Tag: The Luminary

Good for a Girl

This essay was partly written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Women in Music
Thursday, November 19, 2015
The Luminary, Saint Louis, MO

April Fulstone (second from left) describes her experiences with sexism in the DJ world (photograph by Christopher Howard)

How do you deal with sexism in the music industry, personally and professionally? This question from Liz Deichmann, operations and event coordinator at the Luminary, came halfway through the panel “Women in Music.” April Fulstone, known professionally as DJ Agile One, said that her experiences spinning records for fifteen years, specializing for a while in hip hop, have been plagued by “unintentional” sexism, such as comments about her ability to transport two Technics 1200 turntables, which weigh fifty pounds each with a case, by herself. At one venue, an older man was impressed that she was able to set up her equipment on her own.

Syhrea Conaway, a black multi-instrumentalist who works under the name Syna So Pro, cannot separate sex and race: a white woman or black man is less likely to experience what she has. A case in point: after playing with a bluesy band at Ten Mile House, a man remarked to her, “You know what? When you first walked in here, I was like, ‘What’s this black bitch doing here?’ But now that I’ve seen you play, I respect you.” At a venue, she regularly needs to assert that she is actually in the band, that she isn’t the merch girl, and that she isn’t loading in equipment to get free admission to the show. Conaway acknowledged that she will always be “questioned by my mere presence.” The most devalued compliment of all, she said, is being told “you’re good for a girl.”

Laura Sisal, a partner in the Ready Room, a mid-sized concert venue that can accommodate up to 750 people, must regularly persuade touring bands to accept her authority. “It’s extra pressure on you,” she said. “Do I bite my tongue or do I decide to fight this battle?” Often it’s a lose-lose situation when she stands up for herself—but why should she even have to? Christine Sanley, director of AAA radio promotion for co-sign, an artist-development agency for radio promotion, licensing, marketing, and brand strategy, is regularly asked “What does your boss think?” when she presents her company’s final decisions to others.

Five successful women in music, from left to right: Christine Sanley, Syhrea Conaway, April Fulstone, Laura Sisal, and Liz Deichmann (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Deichmann stated that “Women in Music” was held in response to “The Future of Music,” a discussion that took place at the Luminary in February 2015. Like that event, “Women in Music” had a local focus on the Saint Louis scene, yet the five panelists—all women, unlike the earlier, all-male event—shared personal anecdotes and experiences that, for better and worse, many across the country can relate to. Deichmann, who is also a musician and a promoter for Secret Sound Society and St. Louis Arts Project, began the conversation by asking how each woman first got involved with music and about their professional role models. Her questions, while job interview-y at times, garnered interesting and diverse responses.

Promotional flyer for a Clothesline event

A former DJ at Washington University, Sanley came from the Omaha suburbs and entered the music scene surrounding the band Cursive and the record label Saddle Creek. Conaway began playing music at age seven, breaking free from her classical training at age twenty. Her mother played violin, which she took up herself, along with guitar, bass, keyboards, and now drums. A formative experience for her was watching TLC’s video for “Baby-Baby-Baby.” An Iowa City misfit, Fulstone lived for a while in Detroit and now runs a monthly party in Saint Louis called the Clothesline. A child of the 1990s, she admired Björk, Kim Gordon, Courtney Love, and Lauren Hill, and later M.I.A. “I love unique women who have cross-cultural sounds and backgrounds,” said Fulstone, who is Asian. Sisal has played in bands (organ, piano, guitar), worked for music labels, and studied audio production.1 Her peers include radio professionals, publicists, and entertainment lawyers. A foundational moment for her was watching the music video for No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak,” in which the singer Gwen Stefani looked feminine, tough, and beautiful all at once. Sisal also respects Sade for dropping in and out of the music business whenever she wants.

What are your biggest successes and challenges? As a kid Conaway performed at Carnegie Hall twice as a choir member—she is an incredibly gifted vocalist. Another highlight happened earlier this year, when four members of the contemporary chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound performed as her backing band at the Sheldon Concert Hall in Saint Louis. Conaway claimed to be bad at promotion and social media, but her Facebook page looks up to date. Marketing is the fake version of you, Fulstone said. “I’m bad at being fake,” she added, noting that some music promoters actually want fakeness and femininity.

Sanley doubted she can eclipse facilitating a collaboration between Boy George and the Black Lips—they covered T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong.” Her biggest challenge, going from college radio to AAA, has been talking on the phone to old white dudes, persuading them to change their programming. Mainstream radio, Sanley noted, plays about 30 percent music by female recording artists. I wondered how changes in music business—such as corporate media consolidation, the collapse of the record industry, and the decline of radio in favor of satellite transmission and digital streaming—have changed gender relations in the industry.

Sisal, a self-described overachiever and perfectionist, pronounced that opening a concert venue—something she has wanted to do since seventh grade—was both an accomplishment and a challenge, especially for someone lacking an academic business or management background. “You don’t really have any type of instruction manual as to how to do this,” Sisal pointed out. Be patient and go with the flow, this Zen master advised. “If my thirteen-year-old self could see me now, she’d be freaking out.”

Do the panelists self-identify as an artist or as a woman artist? “People are interested, a little more, if you’re a woman,” Fulstone responded. Conaway said the press perpetually touts her as a “one-woman musical enigma,” sends up the notion of a one-man band. “You want to be faceless, so to speak,” Sisal insisted. “You just want the music to do the talking for you.” But appearances matter. She explained two paths to success for female performers: “There are certain artists that are fighting hard to be recognized as an artist, not a woman artist. And then there’s other people taking the approach of ‘I want to use my sexuality to get noticed and then once I’m famous, once I have your attention, I’ll let you know who I really am.’” Sisal finds that approach to be counterintuitive—it doesn’t have to be this way.

Conaway believes that “to slut it up a little bit” is a larger media problem that spills over into academic, athletic, and political life, where women’s achievements aren’t recognized or valued. Sanley argued that it’s transparent when a woman pimps herself, citing Du Blonde’s record cover for Welcome Back to Milk: “This woman, she’s like ‘Hey, it’s me with this banging merkin, and this really rad full coat.’” Du Blonde gets discredited, Sanley explained, for “doing her thing and embodying herself and being comfortable in her own skin.”2 Responding to Sisal’s comments, Sanley said, “It’s a clear line between someone going through the machine and getting oversexualized, and someone else just trying to take hold of their own body and sexuality and getting called out for it in a different way.” Look at Nicki Minaj, Fulstone quipped, “that’s what you have to do to be successful.” She also noted that fans of hip hop must often overlook a performer’s misogyny because of his talent. As a contrast, near the panel’s conclusion Deichmann recalled that she dressed masculine or androgynous on her band’s show days to make it easier to carry equipment, climb ladders, and kick stage divers off the stage.

How does Saint Louis compare to other cities? New York is a competitive hustle no matter what sex you are, Sanley recalled of her three years there. On returning to Saint Louis, she expected to find a tighter-knit community of women but didn’t. In New York, she felt more connected to the scene, less so here—though she recognized that her job in radio has a national scope. Conaway bemoaned that indie rock is the only supported genre in town, especially by publications, at the expense of hip hop and R&B. Band ethics usually dictate that no performer leaves until everyone has played, she added, yet groups in Saint Louis don’t support the whole bill like they do in other cities. Fulstone found a strong scene in Detroit, where the music comes first, but in Saint Louis, it’s who you know. The racially segregated city is also a problem, she said. Sisal recalled that, in 2006 and 2007, you’d see members of other bands in your audience. They’re not there now. This may have to do with aging, the ebbs and flows of the scene, or both.

Syhrea Conway (center) prefers to support musicians on their merit, not their sex (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Any mentoring advice? Sanley advised, “Don’t be afraid, make connections, reach out to people, and support each other.” Emphasizing hard work, Conaway advocated setting goals and being honest with yourself and why you’re doing this. The panelists agreed that programming kids differently—with toys, for example—will help reduce sexism and change the music industry in twenty to thirty years. Deichmann acknowledged the power in collective action and support and, on a personal note, realized that tonight was the first time she and Sanley had talked about these issues, despite being longtime friends.

A male audience member noticed an increasing female presence in the noise, punk, and loud music scenes, identifying Savages, Melt Banana, and Pharmakon as examples. Sanley agreed but pointed out that a member of Perfect Pussy was ridiculed for writing a tour diary for Vogue—for some it’s not acceptable to be a badass punk interested in fashion and feminine things. Meredith Graves of that band wrote a tour diary for Elle in 2014, but maybe Sanley was referring to the “Thrift Diaries” that Emily Panic of Foxygen wrote for Jezebel. Progress is being made, she concluded, but there’s a long way to go—especially when she relayed a story about how an unnamed band’s management dropped an all-female four-person group after replacing two members with men. Fulstone proclaimed that seeing women in power positions in venues, as organizers of programming, demonstrates significant progress and a positive model for younger people.

For further reading (photograph by Christopher Howard)

The contentious discussion of artist and woman artist resurfaced. Conaway brought up the quality argument often heard from men: “You’re not really that good at what you do, but you are getting a lot of support because you are a woman. That’s not okay with me. How about you support a person on the merit of what they’re doing?” Conaway opposed using sexuality to compensate for the lack of talent.3 From the audience, the artist (and former Luminary resident) Tori Abernathy found the staunch agreement of being an artist (and not a woman artist) to be surprising. If gender is removed from the narrative, she argued, history gets rewritten with men being in charge. Women should get documented and make history their own. Putting that aside, Abernathy was curious about how women communicate their strengths, such as the leeway (white) women have when dealing with police and fire marshals—using prejudice to their advantage. Sisal proposed empathy and compassion. Sanley noted that a person’s sex is more intrinsically related to music than to art: an artwork or style can more easily defy gender stereotypes, while a woman onstage or heard on a record cannot.

In Terms Of count: 0.

1 Laura Sisal and Syhrea Conaway played together in Stella Mara, a shoegaze-inspired band, in the late 2000s.

2 Beth Jeans Houghton, who performs as Du Blonde, discussed the cover in Rachel Brodsky, “Du Blonde Pushes Dirt under Her Nails on ‘Welcome Back to Milk’,” Spin, May 12, 2015.

3 April Fulstone said something similar about her DJ career a few years ago: “‘I think it was a big novelty,’ she says. ‘People were really pushing me to take gigs, even before I was ready. They really wanted to see a girl out there. But it was important for me to be respected for my skill and not thrown in there because I’m a female.’” See Kevin C. Johnson, “St. Louis Women in Hip-Hop Struggle to Break Through,” Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 26, 2012.

Read

Natasha Patel, “Gender Inequality in the Music Industry,” Music Business Journal 11, no. 4 (October 2015): 1, 3.

Taylor Pittman, “This Is the Kind of Bullsh*t You Face as a Woman in the Music Industry,” Huffpost Women, August 27, 2015.

Dianca Potts, “DJing while Female in NYC: ‘I Can’t Believe You’re a Chick…’,” Village Voice, October 8, 2015.

Lindsay Zoladz, “Not Every Girl Is a Riot Grrrl,” Pitchfork, November 16, 2011.

January 24, 2016
Running in Circles

This essay was largely written during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Olivier Mosset in Conversation with Marie Heilich
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Parapet/Real Humans, Saint Louis, MO

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.

Olivier Mosset, Sans titre, 2004, suite of four lithographs on Rives, 200 x 200 cm (artwork © Olivier Mosset; photograph by Christopher Howard)

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.

BMPT, Manifestation 1, January 3, 1967, 18th Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. From right to left: Michel Parmentier, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Niele Toroni (photograph ©Bernard Boyer)

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.

2 Sara Stephenson, “Collaborative Reduction: Q+A with Olivier Mosset,” Art in America, February 10, 2011.

December 20, 2015
Critical Conditions

This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Fields and Praxes: Dino Zrnec and Marko Marković in Conversation
Tuesday, October 20, 2015
Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY

The Serbian sculptor Marko Marković has expressed an interest in museum conservation departments and in the process of finding, restoring, and preparing objects for exhibition. For him, the final display is as much the work of archeologists and conservators as it is the labor of artists, artisans, and curators. In addition, Marković is not a fan of the normal exhibition catalogue for an artist, with an art historian or curator explaining the art. He would rather provide a fictional document for audiences to follow, to create something believable beyond the contemporary artist’s professional requirements to present work in galleries, to create a portfolio website, and to give talks.

Marko Marković speaks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

During a lecture at Residency Unlimited, Marković read a written paper while projecting images behind him. His tale started with Jeffrey Horowitz, a University of Oregon professor, who in 1985 made an accidental discovery during an excavation at the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. Horowitz—who may or may not be a real person—found documentation for an unfinished architectural work or broken pieces of an artwork—it’s hard to take in everything. The folder also contained a ninth-century Asian book of geometry and conflicting inventories (from 1864 and 1878) of an archaeological dig in which the Kritios Boy, also known as Acropolis 698, was discovered. Side by side Marković showed two vintage-looking photographs of identical piles of sculpture, except that one included the Kritios Boy among the rubble, and the other omitted the statue. Unless you are a scholar of archaic Greek art, it was impossible to know which image was digitally altered.

Continuing the tale, Marković highlighted a second, more recent archaeological discovery, in 2013 in Ebla, Syria, by scholars at the University of Sapienza. A clay sculpture of a nude torso was unearthed, conserved, scanned three dimensionally, cast in plaster, and exhibited a year later. Through Greek in origin, Marković said, the work had a different stylistic appearance: hard edges instead of smooth curves. This second find was actually Marković’s own sculpture. His elaborate backstory—with real and invented facts and using found and Photoshopped images from the nineteenth century, the 1980s, and today—creates a specific way to view the work. In a later conversation, he told me that, unlike other acts of parafiction in art, his discrete sculptural creation is the primary focus, not the narrative that accompanies it.

Pieces of painted drywall by Dino Zrnec at Galerija Galženica (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Marković’s talk was followed by a presentation by the Croatian painter Dino Zrnec, who articulated his primary interests: the conditions of display and experimental processes. Zrnec showed documents of recent exhibitions at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and Galerija Galženica in Velika Gorica, Croatia. For the latter, he transported rectangular sections of drywall—one had white acrylic paint on it, and another had white oil paint—from his studio and leaned them on the wall. He also removed a square piece of ceiling board and stretched a canvas over it, again leaning it. These material explorations remind me of what Robert Ryman and Gedi Sebony have been doing in New York. Zrnec took a similar approach in Graz. The exhibition’s curator, Katia Huemer, wrote:

The interventions Zrnec employed in order to engage the existing structure were at once minimal and ruthless: the artist cut various shapes out of the wooden panels in the walls of the project space, stretched fabric over them, then inserted the cut-out shapes back into the incised hole. The front of the resulting canvas disappeared into the wall, leaving only a few visible hints that the “actual artwork” was hidden behind it.

While visiting museums in New York and Philadelphia, Zrnec paid attention to how art is displayed, noting how the raised platform on which Robert Rauschenberg’s Winter Pool (1959) rests in the Metropolitan Museum of Art adds a sixth step to a five-rung ladder that is part of the work. (He is not the only one to notice the plinth.) Such curatorial maneuvers could be considered a slight shift in authorship, and Zrnec said he is thinking of ways to cannibalize the work of another artist for his next exhibition.

Dino Zrnec, 23:30–11:13, 2013, plastic tumblers and oil on canvas, 50 x 35 cm (artwork © Dino Zrnec)

Zrnec recounted another exhibition, which took place in an abandoned post-office building in Croatia, where he showed several paintings that had created themselves—almost. He poured turpentine in plastic cups that held surplus paint, placed them on a canvas on the floor, and left the studio. Coming back the next morning, he set the finished painting upright. Here the act of creation takes place while the artist is somewhere else.

Both artists were on a two-month residency in New York after capturing the annual award for emerging artists in their home countries: Marković won the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award in July, and Zrnec received the Radoslav Putar Award in June. Eriola Pira, program director of the Young Visual Artists Awards, which administers the awards from the United States, joined the two for a conversation.1 She asked about the award’s meaning, but neither artist made an effort to provide a sufficient answer. Zrnec felt it was important for artists under 35 to come to New York, and Marković expects a stay in the city to “raise the level of my practice.” These responses, along with the tenor of their individual presentations, attested to a tight-lipped, unforthcoming attitude. Were Zrnec and Marković elusiveness by personality or unsure of their English language skills? Were they holding their cards close? This was frustrating at times because their conceptually oriented work demands explication

Pira’s question about developing new artistic languages stalled. “I still think there are some possibilities within painting,” Zrnec replied. “That’s why I am practicing painting.” Marković declared that works are usually unfinished and not always bound by the exhibition. “Every project continues,” he said. “It takes time to develop” The geometric sculptural models he designs on the computer are not always built, but sometimes he draws these virtual objects on a wall or creates videos for projection. His answer made me wonder if he will deliver his Kritios Boy lecture again, with additions or changes to the story.

Eriola Pira pulls the teeth of Marko Marković and Dino Zrnec (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Both artists articulated a strong attachment to their chosen medium—painting and sculpture—and downplayed the significance of installation, even though the exhibition space plays a crucial role in their work. For Zrnec, the meaning of his work is cumulative as it moves from the studio to the gallery and beyond. “If I were to show [my paintings] in a new space, I would transform them,” Zrnec said, “and they would become something else.” Pira prodded him further: “Your work has been described as performative. Do you agree with that?” With the paintings made with plastic cups in mind, Zrnec replied, “It’s me but it’s not me.” He reiterated his interest in situational qualities: “I always try to experiment with these very technical processes, and to think of the conditions of the work.” He also relayed a story about the limitations of studio space: “I had this small room and I wanted to make a big painting. So I decided to cut really big canvases, but I would stretch them around smaller stretchers … fold them like a very random item, a t-shirt. And then I would paint them from all sides, in different monochromes.” A single canvas might be painted while on several different sized stretchers, achieving a provisional quality. Such a painting could potentially fit over a sofa, a love seat, or a La-Z-Boy, depending on your needs.

Marković was prompted to describe a recent exhibition with his twin brother, which focused on the Serbian architect Nikola Dobrović’s masterwork, the Ministry of Defense building, destroyed in a NATO air strike in 1999. The Markovićs had separate rooms: a project for the restoration of the building for his brother (an architect), and a room for the artist’s six-foot plaster cube made from a single modular unit in plaster, cast from an outside wall of the defense building. Marković stacked the pieces to form the work and in one corner broke a hole to allow viewing of the interior. “For an antimodernist,” Pira commented, “you rely a lot on the grid.” Marković reminded her that Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Grids” emphasized the ambivalence or irrationality of the grid.

Painting in commercial galleries in New York has not impressed Zrnec. There are not so many painters back home, he said, and art institutions have their own agendas. Though Conceptualism and performance are the dominant postwar trends in the former Yugoslavia, he feels an affinity for Croatian artists from forty years ago. “Most of the Conceptual artists had brushes in their hands at one point in the sixties [and] seventies,”

“Is the construction of a work the discover of it?” an audience member asked Marković toward the conversation’s close, adding, “You’re discovering what was already there.” While he didn’t quite answer affirmatively, a good way to interpret his work is as an archaeology of the future. And it’s promising that two artists are exploring strategies of presentation that are artistic in nature, not curatorial.

In Terms Of count: 2.

1 I served on the jury that selected Dino Zrnec as the winner of the Putar award in June 2015. I also conducted studio visits with both artists two days after this talk.

November 21, 2015
Words Got Pwned
This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Jannis Androutsopoulos: Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Goethe-Institute, New York

Texting is ruining language, right? People who use LOL, cul8r, and brb have lost the ability to write formally and coherently, if they ever learned at all. Writing skills are deteriorating, and who else is to blame but the internet? What makes it all worse is that everyone is writing more today than twenty or thirty years ago, a time when civilized people sent letters instead of emails. Yet nothing about this moral panic is true—at least not yet—according to Jannis Androutsopoulos, a professor of German and media linguistics at the University of Hamburg, who gave a talk on “Scenarios and Evidence of Linguistic Change” at the New York branch of the Goethe-Institute. Nevertheless, and with a twinkle in his voice, he said, “something called the media has some mysterious effect on something called the language.”

While some folks perceive how Millennials communicate—through indecipherable internet-informed language and those silly emojis—as a decline that “threatens us as a national community,” Androutsopoulos told us that people have been alarmed over the state of language and communication for some time, noting that a 1991 study by Sigurd Wichter predicted our situation today. Technological determinism such as autocomplete may force people to use language in certain ways, but what is the long-lasting impact? Because the internet is still relatively new, Androutsopoulos said, linguists cannot agree if “fuzzy and indeterminate” shifts in communication will turn out to be systemic changes. Thus blanket statements like those above cannot be validated by social science. To present his arguments, he introduced two current schools of thought: “system and features” and “repertoires and practices.”

Jannis Androutsopoulos translates textese into English (photograph by Christopher Howard)

System and Features

Androutsopoulos identified four critical elements of networked writing:
The spelling of words is shortened to simplify a message, and in German the nominatives are not capitalized; homophones such as gr8 and cu are shortened with no change in pronunciation. These changes, Androutsopoulos revealed, existed before the internet and gravitated online. Look at any high school yearbook from the 1980s and 1990s and you’ll see net neologisms handwritten all over (KIT = keep in touch). Networked writing is also marked with an informal, spoken style (hafta); using all caps identifies tone (typically a shouting one); and the appearance of multiple letters (hiiiiiiiiii) indicates prosody, which means how quickly or slowly something is said. Punctuation such as ellipses takes on multiple meanings depending on where they’re used in a piece of internet writing, and what he called the inflective alludes to bodily movements that express emotion (*doing my happy dance*). The professor’s basic descriptions of “textese” were familiar, if not banal, but they indicate how academics approach the subject.

“When do words exist?” Androutsopoulos asked. “When they are in the dictionary or when people start using them?” Linguists are interested in how new words—and new meanings for old words—enter the larger lexical sphere. Some oldies in the digital realm are download, modem, cyber, web, e-anything, hashtag, tweet, and app. More recent examples are Facebook stalking, unfriend, defriend, selfie, and (in German) entfreunden. “English-language scholars are oblivious, in a sense,” Androutsopoulos remarked, “to many important things happening in other languages.” It’s true. I had no idea that people are having serious discussions about conjugating the verb “to Google” in German. Nor did I ever think about how English-centric such phrases as “because + [noun]” can’t be translated into German, or how German verbs are now dropping their Gs.

How does one conjugate the verb for “having found something out by googling” in German? (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Repertoires and Practices

It’s common sense that written language evolves, but only academic research can confirm what we suspect is true. The German language wasn’t standardized until the eighteenth century, Androutsopoulos said, but digital communication has begun to break down this homogenous and invariant expression. The need to keep records, transmit knowledge, and build lengthy, complete arguments still exists, but the importance of social interaction has returned through the written word, not speech. Sociological studies reveal that people develop competence in more than one way of writing, and that formal and digital language are mutually intelligible. Read through a lengthy Facebook thread or a newspaper’s comment section—both examples of what Androutsopoulos calls “unregulated writing in the public space”—and you’ll find people carrying on a coherent conversation despite flagrant mistakes in punctuation, grammar, and spelling by some, and perfect formal writing by others. As a linguist he doesn’t aim to establish a binary of right and wrong, but rather he wants to know why languages change.

What is also interesting to linguists is how tone, gesture, facial expression, prosody, and contrast appear in networked writing. To indicate expressiveness, “you need to find out ways to write it without saying it,” Androutsopoulos said. When texting, people have replaced the sentence-ending period with one or more exclamation marks, not to project enthusiasm but to avoid conveying apathy. Changes manifest is other ways. For example, in German an email begins with a salutation and ends with a farewell, but the professor’s students sometimes use greetings normally reserved for friends, families, and lovers. While Androutsopoulos claimed that a person’s writing style fits the situation, that people know how to move between the formal and informal styles, I regularly witness senior-level colleagues neglect punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar all within a single two-sentence business email. But maybe that’s just carelessness, not the inability to distinguish between professional and personal contexts.

They See Me Rollin’ They Hatin’

Because Funny

Androutsopoulos spent some time talking about memes and image macros, such as Scumbag Steve and Bad Luck Brian, whose templates for manufacturing he called egalitarian. His specialty seems to be They See Me Rollin’ memes, Bayeux Tapestry parodies with hip-hop lyrics, and Hamburg memes with city-specific humor. The professor strangley claimed that when memes circulate, there’s no original to reference and that it doesn’t matter, but the high level of research presented by Know Your Meme and other obsessives clearly indicates otherwise. A serious analysis of memes may be a valid academic subject, but often it feels like someone explaining a joke—the experience gets ruined.

An audience member asked if differences between male and female internet writing exist. Androutsopoulos stated that girls and women write hiiiii and use smileys more than boys and men do, but it also depends if the female interlocutor is writing to a male or female. Other research, he said, shows that gender differences eventually neutralize, and that scholars try not to make essentialist definitions.

Although the claim of texting having a negative impact on formal writing has been refuted, Androutsopoulos conceded that linguists need more research and data, more fine-grain contextualization that focuses on qualitative close readings alongside quantitative statistical analyses. There is evidence for fleeting innovations, he concluded, but “it is difficult to draw the lines between innovations and change.”

In Terms Of count: 10 (including 1 on a PowerPoint slide)
November 18, 2015
The Body, Unrestrained

This essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Art Talk: Clarity Haynes
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Willem de Kooning, Two Women in the Country, oil, enamel, and charcoal on canvas, 46⅛ x 40¾ in. (artwork © Willem de Kooning Foundation)

It was Willem de Kooning who once remarked, “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.”1 For artists from Peter Paul Rubens to Jenny Saville, this assertion is incontestable—there is no better way to portray human skin in the medium. De Kooning also said that “beauty becomes petulant to me. I like the grotesque. It’s more joyous.”2 The visual thrashing ones sees in the Abstract Expressionist’s midcentury paintings of women is not what the New York–based artist Clarity Haynes has in mind for her Breast Portrait Project, an ongoing series of paintings of women’s torsos that take the genres of both portraiture and the female nude in new and unexpected directions. Her view is more sympathetic to the women she paints, though the works still make some viewers uncomfortable, including me.

Over the past few years, Haynes has invited women from the New York LGBTQ community—typically her age or older—into her studio to pose. The smooth surface of her paintings, which have minimized brushstrokes that give off an airbrushed quality, belie the jagged topography of the people she portrays. The women are often large in size and in courage. Some bear surgical scars—such as those from mastectomy—and many have sagging skin, plump rolls, and stretch marks, conveying how the weathered body unravels after decades of living.

Pinar Yolaçan, Boro, 2009, Lambda print, 20 x 18 in. (artwork © Pinar Yolaçan)

Haynes gave an artist’s talk at Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, focusing on the Breast Portrait Project, setting aside other types of work she does. The event was held in the context of Body Utopia, a group exhibition of six artists at Trestle Gallery, which comprised color photographs by Chitra Ganesh and Pinar Yolaçan, three framed charcoal drawings by Riva Lehrer, two videos by Sondra Perry, a sculpture by Constantina Zavitsanos, and a painting by Haynes. Body Utopia was a judicious selection of expertly installed works in diverse media by an intergenerational group of artists, all focused on “bodies of color, queer bodies, bodies with disabilities, [and] bodies that don’t conform to societal norms and conventions,” as described by Priscilla Frank in the Huffington Post. It was Haynes’s first outing as a curator, and the first time she contextualized her art with that of her contemporaries. For the catalogue she wrote, “The making of art is, for some artists, the making of a utopia, because it posits an alternative space, medium, and reality through which to explore our subjectivities and our bodies. In other words, we get to call the shots.”3

During her talk, Haynes described the Breast Portrait Project and articulated her connections to feminism and to art history. She dates the project to the late 1990s, when she was regularly attending women-only music and cultural festivals like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Where Womyn Gather.4 After making a self-portrait of her torso (and later of several friends), Haynes decided to change her practice, which at the time was social action, studying film, doing murals, and “having every kind of job you could imagine—most of which involved wearing some sort of costume.” Anything but painting. At the festivals, which usually offered some sort of art activities, she would spend one to three hours, under a tent, drawing pastels of the exposed torsos of her fellow festival goers. Haynes would then give the finished work to the commissioning subject, but not before documenting it, and the person depicted, with a photograph and a written statement by the sitter. While the drawing left the artist’s possession immediately, Haynes has stayed in touch with several women from the festivals via Facebook, even though she may have only met them in person once or twice.

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828, watercolor on ivory, 2⅝ x 3⅛ in. (artwork in the public domain)

While the origins of the Breast Portrait Project lay in 1990s alternative culture, it has personal precedents from art history, which Haynes articulated. In particular she cited two works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed, a miniature 1828 self-portrait of her bare breasts, intended only for the eyes of the American politician Daniel Webster; and a lover’s eye painting from the eighteenth century. Both pieces offer a fragmented part of the body and emphasize privacy and intimacy. The oversized scale of the figures in Haynes’s recent paintings correspond to the Buddha Mahavairocana (Dainichi Nyorai), a larger-than-life wooden statue from the twelfth century housed in its own room at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. When the artist revamped the Breast Portrait Project in 2009, she said, “I wanted to make feminist bodies that could be super large, super powerful.” These works, averaging five feet in height, were shown in 2011 at a solo exhibition at Tabla Rasa Gallery in Brooklyn, under the title Radical Acceptance.5

Carlo Pittore, Portrait of Steve Nusser with Artist, 1983, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in. (artwork © Carlo Pittore Foundation)

Haynes had decided to become an artist at age sixteen, and her lifelong interest in skin and detail is evident in a watercolor self-portrait from 1987. An early supporter of her resolution was Carlo Pittore, a New York figurative painter who had moved to Maine in the 1980s. It was Pittore who, over a summer they spent together and many visits after, encouraged her to have a strong work ethic, and to paint from life, as he did.

When she was younger Haynes admired the early work of Lucien Freud and Jenny Saville, but she now looks to Ellen Altfest, Rackstraw Downes, Catherine Murphy, and Josephine Halvorson, painters whom she said “record the facts.” A turning point for Haynes happened during a lecture by Altfest at the New York Studio School in December 2012, where Altfest described the long process for making her detailed paintings. After this talk, Haynes let herself develop a single painting for one to three years. Because she works from life, she gets to know not only the bodies she depicts but also the person inside them, like the trans bodybuilder Roxanne, whom she finished painting in 2012. “I really enjoy the long process of slowly getting to know the body,” Haynes said, “the specific body.” She continued, “It’s emotional when it ends, because you’re not going to have that regular time of seeing each other.” The relationships continue outside the studio: Leonora, whose breast portrait was hanging in the Trestle Gallery show, was in the audience tonight.

The general form of the Breast Portrait Project—frontal view, centered composition, neutral background, and a body cropped at the neck and waist—remains consistent. What varies is the shape, color, and texture of the woman, and also things like necklaces and clothing (pants). The artist realized the importance of such accoutrements after a year’s worth of comments by visitors to her studio.6 In each work Haynes includes a body’s changes over time, but she retains temporary details that she likes. “With Leonora’s tan lines, I was really having a hard time letting that go, because I really like those tan lines,” she said. “And there were times in the winter when they were not there, to the same extent.” Haynes’s subjects are sometimes solicited randomly: she found Leonora in a coffee shop, approaching the older, butch lesbian out of the blue. “Recently I met Dilma in the restroom of a doctor’s office. She was singing in the bathroom.”

Clarity Haynes, Leonora, 2015, oil on linen, 58 x 79 in. (artwork © Clarity Haynes)

A triptych Haynes made as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts depicted three classic stages of life: youth, middle, and elderly. “I … think a lot about age in my work,” Haynes said. “I think about how old women are portrayed in art history,” through tropes like the maiden, mother, and crone. The art historian Svetlana Alpers, Haynes said, “pointed out that there’s a history of gendered distrust of detail in art.” Michelangelo disparaged Flemish painting as inferior to the Italian, tempera-based variety, writing a long paragraph about how Northern painters paint and to whom it appeals (“It will appeal to women, especially to the very old and the very young…”). If he spent all that time negating detail, Haynes remarked, it must have really bugged him.

One of the Body Utopia artists, Riva Leher, who was visiting from Chicago, offered additional observations about how Haynes’s work relates to art history. Northern Renaissance art has “the sense of a luminous, permanent present,” Leher said. And about Haynes’s work she observed, “There’s an inner luminosity in how you’re painting the body…. There’s a slow sense that the painter is telling you that the person you’re looking at is utterly worth your attention, is worth your quiet attention.” In Lucien Freud’s bravado painting, “there’s always a scrim between you and the subject,” which Leher likened to the British artist’s inner struggle and his dialogue with art history. We don’t see “his desire to bring you the pure presence of another human being, unmediated.” While all art is mediated in some way—including the apparently transparent qualities of even trompe l’oeil painting—such realism plays a significant role in Haynes’s work. The subjects of the Breast Portrait Project are older bodies that are neglected, if not unseen entirely, in not just contemporary art but also our culture at large.

Installation view of two paintings by Clarity Haynes in a 2015 exhibition at the New Bedford Art Museum called A Collective Body: Uncovered and Illuminated; the sculpture in the foreground is by Stacy Latt Savage

Leher observed that Haynes’s work lacks blood, trauma, and other qualities that cause people to flinch. The artist agreed: “When people see a disabled body they see pain, and they will not [have] any other reading—they will see pain. I often find that if they see a scar, they see pain, and that’s not my intention, so it’s sometimes kind of frustrating. Because what I feel like I’ve learned … over time is that a trauma may or may not have been a physical trauma, depending on how people reacted, what the memory is.” For Haynes’s friend, a scar from open-heart surgery as a child was a good memory—everyone at the hospital treated her like a princess. Lehrer said that our society doesn’t have the language to approach scarring apart from the wounded warrior. During the last fifteen or so minutes of the talk, the artist and the audience had a good discussion about trauma, healing, and reclamation, about scars, intimacy, and body acceptance, and about gender and gender expression.

With a self-identified affinity for women’s spirituality and body-image consciousness of the 1970s, Haynes offers work with a striking balance between social and aesthetic issues—hitting the mark in every way possible.

In Terms Of count: 1.

1 Willem de Kooning, quoted in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 72.

2 De Kooning, quoted in John Elderfield, “Woman to Landscape,” in de Kooning, a Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 277. Some sources give the quote as “Flesh was the reason why oil paint was invented.”

3 Clarity Haynes, “Visionary Bodies,” Body Utopia (Brooklyn: Trestle Gallery, 2015), 3.

4 Haynes projected a photograph of a 1994 protest march with Riki Wilchins, the author of Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (1997), and the transgender activist Leslie Feinberg when MichFest articulated an informal policy about only welcoming attendees who were born female biologically. The conversation touched on the tension between respecting the pioneers of the feminist movement and pushing against their resistance to trans issues.

5 Haynes’s work has been chosen for the next Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In addition, Stout Projects in Brooklyn will host a solo show of her work in February 2016. Haynes is also scheduled to speak at the New York Studio School on December 8, 2015.

6 I visited Haynes’s studio on April 14, 2014.

November 17, 2015
Tell Me What You Know

Mostly written in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

Robert BarryWednesday, March 11, 2015
Judith Zabar Visiting Artist Lecture
205 Hudson Street Gallery, Hunter College, City University of New York, MFA Campus, New York

You know how lyrics from pop songs look trite and sometimes embarrassing when written down, but come alive convincingly when performed? It’s the same for artist’s talks. Some excel when presenting in public. If an artist is charismatic, unremarkable work becomes good and good work becomes great. The opposite is also true: interesting work can come across as ordinary.

The renowned first-generation Conceptualist Robert Barry is one of those artists whose work—which explores speech, memory, light, time, belief, anticipation, fragility, making connections, and states of flux and change—shines when interpretations are expanded on by others. It’s not that he’s inarticulate. Far from it—the artist speaks clearly, in a straightforward manner. But there was a lack of excitement to his reflections on a six-decade career during a lecture at the Hunter College Art Galleries, held in conjunction with the retrospective Robert Barry: All the things I know … 1962 to the present. His discussion about old and new works revealed no earthshaking revelations but offered plenty to remind you of the humanity behind the brainy work you read about in art-history books.

Born in the Bronx in 1936—and he still has the accent to prove it—Barry received two degrees at Hunter College, earning a BFA in 1957 and an MA in 1963.1 As a student, he took classes with the renowned scholar and curator William Rubin; the artist Robert Motherwell was his advisor. The art department was impressive: William Baziotes taught watercolor, Ray Parker taught oil painting, and Tony Smith taught in a three-piece suit. After Barry obtained his terminal degree, he was hired as a professor at Hunter by Eugene C. Goossen, an art critic, historian, and curator who was the department chair. Barry taught there from 1964 to 1979, a job he admitted made it easy for him to avoid producing art commodities to support his practice.

Robert Barry speaks to an audience at Hunter College (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Like many Conceptualists, Barry started out as a painter, and the exhibition’s oldest work is a painting of gridded red and black squares, a student piece from 1962. By the end of the decade, his attitude toward art changed, and he began working with ephemeral, invisible, and nonart materials, such as typewritten statements like “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 p.m.; June 15, 1969.” He also experimented with electromagnetic waves, with pieces that triggered metaphysical thoughts from scientific concepts. “The most powerful things in the world were invisible,” Barry said regarding Electromagnetic Energy Field (1968), which is “a battery-powered transmitter encased in a nondescript metal box [that] sends out waves of energy, filling the gallery space with an invisible, immeasurable, but nonetheless real force.”2 With a sound “kind of like a whistle,” Electromagnetic Energy Field was as large as its audible range. Carrier Wave (1968–69), Barry said, blots out all other signals in the area. The artist’s father, who was an electrical engineer (and a disk jockey in the 1940s, using his own equipment), made the radio-wave boxes for his son’s art projects.3 At the time, the artist revealed, a telekinetic institute operated near the 57th Street galleries in Manhattan where he first showed these pieces, so he knew he was in the right area.

“I used to call galleries ‘cemeteries,’” Barry said confidently, and several classic works examined art-world mechanics. When dealers contacted him for shows, he told them, “Well, right now I’m closing galleries.” His Closed Gallery (1969) was first done at Eugenia Butler’s space in Los Angeles, and also in Amsterdam and Turin. “Lock the door,” he joked. “Don’t let anybody in.” The public was notified of the negated exhibitions by postcard.

Before the lecture, the Hunter professor Joachim Pissarro discussed Robert Barry’s exhibition in the galleries; Robert Barry is on the far left (photograph by Christopher Howard)

Conceptual artists notoriously pillaged spheres of knowledge outside the domain of fine art. Barry noticed the beautiful Greek names of the noble gases, which are elements on the periodic table that rarely interact with other elements or change chemically. For one his best-known works, Inert Gas Series: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon, from a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (1969), Barry purchased glass containers of these gases from a distributor that worked with schools and, with his dealer Seth Siegelaub, drove a rented Mercedes convertible into the Mohave Desert, where he laid the containers on newspaper and smashed them with a hammer. He smashed more bottles of gas at a Beverly Hills hotel. Siegelaub wanted to document things—these works are typically shown as typeset text and black-and-white photographs in frames—but Barry did not. Nearly fifty years later, the many cubic feet of neon, xenon, and other gases that he released are still floating in the Earth’s atmosphere, somewhere.

“Barry does not work with words; he communicates conditions.” So wrote the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard. One of these conditions, based on trust and agreement, is evident a class assignment for students that Barry sent to David Askevold at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1969:

The students will gather together in a group and decide on a single common idea. The idea can be of any nature, simple or complex. This idea will be known only to the members of the group. You or I will not know it. The piece will remain in existence as long as the idea remains in the confines of the group. If just one student unknown to anyone else at any time, informs someone outside the group the piece will cease to exist. It may exist for a few seconds or it may go on indefinitely, depending on the human nature of the participating students. We may never know when or if the piece comes to an end.

It’s true—nobody is sure if the secret was revealed immediately, as one account goes, or forgotten, as goes another. In a way, misinformation is part of the piece. “I’m not even sure this is a piece,” Barry conceded. “It’s about the fragility of ideas…. It’s life. That’s what life is about.” Two older works received attention during tonight’s lecture: Robert Barry Presents Three Shows and a Review by Lucy R. Lippard (1971) and Marcus Piece (1970). For the former, Lippard wrote a short essay about Barry’s work that, with a collection of index cards that described other pieces she included in other exhibitions, formed a show at Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris. Another text-based piece quoted the philosopher Herbert Marcuse: “A place to which we can come and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do.’” Barry’s strategy was “to plagiarize his idea and make art from it.”

Installation view of Robert Barry’s Red Cross (2008) at Yvon Lambert Gallery in 2009

Barry’s work since the 1970s has been more oblique: collections of words that are read out loud, drawn or stickered directly on walls, appear in paintings, are cast in acrylic, or projected onto the floor. The words he chooses typically express states of being and abstract actions—and he rarely employs nouns. In the Hunter College exhibition, Barry placed transparent vinyl letters on the windows facing Canal Street. His videos are likewise impressionistic, such as one he filmed on a train and in the Centre Pompidou–Metz in France. It’s easy to understand how critics and historians tend to focus on Barry’s early work, because his production from the last thirty years requires viewers to engage more, to be active participants in shaping meaning.

If I were conducting an interview with Barry, I would ask him about these more recent works, skipping over the 1960s stuff that many people know.4 But that is not what Max Weintraub, an adjunct professor at Hunter and the exhibition’s cocurator, did when he joined the artist onstage for a lackluster dialogue. Weintraub asked about topics already covered in Barry’s lecture, such as the mechanics of the art world, so maybe he hadn’t been paying attention. The professor asked an asinine question about blurred authorship of Three Shows and a Review: “Did it occur to you that [Lippard] was doing a Robert Barry?” “No,” the artist responded. Barry and Lippard had conversations, and her writing contribution was perfect. Weintraub did get Barry to talk more about the Closed Gallery pieces, including the one in Los Angeles that employed two old ladies from a telephone answering service in a little office on Sunset Boulevard.

Max Weinberg and Robert Barry talk (photograph by Christopher Howard)

An audience member asked about the difference between a serious work of Conceptual art and a joke—a great question but one left answered. Barry said he needed specific works to compare because he doesn’t like generalities. (The questioner did not give examples.) “‘Conceptual’ is a bad word,” another attendee commented. “Is there one you prefer?” “No,” Barry responded. There’s always something physical about art, he said, though using the term is a convenience and valuable because “you get into shows.” It is rare that an artist cites the benefits of labels and categories. Conceptual art is tangible in other ways. Barry urged artists in the audience that “you should get something for your labor” and “you can’t give it away.” He got over that attitude. His work is valuable.

In Terms Of count: 2.

1 According to a 2010 Archives of American Art interview with Robert Barry, what is now Lehman College in the Bronx was part of Hunter College.

2 Steven Stern, “The Quick and the Dead,” Frieze 125 (September 2009).

3 Barry explained: “My dad gave me a hand, making up these little transmitters that sent out a signal. If you put one in the gallery, and also had a portable radio turned to that frequency, it gave off a whistle. I don’t think my dad had any idea how this connected to art or my drawing, but he had fun doing it.” Barry, quoted in Benjamin Genocchio, “A Career Built on Exploring the Boundaries of Art,” New York Times, November 30, 2003.

3 For criticism on his recent work, see my Artforum.com review of Barry’s 2009 exhibition at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York.

April 2, 2015