September 11, 2014
Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert J. Hurst Family Gallery (Lower Gallery), New York
Laura Owens is exasperated by the art of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“It was a look of horror … or a smile,” said Scott Rothkopf, curator of the exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective and moderator of a panel discussion called “The Koons Effect Part 1,” regarding the responses he received when telling others of his research for a retrospective on the artist. Artists were interested in Koons, to his surprise, and he noted that Pierre Huyghe is fascinated by the “story that didn’t get made,” and Andrea Fraser enjoys Koonsian economics. Tino Sehgal finds Rabbit (1986) to be an iconic work, the curator continued, and Kara Walker responds to the advertisements for art magazines from 1988–89.1 For this panel, Rothkopf invited four American artists to discuss what Koons’s work means to them and how it has affected contemporary art.
A striking feature of the individual panelists was generational: Jordan Wolfson (b. 1980) was bold and unhinged in a way that was rebellious and irreverent but also smart. Laura Owens (b. 1970) and Carol Bove (b. 1971) were approaching the cusp of Zenlike wisdom attained by the senior artist Stephen Prina (b. 1954), though with a noticeable distinction: Bove was accepting and positive of ideas contained in the work of Jeff Koons, (b. 1955), but Owens still resisted those qualities of which she does not approve. Such polarization is emblematic of many opinions of the artist.
In a brief presentation, Bove discussed her interest in the sublime and banal, as well as love and democracy. Her fascination with Koons is paradoxical, proposing that our admiration for him is not unlike how the Democrats elected Ronald Reagan as United States president twice. The art world, Bove said, has a taboo regarding mysticism, ignoring or suppressing “direct communication with the godhead.” Art brings powerful experiences in which you lose yourself, she explained, breaking with administrative consciousness. Like many, Bove came to art as a romantic but became a politician who is on high alert for what she called cheesiness, which differs from tackiness, because the concept behind the latter term is cute and forgivable. For her, Koons uses a “high production value to deliver an ecstatic message,” which a thinking art viewer would feel compelled to resist. Bove wondered if hostility to this message—delivered like a Trojan horse—demonstrates a prejudice against new-age spiritualism and even feminism. The art world has turned from poetry to theory, Bove declared, and “the taboo is self-protecting.”
Prina ruminated on his early experiences with the artist: “Things were wide open when I first saw Koons’s work.” Prina’s first encounter was a 1982 group exhibition called A Fatal Attraction: Art and the Media at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, which included Koons’s New Sheldon Wet/Dry Tripledecker (1982), one of the few objects in a gallery full of painting and photography, Prina noted. A year later he came across more work by Koons in a group show, LA–NY Exchange, at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and a few years after that confronted the Luxury and Degradation series at Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles. Prina said he received the same “wow” sensation that he had experienced in a 1976 exhibition of contemporary European artists at the Art Institute of Chicago, when he stumbled upon an installation by Marcel Broodthaers.2 Koons’s infamous Banality show at New York’s Sonnabend Gallery in 1988, Prina recalled, took place a relatively small space, perhaps dangerously so with all the fragile porcelain sculpture. Prina’s main thought after leaving the gallery was: “Does Koons hold his audience in contempt?”
With time already running behind, Rothkopf jumped to the open conversation among the panelists, but Wolfson hijacked the talk’s direction, reading from notes on his smartphone that he took earlier that week, when visiting the Whitney exhibition. (If Owens had been allowed to speak, I would have received a better feel for her point of view. During the open conversation she came off as a curmudgeon, but certainly her ideas have more depth than her reactions tonight.) Wolfson’s observations centered on distortion, scale, material, and image. One particularly interesting note was: “The work has humor in play but is never actually funny.” Regarding Koons’s Hanging Heart (Violet/Gold) (1994–2006), Wolfson wrote: “Seeing oneself not from reflection but from inner mind—this is very advanced art.” Neverthess, he observed that the piece is cold and dead.
The open conversation moved rapidly, quickly jumping from topic to topic. Rothkopf compared Koons’s work to Lladró figurines from Spain, a reference he admitted that people younger than fifty probably don’t understand. (It was hilarious to me.) Owens and Bove discussed the latter artist’s Trojan-horse idea, in which a Koons sculpture embodies a particular message, usually that of acceptance, with which Koons distracts you. Bove argued that the allure of the object that holds your attention while something else slips into your mind. For Owens, the production is compelling and full of attention—it is not a distraction. Wolfson refined an idea about two major tenants of Koons’s work—image and material—for which one typically dominates the other within a single piece. Bove characterized a similar notion of images versus picture/graphic. Regarding a work’s message, Wolfson recognized that, through the art, Koons accepts the universe’s indifference.
Prina had been indifferent to reproductions of several works, such as Cat on a Clothesline (Aqua) (1994–2001), but was impressed by them in person. For some artists, he explained, seeing the rear of the work isn’t necessary, but for Koons all sides of a work are important. I noticed this most strikingly with Rothkopf’s installation of the Banality sculptures at the Whitney, which had ample room in front of and behind the works. Returning to a Bove observation, Prina found it interesting that she chose the terms “cheesy” and “tacky” over “kitsch,” which is how many describe Koons’s appropriation of tchotchkes.
“We’re all in it,” Owens exclaimed, irritated by the pervasive conversation about Koons and money (such as his high auction prices), which many critics and writers bring up. Koons is a person who has to maintain a certain lifestyle level, Wolfson responded, suggesting that we perceive him as a fallen angel. Otherwise, he continued, one gets preoccupied with formal problems, which he said nearly every artist deals with. “Art goes away,” Wolfson proclaimed, “What stays is intention.” The trouble with Koons’s stated intentions, his never-ending mantra of acceptance, perfection, and the like (as he expressed in his lecture at the New School one day earlier), allows for any interpretative framework of judgment of his work—whether praise or condemnation—is acceptable. In a brilliant move, Koons leaves the ball in the viewer’s court, trusting him or her to offer meaning, and whatever you think of his art reflects who you are and what you think—not who Koons is or what he thinks. If the artist or his work angers a person for whatever reason, it’s on that person, not the artist. Koons accepts all viewers no matter what, like a benevolent Heavenly Father, and this is how he deflects criticism so well—repelling instead of absorbing it and having it shape him.
Koons is “the artist we deserve” Owens stated. He is also the poster boy for 1980s art—for Reaganomics, the AIDS crisis, and so on—but, as the panelists agreed, he’s also an emblematic artist for every decade since. And Koons’s production continues on and on. Owens said it’s not enough: “We ask the artist, ‘Can we have more?’” Bove agreed: “It’s gone a little hyper mega.” Wolfson claimed that Koons’s work is passive, hinting that it’s us who get riled up over it, for whatever reason. But the work also collapses, has no clarity, and loses agency. “The structure takes over,” Wolfson said, but I’m not sure what he was getting at.
Jordan Wolfson discusses the unfunny work of Jeff Koons (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During the audience Q&A, the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch observed that the panel didn’t address the issue of celebrity. Koons was well regarded by other artists from the beginning of his career through the early 1990s, Deitch said, but after the artist’s personal and professional involvement with Ilona Staller, a Hungarian-born Italian politician and pornographic actress known as Cicciolina, his peers turned against him.
Similarly, Rothkopf wondered if Koons has any followers—an odd thought considering the panel’s published aim was to bring together “four artists whose work has variously engaged questions of production, value, affect, taste, and display….” I would argue that many artists share Koons’s various approaches, such as serial production, found objects, and a fascination with mass culture, including Haim Steinbach (b. 1944), whom the panelists briefly discussed. Koons might be exemplary of a certain standard of perfection in his process—it’s often said that his expectations for his sculpture exceed that for aerospace industries and the military—but he is far from being a singular voice his approach to art.
Nevertheless, Owens gets nothing from the show and is even sickened by it; she moaned that Koons makes her hate to be an artist. I wanted to shout, “He’s not the only artist out there, Laura!” In response to a question about irony and sincerity, Rothkopf responded by asking if it’s a better moral position if Koons is ironic instead of sincere, hinting that it isn’t, that the latter position is more nefarious.
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
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.
