The speakers, from left: Marie Heilich, Olivier Mosset, and Amy Granat (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Olivier Mosset was in town for the opening of his exhibition at Parapet/Real Humans, a project space run by Amy Granat in a storefront in the Fox Park neighborhood of Saint Louis. On view was a framed set of four lithographs of two thick black stripes on a square of white paper. The set, it turns out, was made for a Swiss Institute benefit in 2004. Granat said the work reminded her of September 11—I suppose any two vertical lines will do that. The artist compared them to an optometrist’s vision test. As someone who can’t see six inches past his nose without glasses or contacts (and who never skips his annual eye-doctor visit), that made more sense.
With long gray hair and a long gray beard, Mosset easily looked the part of a sixties Euroactivist and biker outlaw—he has lived in Tucson, Arizona, since the mid-1990s. His interviewer was Marie Heilich, assistant director of White Flag Projects in Saint Louis, a slender brunette with bangs, dressed in all black and armed with an MA in curatorial studies from Bard College. Mosset’s talk—a rare speaking engagement for him, we were told—was largely a monologue. Heilich made intermittent comments and Granat, who was operating a smartphone that projected slides of the artist’s work on the wall beside the speakers, jumped in every so often.
Heilich encouraged Mosset to revisit his early years, so he gave a brief history of BMPT, a group of four European artists (Mosset with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier, and Niele Toroni) that came together in 1966. “The idea was to question what gives value to painting,” Mosset said, targeting uniqueness, personal expression, and color as culprits. His conception of art, however, began changing a few years earlier, when Mosset had been floored by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw at Kunsthalle Bern in 1962. “This was in,” he recalled his excitement, “This was happening.” Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–59), the sculpture of a shaggy taxidermied goat stuck in a car tire, “was quite a shock—is this art?” But Mosset still had classical modernism on the brain, as he twice emphasized the painted nature of Piet Mondrian’s work, declaring that reproductions of it are nothing like the real things. Though he wasn’t familiar with Russian Constructivism and Swiss Concrete art at the time, he acknowledged an affinity with them. I got the sense that Mosset is unburdened by tradition, not antagonistic toward it. Give painting autonomy, he even said at one point.
For Mosset, Rauschenberg taking home the Golden Lion, the top prize at the 1964 Venice Biennale, marked the end of the importance of Paris, where he had moved two years before, at age eighteen. Previously the French avant-garde consisted of the Nouveau Réalisme movement: Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni, and others. BMPT reacted against that group’s preferred materials: found objects and rubbish. Earning notoriety after its first event, BMPT was invited to participate in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, where the artists painted their works—Buren’s stripe, Mosset’s circle, Parmentier’s fold, and Toroni’s brush mark—during the opening, not in advance. (They subsequently withdrew from the exhibition the next day.) At that and other events they projected slides, played audiotapes announcing “art is the enemy of freedom” and “art is the enemy of presence,” among other statements, and handed out their propaganda pamphlets. “Ideas are the art, not the paintings,” Mosset declared. Audiences soon came to recognize each member’s signature style, so the four agreed to do each other’s work.1 Mosset began painting stripes and later introduced color: gray stripes on white, then green on white, then white on color, and so on. After that he made monochromes (more specifically, they are single-hued paintings).
Mosset continued his monologue, which by this point felt like someone reading a Wikipedia article—it was all factual recollection in a dry tone. Even in Paris, he said, people were talking about New York, so he traveled there in 1967, where he met Andy Warhol. After moving to the city ten years later, he sought out the painter Marcia Hafif after she wrote an essay on contemporary painting called “Beginning Again,” published in Artforum in 1978. With her and Joseph Marioni, he formed the New York Radical Painting group, which had exhibitions at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1983 (New Abstraction) and at Williams College in Massachusetts in 1984 (Radical Painting). Mosset also got hip to a newer scene of artists, including Peter Halley, Philip Taaffe, and Jeff Koons. In the 1990s, Mosset worked with John Armleder, Sylvie Fleury, Steven Parrino, and Cady Noland, but the artist barely mentioned these collaborations during tonight’s talk.
Mosset affably stated that he has no strategy, does what he wants, and cannot control trends. “I’m basically interested in abstract painting,” he said, and somehow people are attracted to what he does. Heilich questioned him about his social and flexible practice, in which he diminishes his own authorship (evident, for example, in his work with BMPT), but Mosset construed the question differently. “The art practice is very selfish,” he responded, and exhibitions involve a community. “It’s personal when you do it; it’s social when you show it.” Mosset believes the gallery gives you the distance to see your work differently.
During the Q&A, an audience member inquired about the meditative nature of his circle paintings that, she conjectured, might signify emptiness or completeness. Mosset deflected this impression and said he was thinking of the shapes found in works by Johns and Kenneth Noland, which have formalist, not symbolic, meanings. (He also recognized that he did invent the circle.) The questioner asked him if the circles got better and better as he made more of them. Yes, he replied with a smile, but they were still the same.
Heilich asked, “Do you see any contemporary approaches that stand out to you, for better or worse?” He didn’t identify any artists or styles but instead considered the differences between then and now. “At the time in Paris, we could react against what was happening, whereas today, I don’t know exactly what you can react against. It’s a different era.” And who else to blame but the internet. A younger audience member argued that “artists will always respond to each other, and to each other’s work, but that kind of clear dialogue [from the sixties], I don’t think it’s actually possible now.” Today everyone has a voice and a platform, she continued, but with equity that voice is minimized. Mosset agreed—there are now more artists and more information. I feel sorry for them, overwhelmed by online communications, and am sure artists from forty to fifty years ago probably had the same anxieties about their own ballooning art world. The audience member was relieved that artists are becoming activists again. Culture is important, Mosset chimed in, especially after the recent terrorist attack in Paris.
The audience at Parapet/Real Humans (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Earlier Heilich had observed that Mosset’s practice—producing circles, stripes, and singular colors—united painting and the readymade in the same object. This idea made sense at the moment but unraveled the more I thought about it. His practice is actually artisanal and small batch, not mass production, and analogous to someone like Gilbert Stuart, whose cranked out 130 versions of the Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. “A second painting might be a repetition,” Mosset said in a recent interview, “but it can never be a replica.”2 You can’t help but admire the audacity of painting the same type of picture for years, if not decades, while at the same time pity the paucity of ideas.
Trying to vary the topics, Granat asked about Mosset’s interest in motorcycles, which he collects, rides, and occasionally exhibits with his paintings. While such lines of inquiry did not lead to interesting discussion, the effort was appreciated. And while I enjoyed hearing from an artist whom I have not previously studied, I was disappointed with the light moderation—Mosset did not get into much detail about the meaning of his work and with art itself. It seemed as if Heilich was too timid (or just too polite) to cross-examine this art-historical figure about any radical ideas he has or might have had, or to find out what makes him produce what appears to be redundant or complacent work.
In Terms Of count: 1.
1 Olivier Mosset made circle paintings from 1966 to 1974. Daniel Buren obviously never stopped with the stripes.
Dora Budor reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)
This conversation between the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor, whose science-fiction-inspired installation Spring was on view in the Swiss Institute’s basement, and Chrissie Iles, a film curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, lasted only forty-five minutes. To some in the audience, it felt like an eternity. While the discussion started out informative—Iles sketched out a history of science fiction from its nineteenth-century origins in literature to its adoption by cinema in the twentieth—it slid steadily into unintelligibility. By the end of the event, Budor and Iles had made hash of potentially exciting topics, among them the relationship of human bodies to technology and the impact of computer-generated imagery (CGI) on perception, with maddeningly convoluted and directionless statements. It wasn’t pretty.
It was funny, though, pitiably and perversely so. At one point Budor was expounding on the director David Cronenberg’s notion of cinematic bodies being or behaving like a virus, which he probably borrowed from William S. Burroughs, who described written language as a virus. “If you look at the virus, it’s just doing its job,” Budor insisted. “It’s just trying to live its life.” Cronenberg was among the many names she dropped; others were the German doctor and designer Fritz Kahn, the film theorists Darko Suvin and Donna Haraway, the artists Martha Rosler and Robert Smithson, the philosophers Manuel DeLanda and Slavoj Žižek, the interdisciplinary artists Lynn Hershman Leeson and Nam June Paik, and the filmmakers Aki Kaurismäki and Andrei Tarkovsky. Budor seemed more eager to cite other people’s ideas than to develop her own thoughts on art, film, and philosophy—to the extent that I wondered if all the theory she had absorbed has, like a virus, taken over her mind.
For much of the talk, Budor and Iles read from, and based their comments on, written documents on the table in front of them. At times they seemed to be talking at each other. When the speakers went off script, they lost the plot entirely. Here is Budor toward the end of the conversation:
In cinema [Žižek is] saying nothing is spontaneous and natural of human desire, that our desires are artificial, and instead of giving us what we want, the cinema teaches us, or tell us, how to desire. Desire in this way … inscribes itself onto reality and becomes another sort of protrusion or a wound of reality, and that’s where the art of cinema comes. It’s consisting of an arousing desire of playing it back.
Just after that, Iles asked Budor something about eroticized machines, to which the artist responded: “Cronenberg always plays with this idea that something is protruding the body and creating another type of desire, another type of desire that might not yet exist,” which somehow relates to the cyborgization of the body. Iles had her own ideas: “Our experience of light—absorption of it, acceptance of it—is much higher than it was even ten years ago,” she astutely observed. “There’s also different ways in which light, be it intellectual or otherwise, has a very proper relation to the city, to architecture, and therefore different ways in which the body is constituted through that cyborgian relationship to technology and energy and, um….”
Budor could not be stopped. Thinking of Kaurismäki’s description of analogue cinema being light and digital cinema being pure electricity, she announced:
The electricity and how the intensity of the screen, the intensity of the light that you mentioned, has rose up so we can tend to consume more light, and there is way more entropy caused by that. So, what are the things which make cinema alive? This idea of pressing play or starting the machine—which will run, which will use electricity, which will use light to make something alive—is in a way very similar to all of our environments, of the light that is in this room, the hot water that we drink. The flows of energy are pretty much similar wherever you look, either in the fictional world or in reality. And the environments which we have created and animated, environments are created in a way looking at our bodies, so we can program the world around us to—in a similar way of the industrial palace functions—to program the world around us to actually correspond to the flows in our bodies.
How did we get here? In her introductory remarks, Iles argued that failed political revolutions in Europe during the long nineteenth century caused people to imagine better, more humane worlds, first expressed through literature and then cinema. Time travel comes from an ideal, utopic way of thinking, Iles contended, and so we get things like H. G. Wells’s novella The Time Machine (1895) and Robert Zemeckis’s blockbuster film Back to the Future (1985). Not everything Iles said made sense. The popularity of science fiction, she told us, hot in the 1950s, declined significantly in the 1970s, and rose in the 1980s. If that’s true, how does she account for major films such as A Clockwork Orange (1971), Sleeper (1973), The Stepford Wives (1975), Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)? It was as if nothing between 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982) had any impact on culture. To her credit, Iles cited “climate science fiction” as a new genre about cataclysmic changes to Earth—no aliens or monsters there.
Installation view of Dora Budor’s exhibition Spring at the Swiss Institute
The sci-fi overview framed the discussion of Budor’s installation, which consisted of four sculptures in a brightly lit room whose floors and walls were partially covered with some kind of blobby black resin (in fact, flexible polyurethane foam with black pigment). The discrete pieces, titled Our Children Will Have Yellow Eyes, What Kind of a Person Does This, Slow Ticking of the Callous Mind, and One Million Years of Feeling Nothing (all works 2015), meld steel pipes, latex prosthetics evoking an organic body, and an epoxy clay lattice network that looks like a circulatory or digestive system—they’re very strange. Each sculpture has a found object—a “screen-used miniature”—that appeared in three vintage science-fiction-type films: The Fifth Element (1997), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Batman Returns(1992).
Budor defined her approach as “not of making works but making worlds.” But her art doesn’t come from her imagination—it comes from other sources. While the presence in her sculptures of these miniatures, which studios typically sell after using them and which make their rounds at trade convention shows, may impress fans of the movies, they act as excess cultural baggage for works that ought to stand on their own merits, triggering their own associations. I’ve only watched one of those three movies, so learning the origins of the miniatures soured the exhibition for me. Visual elements that had briefly been full of interpretative possibilities were suddenly foreclosed.
To Iles, the “sinister black goo” covering the wall and floor—a work in itself, called Chinchorro People—represents a contamination. Budor named the piece for the several-millennia-old Chilean mummies that have succumbed to decomposition that one scientist reports is caused by microorganisms activated by global warming. (Budor also said the alien virus called the black cancer from the television show The X Files informs her work.) The mummies are actually turning into black goo. So it makes sense that Budor identified infection, the reanimation of the body, and the body combined with inanimate matter, as central tenants in her show. Iles interpreted the black goo psychoanalytically and symbolically, saying something about how its ambiguity represents a collective fear of the power of technology blurring boundaries. Going deeper, she argued that cities are huge machines that constitute the organic human body and its subjectivity (huh?), and that Budor’s sculptures reflect this cyborg nature. And going even deeper than that, the miniatures in Budor’s installation reverses the flatness of the film screen, Iles said because we look at these objects frontally, not yet manipulated by camera placement, which make the miniatures appear larger and more impressive—precisely the reason why they exist in the first place.
Chrissie Iles reads from her notes (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Neither Iles nor Budor could sufficiently explain the importance of revealing the mechanisms of Hollywood cinema, when everyone knows that special effects are designed to simulate a plausible reality, whether that’s a painted backdrop or pointy ears or computer graphics. Or an Instagram filter. “We are getting used to looking at unnatural, composite bodies,” Iles stated, “and at the same time we want our bodies to become also more perfect.” Discussions of this sort have taken place for decades; the difference now—which is true for any present moment in time—is that we are closer than ever to a normalized cyborg or android body. Contact lenses and organ transplants once wowed people. Now paralyzed people can move computer cursors with their mind, and 3D printers can generate customized artificial limbs. That’s progress, right? Similarly, Budor found it earth-shattering that movie franchises create their own character universes: “It’s interesting when fiction kind of totally loses its history in a way,” she said, “and starts finding that history in itself.” The notion of continuity between movies, as well as canon-formation across films, books, animated series, and the like, isn’t terribly hard to grasp.
If my recounting of Budor and Iles’s ideas above makes sense, it’s because I listened to the audio of the conversation twice, after hearing it firsthand at the Swiss Institute. I don’t think difficulties arise because the artist and curator operate at a much higher intellectual level than me; instead, they exist because neither of the speaker had the ability to communicate coherently, much less effectively. They presented what are probably ordinary ideas with overblown rhetoric, backed by obtuse extractions from other people’s theories, that seemed to alienate the audience. It was telling when the Q&A session yielded no inquiries from the audience. None at all.
Theater of Exhibitions, a slender new book by Jens Hoffmann published by Sternberg Press, offers fifteen brief chapters on curatorial work. While Hoffmann, a 41-year-old curator, writer, and deputy director of exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum in New York, rarely mentions specific works of art, he discusses his own exhibitions and criticizes—in a casual way—the alliance between museums and the wealthy, the blandness of international biennials, the overproduction of artists, and the extension of curatorial work into publications, conferences, screenings, and workshops. Unlike Hans-Ulrich Obrist, whose recent reflections on the profession were published in Ways of Curating (2015), Hoffmann is not a storyteller. Instead he writes gently provocative essays that immediately make you agree or disagree with him. Theater of Exhibitions summarizes his thoughts on recent history of curatorial work, with his academic background in theater in mind (but the text make relatively few connections between curating and the dramatic arts).
For a book launch at the Swiss Institute, Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, asked Hoffman point blank: “What drove you to write this book?” The curator traced his inspiration to a class he taught at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, which provided students with a history of exhibitions and practical curatorial knowledge. The experience led to the organization of Exhibition Squared (2001) at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, which took twelve shows of the 1990s as its subject. I wondered if Exhibition Squared was also the inspiration behind Hoffmann’s previous anthology, Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014).
Jens Hoffmann and Jessica Morgan in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Morgan observed that Hoffmann’s shows unfold over time, which harmonizes with the tempo, dramaturgy, and setup of theater. He said he did “small things in a very small theater in Berlin while I was still studying” in Berlin and felt an affinity with the live-action works of Tino Sehgal, Liam Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, all artists who use the exhibition as a medium. Morgan quizzed Hoffmann about working with designers. Hoffmann said communications such as graphic design often become invisible because we are used to it. Design can give form, shape, and consistency to an exhibition, he said; it is also a tool, like analogue film or a type of camera lens. Hoffmann said he has collaborated with the same designers on his shows, which makes sense considering his long-time stints at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2007–12) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2003–7).
Do you encounter resistance from artists, Morgan asked Hoffmann, who is known for strong thematic shows. “I’ve never heard about any complaints,” he replied, “but you never know what goes on behind closed doors.” Everyone laughed. Artists appreciate him doing something different, such as when he offered a trilogy of Wattis exhibitions based on classic American novels—Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851) by Herman Melville, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Mark Twain, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum—that were “very heavy on the staging.” For instance, he said, the Moby-Dick exhibition included audio recordings of the filmmaker Orson Welles reading excerpts from the book at several points as a narrative device.
Blaming the self-sustaining machinery of Big Academia hinders the evolution of the curatorial profession, Hoffmann suggested that students get doctorates philosophy, anthropology, and art history instead of the ubiquitous master’s degree in curatorial studies. He isn’t aware of any graduate program in curatorial studies that does not focus on contemporary art, yet he conceded that the most growth and most creative exhibitions involve exactly that. The journal Hoffmann founded, the Exhibitionist, first published in 2010, initially attempted to start conversations about exhibition making of all types and eras, but Hoffmann discovered that readers and writers lacked an interest in older art. “That’s a big barrier that has to be penetrated,” he said, “or maybe not.” I agree with the former: curators should look at not only displays of historical art but also those in museums of fashion, science, natural history, and the like.
Morgan questioned Theater of Exhibitions (exceedingly banal) promotional phrase, “art after the end of art,” which surprised me since the book’s largely resists affirming art-world trends and myths. Nevertheless, he cited Arthur C. Danto’s and Hans Belting’s writing on the subject from the 1980s as a source but then asked, “Why are we still looking at fairly traditional artworks in 2015?” Because, Jens, such proclamations about the end of art, painting, history, irony, or whatever, are always overstated.
Jessica Morgan and Jens Hoffmann in conversation (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The curatorial role in museum acquisitions is not discussed as frequently at public-facing exhibitions. Hoffmann criticized Dia’s elitist approach for collecting only “ten genius artists” who make Minimalist and Postminimalist work that is alienating to audiences. To her museum’s defense, Morgan argued that Dia:Beacon’s cavernous space is more inviting to skeptics. What concerns her is how institutions collect contemporary art without an endpoint, and how these objects will be shown or stored. When the art world was smaller, Morgan and Hoffmann determined, museums had less product to choose from and as a result were more selective. With MFA programs releasing hundreds of artists into the world annually, that is not the case now. Hoffmann argued that some artworks have temporary relevance, such as Richard Prince’s Instagram paintings, which can be shown in temporary exhibitions and then returned, while Prince’s Marlboro Man photographs have lasting value and belong in a museum collection.
In the Exhibitionist, curators evaluate their past work, responding to their exhibitions years after they closed. Yet these essays, as well as Hoffmann’s Theater of Exhibitions, don’t consider external assessment in the form of published criticism—and the exhibition review in particular—as if written responses to exhibitions from the interested public do not matter. An artist, musician, or actor may decide not to read reviews, but a curator ought to consider them essential to their professional growth.
Jovana Stokic, moderator of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” grasps for elusive meaning (photograph by Christopher Howard)
“I was wondering whether anyone has anything good to say about age as an organizing principle?” someone asked during the audience Q&A for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect,” a discussion hosted by the School of Visual Arts. Jenny Jaskey, director and curator of Hunter College’s Artist’s Institute, recoiled, “No one thinks it is.” When the next audience member rephrased the query—Is there an artist under 30 that you do like?—the five curators on the panel, all based in New York, were smiling but clearly looked uncomfortable. Alaina Claire Feldman, director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International, said flat out, “I think that’s exactly what we’re here not to talk about…. I kind of refuse that question.” Then why, I scratched my head for the hundredth time, are we even here?
Jaskey is allergic to the expectation that she assume her role to be a trendsetter, aggregator, and finder of cool things for people. Feldman recommended that people resist perpetuating trends and the market, and the artist, critic, and curator Chris Wiley concurred. “I don’t really want to be the biased person who names those names,” he said, blaming the short-attention-span economy of the internet for his reticence. Wait—isn’t a contemporary curator’s primary responsibility to select, to choose one artist or object over another? “There are tons of artists under the age of 33,” Wiley let slip, “who I think deserve a tremendous amount of attention and who are making incredibly interesting work.” Then why was it so painful for these curators to identify publicly a few artists making cool stuff, or to praise a few recent exhibitions that excited them? Is the specter of the art market so incredibly suffocating that art-world professionals have become paralyzed with fear to simply say what they like?
The teaser text for “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” promised a conversation on how “The global youth-obsession is manifest throughout contemporary society, including the complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions.” Taking into account the exhibition The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, held at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 2009, the audience likely expected an investigation into “what might be called the Younger Than Jesus Effect,” because “This show turned the parameters of curating by age limit into a lively debate about talent and how it is recognized, nurtured, represented, and distributed.” Tonight’s participants were supposed to be “contending with the mechanisms of youth, novelty, and the market” and they would tell us “how they have navigated the narcissism of institutional power.”
Unfortunately, the assembled group preferred to avoid these subjects, and when they did talk about age, the discussion was slight.[1] It turned out that the age of the curators, all 33 and younger, was the sole organizing principle of the panel, which superficially mirrored the conceit of the exhibition whose conditions it aimed to critique. If one can generalize about a generation of curators, based on these speakers, then one can say with confidence that this generation is equivocal, meaning curators are uncomfortable and defensive about discrimination, bias, and judgment, which is puzzling since a contemporary curator’s core function is to select. “It’s not me who does that,” the panelists knee-jerked, with only one person (Wiley) approaching a stance that it’s no big deal, that an exhibition organized by age can attempt to define a generation or a specific period of time.
Despite a rambling introduction, the moderator Jovana Stokic, deputy chair of the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts (and the only participant who was older than Jesus when he was crucified), managed to describe the ideas behind the panel’s tongue-in-cheek, provocative title: youth, novelty, commodification, and fetishization. Curators, Stokic said, “have a mission, a messianic role to save the art, the eternal art.” Throughout the event I strained at times to hear her words, and even when I recognized a few, her sentences made little sense. Stokic didn’t want the imminent discussion to summarize anything—what a surprise—but rather open a discussion. How about continuing the “lively debate” that started five years ago, when the New Museum show opened? God forbid anyone take a position, propose solutions, or highlight successful activity from the past. Instead, at nearly every opportunity the panelists washed their hands of the topic.
Speaking first was David Everitt Howe, an art critic and the curatorial/development associate for a nonprofit space called Participant Inc., who announced his decision to “go a little bit off topic from the get-go.” He wanted to know the responsibilities of the institution to show diversity in race, age, and sex—a topic worthy of discussion, maybe at another panel or as the subject of an investigative essay. We did learn of Howe’s background: he began organizing exhibitions that often involved artists he met in the MFA program at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology. He worked with these friends and acquaintances (whom we assume are about the same age as him) out of “proximity and convenience,” and because he didn’t have budgets to invite older, established artists into his curatorial projects. Fair enough.
Howe awkwardly recapped an anecdote about including the fictitious artist Donelle Woolford in The Color of Company, an exhibition he organized at the Abrons Art Center, where he had a curatorial residency in 2011. As a black female artist from the South, Woolford would have been perfect for his show, Howe said, but later learned that she’s the creation of a white male artist, Joe Scanlan, who was then teaching at Yale University. “The art gods shat over me for this show,” he said disappointedly, but kept Woolford’s work, an abstract piece, in his show for formal reasons. The 2014 Whitney Biennial controversy surrounding Woolford, Scanlan, and the exhibition’s curator Michelle Grabner is well documented in online articles and blog posts, with many siding with the YAMS Collective, which withdrew from the biennial in protest because Scanlan’s work offended its members. Was Howe coming clean for his past curatorial sins? Was he making excuses for supporting Woolford’s work instead of defending his decision? It seemed like it. Instead of framing this episode as an instance in which a curator can drop his or her support of an artist whenever the critical tide turns, Howe shifted the blame to opaque institutions that aim to suppress or avoid dialogue. I nodded at his notion of a changing “alternativity” in society, but his advocacy of curatorial transparency struck me as ill advised.
Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, had spent all day installing the upcoming show, Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond, which she organized with her senior colleague Eugenie Tsai. Like Howe, she began her career curating shows with artist friends. And, like Howe, she wanted to change the panel’s subject, from “youth” to “emerging.” “My thing is that you can be emerging at any age,” she said, describing the longevity of careers, how artists can do weird stuff that people love or hate, make bad decisions, and double back again. Curators, too, should have jobs at age 60, she said. I can’t imagine anyone who would disagree and hope that curators of all ages have the freedom to experiment and occasionally fail. Institutional curators certainly need an organizing principle to justify their work, but if any differences exist between putting together a geographic-specific exhibition (such as Crossing Brooklyn) and a show based on age, Hockley didn’t say. Following Howe, she related curatorial ethics to curatorial transparency but admitted she wasn’t sure what either concept means.
Hockley revealed that she uses an organic process when organizing exhibitions, through studio visits, conversations with people, and her emotional responses to works of art. “These things feel good together,” she recalled after doing many studio visits for Crossing Brooklyn. “This looks like a show.” Artists who look at the world around them pique her interest, but not those with a “hermetic practice,” which indicates her predilection for social practice—the focus of Crossing Brooklyn—over traditional painting and sculpture. I found her binary framework to be misguided: just because a person’s art isn’t engaged with the world doesn’t mean the artist is aloof to social and political concerns. Hockley ended her solo presentation with an anecdote about a recent conversation with a curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, exclaiming to the audience that “He’s literally talking about things from Jesus’ time!”
If Chris Wiley wasn’t the voice of reason, at least he articulated a perspective that attempted to address the panel’s subject. He believes the curator’s role is to be an advocate, supporter, and nurturer; as an organizer of exhibitions himself, he advocates the photography of his peers. One of the notable things he said was this:
The primary onus of the curator is to tell a story about art, and within that, to allow the artists to tell their own stories. And if those stories happen to be about the world in this very pointed political and engaged fashion, then so be it. But I think that there is perhaps too much curatorial emphasis on a heavy-handed approach to using the artist as a tool to speak about the world rather than letting the artists speak about the world themselves.
His remarks deserved a standing ovation, though it must be said that art audiences can also learn from curators who bend the intentions of artworks and their makers to fit a particular vision.
Wiley worked directly on Younger Than Jesus, writing and editing materials for the catalogue and the reader; he also wrote the wall labels. The character of our present art world, he said, is different from that of Younger Than Jesus, especially regarding how art is consumed, looked at, and valued. How so, I wondered. And how different might 2009, the year in which the New Museum show took place, compare to three years earlier, a time when dealers and collectors allegedly trolled the open studios of MFA programs in the greater New York area looking for fresh, young, sexy blood. Wiley said that Younger Than Jesus was the among the first museum appearances for current art stars such as Ryan Trecartin, Elad Lassry, and Liz Glynn. The reader was “entirely open source,” that is, it wasn’t an edited book but instead reprinted what the artists sent to the museum and what was found online. Thus the project was, in Wiley’s words, “egalitarian and useful.” The exhibition and its title were “designed to be controversial,” he disclosed. “Part of the curator’s job is to bring people in the door.”
Chris Wiley speaks, with Alaina Claire Feldman (left) and Jenny Jaskey listening (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Two trends in contemporary art pursued by young artists unsettle Wiley: the rise of process-based abstract painting and the rise of global postinternet aesthetic, which he eloquently defined as “art that materializes the aesthetics of the internet in physical space.” These two genres, he argued, have dominated the way we think about youth, but he interestingly noted that they have no institutional support. Museums would “be run out of town on a critical rail” if they mounted a painting show of what the artist and writer Walter Robinson has called Zombie Formalism. “And collectors still wouldn’t care.” Putting the art market aside (which needs to be done more often), that’s precisely the reason why a curator should take on the undesirable task to historicize and contextualize this widespread practice. “Why are so many artists making work in this way?” is an important question not just to ask but to answer. Three writers have attempted to do just that. Articles by Raphael Rubinstein for Art in America in 2009 and 2012, Sharon L. Butler for the Brooklyn Rail in 2011, and Lane Relyea for Wow Huh in 2012 present convincing theories on the style. What’s more, each writer deals with discrete sets of artists that could serve as the basis of an exhibition.
Wiley offered interesting observations on new-media art. For instance, the first generation of postinternet artists were critically addressing how technology affects our lives, focusing on the posthuman, the singularity, the human brain, and biological augmentation. The newer generation, he continued, assimilates the aesthetic tropes of those earlier artists—which are only two or three years older—to create an “aesthetic pastiche of this previous work.” He favors the work of Josh Kline, who blends and inserts substances such as Red Bull, Emergen-C, spirulina, and gasoline into plastic intravenous bags and calls it an Energy Drip (2013), over the Jogging, an image-based Tumblr blog founded in 2008 whose aim, Wiley said, is to take “interesting, charged signifiers and smash them together to make a thing that’s meme-able.”2 The Jogging reduces ideas to images, he concluded, just as the vogue of process-based abstract painting severs itself from historical abstraction.3
Alaina Claire Feldman spoke about looking for blind spots in curating and art history—surfing the recent trend of rediscovering neglected artists—and doesn’t just focus on contemporary work. I’m not interested in age, she said, but rather in a “generational consciousness” and how artists present it and curators frame it. Rather than explain this notion, Feldman launched into an extended chronological presentation of her own career: her involvement in the scene at Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery run by a collective of cool-kid artists called the Bernadette Corporation; how the Great Recession in 2008 and other significant New York events made her rethink life and stuff; moving to France to continue her studies (which were free), work for a journal called May, and learn French on the cheap; and settling down at Independent Curators International. She also described the impact of Occupy and Hurricane Sandy on her circles of friends and summarized several exhibitions, screenings, and symposia that she organized over the past couple years. Feldman sure has kept busy; she also drops a lot of names, too.
Jenny Jaskey declared that nearly all the artists with whom she works are older than Jesus, with a median age of 52. This begs the question: Why was she invited to speak? Jaskey equated youth with the art world’s obsession with “the new,” an intriguing proposition that deserved further exploration. Instead, she urged us “to consider time more carefully” in order to understand contemporary art. Like Howe and Hockley, Jaskey wanted to reframe the discussion, distancing herself from the panel’s subject in favor of talk about horizons and returns. After giving a few illustrations of her circular notion of time, Jaskey ended her presentation with two questions: “What are our curatorial priorities?” and “How do they fail to meet the demands of our times?” I wish this had been the starting point of her talk, with her providing answers to these questions as they relate to “complex relations of novelty, celebrity, capital, and youth in the art world and the curating of exhibitions,” as the panel description promised. Jaskey recommended that we follow art and not be distracted by our times, which sounded like the type of ahistorical, escapist work made by artists excluded from Hockley’s Crossing Brooklyn.
Opening the conversation among the panelists, Stokic made some incomprehensible statements about curatorial responsibility to the world. So aimless were these remarks that I couldn’t tell if she was muttering to herself, the panelists, or the audience. Panelists made their own scattered observations for a good while. Hockley wants to curate what she likes but is too oppressed by money and the market. Feldman said curators shouldn’t fit artists into a theme—“That’s, like, the worst thing ever” she spat out—but why foreclose this curatorial approach, which can yield interesting results? Her assumptions about young contemporary artists disregarding the history of abstract painting and working in so-called isolation, and suggesting that people go out more and get internships, make my jaw drop. At several times the panelists began commenting on a specific subject, such as a recent performance at the Kitchen, but lost the plot along the way. Instead of regrouping, they kept talking. This is what happens when a moderator fails to take charge of her discussion.
Despite having earned an MA in curatorial studies from Columbia, Howe questioned the usefulness of such degree programs. No academic training prepares you to be a good curator, he said, and a fledgling curator should instead focus on taking risks, failing, and meeting artists—doing what you want to do and “getting your hands dirty.” Feldman quickly read a list of names and ages of art-world figures—Gertrude Stein (30), Kasper Koenig (23), Walter Hopps (23), Claire Hsu (23) of the Asia Art Archive, and Harald Szeemann (24)—when they assumed prominent positions. “Maybe we’re old now,” Feldman trailed off. If any 23-year-old museum directors exist, she doesn’t know who they are. At least someone did some historical research before showing up tonight.4 An audience member inquired about privilege and access, but Hockley responded with a comment about longevity and sustained careers. Wiley wondered how things are different today than in the 1960s, when it was possible to make a living as a writer.
Rujeko Hockley talked about Crossing Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum, with David Everitt Howe (left) and Jovana Stokic listening closely (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Wiley also touched on prohibitive student debt for young people, and Hockley noted that it’s important for graduate schools to mix artists and historians. Someone asked a question about the generation of curators that has came after the symbolic figure of the global curator of the late 1990s. Is there a gap in the education system? Stokic stumbled through an explanation that MA students in curatorial practice takes studio-art class to learn compassion and to recognize the difficulty of making art. I, too, have observed an imbalance in higher education in the arts for many years: often MFA students are required to take courses in art history, but MA and PhD students in art history remain relatively unexposed to the material properties of art and the processes by which art objects are made.
The panelists were stumped to make distinctions between the kinds of art shown in commercial galleries and in nonprofit spaces. They also couldn’t tell the difference between the qualities or roles of nonprofit and for-profit curators, while at the same time expressing anxiety about exhibitions in nonprofits that sell out. “The artist should not be pressured to sell their work in a nonprofit,” Howe said, “The artist’s work is not obligated to sell.” But is it a bad thing when it does? The curators agreed that galleries that make money from nonprofit budgets are pervasive in New York. How does that work, exactly? Howe noted that patrons of Participant Inc. buy art at Gagosian Gallery, one of the top commercial venues for contemporary art. The funding sources for nonprofits (I think) are different in Europe.
Stokic acknowledged that the perspective of commercial galleries on the panel would have been represented by the invited-but-absent Piper Marshall, who has worked as a freelance curator for Mary Boone Gallery since early 2014 but who spent six years as a curator for the Swiss Institute, a New York nonprofit. Jaskey thinks about long-term goals and said that her space, the Artist’s Institute, “should offer the artist something different” than another commercial opportunity. Since the institute is part of a public university system, I found it odd that it leans toward supporting the work of well-known, middle-aged artists such as Pierre Huyghe, not students from Hunter College or artists that have few if any commercial opportunities. Since galleries take care of artists more than anyone else does, according to Jaskey, I feel terrible for a creator, young or old, without a gallery.
An audience member (who sounded like the writer Orit Gat) asked the curators if they had ever considered starting their own institution. No one really had, and I don’t blame them. It’s a relief to have a stable, salaried job with benefits at a longstanding institution, which occasionally has the capacity for progressive,meaningful change. Feldman described a recent crisis at Independent Curators International, which nearly went bankrupt in 2008. The incoming director Kate Fowle gutted the nonprofit, Feldman said, and seriously questioned its relevance. A better organization resulted, and Feldman is thankful that ideas and criticism from its employees are welcomed. The audience member agreed: “You have to be young and stupid to start organizations.” On the panel’s request, this person threw out the names of several groups—P! in New York and Arcadia Missa and Auto Italia in London—that are working with hybrid models of curatorial work and entrepreneurship to produce and sell work. See how easy it was to name names?
A major flaw of “Curators: The Younger Than Jesus Effect” was the lack of such concrete examples. While the panelists occasionally referred to Younger Than Jesus, no one discussed the 2009 exhibition and its critical and curatorial aftermath with any depth; nor did they mention the approach in the New Museum’s 2012 edition of the triennial, The Ungovernables, or prophesize about the upcoming 2015 iteration. Nobody brought up Lonely Girl, organized last year by Asher Penn for Martos Gallery, whose seven female artists were all in their twenties, nor did anyone reach into the not-so-distant past (e.g., Another Girl, Another Planet from 1999). No one counted age beans for the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York. Without case studies and confirmed research—which neither the panelists nor the moderator really bothered to present—the conversation about age and youth in the contemporary art world failed to transcend personal anecdotes, reactionary feelings, and vague abstractions. What a pity.
In Terms Of count: 6.
1 Moreover, it became absurd to see each panelist constantly fiddle with the UGA adapter, jiggling it to connect the laptop to the video projector. It’s 2014 and people still can’t manage presentation technology. Why was it so difficult to rest the laptop on the table so that the equipment remained stable?
2 It wasn’t clear if Kline and the Jogging belonged to different generations. Though Kline resembles the earlier generation, according to Wiley’s breakdown, and the Jogging corresponds to the later group, both achieved recognition at about the same time. Oh, chronology.
3 Wiley took back his comment about the Jogging after Lauren Christiansen, a cofounder of the blog, spoke up during the audience Q&A.
4 For another list of names and ages, see Christopher Howard, “Younger Than Jesus, ca. 1968,” Global Warming Your Cold Heart, April 10, 2009.
Read
Jennifer Burris, “The Younger Than Jesus Effect: A Conversation with Jovana Stokic,” On the Curatorial, September 29, 2014 (no longer available).
Bruce Nauman in the doorway of his San Francisco studio in 1966 (photograph by Jack Fulton)
Is Bruce Nauman psychedelic? Though his early work is generally considered formally and conceptually apolitical, one wonders how much the culture in San Francisco in the mid-1960s—from the Free Speech Movement to the Summer of Love—influenced his mindset at the time. After Nauman graduated from the University of California, Davis, in 1966, he established a studio in a storefront in the Mission District, where he spent several years realizing a now-seminal body of work that drew from the city’s tradition of Funk art as well as Minimalism from New York and Finish Fetish from Los Angeles. Though the artist has only admitted to drinking a lot of coffee in the studio, might have he sweetened his beverage with special sugar cubes?
“Nauman had a lot of time on his hands,” wrote Constance M. Lewallen in a recent exhibition catalogue, “and very little money.”1 Though the artist taught one class at the San Francisco Art Institute, he didn’t fraternize much with his fellow professors and spent many hours in the studio. In his Mission District space Nauman underwent intense self-examination and self-exploration, as the story goes, and made a monumental shift from making objects to foregrounding process. He contrasted the ephemeral nature of physical senses by casting his body parts—arm, ear, mouth, armpit, knees, hands, back, shoulder, and feet—in solid materials. He also explored language, especially the profound nature of jokes and puns, and documented loosely choreographed, seemingly absurd performances on camera.
Let’s look at a few of these works. One film depicted Nauman, dressed in a light t-shirt and dark jeans, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68); for another, Art Make-Up (1967–68), he filmed himself covering his face and torso with white, pink, green, and black paint. Nauman also hung a neon sign in his studio’s front window—the well-known The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967)—whose words must have both baffled and delighted passersby, which would have included stoned hippies. Another neon sculpture, My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968), spelled out “bbbbbbrrrrrruuuuuucccccceeeeee” in lowercase cursive script, referencing the lower gravity on the Moon’s surface but also the slower sense of time that a drug user purportedly experiences.
Traditional scholarship on Nauman’s work at this time focuses on his interest in the playwright Samuel Beckett and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as to contemporaneous avant-garde dance groups (Anna Halprin) and underground film (Kenneth Anger) then flourishing in San Francisco. But what about psychedelia? After all, Nauman’s studio was located only three miles from Haight-Ashbury—the heart of American counterculture—and his work at the time was pretty far out, man.
The art critic Ken Johnson offers a theory of psychedelic art in his book Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art (New York: Prestel, 2011), which considers work that was previously understood as embracing psychedelic characteristics (Fred Tomaselli, Robert Crumb) to those that didn’t (Sol LeWitt and Adrian Piper, Kay Rosen and Kara Walker). It’s fair to ask how the boxes of Donald Judd might look to a stoned viewer? How might the implausible or impossible works of Conceptual art correspond to the root of the word psychedelic, “mind manifesting”? Johnson makes a compelling argument for seeing twentieth- and twenty-first-century art in a new way.
Rethinking the influence and potential of psychedelics is happening across culture, into business and science. The artist Emily Segal, the host for tonight’s event and a cofounder of a trend-forecasting company named after a drug experience, asked: “Is K-HOLE art influenced by psychedelia in a different way?” While recently browsing the shelves of a bookstore, Segal came across a Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). The book, written by the handsome and youthful-looking Nicolas Langlitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the New School, attempts to reconcile mysticism with materialism through a historical, anthropological, and philosophical analysis of his subject. Segal invited Langlitz to give a presentation at the Swiss Institute, in conjunction with its summer exhibition, The St. Petersburg Paradox.
Nicolas Langlitz and Emily Segal (photograph by Christopher Howard)
During his talk Langlitz surveyed the history of psychedelic research in Switzerland and the United States and explored how mainstream society and the counterculture have found common ground, especially over the last twenty-five years, since President George H. W. Bush declared the 1990s to be the “Decade of the Brain,” which initiated a federal campaign to raise awareness for neurological research. The history goes back further, though, to the mid-twentieth century. Langlitz reminded us that pharmocological breakthroughs such as antidepressants and antipsychotics were discovered, refined, and produced in the same era as LSD. From Albert Hoffman to Timothy Leary to Richard Nixon, Langlitz traced the decline of scientific research up to the 1970s. (Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] in 1973.) After that time the occasional rogue scientist operated on the fringes, such as the Californian scientist Alexander Shulgin, who created about two hundred varieties of psychedelic substances and tested them on himself with a government-approved license that was revoked in 1994 after self-publishing what were essentially drug cookbooks. Since then knowledge about psychedelic use has permeated the internet, notably through anecdotes on the website Erowid.
Today there are two groups advocating psychedelic research. The first is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a group based in Santa Cruz, California, that frames its work to mollify—I mean, appeal to—the establishment by addressing such conditions as posttraumatic stress disorder and end-of-life anxiety for the terminally ill. “Nancy Reagan,” Langlitz joked, “would not say no to a drug that would alleviate anxiety.” The second group is the Heffter Research Institute, an institution based in Zurich, Switzerland, that Langlitz said has a “less activist brouhaha.” Advocates for psychedelic research have come from unusual places, such as the “Silicon Valley gods.” Bob Wallace of Microsoft funded Swiss research in the 1990s, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been a longtime activist. Based on his positive recollections of psychedelic experimentation, Steve Jobs was approached for money—directly from Hoffman, it turns out—but the Apple cofounder declined to get involved.
Nicolas Langlitz, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain (2012)
Switzerland has a liberal drug policy that dates to the 1910s, Langlitz stated, perhaps not unrelated to a large chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the famously neutral country. The 1990s saw a loosening of state policy: government-run clinics began supplying heroin to addicts, and scientists were permitted to run a mobile drug-testing lab in a popular Zurich techno club. When people come to find out what their still-illegal purchases are made of, they talk to social workers and take surveys, generating data that helps researchers to determine patterns of drug use and dosage, to monitor black-market products, and to educate club goers about current substances. Scientists also recruit, via the mobile unit, human test subjects for laboratory experiments.
The lively Q&A session with the audience revolved around three issues: differences and contradictions between physical and spiritual experiences; the authenticity of mystical experiences, hallucinogenic or otherwise; and the aesthetics of psychedelic art. Indignant with the term “spiritual,” one audience member asked Langlitz to produce an objective term. The psychedelic “experience is material through and through,” he responded, calling attention to the chemical nature of all brain activity. Like many, though, Langlitz is curious about what does the subjective experience opens, especially regarding the shared qualities of oneness, loss of ego, and being neither subject nor object that drugs offer. Aldous Huxley believed that all religions are built around “unitative technologies,” Langlitz said, which were achieved through practices such as fasting, meditation, chanting, and flagellation (ouch!).
Theologians may claim that hallucinogenic drugs provide an inauthentic, valueless experience, Langlitz continued, and prefer prayer and meditation. But Huxley had trouble obtaining elevating experiences the old-fashioned way, he continued. We shouldn’t limit the influence of chemicals on behavior to psychedelics. What does an authentic experience mean, Langlitz wanted to know, for a person taking Prozac? Is he or she experiencing real or false happiness? Similarly, he mentioned that anthropological research on psychedelics—especially in the 1970s—has focused too much on the shamanistic (and presumably authentic) use, in contrast to studies of how everyday people might find transcendence.
And what about psychedelic aesthetics, which Langlitz characterized as “the ugly and off-putting art of the 1960s.” You know the type—the wavy lines and bright colors found on posters for acid-rock concerts and in the earnest paintings of Alex Grey. Langlitz acknowledged that modernist abstraction was generally objective and cold, with Pop, ornamental Islamic forms, and East Asian traditions offering alternative formal models. He accepted the physiological aspect of psychedelic tropes—the cobwebs and other patterns—but pleaded, “What exactly does it have to do with psychedelics, anyway?”
Langlitz finds that large-scale photographs by the German artist Andreas Gursky better represent the psychedelic experience, especially with the simultaneous macro- and microscopic perspectives in his busy images of hotels, stock exchanges, sporting events, raves, and commercial retail stores. As an art student, Gursky was influenced not only by his famous teachers—the straight photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher—but also by his LSD experiences. Today Gursky is too famous or too concerned with his professional image, Langlitz conjectured, to talk openly about psychedelics, like he did early in his career.
The art world has embraced the drug-inflected work of painters like Fred Tomaselli, as Ken Johnson has noted, but typically shuns the earnest spiritualism in the work of Alex Grey and others. Yet perceived shame of associating artistic output with drugs wasn’t adopted by everyone in the Swiss Institute audience. At one point a man stood up to describe his incredible personal experience on DMT at great length—cool story, bro—and an aging white-bearded hippie type proselytized the transcendent experiences that art environments by James Turrell and Robert Irwin offer, labeling the swirly stuff as kitsch. “So Alex Grey is the Norman Rockwell of psychedelics?” someone else asked, to much laughter. “Anything can be psychedelic if you take enough drugs,” joked Langlitz. “Everything reminds you of drugs.”
In Terms Of count: 1 (an audience member broke the seal toward the end of the Q&A).
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 Americainterview 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?
