In Terms Of

Tag: Richard Serra

  • Where All the Action Is

    Lee Lozano Drawings and Paintings: A Conversation with Jacqueline Humphries, Jutta Koether, and Bob Nickas
    Wednesday, July 22, 2015
    Hauser and Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York

    In her notebooks, Lee Lozano asks herself, “WILL I ‘GO BACK’ TO ‘JUST PAINTING’?”

    I first discovered the work of Lee Lozano (1930–1999) in 1997, when reading the reprint of Lucy R. Lippard’s classic chronology of Conceptual art, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. The descriptions of Lozano’s experientially based art from the late 1960s, including Dialogue Piece, General Strike Piece, and Grass Piece, were among the most compelling in the book. Because of the radical nature of these works—making art from talking, from art-world protest, and from the desire to “stay high all day, every day”—I thought everyone knew about her.1 So when Lozano was rediscovered in the early 2000s, having left the art world for good thirty years earlier in her infamous Dropout Piece (initiated in the early 1970s), I was surprised. But upon reviewing the artist’s slender exhibition history and bibliography during the eighties and nineties, her omission from the historical record was clear.2

    The first question posed by Robert Nickas, the moderator of tonight’s conversation at Hauser and Wirth, was this: When were you first exposed to Lozano? The painter Jacqueline Humphries said she first saw Lozano’s work in the traveling exhibition High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975, organized by Katy Siegel and David Reed, at the National Academy Museum in 2007. Humphries had also read Siegel and Reed’s conversation about the artist, published in Artforum in 2001. The conversation’s third participant, the artist Jutta Koether, became acquainted with Lozano’s work “as a concept, as an idea” in the 1990s—through Nickas, actually. Strangely, based on her words and expressions, it seemed as if Koether had never actually seen Lozano’s work in person before tonight.

    The painter Jacqueline Humphries (center), flanked by Robert Nickas and Jutta Koether (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Tonight’s conversation was held in conjunction with an exhibition of five large paintings and numerous tiny drawings from 1964 to 1966, Lozano’s fourth solo show with the gallery since 2007. Despite Nickas’s unconventional approach to curatorial work and criticism, and despite his longtime support of Lozano’s work—he organized Lee Lozano, Drawn from Life: 1961–1971 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2004—he framed the discussion around clichés: the death of painting, the artist as outlaw, the inadequacy of categorization, the goodness of failure, the performative turn, and, of course, the rediscovery of forgotten artists. Doing so produced a mostly stilted, directionless talk—the speakers missed the mark, and not positively so. Maybe they just didn’t prepare ahead of time. In spite of these obstacles, the talk had numerous moments of interest.

    Koether is attracted to Lozano’s multifarious practice: her process, her being female, and her “antagonistic propositions about failure and rejuvenance [sic] of painting.” Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition created a “highly problematic proposition about Lozano” that interrupts her unified idea of the artist. “There’s not one Lee Lozano,” Nickas reminded her, briefly describing each of her five periods, such as the Tools works, the Wave paintings, and the written conceptual pieces, which came quickly over her ten-year career. Humphries said that museums often misrepresent an artist’s diverse body of work with an authoritative, streamlined version, and most artists she knows do a bunch of stuff. Well, duh.

    Why did Lozano paint, Nickas asked, when she could have done anything? “Is painting acquainted with winning [more] than any other practice?” he wondered. Looking around the room, Humphries saw something unique in the paintings that viewers, both then and now, can’t come to grips with. “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” she said. “They do something else.” Lozano wasn’t reliant on anyone, Koether conjectured. “She would want to paint because people told her not to.” Koether then launched into a meandering filibuster that barely made sense, followed by a similar monologue from Humphries. The group was at its weakest when discussing the physical qualities of the paintings in the room, yet Nickas didn’t bring the conversation back to earth.

    Jutta Koether (right) talks about rough sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In the late 1960s, Nickas claimed that Lozano interacted with sculptors and artists who worked with language—Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Dan Graham—rather than with painters. He also positioned Lozano’s work (e.g., depictions of hammers and drills and of shapes with volumetric forms) as masculine—a gendered view that Humphries challenged. “I never knew what that meant,” she firmly stated, noting that nobody calls out men who paint pictures of women for being feminine. Nickas fumbled with a definition of masculinity as portraying toughness and violence and mentioned that Lozano, in her art and writing, had a man’s voice. Koether explained this observation as a symptom of the time. “It’s like really rough sex … all the time,” she said. “It’s brutal—it’s very hard and super desperate.” While Humphries recognizes the “unbelievable force” in Lozano’s work, the artist is also cheeky and, formally speaking, was addressing mainstream issues in American painting at the time, such as mass and scale, in spite of the radical qualities that people usually ascribe to her work.

    Nickas was refreshingly skeptical about the performative aspect of contemporary art—he said “there’s not a lot behind it”—but Lozano is the real deal, especially regarding her Wave series of paintings, one of which was completed after fifty-two consecutive hours of work. The real topic of discussion, however, was Lozano’s social relationship to the New York art world and how she integrated social performance into her studio work, which Humphries attributed to the emancipatory politics of the 1960s. Representative works are Dialogue Piece (1969), for which Lozano invited people to her SoHo loft for a conversation whose content would remain private, and Drop Out Piece, for which Lozano withdrew from the art world and eventually left New York, later settling in Dallas to live the life of an acid casualty.

    Most contentious was Lozano’s Boycott Piece (1971), which comprised her refusal to speak to women for two months—though apparently the work continued until her death. Tonight’s speakers felt uncomfortable with this resolution, which the curator Helen Molesworth has called “consummately pathological” and “incredibly disturbing,” though they understood how Lozano was critiquing institutional sexism, both within and outside the art world.3 Koether identified the problem of Lozano trying to be more revolutionary than the revolution, and Boycott Piece has affected the way she understands the artist’s entire oeuvre.

    Though Koether finds Lozano’s position to be “nonreconcilable,” I can’t help but think of other controversial artists who push moral and aesthetic boundaries, such as Santiago Sierra and Adel Abdessemed. Though their strategies and results are questionable, it’s generally a good thing to see artists like them working with contentious subject matter and pushing liberal attitudes. After all, it was Lozano who wrote “‘SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS.’”4 Nickas more or less accepted that testing limits pushed Lozano beyond painting, and beyond the art world. Humphries said we will never know her reasons for dropping out—especially since, Nickas added, “it’s a world people want to drop into.” Koether postulated that acting crazy and aggressive might be the only way out of an enduring problem of sexism.

    “The visual cues in the paintings are very few,” Jacqueline Humphries said of the paintings on view (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Nickas detected rage, not anger, in Lozano’s work, based on her written statement: “I am not angry at anyone or anything but I feel rage.”5 Koether agreed, seeing rage in the tight control of the paintings hanging on the gallery walls around her. Moments later, during the audience Q&A, an attendee refuted that idea. “One person’s rage is another person’s tranquility,” he shrugged, adding that, when considering the brownish-orange color in one painting, “rust isn’t rage—it’s slow deoxidization.” Koether was unmoved: “I still think they’re very angsty.” Humphries called the paintings austere, not minimal, and Nickas compared Lozano to contemporaneous Californian artists, calling her “the Light and Space artist of darkness.” Humphries concurred, stating that the works on view contain neither air nor figure-ground. Lozano had a sensibility, she continued, not a style; Humphries believes Lozano made works that she wanted to see for herself. Nickas said that one of Lozano’s goals was to “picture time and space, expanding and contracting. It’s improbable, but you just have to accept it.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 101.

    2 The Lee Lozano revival can be traced back to an exhibition of her work at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1998.

    3 Helen Molesworth, “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano,” Art Journal 61, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 65, 70.

    4 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, April 24, 1969, in Lee Lozano: Notebooks, 1967–70 (New York: Primary Information, 2009), unpaginated.

    5 Lee Lozano, private notebook excerpt, Book #5, December 29, 1969, in Barry Rosen and Jaap van Liere, Lee Lozano: Drawings (New Haven: Yale University Press; New York: Hauser and Wirth, 2006), unpaginated.

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  • Landscape Surveyors

    The Changing Landscape of Museums Today
    Thursday, January 29, 2015
    Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, New York

    Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)

    A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.

    The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.

    Building and Expansion

    Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.

    Richard Armstrong oversees the Guggenheim Museum franchise (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.

    Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.

    Melissa Chiu explains how artists have used the Hirshhorn Museum building in creative ways (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)
    Diversity and Inclusivity

    Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”

    Tom Finkelpearl laments the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on museums staffs in New York (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.

    From the Ground Up

    Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1

    Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.

    Peggy Loar interviews the panelists (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.

    Locations and Audience

    While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?

    Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”

    Education and Experience

    Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.

    Tom Finkelpearl explains Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fill New York City schools with art teachers (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2

    For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.

    Concluding Thoughts

    While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.

    Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

    1 See Colin Moyniham, “Protests Resume at Guggenheim over Abu Dhabi Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 2014; and ongoing coverage by various authors for Hyperallergic.

    2 See Michelle Jubin, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” Artwrit (Summer 2011); Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6 (Summer 2007); and Helen Reed, “A Bad Education: Helen Reed Interviews Pablo Helguera,” Pedagogical Impulse (publication date unknown).

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    The Asia Society has posted the video of “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today.”

  • Value Added

    The Idea of the Moral Imperative in Contemporary Art
    Friday, February 17, 1989
    77th Annual Conference    , College Art Association, Hilton San Francisco, Continental 7, 8, 9, San Francisco

    Future generations researching the good old days at College Art [Association’s Annual Conference] may take this panel for a distillation of its moment, as it casually splices ideals, philosophy, jargon, celebrity, and non sequitur with talk of art-as-money. We see also the intense longings, the search for uplift, the demands for salvation that are increasingly deposited in art. (The most interesting discussion of the panel addressed whether they belong there.)

    Nine years earlier, in what was for me one of the most poignant moments in this book, a student in the audience at a “postmodernism” panel told how artists were making art to oppose nuclear annihilation. A panelist then explained gently—very gently, given the ironic, even caustic, tone of the evening—that such real-world activism would in fact be the opposite of postmodernism in art. Now, at the “Moral Imperative” panel, a speaker tells us “a new link” has been established between postmodernism and ethics—but then fails to explain what that link might be, indeed, in some uncommonly elusive passages, seems to prove the opposite.

    Well, clearly there’s room for argument.

    Moderator: Mel Pekarsky

    Panelists: Amy Baker Sandback, John Baldessari, Luis Camnitzer, Suzi Gablik, Jeff Koons, Robert Storr

    The heartening part was that this high-sounding title, having nothing to do with how to get your work shown or reviewed, had possibly the biggest turnout of any session at this year’s College Art.

    Moderator Mel Pekarsky noted that:

    The words “art” and “morality” have been aimed at each other for a very long time, but never so much as now, and never with such broad multiple definitions of each. Both words are seen often in good and bad company in this postmodern, pluralist unsacred end of the twentieth century—or “McSacred,” as Peter Plagens has called it. And I wonder if either of these words had even the same meaning in, say, Rembrandt’s time; art’s meaning is now perhaps as multiple as its varieties, and the definitions of “moral” laid at art’s doorstep are equally myriad and provocative.

    For example, Paul Goldberger discusses the “morality” of Michael Graves’s designs for the Whitney Museum addition in consideration of Marcel Breuer’s original (assumedly moral) structure.1

    Names themselves—like Richard Serra, and in different ways Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Jesse Helms, too—are touchstones for any number of serious and complicated considerations.

    And the relationships between artist, critic, dealer, collector, patron—everyone in postmodern capitalism’s changed art world—have provoked shelves of articles and books on “art and money” and “art and business” [while] James Rosenquist says of art money: “it’s become like drug money.”

    Then, too, it seems fashionable to call the personal as well as aesthetic morality of the artist into question.… Cellini never had it so tough from Vasari!

    And the current relationships between the art community and the rest of humankind have frequently and rightfully been questioned…. Andrew Kagan writes of the “moral emptiness of [contemporary] art” and says, “But what is becoming increasingly disturbing is the tact that we have for so long lacked even the climate, the attitudes of high seriousness and commitment in art.”… Donald Kuspit considers the artist as activist, weighing “the human and political potential of activist art” to which many have indeed turned, while Alberto Moravia states categorically, “Art cannot politicize itself without committing suicide; in politics, terrorism is always anticultural, and in art, the avant-garde is always terrorist.”

    And William H. Gass in his essay “Vicissitudes of the Avant-Garde,” subtitled “In Search of a Worthy No,” [says] “There is nothing that a group of this kind can do that such a group once honestly did…. To live is to defend a form.… It might be defended still, if painters refused to show, composers and poets to publish, every dance were danced in the dark. That would be a worthy no—but it will never be uttered.”

    This panel will begin with the premise that the first decision an artist makes when starting to work in this postmodern, pluralist end of the twentieth century is a moral one; that is, if you can paint whatever you want—since nobody cares what you paint or if you paint at all until you’re a commodity—the first decision is what to paint. This is diametrically opposed to premodern art, which was preceded by “need” and “commission” with the style usually universal and content preordained….

    To show that Abstract Expressionism had been a movement of moral strength and conviction, Pekarsky quoted Barnett Newman recalling the ’40s in the ’60s:

    We felt the moral crisis of a world in shambles, a world devastated by a great depression and a fierce world war, and it was impossible at that time to paint the kind of painting that we were doing—flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello. At the same time we could not move into the situation of a pure world of unorganized shapes and forms, or color relations, a world of sensation. And I would say that for some of us, this was our moral crisis in relation to what to paint.2

    Pekarsky then quoted John Baldessari as talking of “trying to get back to bedrock in his work, trying to strip away all the nonessential and thereby arrive at choice through this reductivist approach; choice, which seems such a fundamental issue of contemporary art. In his own work, Pekarsky said:

    I have “risked,” I suppose, a large number of embarrassing paintings in trying to arrive at an iconography I could believe in—and believe worth painting. In the process, format as well as form became a concern for a while, in addition to subject or content, and led me into an involvement with public art: trying to make art that belonged to everyone but was nobody’s property … to not make tradable objects; to play with the idea of large landscapes on walls in the real, urban landscape…. These concerns immersed me in the questions we’re here to discuss today.

    Then he quoted British sculptor William Turnbull on public sculpture commissions: “The problem with public sculpture is with the public, not with sculpture. The idea of designing a sculpture for a particular site, even if chosen oneself, seems to me a gross limitation on the sculptor’s freedom of action.”

    Pekarsky ended his introduction with, “If you can paint whatever you want, what do you paint? Does it matter? … If you can paint whatever you want, isn’t there implicit in your decision great power? … And no small byway—what should the critic be doing these days? What’s the critic’s responsibility, moral or otherwise? I have yet to see a critical program equal to facing the millennium with honor.”

    Amy Baker Sandback’s opening was not promising: “There’s no such thing as moral art, just moral artists. Words are only symbols for ideas, not fixtures of thought. Their powerful meanings are shaped by public and private perceptions and fine-tuned by considerations … more down-to-earth than the spiritual…. ‘Moral’ and ‘Art’ are both valid symbols of important contemporary concerns—the first has to do with the maker and the second with what is made.”

    Sandback said that [when] preparing for the panel she had consulted her dictionary. In the ten-volume New Century she found six columns of tiny print for the word moral. The words aesthetic and art took up one column, and imperative a quarter of a column. Moral was followed by morass, a swamp. Sandback concluded that “moral is a noun related to ethics, pertaining to right and wrong, manners and custom; to the mind as opposed to the physical; part of a truly developed healthy intellect.”

    She then said in a tone of great authority that she is “all for moral persons who happen to be artists, and for moral viewers,” which she and the audience seemed to feel was a valuable insight. However, she went on with a sharp, cogent, and honest (albeit unfashionable) commentary:

    The role of the contemporary artist as new-wave guru, and the perception that art making provides an inside track to a special truth denied the rest of humankind, is a dangerous role for all concerned. Artists are as flawed and sometimes as brilliant as academics, doctors, or bricklayers. No style is necessarily moral, no subject matter is necessarily correct, no political message or religious symbol necessarily renders great art. Piggybacking an aesthetic to a cause may indicate an important aspect of a personality or maybe marketing or simply a stylish ideological trick. Bad artists can produce masterpieces as well as the obverse. If morality is an imperative of art, how do you approach an erotic Shunga image of strange sexual contortion or the photographs of artists such as Mapplethorpe, Witkin, or any other sometimes disagreeable talent [or how do you enjoy] a lyrical Matisse knowing it was done during the Occupation?3 … I believe in art and its ability to make magic even when it’s ugly or anguished or performed as an intellectual exercise and even when it’s dumb and lovely. Morality is a judgment that serves no aesthetic purpose.”

    Sandback’s final comment was, “Being able to speak well of your work is good for business.”

    John Baldessari told an anecdote about running into Jeff Koons in New York and mentioning a profile on Koons in a recent Los Angeles Times, in which a critic who ordinarily writes on rock and roll criticized Koons’s work, applying different standards of morality to it than would be applied to music. Koons’s comment was, “Gee, you’d think she thought I was Mark Kostabi or somebody.” (The audience found this retort hilarious; it brought the house down—perhaps something about the word “Kostabi.”) Baldessari took this as evidence that “art is the last bastion of morality.”

    He continued, free-associating:

    When I think of morality I think of money. [T]here was a period when poster sizes got smaller until you just had little cards being mailed out with discreet type and you’d go into a gallery or museum and it would be hard to see the work, and, as Lucy Lippard has said, “It’s hard to read things on the wall when you’ve got a screaming baby under your arm.” Now they’re getting bigger again; people like to have stuff [posters]—stuff sells. Sculpture went from ephemeral materials in the ’60s and ’70s to where now everything is in bronze—it’s durable and can be handed down. Your investment is protected; it won’t disintegrate in twenty years.

    Art is now equated with money, and they all want to have all the news on art. You can’t even get into a panel anymore. Art is reaching a point where it may be interchangeable with money—art as a medium of exchange. [But] if art didn’t sell we wouldn’t worry about it so much. If Schnabel’s paintings didn’t sell, they might be more interesting. They are less serious because they sell for so much money. Anselm Kiefer seems to be very moral and serious, but with his prices going up, we start to question his seriousness. When money comes in, it starts to cast doubt. I had an argument in a New York bar with a friend who said, “Koons’s art caters to the lowest common denominator,” but [Koons] seems to perfectly reflect our culture. I’m very suspicious of anyone who tells anybody what kind of art they should do. An old dealer friend in Germany said art should have no message. I feel I should do what the culture needs, but I’m bored with the idea. I’m paralyzed in front of the question of what is the right art to do…. Do what one does best—like athletes. Find out what your weaknesses and strengths are and work on the strengths.

    Baldessari said with students he works on strengths and tells them to forget their weaknesses. He believes moral purpose is “using all the strengths you have.”

    Luis Camnitzer, an artist originally from Germany who has lived in Uruguay, said a friend, after reading the paper he was about to present, warned that it was very pious, but it was too late to change it:

    We live believing we are artists, but we are actually ethical beings sifting right from wrong. To survive ethically we need a political awareness to understand our environment…. Packaging is all. Thoughtless substitution can create the same havoc as when detergent is packaged as perfume. “Manipulation” of the viewer has negative connotations [so] we always avoid it when describing art processes, using euphemisms like “composition” and “design.” The shift of the action from ethics into aesthetics allows for the delusion that only those decisions pertaining to content have an ethical quality. [But] most of our art is socially muddled, even when it functions in the market. The explicit wish of most artists is to live off their art production, but they have mixed feelings regarding the question of money as unethical.

    Lately a new link has been established between ethics and postmodernism. The postmodern label serves to co-opt and unify some artistic expressions. Postmodernism can be seen as a demoralization of some antiformalist tendencies, [a] replacement of some conservative contexts, and a reinternationalization of what threatens to become a nationalist fragmentation in art. Art is still far from being an ethical affair. We rarely challenge in depth the parameters which define art or the technical constraints offered by art history.

    Surely the “parameters which define art” are challenged six times a day by every MFA student in America. But this paper seems less “pious” than murky, or let’s say overly succinct, leaving us to wonder what “reinternationalization” does, what “the technical constraints of art history” are, how one would “challenge” them, in depth or not, how such technical constraints become moral issues, etc., etc., etc.

    Suzi Gablik said that as a critic in the late ’80s she is concerned with understanding our cultural myths and how they evolve, what it means to be a “successful” artist working in the world today, and whether the image that comes to mind is one we can support and believe in:

    Dominance and mastery are crucial to our notion of success…. The art industry is inseparable from the giant web of our cultural addictions to work, money, possessions, prestige, materialism, and technology. Unless efforts are made to reassess our relationship to the present framework and its practices, new patterns won’t take hold. Vested interests will ensure that they are maintained as before. If we want change, we need to evolve new ground rules for the future. The moral task before us is to identify which approaches to art make sense in today’s world, Aesthetics views art as something autonomous and separate, as socially nonfunctional, existing for its own sake, The best art is made for no good reason and is valuable for its own sake. Ortega y Gasset said, “A work of art is nothing but a work of art, a thing of no transcendency or consequence.” Once fully conscious of how we’ve been conditioned to follow a certain program, we can begin to surrender some of these cultural images and role models as personal ideals and the possibility then opens for actually modifying the framework and not just being immersed in it.

    Gablik described the project of Dominique Mazeaud, an artist friend living in Santa Fe [called] The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande River. Once a month she and other friends meet to clean pollution out of the river. Gablik showed slides of the work and read excerpts from a diary of the ongoing project. One entry records picking up as much as 103 pounds of broken glass in a single day; others ponder how the strange miscellany of objects finds its way into the river. The artist calls her journal entries her “riveries.”

    Gablik quoted Caroline Casey: “Nothing which is not socially and ecologically responsible will make it out of this decade alive.” [Gablik] concluded, “Moving away from the competitive modes of institutionalized aesthetics is one way of not perpetrating the dominator system. Forgoing its rites of production and consumption, its mythology of professionalism, and its power archetype of success, only then can we begin to evolve a different set of ground rules for the future. But the willingness to make this systems shift is the beginning of recovery.”

    Jeff Koons, who showed a history of his work from 1978 to the present, said there is a great shuffling and shifting of power now in the art world, but that he’s an optimist and believes things beneficial to humankind will be “absorbed into evolution” and “things that are negative will be destroyed.” Koons said he has always been “at the service of his art,” explaining that his work on Wall Street was to finance his art. White middle-class kids use art for social mobility as some ethnic groups use basketball for social mobility, he said, and, “just as basketball players become front men, so do artists.” Koons was very funny and appealing, despite intermittently feigning modesty and becoming sanctimonious over his slides.

    Robert Storr, a contributing editor to Art in America, started to paint because he needed a hobby, and found it was fun.4 He quoted Picasso that “the best art is always fiction,” adding that “the religion of art is not religion, the spirituality of art is not spirituality, the humanism of art is not humanism, and between those terms, in that negation, is the reasonable place to start.” As for morality:

    The consciousness of artifice is the one thing for which the artist is morally responsible, not to be a sucker for his/her own ideas and sincerity and not to ask anyone else to be one either…. Rather than commandments, I would put forth two propositions for the audience: never trust anybody who say he’s telling it straight from the shoulder [and] never trust a kidder.

    For the question period, Pekarsky gave the usual warning (“No manifestos, only questions”) but, beginning by recognizing his friends in the audience or those whose names he knew, he was rewarded mostly with manifestos. Then came questions like, “Can you maintain your morality in New York’s glitzy art world?” Gablik responded, “Transformation of one’s own consciousness and the place where that transformation is most important is New York, and anyone undergoing such a change should get to New York fast.”

    Another statement-question was, “Careerism is related to morality and Koons said on Wall Street he faced a daily handling of moral issues, and that he felt free when he left the business world for the art world, because it was free of those issues, and yet here we are discussing it.” The response to that was, “Careerism is meaningless until given meaning by the speaker,” which seemed to satisfy the questioner. Someone asked why the person “cleansing” the Rio Grande didn’t work with local governing agencies, such as environmental protection; another started with, “An artist is one who produces masterpieces.” That question and several others were rejected outright by the panelists, who said they couldn’t deal with them.

    Perhaps I’m the only one who found much of these talks (transcribed practically verbatim above) or their relation to the issues baffling. The standing-room-only audience was rapt throughout, and at conclusion couldn’t stop applauding.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 See Paul Goldberger, “The Whitney Paradox: To Add Is To Subtract,” New York Times, January 8, 1989.

    2 See Barnett Newman, “Response to the Reverend Thomas F. Mathews,” in John P. O’Neill, ed., Barnett Newman: Selected Writing and Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 287.

    3 Sandback could be referring to either the painter Jerome Witken or his twin brother, the photographer Joel Peter Witken.

    4 As of 1990, [Robert Storr was] curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Value Added” was originally published in Women Artists News 14, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1989); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 287–90. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.