In Terms Of

Tag: Richard Prince

  • The Butcher, the Baker, the Exhibition Maker

    Theater of Exhibitions with Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann
    Wednesday, August 5, 2015
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Jens Hoffmann, Theater of Exhibitions (2015)

    Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).

    For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).

    Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).

    Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.

    Museums front and center (elevation illustrations by A Practice for Everyday Life)

    Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.

    Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.

    Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.

    In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.

    In Terms Of count: 4⅔.

  • Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

    Gendered Expectations: The Representation of “Girls” in Contemporary Art
    Sunday, June 7, 2015
    NEWD Art Show, Brooklyn, NY

    Cindy Hinant, Celebrity Grid (The Rich Kid), 2013, ink, Mylar, and magazine page, 11 x 8½ in (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    The artists Alex McQuilkin and Cindy Hinant and Kathy Battista, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and senior research fellow at the University of Southampton in England, met at the NEWD Art Show, a small art fair that coincided with Bushwick Open Studios, to discuss art that deals with “girly” aesthetics. The panel’s teaser offered this: “From makeup to celebrity culture, these artists mine “girly” motifs—often ignored or dismissed as flippant and unserious by the art world—to explore issues of gendered expectations and pressures women face through representations of women in the media and culture at large.”

    But what exactly is a “girly” aesthetic, anyway? On a casual level, Hello Kitty and Holly Hobbie come to my mind, as do princesses, pink dresses, tea parties, heart-shaped cupcakes, fruity cocktails, playing dress-up—and actually dressing up. I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Yet for a panel that implicitly set out to challenge stereotypes, the speakers didn’t try hard to debunk this aesthetic ghetto or even define it. It would have been enlightening if they had pointed out when images of stereotypes are innocuous or dangerous, but they didn’t I suppose we can use Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s helpful rule of thumb of “I know it when I see it,” but such an approach can reinforce faulty preconceptions. Instead, McQuilkin and Hinant gave brief presentations of their work, followed by a discussion about feminism with Battista.

    Alex McQuilkin, Sweet Sixteen, 2003, C-print, 20 x 24 in. (artwork © Alex McQuilkin)

    McQuilkin made her video Fucked (2000), a three-minute clip of the face of a young woman—the artist herself at age 19—putting on makeup while (apparently) being fucked from behind. The work caused a sensation when the gallery Modern Culture showed it at the 2002 Armory Show. (I was among those who saw it there.). Explaining the piece, the artist said that Fucked demonstrates how physical appearances alienate a person from the world, and how an image can be greater than the experience. Ironically, she always gets asked if the sex in Fucked is real or simulated, a fact that for me is ancillary, and not integral, to the work’s meaning. That didn’t matter when Fucked was pulled from an exhibition in the Netherlands for being child pornography. The edition sold well at the Armory, McQuilkin said, and one creepy collector even permanently installed it in his bedroom. She knows this because he showed her the room.

    Alex McQuilkin describes the motivations behind her work (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    More recently McQuilkin has been drawing the likenesses of Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve in their prime, but with blank spaces where their faces should be. “They’re made for us to project ourselves onto,” she explained. McQuilkin noted that Bardot felt that she had scored her first serious role as an actor when cast for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Contempt, but the American trailers pimped her babeness instead her professional chops, offering sexy shots of Bardot that were not in the film.

    Another recent work is Magic Moments (Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl) (2013), a video comprising appropriated clips of young, white fashion models from television commercials and online advertisements, moving in slow motion to the soundtrack a woman singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”1 We are comfortable looking at the women, McQuilkin observed, adding that she gets the “feeling of ‘I want what they have.’” It’s the classic male gaze. Combining ubiquitous images with national pride and naturalizing both, Magic Moments is not dissimilar from what you might see on a billboard-sized television screen in Times Square or in a display in a retail clothing store—delightfully blurring the division between art and commerce. The lack of a clear position—critical or complicit—seems to be McQuilkin’s point.

    Hinant admitted having a love/hate relationship with popular culture and cosmetics. For The Sephora Project (2012), she visited branches of the cosmetic-and-perfume chain store across Manhattan, filling out comment cards that detailed her interactions with staff and other shoppers. Her exhibition Aesthetic Relations at Joe Sheftel Gallery in 2012 addressed the right of publicity and agency: celebrity sex tapes, up-skirt photography, and revenge porn—what Hinant succinctly called the “aesthetics of violation.” Another body of her work reacts to paparazzi photos and Instagram feeds that show celebrities without makeup, with the former genre mocking their looks and the latter resisting the beauty myth. She explained that “‘without make-up’ is code language for ugly,” though it seems as if the famous are trying to dispel that thought. Inherent in Hinant’s conception of celebrity is a process of identification with, and rejection of, both yourself and the object of your fascination. Whether or not this experience is just part of growing up, she didn’t say.

    Hinant screened an early work, The Kissy Girls (2006), a kind of home movie that interviews her 11-year-old sister, who admitted to kissing at least ten boys. The video also showed Hinant’s sister—who perhaps exemplifies the sexually precocious “knowing child”—teaching the artist how to dance to a Missy Elliot song. In another series of works, Hinant overlaid grids of ink and Mylar on pages taken from trashy magazines like Us Weekly, pages that show photographs of the former child stars Tori Spelling, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, and Amanda Bynes, as well as the those of television personalities Kourtney and Khloé Kardashian. “The grid is a utopic space,” Hinant said mysteriously, “where one line does not have more value than another.”

    Cindy Hinant, one image from Women, 2011, C-print, 5 x 7 in. (artwork © Cindy Hinant)

    As moderator, Battista tried to create a conversation around art, gender, and fashion, and on the body as a site for consumption. In the mass media “we see images not of girls,” she said, “but of capitalism.” McQuilkin’s students at New York University believe that we live in a postgender time, but she still finds images as problems, which she attributed to being older and wiser. Hinant pointed out sexism in measures of artistic success: “If Carolee Schneemann wasn’t a babe, she wouldn’t have made it in the art world.” (In 2011 Hinant made C-prints of cropped appropriated images of the bare breasts of artists such as Schneemann, Yoko Ono, and Hannah Wilke.) Battista argued that male artists Richard Phillips and Richard Prince make work about female celebrity and noted that the singer and producer Pharrell Williams organized an exhibition called G I R L for Galerie Perrotin in Paris, on view when his “date rapey” song with Robin Thicke, “Blurred Lines,” became a smash hit. Though Williams publicly calls himself a feminist, Battista said, he practices “strategic misogyny” elsewhere.

    Kathy Battista (left) moderates the conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    During the audience Q&A, someone said that, when understanding feminism, some take a strictly economic view, which demonizes mothers who stay at home to raise children. An audience member made a comment that I interpreted as “It’s 2015—what the fuck.” Battista said that having children takes years off the lives of artists and academics, based on anecdotal, personal experience. Both artists recoiled at the term “girl” when asked to participate on today’s panel, but in 2006 interview McQuilkin was much more forthcoming with her attraction to adolescence—but she also said that she has moved on.2 The only time the “girl versus women” debate surfaced what when McQuilkin said she had no problem referring to a male-dominated art world as a “boy’s club” because the power dynamic is different.

    If I were moderating the discussion, I’d ask the artists about authenticity, imaginative play, and feelings of immortality, among other topics. For instance, can older men to portray girls in contemporary art without being total creeps? Are depictions of girls by women the only acceptable kind of representation? Growing up, McQuilkin lived in a bedroom “curated “by her mother, like a dollhouse. By contrast, her brother taped Metallica posters to his walls. “The maid didn’t go in there,” she said, without irony. How are gender roles inscribed across race, class, and nations?

    Adolescent studies in disciplines like psychology and sociology are rich, and so is literature—Lewis Carroll’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) are touchstones. But the subject has been little examined in visual art apart from a collection of essays in Girls! Girls! Girls! in Contemporary Art (2011), edited by Catharine Grant and Lori Waxman. The book argues that the art world’s fascination in girls peaked in 1999, the year in which a photography exhibition called Another Girl, Another Planet took place at the gallery Lawrence Rubin-Greenberg Van Doren, yet interest in young women in popular culture—from songs by the Beatles (“I Saw Her Standing There”) and the Rolling Stones (“Stray Cat Blues”) to the Larry Clark film Kids (1996) to Lena Dunham’s television show Girls—is decades old and continues to grow.

    Anna Gaskell, untitled #26 (override), from the series wonder, 1997, chromogenic print, 19 3/8 x 23 ⅝ in (artwork © Anna Gaskell)

    I would argue that the same is true in the art world, but the panelists neglected to discuss other artists making work about girls, such as Anna Gaskell (who once assisted Sally Mann), Laurel Nakadate, Collier Schorr, and Sue de Beer (for whom McQuilkin has worked). There’s something repulsive in how Erin M. Riley cranks out tapestries of scantily clad teen girls taking selfies in the bathroom mirror, but images of them are hugely popular on Instagram. What about historical figures such as Balthus and Edgar Degas, or contemporaries like Ryan McGinley and Richard Kern? As an artist who specializes in nude pictures of young (but legal) women, Kern practically lives Matthew McConaughey’s famous line in the movie Dazed and Confused: “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older; they stay the same age.” Should why is the representation of “girls” in contemporary art a subject stuck in perennial adolescence?

    In Terms Of count: 1.

    1 McQuilkin cited the book Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999), written by a collective of French artists and activists under the name Tiqqun, as an influence.

    2 Ana Finel Honigman, “Overwhelming Life,” Artnet Magazine, March 29, 2006.

  • Help the Aged

    Amalia Ulman in Conversation with Dr. Fredric Brandt
    Thursday, June 5, 2014
    Swiss Institute, New York

    Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, introduces the speakers (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    The twenty-five-year-old artist Amalia Ulman announced that she just had plastic surgery while spending time in California for her recent solo exhibition, Used & New, at LTD Los Angeles. The before-and-after pictures of her profile, projected onscreen above her, showed nearly imperceptibly minor work on her nose, straightening a slight bend. Ulman also revealed that she had Botox fillers injected under her eyes. According to comments in an Art in America interview published a day before this event, Ulman considers the eye fillers and the nose job to be art.

    “We thought it was too good to be true,” said Simon Castets, director of the Swiss Institute, for his organization to pair a young artist who thrives on beauty and appearance with the world-renowned cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt, famous for his contributions to the New New Face, a term used to describe his and others’ medical practice in a 2008 article in New York magazine. It was, in Castet’s words, “a match made in heaven.”

    Castet introduced Ulman’s work—in photography, sculpture, and installation—as concerning value creation, wealth, game theory, and 89plus, a project on artists born in 1989 or later, on which he and the curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist work. She understands her art as analyzing class and addressing social and power relations, especially in representations of the second world—she has singled out Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece—through dollar/euro/pound stores as well as on lifestyle blogs such as Apartment Therapy, where it’s hard to tell if an object is well or poorly made based on a digital photograph. Ulman’s work, which deals with beauty, consumerism, and social media and takes both digital and physical forms, has been exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. Criticism on her is hard to find via a Google search, as writers are inclined to publish Q&A interviews with the artist rather than analyses of her work.

    Amalia Ulman, before and after her recent body modifications

    Born in Argentina, raised in Spain, and educated at Central Saint Martins in London, Ulman regularly posts photographs to Instagram that seem to have a gauzy soft focus like television shows from the 1960s. The whites and pale pinks in her aesthetic palette are, coincidentally or not, the same hues generally ascribed to the Caucasian race and the color of its skin. Her postinternet worldview is typical of a newer generation in which the older Marxist critiques of society do not apply, or at least not as much. Ulman has admitted to reading theory, but her work is quite different from that of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger in the 1980s, and that of Nikki S. Lee and Laurel Nakadate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ulman’s criticality is questionable, since she’s seemingly complicit with existing power structures in supporting the elegantly bland (or blandly elegant) qualities of life. But don’t hate her because she’s beautiful.

    Ulman began the evening’s conversation by reading a prepared artist’s statement from printed pages, while the audience of largely twentysomethings followed along, craning their necks to take in a projected PowerPoint presentation. Ulman recalled being introduced to art at a young age—8 to be exact—by a television program on Orlan, the artist whose career-long project is to transform herself via plastic surgery. The Australian performance artist Stelarc and the photographer David LaChapelle were also formative influences, she said. While speaking, the carefree Ulman casually tossed her just-read pages onto the floor between her and Brandt, as if she were lackadaisically scrolling a website, and asked the doctor about his work.

    Fredric Brandt preaches his aesthetic gospel (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    With whitish-blond hair, Brandt bore an uncanny resemblance to Andy Warhol. The sixty-four-year-old cosmetic dermatologist also possessed a face that had obviously undergone extensive work. (An article in the New York Times noted that he experiments on himself.) The old medical tools and processes such as peeling and collagen injections, Brandt said, were developed a long time ago. Collagen injections, for example, are no longer available. People in their forties and fifties made appointments with him in the old days; now he gets younger first-time clients. With the language of a benevolent, confident self-help guru, Brandt used phrases such as “subtly refreshed” and “continuity of youth” and revealed that few patients have expectations to fix an aged face. “We can improve on Mother Nature,” he professed. “I’m not going to make you look like a porn star—unless you want to.” Not many people do.

    “We understand the age and face better,” Brandt said, saying how doctors can separate and empty fat pockets to affect the reflection of light. His clients “don’t want to look young” but instead “don’t want to look tired.” Besides feeling better, they also express a desire to “extend their life in the workforce,” an honorable motive that may not do enough to combat institutional or structural biases against older employees. Making a distinction between a person’s chronological age and his or her biological age, Brandt encourages his patients improve their looks for themselves, not for their husbands—the implication here that women, not men, receive treatment from him. Brandt made two points I agree with: that people shouldn’t impose their beliefs on others, and that you should criticize yourself before criticizing others.

    “Botox is the most amazing drug that came along in the mid-nineties,” Brandt continued what essentially had become a monologue, “and it really changed the course of cosmetic dermatology.” Botox replaced collagen injections and works by shrinking lines, lifting the eyebrows, and changing the shape of the face, he said. Is it all necessary? “People come in and they’ll point out these flaws in themselves that nobody can see. And I say, ‘I can fix that little scar or line but that’s not going to affect your appearance to anybody else but yourself.’” Brandt points out other areas for work—he called it educating his patients—that could improve their face, making them beautiful.

    Putting science aside, Brandt talked about other matters, such as routine. He does yoga. “I do have a spiritual side,” he said. What about diet, Ulman asked the doctor. He minimizes sugar intake and doesn’t east red meat, which has inflammatory qualities that can accelerate aging. And because he is gluten free, he avoids filling up on bread when dining at restaurants.

    Although Brandt stopped short of calling himself an artist, he strongly emphasized the aesthetic nature of his work and touted his great eye for facial improvements, citing the golden ratio and the rule of thirds as tools in his kit. His instincts are so refined, he bragged, that he can look at someone and know exactly how make them look better. The face, Brandt said later in the talk, is a painting that he creates.

    Amalia Ulman and Fredric Brandt at the Swiss Institute (photograph by Jesse Untracht-Oakner)

    Ulman and Brandt briefly discussed insurance issues, with the doctor favoring private-pay systems and urging healthcare companies to stay out of plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, which would introduce chaos and make costs skyrocket. In an interview in Kaleidoscope, Ulman expressed interest in getting Korean plastic surgery, which I understood to mean that she wanted to look more Asian. She prodded Brandt to talk about “corrective” surgery for Asians to look more Western, but the doctor didn’t bite, though he did acknowledge that Asians may desire a Western-looking eye. What about patients who don’t really need work, Ulman asked. “Your perception of yourself is the hardest thing to change,” he responded. Brandt also emphasized that his work is reversible: “If you don’t like it, it goes away.”

    During the audience Q&A, someone brought up Michael Jackson, who Brandt said was “a very extreme transformation.” “You can’t have ten rhinoplasties,” snipped the doctor, “and expect your nose to look good.” Where does the desire for change come from, someone else asked. “Within us there’s an innate sense to want to look good,” he answered, which for him explains why things like mirrors and hair salons exist in our world. The role of the media, he continued, is to educate, to provide tools and information on procedures that weren’t available twenty years ago. “Obviously the media, all the images out there affect you, but they’re educating you, and probably … it’s not like they’re forcing you [to do] anything you didn’t want to do. They’re reinforcing your own thoughts of what can be done.”

    A young man in the audience described how the technology for antilock brakes, originally developed for Formula One racing cars, has become a standard feature for even the cheapest car. Has social good, he asked, come from Brandt’s work? Obviously prepared, the doctor said that scars, accidents, and birth defects all benefit from reparative surgery. Botox, he said, helps with migraines, bladder dysfunctions, prostate problems, and eye spasms. (Remember that Viagra was developed to alleviate symptoms of pulmonary arterial hypertension.) Someone else asked about new and old standards of beauty. Brandt wants to democratize beauty: “We’re taking typical standards of beauty and applying them to more people … like photocopies.” But at the same time, he said, “I would hate for every one of my patients to look the same.”

    A noted collector of contemporary art, Brandt first acquired a Monochromatic Joke painting by Richard Prince—the one about the psychiatrist stealing his patient’s act—in the 1980s. He also owns one of Yayoi Kusama’s white Infinity Net paintings, which he described as “ethereal.” Brandt enjoys how John Baldessari masks the identity of people in his artworks with colored dots, changing our perception of their faces. In sum, he said that he like feel-good art.

    It was odd that Brandt showed no interest in Ulman’s work, not even asking her once about her own practice. At one point she even asked him “What do you think of my nose?” and he responded with “I think you’re a pretty woman,” eventually conceding with “Good, it looks good.” I was amused with how one narcissist out-narcissized the other. What was even more surprising, though, was the dull affect of the audience throughout the event. I expected the crowd to be, by default, deeply skeptical of Brandt’s line of work, with its impossible standards of beauty and synthetic body transformation by a wealthy elite. (What, with all the concern over genetically modified foods and an obsession with all things organic and artisanal.) Then I realized that’s the old way of thinking. Lifestyle drugs and unnecessary medical surgery are more popular than ever and much less controversial than in the past. Plastic surgery and cosmetic dermatology, as common and unobtrusive as wearing contact lenses, are no longer garish procedures, if handled by the right doctors; they also allow people to happily and blissfully maintain their personal brand. Who could possibly object to that?

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Anna Soldner, “Face to Face with Amalia Ulman and Dr. Fredric Brandt,” Dis Magazine, June 6, 2014.

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