Eric Banks Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Creative Writing Program
New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York
Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)
In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.
“I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”
The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”
Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.
The cover of Artforum in October 1997
Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”
I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.
Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.
The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks
The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.
Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:
People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”
Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.
Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).
Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”
Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.
Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?
In Terms Of count: 3.
1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.
Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)
From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.
In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”
Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)
Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.
“Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”
Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.
A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.
Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.
Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.
Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.
Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress
Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.
“For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.
During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.
Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)
An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.
Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.
Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”
Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)
You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”
Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.
2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.
Tehching Hsieh Tuesday, March 3, 2015
Artists at the Institute
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, James B. Duke House, New York
Tehching Hsieh speaks at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Tehching Hsieh created among the most radical, strenuous, and bizarre bodies of work in all of art history. Only prisoners with life sentences or captured soldiers could ever relate to the parameters Hsieh set for himself for his five One Year Performances, which he described in chronological order during his lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts. Prisoners of crime or war rarely elect to put themselves in a position that isolated themselves, mentally and physically, for long periods of time.
Speaking broken English in a thick Asian accent, Hsieh told his life story as an artist. Born and raised in Taiwan, he “jumped ship” in Philadelphia on July 13, 1974, while serving with the Taiwanese Merchant Marine (and after his compulsory three-year military service). Hsieh headed for New York, where he lived for fourteen years as an illegal immigrant as he tried to establish himself in the downtown art scene. In fact, he even made an artwork resembling a US Immigration Service “wanted poster” four years after surreptitiously slipping into the country.
For his first One Year Performance (1978–79), also known as Cage Piece, Hsieh (using the first name Sam) built a mock jail cell, about one hundred square feet, in his TriBeCa loft, where he lived without speaking, reading, writing, listening to the radio, or watching television for an entire year.1 After reading the brief explanation of the piece from the digital image of a typewritten manuscript projected onscreen, Hsieh explained how he rationalized his cramped quarters: “Space—I try to create bigger…. I try to make so this corner become my home. Opposite corner become outside. So every day I can go out, take a walk, and come home.” He held visiting hours, but not many people came to visit this human zoo. For his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2009, he reconstructed the cell, which was displayed with documentation of the project.2
Presenting his career chronologically, Hsieh described the second One Year Performance (1980–81), also known as Time Clock Piece, in which the artist set a goal to punch a time clock on the hour, every hour, for 365 consecutive days. Hsieh screened a video of the film he made at the time—a six-and-a-half-minute succession of single 16mm film frames taken every time he punched the clock. As the hours and days progressed, the hair on Hsieh’s shaved head grew out, and he looked considerably tired toward the end. What struck me the most was how Hsieh just stood there, in the silent room at the institute, with an expressionless look on his face, blinking occasionally as he watched the rapidly changing stills of himself from thirty-five years ago.
Tehching Hsieh watches himself on film (photograph by Christopher Howard)
For his third One Year Performance (1981–82), Hsieh—now using his real first name, Tehching—spent the entire year without entering an indoor space. Almost. The New York City police detained him briefly, and a video clip of Outdoor Piece that Hsieh showed included footage from the day when cops dragged him into the station house after a vagrancy arrest. Again, Hsieh’s face was expressionless as he watched his younger self, screaming hysterically.
The fourth One Year Performance (1983–84) was subtitled Art/Life or Rope Piece. For the project, Hsieh tied himself to a fellow performance artist, Linda Montano, with an eight-foot-long rope. “She like to do meditation, but I don’t quite … feeling,” he joked as he showed a photograph—one of several hundred taken during the span of the performance—of a grumpy-looking next to an absorbed Montano. While Hsieh didn’t hold a job for his first three pieces, he did construction work during the fourth to make a little money, and he traveled with Montano to Philadelphia, where she taught. Many of their conversations were audiotaped, Hsieh said, flashing an image of ordinary cassettes sealed in plastic cases—intended never to be heard. Like the previous pieces, the artist never described what it was like in the midst of the performance, providing us only with basic facts—and limited ones at that. What was, for example, the significance of the start and end date of July 4?
The fifth One Year Performance (1985–86), in which Hsieh did not see, talk, or read about art, but “just go in life,” preceded the sixth, called Thirteen Year Plan or Earth, which lasted from his thirty-sixth to his forty-ninth birthday. From December 31, 1986 to December 31, 1999, Hsieh stated that he would make art but not show it. He tried to “disappear” in Alaska but only made it as far as Seattle, working the same kind of jobs he did in New York when fresh off the boat. (He also sold his early paintings for $500,000 and bought a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that housed a residency program for artists.) A poster for each project is the only documentation we have of how Hsieh spent his time. Onscreen he showed digital renditions of his desired retrospective, a timeline of his work in eighteen equally size rooms, one for each year of his performances. In his proposed exhibition, visitors would walk through and become aware their own personal time, thinking about their own life experiences.
Tehching Hsieh presented a diagram of his ideal retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During the audience Q&A, an audience member asked Hsieh which performance had the strongest impact for him? Hsieh skirted the question, explicating further his concept of separating “art time” and “life time,” the latter of which happens between performances, and of thinking about present time. “I don’t want people to see my work as document,” he said, considering the documentation as the proverbial tip of an iceberg.
One audience member quizzed the artist about his reconstruction of Cage Piece at MoMA—some folks get really hung up on originals and re-creations—but what is more interesting to me is if that performance can be restaged under the same conditions. Ten years ago Marina Abramović covered five classic works of 1960s and 1970s performance art—by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, VALIE EXPORT, Joseph Beuys, and Bruce Nauman—in Seven Easy Pieces (2005), which took place at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum during the first iteration of Performa, the New York–based biennial of performance art. Can you imagine her or anyone else punching a time clock every hour for a year or staying outdoors for 365 days? Even if someone were crazy enough to redo Cage Piece, that person’s experience would be completely different that Hsieh’s.
A thoughtful attendee asked Hsieh how he first conceived time as his medium, so Hsieh started from the beginning. Reminiscing about his early days in Taiwan, “I’m very good for abstract painting,” he laughed, “express my emotion.” After college friends who had traveled to the West described Conceptual art to him, he experimented on his own, including a jump from a second-floor window (a la Yves Klein) and exposing one hundred newspapers that were laid on the ground with paint. In New York Hsieh worked as a dishwasher from 1974 to 1978, an experience he considered a “four year wasting time experience,” during which he thought about life. “I don’t go looking for it,” he explained his realization. “I already in the situation. I just repeat wasting time one more year. I will catch it. I just create a form. I did it in a cage.” Hsieh deems himself to be best at wasting time, a time of freedom during which “freethinking” can happen. “Life is difficult, but you’re still freethinking.”
Hsieh avoided confirming the audience’s interpretations of his work: fear and bureaucracy as form, the legal medium, and so on. Instead, he responded, “I’m more like caveman.” Hsieh’s work may concern Zen Buddhism, the penal system, and political asylum, and the artist is content to let others elucidate its meaning. Critics and historians have done a good job. Colby Chamberlain recently wrote: “By pledging to imprison himself in his studio, or to punch a time-clock at hourly intervals, or to stay outdoors, Hsieh imposed on his own body strictures that reverberated with wider regimes of control: incarceration, labor, homelessness (and, perhaps, in the case of his collaboration with Linda Montano, marriage).”3 And six years ago, Roberta Smith assessed Hsieh’s succession of performances: “For ‘Cage Piece’ Mr. Hsieh deprived himself of nearly all contact with the world. In the next four pieces he eliminated, in succession, concentration, shelter, privacy and finally art itself. In each case he altered the nature of time radically for himself and, retrospectively, us.”4 She is right—he made this work, putting himself through these strenuous activities, so we don’t have to. And neither does he: Hsieh more or less retired from making art on January 1, 2000, after concluding the Thirteen Year Plan.
The government has no compelling case for mass surveillance, proclaimed Robert Scheer, a longtime journalist and the editor in chief of Truth Dig. In the predigital days of snooping on the bad guys, he said, “All you needed was a half-sober cop to go sit in a car outside their house and figure out what they’re up to.” American authorities, Scheer continued, were already aware of the Boston Marathon bombers and Charlie Hedbo gunmen before their attacks, and preemptive surveillance by the government is “a betrayal of the American tradition,” to the audience’s applause. He defined this tradition as embracing transparency, honesty, open debate, consumer choice, and the ability to defend oneself within a legal system.
Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You (2015)
Noticing a chilling effect on free speech and intellectual inquiry online, Helen Nissenbaum, professor of media, culture, communication, and computer science at New York University, explained how the digital surveillance of the online habits of Americans can predict if someone is a Democrat or Republican—a process known as voter targeting. With this information, marketers can influence a person’s political views. This “highly tailored” message, she said, drowns out conversation in the public sphere.
Jen Lowe, an independent data scientist and researcher, argued that complex surveillance develops invisibly and so quickly that regular people can hardly keep up. “We are absolutely having fewer and fewer unobserved moments,” Lowe said. “We are being observed in our homes by our devices.” Advocating informed consent, Lowe pleaded for more “froth and dissent in democracy.”
Edward W. Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, stated that although algorithmic predictors offer customization and personalization, they serve interests that aren’t your own. “Predictors tend to work best if you’re very much like everyone else,” he said. Felton said that we live like public figures, editing our lives and strategizing our behavior in fear of the consequences of making a mistake.
In an article he wrote in the late 1990s, Scheer remembered observing that “there is no other profit model of any substance” on the internet. “Basically we convinced people that giving up their information would enhance their shopping experience,” he said, “and we didn’t think what it might do to their self-censorship, to their citizenship, and so on.” And until Edward Snowden’s findings were made public, Scheer said, we didn’t know how massive post–September 11 government surveillance had become.
“Where are the protests?” asked Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker who served as the panel’s moderator. “Is anyone quitting Facebook?” Felten claimed that individuals “feel powerless to change it.” Nissenbaum said the back end of data mining is complex. People might revolt if surveillance becomes more visible, Lowe offered, but she defended Facebook for being good at community: “There’s value that people don’t want to walk away from.”
Turning back to politics, Felten stated that “we are still far from understanding the implications of the Snowden documents,” many of which, he said, have not been released. He believes the best stuff has yet to come: “That pot will continue to boil for quite a while.” Felten also brought up the recent revelation that American and British forces stole or cracked 2 billion SIM cards, which makes it easy for government agents to listen to calls and rewriting software to turn a smart phone into a recording or tracking device—even when it’s turned off. Scheer argued that technology simultaneously intimidates and seduces the masses. Younger Americans today think the government is benign, he said, but foreign-born students who have personally experienced repressive government regimes see things differently. But, he lamented, “As long as society can disperse the goodies, everything is fine.”
Lowe doesn’t believe in Google’s rhetoric (“do no evil”), and Nissenbaum doesn’t trust “mammoth” companies more than she does the government. Felten said private companies want fences protecting themselves from government surveillance but noted that the feds can always buy data from companies and piggyback on existing surveillance technologies. Scheer somewhat agreed with the three others: “I hate to be reduced to hoping that Google and Apple and Facebook will do the right thing, but I give them a better shot than I do the NSA.” A misuse of data scandal, he conceded, might cause Facebook to collapse. Nissenbaum weighed the traditional right-to-be-left-alone versus the obligation to share information in a social society, but Felten reminded us that citizens freely give their information to data companies. He also noted that observation by surveillance cameras in public spaces, as well as via smartphone locational devices, is a given in society, not a choice.
Scheer warned against collusions between business and government, like when privately held companies such as Palantir and In-Q-Tel analyze and sell data to law-enforcement agencies. “A wall has been breached,” he finished, “between the public and the private sector.” Palantir was founded with CIA money, he said, and the federal agency was its only client for three years. Lowe added that the Chicago Police Department has begun predictive policing, identifying criminals by algorithm and knocking on their doors, basically saying “We’re watching you.” The same police department, it was recently discovered, has been operating a black-site prison and interrogation building. “We’re being sold the story that data is unbiased,” Lowe said, “but it’s not magic either.” We shouldn’t forget about human error and bias.
Schwartz asked about using Tor, PGP, torrents, Tails, and encryption, as well as the judicial system. Nissenbaum reminded us that the government isn’t monolithic; some agencies with good values conduct solid research and take positive action. To help thwart questionable surveillance, she suggested flooding online interactions to obfuscate the system, such as TrackMeNot, which she helped to create. People are more aware of encryption and privacy-enhancing technology, Felten said, and these tools are becoming more practical for ordinary users. “We’re seeing a growth of interest in these things beyond the tin-foil-hat crowd,” he joked. “And that demand is being responded to by, I think, a lot of public-minded researchers who want to try to improve the technical tools.” With hope in the power of the individual, not the corporation, Lowe advocated more education and tutorials for encryption. Deep Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is a new research group that is helping. Scheer said that every government claims to have enemies to justify its actions but implored, “If your cause is right, freedom will serve it.”
In March 2014, the economics journalist Catherine Rampell crunched numbers from an online US Department of Education tool that collected data on college costs. Her results were stunning. After “subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid” for private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, she determined that “seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are art schools or conservatories of some kind.”1 These included the familiar institutions: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the San Francisco Art Institute. What’s more, two others on her list—the New School and New York University—offer numerous degrees in the arts.2 Tuition and required fees for the top ten range from $36,032 to $42,882 a year—which doesn’t include room, board, and related nonacademic expenses. Keep in mind that these are undergraduate degrees—master’s and doctoral degrees run even higher.
It’s no secret that the tuition for all kinds of schools has increased significantly over the last thirty years, and thousands of students take out huge government and private loans to cover their educational expenses. Those armed with BFAs are unlikely to make tons of money right out of the starting gate, as the familiar narrative goes. Yet we live in a time in which euphoric articles pronounce the MFA as the new MBA appear with alarming regularity.3 What should a young artist do?
Coco Fusco finds art-school debt to be unreasonable (photograph by Tal Beery)
Neither alleviating nor preventing student debt was the subject of an informal, passionate lecture by Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and visiting associate professor in comparative media studies and writing for 2014–15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking from her perch in the academic ivory tower, Fusco vented about the debt crisis, pointed fingers at numerous culprits, and found many sympathetic listeners. (She was a professor at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008—spending five years in the School of the Arts’ renowned MFA program—and following that was director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design from 2008 to 2013). Fusco was a “lone wolf in the wilderness” while teaching at Columbia during the boom Bush years, said Noah Fischer, a former student of hers and a founder of Occupy Museums, the group that sponsored her lecture and was participating in Momenta Art’s exhibition Work It Out.
A year has passed since Modern Painters published Fusco’s essay “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns” in its December 2013 issue. For the article Fusco gathered anecdotal knowledge from conversations with students, arguing that debt influences the kind of art a person makes after graduation, that schools use recruiters, and that art theory influences students, for better or worse. While “Debating an MFA?” focused on expensive graduate programs, tonight’s forty-five-minute talk made few distinctions between bachelor’s and master’s degrees and interchangeably addressed art schools, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities. As a result, the targets of her accusations were confused, perhaps deliberately so for rhetorical effect, leaving me without a solid grasp of the problem. It felt like the mark in Three Card Monte.
Cost of the Ticket
The “cost of the ticket” for art school has risen significantly, Fusco said. The 1980s, when she earned her BA and MA, were different. “It’s not that we didn’t borrow money,” she explained. “We didn’t have to borrow as much.” Fusco ended up with “relatively little debt” from her undergraduate education and none for graduate school.4 Back then “school wasn’t the problem—school was the escape,” especially for those riding out tough economic times. Waitressing lunch shifts for four hours a day after first finishing school, Fusco said she was poor but had time for art, and even worked for other artists for free. Needless to say, few can afford this lifestyle today, at least not in New York.
Design schools such as Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago figure disproportionately among the institutions that use “predatory lending schemes,” Fusco declared, and the top debtor schools are for-profit institutions. Schools that teach software and web design are “massive factories with debt schemes built into them,” she remarked, and the situation has become intolerable and oppressive. Her information was confusing, since she didn’t explain what these schemes are. Besides, for-profit institutions such as the nationwide chain of Art Institutes or places like Full Sail University teach marketable skills in lucrative creative areas such as web development, video games, and film production.5 Their graduates are hardly knocking on the doors of Chelsea galleries. Fusco left me wanting to know how SCAD and SAIC, which are nonprofit institutions, compare to the for-profits.
In Fusco’s experience, students are battling their parents over money for a collegiate art-school education, and parents are selling property, taking a second mortgage on their homes, and draining their retirement funds to pay for it all. At the same time, schools offer country-club experiences, with lavish dormitories and student centers—not to mention new buildings by starchitects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry—to supposedly impress wealthy parents to fork over cash. Paying for such expansions, Fusco said, is higher tuition.
During the first audience Q&A, an older man recommended that artists “show up” and “be weird.” Why even go to art school, he asked, suggesting that we get rid of the middleman and hook up students with working artists through apprenticeships. “That’s the medieval way,” Fusco responded, which “can become free labor for a long time.” Another attendee, the writer Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, wanted to know how we might let parents know about debt in advance. I asked Fusco if she knew how much effort today’s students make to find nonloan funding for their education? What about student complacency regarding tuition increases, questioned another person. Fusco did not have adequate answers. We are at a point when the outrage is over, Fusco had said earlier, and organizing should begin. But the only solution she offered was going to free schools like the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and “others in Los Angeles,” as if these groups offer something comparable to a degree from an accredited institution. It’s disappointing if Bruce High Quality is the only alternative pedagogical project that she knows by name. Fusco can find a rich history of both current and discontinued alternative pedagogical institutions indexed by the TEACHABLE FILE and use Google to discover newer projects making headlines.6
Proliferation of Degrees
The proliferation of degrees at art schools isn’t an expansion of choices, Fusco argued, but an opportunity for schools to procure more students and dispense degrees without providing marketable skills (e.g., fabrication, installation, canvas stretching, and finding your way around a woodshop). Indeed, any subscriber to the Art and Education email list can vouch for the mushrooming of art-degree programs in discourse-based areas such as, for example, the MA in art, education, and community practice at New York University, the MA in social design at Maryland Institute College of Art, or the MA in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.7 Talkers who don’t make things don’t last long, Fusco warned, even though she acknowledged that she’s a talker artist herself.
It’s more expensive for a school to maintain a glassblowing or ceramics studio, Fusco said, than to provide space for students doing social practice and, in her words, “transdisciplinary design.” While I generally agree with Fusco—it seems likely that programs for socially engaged art, which have multiplied in recent years as the genre gained visibility and respect, are less expensive to operate than programs in studio art—I can’t help but think that academic institutions are places where significant changes in how artists interact with the world take place. While initially frivolous sounding, these new degrees may evolve into progressive incubators for careers that haven’t yet grown mainstream roots. On the other hand, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment in an experimental, emerging field worth the risk?
Art School Administration
Fusco stated that art schools increasingly operate in a corporate manner, a glib remark evoking the evil ways of vulgar capitalism. Yet pundits have proposed the same thing for ALL of higher education for years, if not decades, and the tedious concept of university-as-business becomes superfluous when considering that any institution that ignores balancing income and expenses will simply not survive. Continuing her blanket dismissals, Fusco claimed that art schools confuse students by promoting themselves as research centers for knowledge production, when in fact these institutions are trade schools focused on technical training. (Didn’t she say earlier that students aren’t being taught usable skills?) “There is no concept of research in trade school,” Fuso said, apparently comparing studying art to vocational training in refrigeration or plumbing. Her line of thought might have served a purpose if she had identified the BFA or the MFA as her target, or even specified the culprits of her critique.
Image illustrating “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns,” Coco Fusco’s article from Modern Painters
Art schools devise ways to make the precarious employment of teachers permanent, Fusco continued, saying “It’s way beyond adjuncts now.” In fact, she stated that 90 percent of faculty members at art schools are adjuncts, without providing a source for this figure. “Those contracts have wonderful names,” she joked, “like visiting professor, visiting associate adjunct whatever, the titles go on and on, but the bottom line is that this is about the permanence of impermanence.” Adjunctification is indeed a huge problem across academia and especially in the visual arts. The three art capitals of America—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—boast a larger supply of artists, Fusco reported, and therefore teaching is a rough way for them to make a living. She floated the idea of living and working in Kansas City or Iowa City, in Dallas or Houston, but didn’t seem to take that seriously.
A decline in full-time professors, Fusco went on, has adversely affected faculty governance. In addition to being poorly paid, she said, adjuncts lack a political voice within the institution and must placate students and not rock the boat—“it’s about hanging on.” Professional development has also suffered, which has led to teachers using thirty-five-year-old syllabi. “No one should be allowed to do that,” she fumed. Artists are the hardest adjuncts hit, since part-timers in design and architecture usually have day jobs, which affects their political outlook on precarious labor. “They don’t want more obligations,” Fusco said, so it’s hard to win their support for change. Art schools, she told us, employ students in positions where other institutions, such as MIT, have a support staff of unionized professionals. While a federally subsidized work/study program is certainly beneficial for students, I can imagine that not having properly trained people running the darkroom or the print shop to be frustrating.
Because art schools face a dearth of applications from the US and a high turnover of students after one year, Fusco claimed, schools don’t have enough students—that is to say, they don’t have enough students to justify the expense of the legions of administrators who manage the pupils. Therefore an influx of foreigners has populated programs at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and CalArts. “Where am I, in Singapore?” she joked at the sea of yellow faces in art schools today. That comment sounded xenophobic, if not racist.
Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion
The seduction strategies that recruit students are real, Fusco said, and people aren’t told the truth before entering school—which is that most artists will not make it. (Who are these recruiters?) The lure for the Columbia MFA program in recent years, she said, is that an unidentified department head told students in private conversations that they’ll be rich before they finish school or they’ll hang out with famous art-world people who will help them find money. Fusco also argued that glamorous precarious workers—described by the journalist Riva Seth as “highly educated, skilled professionals who frequently are well compensated but nonetheless lack the security, social benefits or established career trajectories traditionally associated with their professions”—have an illusion of independence.8 Yet the media spin on successful young artists, she warned, fails to acknowledge that artworks bought by collectors who speculate are typically priced less than $10,000 each—hardly a get-rick-quick scheme. Of course, during her talk Fusco assumed—almost arrogantly so—that market success in the commercial art world is the solitary goal of those attending MFA programs. Throughout her talk she avoided discussing any other reason why artists might better themselves through education, leaving no room for other career pursuits.
During the 1970s, Fusco revealed, artists didn’t depend on the market: selling art was unusual and artists found cheap ways to live. Now those artists—whom she identified as male Conceptual artists teaching in higher education—aren’t the ones who can spread an awareness to students of the need for immediate financial returns after graduation. I’m not sure how that observation squares with her other comments. For example, Fusco said that some professor-artists connect their students to the market because that’s all they can offer as teachers. Art dealers visited CalArts in the 1980s to meet the students of Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, the “spiritual children of the Svengali types” as she put it. And during the 1990s, Fusco continued, dealers visited students at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University School of Art. It was certainly revealing that, according to the speaker’s anecdotes, the art market had begun invading MFA programs over thirty years ago, that it’s not surprising for gallery owners and collectors to pluck fresh talent from artists still in training.
Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art
If a young artist’s goal is to exhibit at galleries like Murray Guy or Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Fusco said, or to show in a booth at a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair, then he or she should consider attending expensive graduate schools. At Columbia, she disclosed, students specialize in networking, socializing, and drinking—and even complained to administrators when Fusco made them read and write. “Those students are like little barracudas,” she groused. “If they could kill me and get to my dealer, they would.”
Since “you’re paying $50,000 a year to be looked at before you even begin your career,” as Fusco claimed, should a prospective student attend a top art school or settle for an MFA program in the hinterlands of America, where he or she might earn a full ride? In the age of $120,000 art degrees, to borrow a slogan from the collective BFAMFAPHD, the latter option is the only sensible choice. Fusco named Arizona State University in Tempe and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as possibilities. For an artist interested in technology, she suggested heading to a school with the latest equipment, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and not to a boutique MFA program that specializes in seminars. I’ve heard that the University of California in Irvine and in Riverside, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale all offer generous packages to MFA students. Germany just made higher education free for anyone, Fusco pointed out, and students don’t even have to be citizens. If it’s actually true that “students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate,” as the critic and adjunct professor Jerry Saltz wrote, then attending a less-prestigious and less-expensive school—and consequently incurring little if any debt—before moving to New York (or wherever) to break into the commercial gallery scene makes a lot of sense.9 This artist will have hundreds of extra dollars a month for studio rent, art supplies, and food.
During the audience Q&A, the artist Kenneth Pietrobono, who like Noah Fischer is involved in Occupy Museums, declared that he turned down a spot in an MFA program at New York University because the cost of attending was too high, despite loan money being available. That was a wise decision. When faced with rising costs for art school and low expectations after graduation, prospective students must recognize that they are adults who are capable of conducting research, seeking counseling, and making their own decisions before accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loan money. They also must recognize the importance of saying no to unfavorable financial situations. But the fact remains that many artists have shackled themselves with huge amounts of debt, and that is a pity.
2 The tenth institution, Beacon College, is a small school in Florida “exclusively serving students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and other learning differences,” according to its homepage.
4 Fusco earned a BA in semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and a PhD in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2005).
7 It’s interesting that all three are MAs, not MFAs. Because these are not terminal degrees, their recipients will not be qualified to teach art at the college or university level.
This essay is the fourth 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 first, second, and third texts.
Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late The Koons Effect Part 2 Friday, September 12, 2014 Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York
Concluding the two-day symposium on the work of Jeff Koons was a keynote address by the art historian Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By choosing a single decade—Crow’s talk was titled “Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late”—the scholar conveniently avoided discussing the artist’s work since the early 1990s, typically considered the divisive break between those who respect and loathe the artist, in particular when Koons exhibited his Made in Heaven series (1989–91). Indeed, in a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, one critic wrote, “Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture.”1 Even the exhibition’s curator, Scott Rothkopf, skirted the later work in his catalogue essay “No Limits,” which analyzes Koons’s work up to Made in Heaven before defending the artist against the art market for the last half.2
Crow’s delivery was slow, calm, assured, and never overbearing; his modest confidence was almost fatherly. He began his talk by discussing three artworks typically understood as “distant from Koons” but with “corresponding and congruent” ideas. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sculpture comprising water inside a Plexiglas cube that responds to an exhibition’s environment, becoming “a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.” Condensation Cube, Crow noted, can exist in the three chemical phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—depending on its physical conditions. Crow returned to the notion of phases, and to elements such as air and water, and also to conceptual, representational, and literal phases of imagery, several times during his talk.
The second predecessor work was Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver’s Silver Clouds (1966), consisting of helium- and oxygen-filled balloons made from Mylar film, “a still very novel DuPont product,” Crow said, that was used by NASA for the first communication satellite, Echo 1, launched in 1960. The third work was unfinished: Gordon Matta-Clark’s made drawings for an airborne structure of his own; he even corresponded with the American businessman Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of Mylar film and the creator of Echo 1, circa 1977, during his research. Matta-Clark’s project was concurrent with Koons’s earliest works, The Inflatables (1978–79). “These two projects,” Crow said, “while coincidental in time, manifest vastly different scales of endeavor and intended effects on their audiences.” Unlike Matta-Clark, Koons avoided engineering problems by purchasing his materials—mirrored squares and plastic toys—off the shelf.
Thomas Crow speaks right on time (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Moving to Koons’s series The New (ca. 1980–83), for which Koons entombed out-of-the-box vacuum cleaners in upright Plexiglas coffins, Crow asked, “Why choose vacuums in the first place?” While many would offer “commodity fetishism” as an answer, he argued that these machines signify “tiresome, disagreeable, and never-ending work.” With a design basically unchanged since World War II, Crow said, vacuum cleaners are simply not seductive. When the machine’s power is switched on and off, its bag inflates and deflates, just like a pair of lungs. “The mental enterprise of reconciling the fantasy of immortality—being forever new—with the fragility of actual life is not something that Jeff Koons invented,” he explained. “To the massive contrary, it comes close to a core definition of the whole symbolic dimension of human culture.” For Crow, Koons’s work is about mobility and stasis and the contradiction between the mortality of humanity and the idea of perfection that people over the centuries have attributed to gods and demigods. “Needing a tool,” Crow remarked, “doesn’t make you a commodity fetishist.”
Crow argued that Koons’s populist touch surfaced in the three distinct bodies of work in the Equilibrium series (1985), which included the cast bronzes of the inflatable lifeboat and snorkel, the floating basketballs in glass tanks, and the appropriated Nike posters. The bronze works are hollow—the air is trapped inside. The poster of Darrell Griffith (a.k.a. Dr. Dunkenstein) featured dry ice (a carbon dioxide that skips the liquid phase) rising from bisected basketballs, and the poster of Moses Malone boasted a dry seabed. Crow noted the racial tension inherent/embedded in professional basketball, in which white fans deify the unfathomably natural talent of black players. These revelations arrived relatively late in the artist’s career, the scholar said, but he seized them. The posters in particular, Crow stated, “must have confirmed the artist even more deeply in his sense of the rightness of his sculptural intuitions.”
Crow briefly discussed works from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), which showcased “anonymous drinking artifacts” used in “suburban Bacchic rites,” and from Banality (1988), for which vernacular and religious images were enlarged to ridiculous proportions using the means of Old World craft. Entering the 1990s, the critical tide, which had been on Koons’s side until then, turned against him. It was acceptable, art historically speaking, for Koons to employ bronze casting and fabricate Minimalesque cases Koons used for The New and Equilibrium. But, it seems, the pornography of Made in Heaven was rejected. In 1994, Koons turned to air and matter again in the Celebration series (1994–2014), whose works featured thin, liquid membranes such as balloons. Unlike a heat-sealed plastic rabbit, a balloon is expansive, and its surface becomes thinner when blown with more air
From the audience, the artist Josiah McElheny asked Crow how today’s Koons squares against 1980s Koons. During a Flash Art panel in 1986, Crow replied, Koons was a twentysomething artist who wanted to be taken seriously at the time.3 Is that just as much an act, McElheny wanted to know, as the self-help affirmation guy that Koons has become? During the symposium, McElheny noted, panelists perceived the fun in Koons’s act as a portal into dark, uncomfortable places—and, like many other thinkers, one should not take Koons’s words at face value. “He’s speaking through his art in a way that’s quite transparent,” argued Crow, “and that goes against the grain of the things he generally says.” Topics such as the quest, danger, and allegory, as well as supernatural personification, were historically the domain of fine art, Crow said, but have since been suppressed in modern times. Now we find these ideas in astrology columns and young-adult fiction. Echoing the artist Carol Bove’s position from last night’s panel, Crow wondered aloud, “Where myth has gone to live now that we don’t feel we believe in this anymore?”
Buster Keaton on Palm Sunday (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Another audience member asked, “Where is Mike Kelley in this?” After a moment of flabbergast at the momentous nature of the question, Crow responded, “Kelley is honest. He’s always honest.” Kelley and his admirers, the scholar continued, share an intellectual ambition and an educational influence, as well as a desire for mythic, emotional expressions but not in a high-minded way. According to Crow, Kelley “had to debase to get to affirmation.” The artist Stephen Prina recalled that Kelley worried about the psychoanalytical aspect of stuffed animals: because people understood these objects to reference the artist’s own past, Kelley became scientific and conceptual about their display, putting them on tables like specimens. Prina concluded the digression: “I’ve only become worried about infantilism as an adult.”
2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 15–35.
3 The panel discussion was moderated by Peter Nagy and comprised Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. See David Robbins, ed., “From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49.
This text is the first of three that reviews a series of panels on residual rights for visual artists, held in 1974. Read the second and third reports.
Residual Rights for the Visual Artist—Are They Desirable?
Monday, October 28, 1974
New York University, Loeb Student Center, New York
An array of worthies in and about the art world met at Loeb Student Center for three panels on the question of “rights” for the visual artist. The principal topic, the controversial 15 percent residual payment to the artist on resale of his or her work, is nothing new. However, last year’s historic Sotheby Parke Bernet auction dramatized the issue.
That was when a Rauschenberg painting, originally bought by collector Robert Scull for $900, was resold by him for $95,000 [actually $85,000]. Rauschenberg was enraged, publicly scrapped with Scull [legend has it fisticuffs were exchanged], and, with his accountant Rubin Gorewitz (“the artist’s accountant”), formed a foundation and went to Washington to lobby for an artists’ rights bill.
The public had been invited to hear the pros and cons discussed. According to a show of hands, the audience consisted of perhaps 85 percent artists; they came and went in large numbers during the marathon event.
Moderator: S. Spencer Grin, publisher of the Saturday Review
Panelists: Paula Cooper, Paula Cooper Gallery; Lawrence Fleischman, director, Kennedy Gallery; Robert Scull, collector; and Ron Gorchov, Nathaniel Katz, Jacob Landau, Peter Max, and Robert Rauschenberg, artists
Then Lawrence Fleischman opened by objecting to the residual agreement, a not-unexpected position for a dealer. Artists would be more hurt than helped, he said; anyway, “90 percent of artworks go down in value.” Paula Cooper was in favor of the 15 percent, but pessimistic about implementation. She has one artist who uses the voluntary contract, but says she meets buyer opposition.
Jacob Landau thought the only artists to benefit would be the ones who have already benefited from the art boom, the elite few. Rauschenberg was succinct. He was in favor, “and I don’t want to argue about it.” Scull, charming and soft-spoken, had apparently had a change of heart. He now favors some sort of royalty for the artist and said he doesn’t believe it will slow the art market.
Landau felt it would. He sees a world depression coming [in] which little art will be sold. Rauschenberg countered, “No artist can afford that kind of pessimism.” As for size of the royalty, panelists either agreed on 15 percent or hedged, except Ron Gorchov, who insisted on 50 percent. “Fifteen percent is like a tip!”
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.
The paper [by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy] excerpted below, an explanation of how to “make a market in a living artist’s work,” was a highlight of the [“What Price Art?”] conference. Further details appear in Ronald Feldman’s truth-in-jest advice later in the year.
The art world in 1985 at Mr. Chow (photograph by Michael Halsband)
Art is a conveyer of status, a vocabulary of power. Men and women of wealth and influence, after they have acquired their money and power, need signs and symbols of their importance. Collecting art is often a way to gain entry into a desired social stratum….
How do dealers “make a market” in a living artist’s work? With virtually any new painting commanding an entry gallery price of $1,200 to $2,550 (sculpture begins a bit higher), there are price thresholds that a new or unrecognized artist must break through as he or she goes up the ladder. Assuming the dealer truly believes in the quality of the work, he [sic] must publicize this belief through exhibitions, critical reviews, word-of-mouth….
Dealers try to get their artists’ work seen by museum curators [and get] well-known, serious collectors to buy. Many galleries will only release works by certain artists to certain collectors, recognizing the Doppler effect of those collections. These collectors are also likely to be on museum boards and to encourage recognition of artists they favor at those institutions. Ten percent or 20 percent discounts [or more] off quoted prices to valued customers are common. (I have heard it rumored that some sales are made at up to 80 percent off quoted gallery prices.) Sales to museums at far-below-market prices will permit the dealer to jack up subsequent prices. The aura of market activity can also enhance an artist’s reputation and build market interest. There is a high risk-high reward factor…. Collectors respond to the idea of buying a hot young artist’s work at prices which will escalate rapidly. The idea of investing in contemporary art is rather new, and one which reputable dealers claim they do not use as a sales tool. But the media attention given such artists makes that kind of hard sell almost unnecessary, since speculation becomes a tacit factor in everyone’s mind.
About three years ago, I noticed a brand new painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat hung in the loft of a famous artist. He said, “This time I wanted to get in at the beginning. I’m tired of seeing the collectors make all the profits.” In three years, Basquiat’s prices have risen precipitously. Sales to major collectors also build an artist’s image and thus allow his prices to rise. Once an artist’s reputation is established, the auction house may play a part. Sales at auction are not only important exposure … they publicly ratify prices. Dealers have been known to put up a work at auction and buy it back themselves simply to establish a price…. If works are “bought in” (i.e., do not reach their reserve price), a certain superficial credibility of price still remains to the public at large. However, savvy collectors who follow auctions closely may then consider a picture “burned,” thus making it harder to sell subsequently….
Because the “value” of a new work is in fact so much a matter of opinion, those who wish to participate in the game soon discover that becoming an insider, i.e., having access to the informal as well as the formal network of information about the art, is crucial…. In the oddest way, works of art achieve value because certain individuals in certain sectors of the system decide they are valuable, but much of what goes on goes on behind the scenes…. An artist whose production is very small or who shuns the publicity machine [may not achieve] “brand name” status. [Yet] in the long run … mediocre pieces bring mediocre prices and great works bring ever-greater prices.
Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat (photograph by Michael Halsband)
Another market factor is the “auction ring.” A group of dealers interested in the same material agree not to bid against one another, assigning one to bid unopposed. After the sale they reauction the things among themselves. [This] is strictly illegal. But, when done skillfully, it is almost impossible to uncover. Auctions have also been manipulated in another way. Dealers bid up prices of their own artists even if they themselves have to buy the work. Then they call claim the auction price as ratifier of prices in the gallery. Or it may be arranged in advance to have people (assigned to go up to a certain price) bid on a work, thus pushing up the price.
In recent years, auction houses have attracted a much wider public, often competing with the dealer for the collector’s dollars, so that antagonisms between the two have surfaced. Large advertising budgets, increasing media publicity, glossy catalogues, and an aura of theatrical glamour attract high rollers to the auction rooms (recently refurbished) of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. [R]ecord-breaking prices are touted widely, while heavily bought-in sales are played down whenever possible. Auction houses have learned how to use the tools of modern marketing. Michael Thomas, a former investment banker, in a column about the forthcoming Sotheby’s sale of pictures owned by the late Florence Gould, [wrote that] “advance publicity would have us believe that the equivalent of the Jeu de Paume or the Phillips Collection are being disgorged at auction, but by and large … the pictures are pretty and accessible, just the kind of thing with which rich Arabs like to decorate their Home County mansions.”
The combination of hype to create demand that takes advantage of ignorant, cash-heavy, status-hungry consumers of art is hardly a new one, though it may operate more widely and efficiently than in the days of Joseph Duveen and Bernard Berenson. Policies of full disclosure for critics, scholars, and curators (to reveal any vested interest in art they write about or curate) and for dealers and auction houses might go a long way towards correcting the abuses of the art market as we know it. Meanwhile, caveat emptor remains sound advice.
In Terms Of count: 0.
Source
Written by Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, “What Price Art? A Market of Mirrors” was originally published within Cynthia Navaretta’s “Conference: What Price Art?” in Women Artists News 10, no. 4 (June 1985): 5; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 237–38. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
This essay is the first of five that reviews a recent conference at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the second, third,fourth, and fifth texts.
The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk Monday, April 7, 2014 Exhibit A: Authorship on Display Center for the Humanities Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York
Boris Groys poses for photographs during his keynote address (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Boris Groys presented a keynote address called “The Museum as Gesamkunstwerk” to kick off a daylong conference, “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” that explored historical and contemporary approaches to organizing exhibitions. An interdisciplinary scholar and occasional curator, Groys is Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and senior research fellow at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. A few years back he wrote an excellent book called Art Power (2008).
Groys’s accent made it difficult for me to concentrate on his words, and he repeatedly chuckled at what seemed like minor disciplinary quibbles between himself and other theorists (hardly anyone laughed with him). Reading a prepared paper, he relayed that “the artist of the future must be radically indifferent,” according to the nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner. He also boldly claimed that “dictatorship is a curatorial project” and that documentation of such projects invokes nostalgia for the ephemeral event. I think he also made a quick reference to the experience of watching live sports (that is, in a stadium or arena) without hearing the play-by-play analysis and color commentary from a radio or television broadcast.
Since Groys’s keynote contained significant chunks of a previously published essay, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” I was able to grasp several of his ideas afterward—and they are good ones.1 First he establishes that art museums traditionally removed works of art from the flow of time “to resist material destruction and historical oblivion,” which are precarious, unstable, and finite things that happen to humans or to things not saved in archives. Groys’s cumulative argument elaborates on Wagner’s notion of an author’s self-sacrifice in the Gesamtkunstwerk, which he likens to suicide, and how the kind of curatorial project popularized by the Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann—something Groys calls a “temporary curatorial dictatorship”—has displaced the traditional art display and transforms into a new Gesamtkunstwerk that returns to art its provisional status. An exhibition goes on view for two or three months, he said of the typical institutional calendar, and then is dismantled. The art museum has consequently responded, as written in the essay, by becoming “a stage for the flow of art events … which include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth.”
What’s novel about the précis is how Groys postulates that the internet doesn’t embody the flow of time but rather, with its innate characteristics of surveillance and traceability, halts that flow. The documentation of museum events, he argues, whether a catalogue, film, or website—or streaming video, as his keynote was broadcast live online—is absorbed into the artwork. (Oh, process.) One crucial function for art museums, Groys concludes in the essay, will be to provide a space for an encounter to both take place and be “thematized and critically theorized.” The published text expresses a few more good ideas, but I’m not sure how to understand my experience of listening to Groys speak—during which I took few written notes because of his illegibility—to the written documentation I read later and can more easily remember.
Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun using mirrors, light, and mist for The Weather Project (2003), which he said was the basis for exploring ideas about experience and mediation. Within two months the installation at Tate Modern in London had attracted more than one million visitors
After his talk Groys was joined by the art historian Claire Bishop for a brief conversation and audience Q&A. She pressed him to talk more about the “suicidal dictator,” but he deflected the question, instead focusing on linking important curators to political leaders. “When you speak about Szeemann,” he mused, “you talk about Caeser, Alexander the Great.” Is reenactment a form of documentation? No, Groys said to Bishop, marking the former as a kind of fiction that the latter lacks. Curiously, Bishop told Groys that his writing has a polemical quality but does not advocate or criticize, which may reflect the lack of a straightforward position on the entertainment-industrial complex described in his essay.
From his chair in the audience Dieter Roelstraete, a curator from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, was pleased that Groys identified visitors as the most interesting objects in an exhibition (a statement absent from the published essay). What about wall labels, asked Roelstraete. What about exhibitions without visitors? “It’s good,” Groys smiled while regarding the second inquiry. With a show that no one sees, he suggested, the curator becomes a legend, which corresponds to his idea of the suicidal curator as discontinuous and immortal. Natalie Musteata, a doctoral student in art history at the Graduate Center (and also one of three organizers of the conference), asked Groys if he had a similar term for the artist? The artist has the ability to subvert the curator, he responded obliquely, and also become a curator. I’m not sure Groys answered the question—perhaps he is saving his thoughts for another essay on the subject.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Boris Groys, “Entering the Flow: Museum between Archive and Gesamtkunstwerk,” e-flux Journal 50 (December 2013). The author had presented the essay as a lecture at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain, on November 8, 2013.
