In Terms Of

Tag: Venice Biennale

  • 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.

  • I Don’t Want No Retro Spective

    This essay is the third of five that reviews a recent symposium at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Read the first, second, fourth, and fifth texts.

    The Retrospective
    Monday, April 7, 2014
    Exhibit A: Authorship on Display
    Center for the Humanities
    Graduate Center, City University of New York, Skylight Room, New York

    Ed Ruscha, I Dont Want No Retro Spective, 1979, pastel on paper, 23 x 29 in. (artwork © Ed Ruscha)

    For artists, the solo exhibition reigns supreme. For curators, it’s the group show. From major events such as the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Whitney Biennial to curator-driven institutions like the Wattis Institute in San Francisco, Witte de With in Rotterdam, and MoMA PS1 in New York, the authorial curator’s name has typically transcended the artworks on view (or so the story goes). While the art-publishing industry ceaselessly cranks out new books on curatorial issues—nearly always an edited, multiauthored tome—few critical studies have considered the theory and practice of showing the work of a single artist, which is perhaps the bread and butter of art museums worldwide. For the second session of “Exhibit A: Authorship on Display,” titled “The Retrospective,” one panelist presented a brief investigation into the history of the solo exhibition while two more offered case studies on atypical exhibitions of a contemporary artist.

    Exhibitions are generally categorized as solo, group, and collection, explained João Ribas, deputy director and senior curator of the Serralves Foundation in Portugal, and scholars have typically historicized the group show. He cited key studies such as Ian Dunlop’s classic The Shock of the New: Seven Historic Exhibitions of Modern Art (1972) and Bruce Altshuler’s massive two-book set, Salon to Biennial—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (2008) and Biennials and Beyond—Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 2: 1962–2002 (2013), as providing concise histories of the form.1 For curators, Ribas said, group exhibitions contribute to economies of reputation and curatorial prestige. Nevertheless, the “one-man show,” he acknowledged, has formats, methodologies, and conventions of its own: chronology, biography, connoisseurship, evaluation, and mediation (e.g., the purity of the artist’s voice, curatorial self-effacement). Ribas didn’t discuss collection shows, though I imagine that museum handbooks and guidebooks follow a conventional scholarly logic of highlighting the greatest hits of an institution.

    Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in My Artistic and Moral Life, 1855, oil on canvas, 142 × 235 in (artwork in the public domain)

    Ribas’s preliminary research into the history of solo exhibitions started with Nathaniel Hone, an Irish artist who independently presented a satirical painting called The Pictorial Conjuror after the work’s rejection from the Royal Academy’s annual exposition in London in 1775. Ribas pinpointed the names of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European artists who had important solo and single-painting shows in public and private locations: John Singleton Copley, Thomas Gainsborough, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne, among others. William Blake’s solo showing in 1809 had a visual and theoretical system, Ribas said, and Joshua Reynolds’s 1813 exhibition in London was organized for general symmetry and an overall pleasing effect. Further, Ribas noted that James Abbott McNeill Whistler designed interiors for his paintings and Paul Signac had formulated ideas about the ideal display of his work.

    Various nineteenth-century accounts described one-person exhibitions as commercial and career advancing, which was certainly true of Gustave Courbet, whom Ribas said purposefully identified a solo presentation of his work—housed in a temporary structure near the official Exposition Universelle of 1855, which featured more of his paintings—as an “exhibition,” not an “exposition,” to enhance the term’s arrogant commercial connotation. (The Painter’s Studio, pictured above, was among the highlights of Courbet’s independently produced exhibition, which he called The Pavilion of Realism.) Ribas reported that other sales tactics involved concepts of a good picture and the importance of an artist’s late work. He also mentioned how a retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s work in Beijing in 1985 was highly influential to Chinese artists.

    Installation view of Maurizio Cattelan: All at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (photograph by David Heald)

    Lewis Kachur, an art historian at Kean University and the author of the excellent book Displaying the Marvelous (2001), discussed Maurizio Cattelan’s “un-retrospective” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011–12, which Kachur characterized as a witty engagement with the career survey. The Italian artist was horrified, Kachur said, when the Guggenheim offered him a show. Cattelan proposed an all-or-nothing gambit: the museum had to display every work he has ever made. Despite his usurping of the curatorial role—the selection of objects would already be determined—the museum’s senior curator Nancy Spector agreed to the novel format. The show, titled Maurizio Cattelan: All, had no chronology, theme, or choice: “It’s everything, it’s all,” Kachur said.

    As Cattelan “sweeps his work into the immediate present,” the overall effect of his oeuvre, which hung from the skylight down the center of Frank Lloyd Wright’s building, circumvented the individual contemplation of objects. Kachur enumerated various precedents of artists engaging the museum’s central atrium and surrounding architecture. Alexander Calder was the first to suspend work in the museum’s open space, in 1964, followed by various types of presentations by Jenny Holzer (1989), Dan Flavin (1992), Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen (1995), Nam June Paik (2000), Matthew Barney (2003), and Cai Guo-Qiang (2006). Cattelan claimed to have seen every show at the Guggenheim since 1993, when he moved to New York, and would have been aware of these installations. Kachur’s research into the subject, he admitted during the session’s Q&A, was limited to the published material on the exhibition—he hasn’t conducted visits to archives or interviews yet. Even so, the scholar’s trajectory looks promising.

    Installation view of Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (photograph by Benoit Pailley)

    Lynne Cooke, chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, described her experiences planning a retrospective for Rosemarie Trockel. Allergic to the white box, this German artist prefers to show in institutions that challenge her. And because she values her studio time and wanted to spend less on exhibition administration, Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos was conceived as a traveling show for multiple venues. Each iteration of the exhibition, though, did feature new and different elements. Cooke and Trockel elected to include art by her peers and objects important to the artist, as well as works by so-called outsider artists like James Castle, Manuel Montalvo, and Judith Scott. The Madrid show included eighteenth-century botanical drawings—and also their late-nineteenth-century transformations into exquisitely crafted glass objects—that all Spaniards know, Cooke said, just like they know the paintings of Diego Velázquez and El Greco.

    The two also took field trips together and considered past work, unfinished projects, and new projects. They didn’t write a list or set of goals—at least not at first. The show, Cooke said, developed organically, in an associative way. Despite such close collaboration, Cooke relayed that Trockel did not want to be identified as a cocurator for the show, but the Reina Sofía’s website credits both women as organizers. When A Cosmos landed at the New Museum in New York in 2012, my strongest reaction was that the show looked heavily curated, which may relate to Cooke’s discussion of the art historian Svetlana Alpers’s concept of the “museum effect” and of the differences between visual distinction and cultural significance.

    Lynne Cooke, Lewis Kachur, João Ribas, and Chelsea Haines survey the retrospective (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The audience Q&A, adeptly moderated by Chelsea Haines, a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center, touched on concerns ranging from practical to absurd. Someone asked about a hypothetical exhibition that has neither artist nor curator, which Kachur called a “riderless horse.” Someone else brought up the idea of a curator’s “portfolio artist.” Sometimes our reception of individual artists, Ribas said, is shaped by their exhibitions, giving credit to Cooke’s past work with  Hannah Darboven and to the 1960s dealer Richard Bellamy’s framing of his artists.

    In Terms Of count: 10.

    1 I would add Bruce Altshuler’s The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (1994) and Jens Hoffmann’s Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art (2014) to this list, though I’m sure there are many others.

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  • An Almost Unimaginably Radical Act

    Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings: A Panel Discussion
    Wednesday, September 18, 2013
    Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

    Sol LeWitt in his Manhattan apartment in 1961 (photographer unknown)

    Unlike many of his colleagues, the American artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) embraced the term Conceptual art. And at a time when artists were abandoning the white cube to make work in the real world, the traditional gallery was for him the best place to show his art. In fact, in a 1969 interview with Patricia Norvell he said: “The gallery situation is, I think, a very good situation in that it’s an optimum way of showing things. A lot of my things are designed specifically for that particular space. Some galleries are better for showing art and some are worse. But I think that for a certain kind of art a gallery is pretty good.”1

    These facts might paint the artist as being more conservative than others of his generation. Conceptual artists were famous for their information-heavy, language-based approaches, which drew from science, mathematics, and sociology, among other disciplines, but LeWitt insisted that his work was irrational and absurd, even in spite of the clarity of the written instructions for executing his pieces. What makes him radical, perhaps, was his openness, the way he achieved a kind of Zen freedom in his perspective on not only making art but also living life. Famously generous for trading artworks with almost anyone and for being an all-around great guy, the artist might be publicly acclaimed as Saint LeWitt—if only he weren’t Jewish.

    Sol LeWitt, installation view of Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed, 1988/2013, dimensions variable (artwork © Estate of Sol LeWitt; photograph by Steven Probert for Paula Cooper Gallery)

    Tonight’s gathering, titled “Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing: A Panel Discussion,” supplemented Paula Cooper Gallery’s current exhibition, Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed, which largely comprises a three-walled piece that has not been seen since its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1988. The panel’s moderator, Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, asked Cooper (who was sitting in the audience) to describe her experience of LeWitt making his first-ever wall drawing, which was part of her gallery’s inaugural show in October 1968. Briefly, the work (illustrated below) consisted of two squares, each made of four smaller squares that were formed by parallel lines, drawn directly on the wall with an ordinary pencil, that went in four directions: vertical, horizontal, and two forty-five degree diagonals. As a businesswoman, Cooper naturally wondered what would happen to LeWitt’s piece after the show’s conclusion, asking him “What do we do?” He responded, she recalled, by suggesting they “just paint it out.”

    The art historian and curator Brenda Richardson called this approach “an almost unimaginably radical act that dramatically influenced the evolution and sequential redefinitions of art over subsequent decades.”2 Certainly decorating the surfaces of walls with pigment or ink, as seen in cave paintings, Renaissance frescoes, and modern murals, is among the oldest, most venerable forms of art. Richardson’s argument, however, largely emphasizes the ephemeral nature of LeWitt’s work (“just paint it out”), its obliviousness to commercial concerns, and the removal of the artist’s hand, that is to say, anyone with the instructions can re-create a work by LeWitt. Of course one could find examples of such conditions throughout the history of art, but that’s beside the point here—dematerialization was all the rage in the late sixties.

    Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1: Drawing Series II 14 (A&B), 1968, black pencil, 48 x 108 in. (artwork © Estate of Sol LeWitt; photographer unknown)

    Reynolds asked his three colleagues at the table about their experiences with LeWitt’s work. He had first encountered it himself in the 1970s at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which had exhibited Wall Drawing #260 (1975), a piece now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the panelist Ann Temkin is chief curator of painting and sculpture. Previously Temkin spent thirteen years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns and displays a work called On a Blue Ceiling, Eight Geometric Figures: Circle, Trapezoid, Parallelogram, Rectangle, Square, Triangle, Right Triangle, X (Wall Drawing No. 351) from 1981, which was installed a year later on a barrel-vault ceiling in the modern-art wing of the museum’s enormous beaux-art building. During her thirteen years at the museum, she said, this work complemented everything that had ever hung below it. Reynolds agreed, saying that LeWitt was brilliant at placing his art inside buildings. He should know, since he organized a retrospective of wall drawings in 1993 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, where workers created forty-four drawings in ninety days for an exhibition that was up for only two months. Reynolds is also the man responsible for the twenty-five-year exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), on view through 2033.

    John Hogan, the technical manager for the Estate of Sol LeWitt who oversees the creation of new wall drawings—including the Paula Cooper show—first heard of his former boss when he, as a young artist in Chicago, became intrigued by a type of art that could move around the world in an envelope, which to him was a political gesture. Hogan recalled that during all the years he had worked for LeWitt, the artist never scolded a wall drawer by saying “you’re doing it wrong.” Instead LeWitt told that person that he or she didn’t comprehend or understand the work. I’m not quite sure exactly what the difference is.

    Hogan relayed how his assistants, from high schoolers to professional artists, love doing the job: for the ideas, for the travel, and for the employment—LeWitt was apparently generous with wages. Thousands of people have realized wall drawings over the past forty-five years, Reynolds noted, and some of the “wrecking crew” that made Wall Drawing #564 sat in the front row of the audience. Reynolds even asked one of them, Krysten Koehn, to say a few words. She had joined the team as an MFA student in the Yale School of Art and explained the respect and appreciation she now has for the intimate nature of LeWitt’s work. Her own art, she revealed, had become more idea and processed based as a result. Later Reynolds would similarly call on Erica DiBenedetto, who as a graduate student helped organize The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2008–9, to describe her curatorial experience. Who would Reynolds put on the spot next?

    The steady crew (from left): Ann Temkin, Jock Reynolds, John Hogan, and Béatrice Gross (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The clarity of LeWitt’s straightforward instructions, Hogan emphasized, belies the dedicated work needed to execute a piece. Everyone draws an “unstraight line” in a different way, he said, but a certain quality of line, color, and discipline is expected. Agreeing with Hogan, Reynolds said the idea, hand, and eye must work in tandem. Even though the artist died six years ago his work continues to evolve, Hogan noted. Sometimes artists bring new ideas for materials over time, and sometimes companies stop manufacturing the stuff favored by LeWitt. Nevertheless, he said, “the rendering should be optimum” to better present the idea, from straight lines to the crystalline facets produced by myriad triangular and pyramidal forms, as demonstrated at Paula Cooper.

    Béatrice Gross—the editor of a forthcoming digital catalogue raisonné of wall drawings, curator of Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings 1968–2007 at the Centre Pompidou Metz, and the only panelist never to have met the artist—firmly believed that a new iteration of an older work was not a copy or a reproduction, but rather that the “original” was the inaugural existence or embodiment of the work. Some wall drawings were made twenty-five times, she said, and others not at all. Because LeWitt had a pencil in hand until a week before his death, Gross noted that some of his late “scribbled drawings” had not yet been realized. The multigallery, multifloor installation at MASS MoCA has a few of these, which were dated to 2008 (LeWitt died a year earlier). Reynolds recalled that when visiting this show, the Conceptualist artist Mel Bocher was playfully astounded that his friend had outwitted him, discovering how a person could keep making new work even after passing on.

    An audience member asked Hogan how the color for the wall drawings is made and how it is communicated. Color choices are programmed, the technician answered, with simple combinations: overlays of red, yellow, and blue inks. At Paula Cooper, certain colors had only one or two combinations, while others had four or five. Regarding implementation, there is “no variable other than the human hand” when workers rub ink-soaked rags or draw hundreds of lines. The tools for making the work, LeWitt had insisted, should not be complicated. Again emphasizing quality, Hogan said the work should be concise and consistent but not clinical.

    Several times Reynolds and Hogan stressed how LeWitt saw each exhibition opportunity as a new project or experience. This, combined with the other elements of his practice—such as encouraging serialized production and chance operations within a single work—is “what young artists are still trying to wrap their heads around.”

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 122.

    2 Brenda Richardson, “Unexpected Directions: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings,” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2000), 37.

  • How the Ruling Class Stole the Idea of Contemporary Art—and How to Get It Back

    9.5 Theses on Art and Class with Ben Davis and Special Guests
    Thursday, September 5, 2013
    Housing Works Bookstore Café, New York

    Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013)

    At the end of the first chapter of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, the New York–based art critic and editor Ben Davis writes that a “theory of class might provide the missing center of the debate about art.” Indeed, the use, value, and status of art—especially in relation to politics and economics—have been the subject of a constantly flailing conversation since the Occupy moment, since the Great Recession, since the Bush years, since the rise of the biennial, since the Culture Wars, since Reagan, since Conceptual art, since Duchamp—okay, you get the point. It’s exactly this kind of exasperating, roundabout conversation that Davis wants to displace, and his new book does exactly that with resounding success.

    Much of this success comes not from confrontation and agitation but rather through reason, logic, and clear thinking, which is perhaps why the book launch with a five-person panel last week was such a cordial affair. After giving a brief autobiography, Davis declared that the book comes from a new place, without the usual art vocabulary, and that he wants to bring together the art and activist communities. (The left-leaning Haymarket Books, known for titles on radicals and revolutionaries, published 9.5 Theses on Art and Class.) Many of its thirteen chapters had appeared over the years, in rougher forms, at Artnet.com, but the material also came from vigorous conversations with artists, dealers, critics, and activists. A significant moment for the author was #class, an exhibition cum seminar cum think tank cum rant room that was held in early 2010 at Winkleman Gallery. Davis’s contribution to the event was the enumerated “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” a cumulative list of Marxist-informed positions that illuminates much of what is wrong—and what could be right—about the contemporary world of art. “So you’re calling for a Reformation?” the art dealer Edward Winkleman asked him at the time. Apparently so, and it’s about time.

    In his talk, Davis summarized the distinctions and misconceptions among proper definitions of working, middle, and capitalist classes, which are elegantly covered in the first chapter. It’s not quite accurate to identify the middle class as based on income, education, or culture, but instead by the nature of a worker’s relationship to his or her labor. A middle-class person, Davis said, has agency, independence, and the ability to be one’s own boss. As an example he selected the mother of a Chicago-based activist and friend who runs her own cleaning business and employs two workers. Despite the type of work she does—maid service, really—this woman is middle class when compared to someone else in the same job at, for example, a hotel.

    Taking the subject of a chapter in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011), Davis provided a second anecdote of class perception in art. For his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, Robert Morris turned the museum into a construction site, bossing around the workers who moved large pieces of timber, concrete, and steel. Despite an intention to appear as a working-class construction worker, he actually became a supervisor—a middle- or even ruling-class position—of a process piece involving forklifts, cranes, and pulleys, burning through hours of hired manpower. (Later on Davis proclaimed that blue-chip stars like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have exited art and become company floor managers.) Last, the author described a tension between the middle-class, noncommercial artist who fears of selling out (i.e., making money) compared to the working class, which purposefully fights for a bigger piece of the pie. This dual identity, hyperbolically described by some as schizophrenic, was a strong undercurrent for the panelists.

    The class of 2013 (from left): Blithe Riley, Jennifer Dalton, William Powhida, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Starting the discussion, Blithe Riley, an artist, activist, and member of a collective that founded Interference Archive in Brooklyn, considered 9.5 Theses on Art and Class to be inspirational while raising important questions. The book, she felt, unwittingly presented the identity of artist as totalizing; it also doesn’t reflect the experiences of the museum and gallery workforce. Art is an “opaque economy,” Davis responded, acknowledging that a primary problem is that an artist, whose creative labor is middle class, must sometimes identify simultaneously with the working class through a day job (that dualism again). With New York in mind I thought immediately of artists working as art handlers and in entry-level positions and internships at commercial galleries and nonprofit organizations.

    Jennifer Dalton, an artist whose work addresses sexism in the art world and an organizer of #class, had a problem with thesis 2.8: “Another role for art is a symbolic escape valve for radical impulses, to serve as a place to isolate and contain social energy that runs counter to the dominant ideology.” Not all art is radical, said Davis, whose observations in theses 2.0 to 2.9 explicate the roles of art for the ruling class, which of course do not foreclose other possibilities for creative labor. Dalton wanted to know about the political responsibility of artists and how it affects their practices: “When is an artist a citizen?” A better question, I think, would be “When is a person an artist and when is he or she a citizen?

    William Powhida, How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality, 2009, graphite on paper, dimensions not known (artwork © William Powhida)

    A veteran instructor for New York City public schools, the artist and #class conspirator William Powhida had started teaching this week and grumbled about the excessive time spent on administrative and evaluative duties that inevitably come with the position. He then conveyed his experiences as an artist with limited capital, which can be strained when studio accidents break expensive materials. With a corporate credit card for his practice—which is smartly registered as a limited liability company—Powhida has become that artist who produces work for art fairs, yet the majority of his income, he said, is derived not by selling his work with a gallery but through part-time teaching.

    Powhida is well known for creating art that is abrasive to the upper echelons of the art world but wonders about the effect his work has on this elite. For instance, what is he supposed to do when the Greek shipping magnate and art collector Dakis Joannou buys a print of a drawing called How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality that he designed for the cover of the November 2009 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, which satirized a decision by the downtown institution, on whose board Joannou serves, to let Koons organize an exhibition comprising only his holdings? After laboring in his studio throughout the early days of Occupy Wall Street in fall 2011, Powhida later attended meetings of the Arts & Labor working group but after a couple months decided that his satirical and parodic approach didn’t fit in with it. Undeterred, he has recently partnered with a few Bushwick artists and scenesters to investigate purchasing a commercial building to provide affordable studios for artists in an effort to slow down gentrification.

    Like Dalton, Naeem Mohaiemen, an artist, activist, and member of Gulf Labor, found thesis 9.0, which states that “The sphere of the visual arts is an important symbolic site of struggle; however, because of its middle-class character, it has relatively little effective social power,” to be contentious—if only as a call to arms to prove it wrong. He said that even a struggling artist has cultural capital and reiterated the evening’s recurrent notion of a person with multiple identities that cross class lines. To which group does an artist have a natural affinity, he asked, working or middle class? The answer is hard to produce here, but in other countries, he continued, divisions among classes are clear cut. Gulf Labor focuses on working conditions for migrant labor in the Middle East, that is, the ones who build the physical structures that house the institutions in which the art world works, such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. People [in America] dismiss the subject, Mohaiemen said, because they believe that it is too complicated and that workers should be happy to have jobs. To people over there, a New York artist is part of an aloof elite.

    52 Weeks of Gulf Labor announced at the Venice Biennale

    Everyone seemed to agree that artists have tremendous amounts of symbolic power but not enough to mitigate rapidly growing inequality. What is the centralized institution against which to strike, Davis asked. Artists will keep making art, he proceeded, whether they sell it or not. Dalton contended that artists should boycott, not strike: “Don’t participate in what you don’t believe in.” The power of saying no is certainly one implicit goal of a group like Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Similarly, Mohaiemen offered this advice to artists: “withhold and engage.”

    Circling back to the gentrification issue, a man in the audience with a British accent propounded that artists never exercise community power in their neighborhoods, like immigrants do. It is true that certain cultures have roots while others don’t. Powhida reminded him that his current interest—collectively buying and operating a studio building—would not displace residents; it’s an endeavor that aims to take advantage of underused commercial property—and therefore give the participants an important stake in the community. The questioning continued: Would the artists sequester themselves from the community? Should they teach computer classes to their neighbors? To me, these lines of thought obscure the larger picture, and Powhida has the right idea. Gentrification in New York can generally be mitigated in two ways: by owning property and through rent stabilization. The focus of advocacy efforts should be on education and action, in particular, guiding residents through the legal, financial, and governmental landscape of property ownership while helping enforce the rights of those facing eviction and displacement. The encroachment of hipster bars and restaurants, and galleries and boutiques, is consequential but beside the point. We need lawyers and social workers, teachers and those with political connections, not artists.

    One audience member contented that 9.5 Theses on Art and Class collapses politics into activism. “Professional revolutionaries” like Leon Trotsky or Hannah Arendt, he argued, would not think of themselves as activists. “Is activism your ultimate goal?” he finally asked. Davis briefly discussed his involvement with anti-racist, anti-prison, and anti-death-penalty groups, which he admitted has a narrow, limited scope. Yet helping people on a case-by-case basis, he hoped that this activity would have a larger impact. Powhida observed that Occupy Wall Street started large and fractured into working groups. The movement no longer has a discernible physical presence, amplified by the media and through confrontations with police, like it did in 2011, but instead operates on a smaller scale. I was reminded how Occupy Sandy mobilized relief efforts much quicker than established charities following the November 2012 hurricane.

    Looking beyond New York, Riley has noticed, through conducting professional-development workshops with Creative Capital across the country, that people all over have different solutions. The “professional art world,” she implored, needs to “think bigger.” She also encouraged people to step away from the art world and get involved in social-justice issues. “There are a lot of wins,” she said, that just “may not be visible” to someone with a passing interest in activism and politics. Dalton wanted people to “hesitate less” and “pick up a shovel.” Ultimately, Davis’s book makes its readers dig deeper, asking them—us—what they value in art and in life.

    In Terms Of count: 6.

    Read

    Carol De Pasquale, “And Then We’ll Dissolve the State,” In Terms Of, September 8, 2013.

    Edward Winkleman, “The Paradox of the Artist Activist,” Ed_ Winkleman, September 6, 2013.