what are the most pressing questions for contemporary curators today?
C U R A T I N G c c a c
N O W
C U R A T I N G
N O W
What are the most pressing questions for contemporary curators today? On November 13, 2002, FIVE panelists gave their perspectives on the issues and debates that are influencing the future of exhibition making. The transcripts of their contributions are reproduced in this publication. panelists Michelle Grabner, artist/indepen artist/independent dent curator/critic and director of the Suburban Gallery in Chicago Matthew Higgs, artist/writer and curator at CCAC Wattis Institute, San Francisco Lars Bang Larsen, independent curator/writer based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Glasgow, Scotland Renny Pritikin, chief curator of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Fred Wilson, artist based in New York
Curating Now Organized by the new MA Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in collaboration with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, to coincide with Bay Area Now 3, a triennial survey that presents recent developments in Northern California’s art scene.
cover photo: Eric Wesley, Kicking Ass, 1999 (China Art Objects, Los Angeles) photo: Kate Fowle
introduction
Kate Fowle There were two reasons to instigate this panel discussion, the first being the development of the graduate program in curatorial practice at CCAC. This kind of event is one of the ways in which we hope to open up discussions that start to unravel contemporary issues of curating and their relationship to current art practice and thought. The second reason, and the motivation behind the collaboration with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, was that it made sense to have this event in the context of the Bay Area Now 3 show. In his introductory essay for the exhibition catalog, René de Guzman, Yerba Buena’s visual arts curator, suggests that the artists selected for the show share an interest in creating subtle and idiosyncratic ways to visualize perceptions that evolve out of their immediate surroundings and experiences. Drawing on the language of film, politics, the media, and music—and with a strong emphasis on utilizing common materials or mundane actions—each artist works to challenge, or perhaps question, the conditioning that naturally develops through routine. At the same time they are linked by an obvious awareness of the broader context within which their work is now presented. The show can be seen as a spotlight—not just on the individual works, but also on the many discussions around current art practice and sociopolitical trends in the Bay Area. In a similar spirit, each panelist is going to outline his or her thoughts about curating in the context of his or her own work, as a starting point for further discussion. Each has been invited because of the contribution he or she has made to different approaches to, and perspectives on, current curatorial practice, helping to create a more open and discursive arena through which to think about and experience contemporary ideas and art. Curating today is a kind of r enaissance endeavor, with practitioners positioning themselves perhaps more as mediators or cultural producers than the upholders of an institutional mandate or purveyors of taste. Looking at the approaches taken by the panelists alone, we can start to see diverse strategies at play. They work as artists, writers, facilitators, performers, educators, and collaborators, commissioning new work from artists, re-presenting cultural and historical artifacts and data, initiating discussion, and creating exhibitions that highlight the fluidity of contemporary art practice. Each of the panelists has initiated projects that reveal different ways of understanding and interpreting the traditional museum display; of pushing the permeability of the “white cube” gallery space; or of developing the language of presentation in domestic settings and shops, in civic and corporate spaces, and on the street, as well as through publications. In effect you could say that this panel is a partial representation of ways that curators are going beyond working with spatial concerns in relation to art, creating mental, social, and political spaces through which issues and ideas that are relevant to us today can be explored.
biographies K a t e F o w l e is the associate director of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice and an adjunct lecturer in the MFA Program in Fine Arts at CCAC in San Francisco. Fowle is also codirector of smith + fowle, an independent partnership based in London and San Francisco that specializes in commissioning and curating contemporary art. Recent exhibitions include Shelf Life for Gasworks Gallery, London and touring (2001); three: art projects for social exchange for Kent Institute of Art and Design, U.K. (2000); and to be continued for The New Art Gallery, Walsall, U.K. (1999). A regular contributor to publications such as Contemporary, Artists Newsletter, and Graphics International, Fowle is writing a book on recent architecture in San Francisco, forthcoming in 2003 from Chrysalis Books. M i c h e l l e G r a b n e r is an artist, writer, and curator based in Chicago. She is codirector of The Suburban, a nonprofit space that she initiated in 1998 together with the artist Brad Killam, which hosts international artists and projects, including Dave Muller and Joseph Grigely. Currently Grabner is developing projects with the London-based collaborative Bank and with Luc Tuymans. Grabner also develops independent curatorial projects, including Inheriting Matisse: The Decorative Contour in Contemporary Art in 2002 for the Rocket Gallery in the U.K. In 1998 she collaborated with Lars Bang Larsen and Jacob Fabricius on Bicycle Thieves, which took place at multiple sites across Chicago. A regular contributor to Frieze, Tema Celeste, and New Art Examiner , Grabner is an associate professor of painting at the University of Wisconsin and a graduate advisor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 1996 Grabner has exhibited her paintings regularly with the Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica; Ten in One Gallery, New York; and the Rocket Gallery in the U.K.; as well as participating in numerous group shows across the U.S. and in Europe.
M a t t h e w H i g g s is curator at the CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and associate director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is also a faculty member of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at CCAC. Since 1992 Higgs has organized more than forty exhibition projects, including Program & Survive at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 2000, and The British Art Show 5, which toured the U.K. in 1999. Since arriving at the Wattis, he has organized To Whom It May Concern and Reality Check: Painting in the Exploded Field, both in 2002. A regular contributor to Artforum, Higgs has written for many catalogs and other publications on artists such as Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Rodney Graham, and Susan Hiller, among others. Higgs also publishes Imprint 93, a series of artists’ editions and multiples, which to date has presented more than seventy projects with artists including Elizabeth Peyton, Chris Ofili, and Paul Noble. As an artist, he is represented by Murray Guy, New York, and by Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
As an independent curator and critic, L a r s B a n g L a r s e n has established a reputation as one of the leading protagonists for contemporary Nordic art. In 1998 he was a curator for the Nordic Biennial that took place in Norway, and from 1997 to 1999 he was a curator at the Danish Contemporary Art Foundation, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bang also has developed exhibitions across Europe, including Pyramids of Mars in 2000 at London’s Barbican Art Gallery and Something Rotten in 1998 at the Fridericianum Museum, Kassel, Germany. Now working between Copenhagen and Glasgow, Bang is the author of many critical essays and interviews with artists who have emerged on the international scene over the last ten years, particularly those who engage in social and critical practice such as N55, Aleksandra Mir, Jens Haaning, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen. Currently he is an associate editor for Art/Text, Nu, and Springerin, as well as a contributor to Artforum and Frieze. Bang is also the art critic for the Copenhagen-based newspaper Politiken. Just before his trip to the West Coast, Bang mounted his most recent show, Fundamentalisms of the New Order, at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. His book about Sture Johannesson’s psychedelic art of the 1960s was published by Lukas and Sternberg in 2003.
R e n n y P r i t i k i n was named director of the Visual Arts Program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 1992 and s ubsequently chief curator for all artistic programs—visual art, f ilm, performing arts, and education—in 1997. He initiated the Bay Area Now triennial six years ago as a centerwide festival to celebrate regional practice. From 1988 to 1992 Pritikin served as executive director of New Langton Arts after joining the gallery as codirector in 1979. A founder of the National Association of Artists Organizations, Pritikin is a frequent consultant to the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies in California and nationally. In 2001 he was selected to organize the U.S. participation at the Cuenca (Ecuador) Biennial, and in 2003 he traveled to Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington, New Zealand, on a Fulbright fellowship. As a writer, Pritikin received the 1989 McCarron Fellowship for art criticism and has had two small press chapbooks of his poetry published. In 1995 he received a United States Information Agency fellowship to tour and lecture at four museums in Japan and the Koret I srael Prize, a fellowship to visit Israel. In 2003 Pritikin also will be a faculty member of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at CCAC.
F r e d W i l s o n is an artist who has become known for his pioneering interventions in the museum environment. For over two decades his projects, including the landmark Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, have exposed underlying cultural and racial issues in many institutions across the world. In 2001 his exhibition Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979–2000 was presented at the Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and it has subsequently toured the country. It was presented at the Berkeley Art Museum in January 2003, together with a new project that he has developed through his research at the university’s Hearst Anthropological Museum. Wilson has participated in many group shows internationally, including Museum as Subject at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan, in 2001, and Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in the same year. His work also was included in Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1994, as well as in The Museum as Muse in 1999 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Wilson has served on the boards of directors for many visual arts organizations, including Artists Space in New York and the National Association of Artists Organizations. He was a curator for the Bronx Council of the Arts from 1988 to 1992 and a member of the exhibition committee for Independent Curators Inc. in 1998. In 2003 Wilson will represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. He will also be a faculty member of the MA Program in Curatorial Practice at CCAC.
remarks on mediation and production
1
Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen We use the term “middleman” as an overall denominator for productive subjectivity, including the nominal roles of artist, critic, curator. Take the two of us, for example, artist/writer and critic/curator, respectively, we are at the same time producers, distributors, and consumers of art. Middlemen between ourselves.
In 1970, the critic Harold Rosenberg stated: “At the present time—and this explains the interest shown in [the curators’] work—only the middleman has the power to fulfill the dream of union between the creative individual and society.”2 Rosenberg’s nearly thirty-year-old concept of the middleman resonates with the many functions of today’s flourishing culture of middlemen and -women: curators, consultants, producers, DJs, facilitators, spin doctors, etc. People whose profession it is to mediate or to prevent the occurrence of problems. It seems like the middleman is a privileged agent of subjectivity in late capitalist-bureaucratic society. However, the concept of the middleman is more than a mere job description and more than a critique of certain functions; our claim is that middlemanship is today a general condition of authorship and behavior. The existence of middlemen indicates that exchange itself is central to how value is estimated. It means being acutely implicated, it is a portrait of the desire for complicity. There is, so to speak, no “outside middleman”: everyone is a middleman. Which isn’t to say we don’t do different things in different ways; it is subjectivity as it is predicated by the marketplace of a globalized economy. In 1993 Pierre Bourdieu wrote about the field of cultural production: “… the subject of the production of the artwork—of its value but also of its meaning—is not the producer who actually creates the object in its materiality, but rather the entire set of agents engaged in the field. Among these are the producers of works, classified as artists, … critics of all persuasions, … collectors, middlemen, curators, etc.; in short, all those who have ties with art, who live for art and, to varying degrees, from it, and who confront each other in struggles where the imposition of not only a world view but also a vision of the art world is at stake, and who through these struggles, participate in the production of the value of the artist and of art.” 3 Bourdieu’s analysis seems apt, if it weren’t for the productive identity he assigns to the artist as a maker of “material objects.” In the era of immaterial work this comes across as somewhat outdated. In other words, Bourdieu sees the site of artistic creativity as a primal scene of sorts; we would like to argue that there is no such primal scene of production. That is a modernist idea. Instead, the style of productivity today is a patchwork of mediated sign-materials. Let us take a look at the mechanisms of authorization that underpin the role of the cultural producer. What we are talking about might be called an evaluation of power, a dissection of the complex web of signification that the mediating subjectivity is entangled in. As Michel Foucault told us, having power or being empowered is not a problem in itself. The question is how power is used and represented. We need to find positive ways to evaluate power from within the role of the middleman, from the position of networking and being networked. The classical problem with the middleman—which is at the same time the perennial prejudice against the middleman—is that as soon as he interferes, the situation is no longer one to one. Middlemen are seen as the ones who quietly follow and are subservient agents of market trends. In opposition to the traditional notions of the maker, the worker, and the author, the middleman is only involved in a process part of the time, but in that time his agency significantly affects the further course of this process. Typically, his involvement raises the value of the goods that are circulated. He is seen as having shifting loyalties and being somewhat immune, comfortably placed as he is between producer and marketplace. You can’t reduce him and you can’t add anything to him. At the same time as he has power, he isn’t really the guy in charge, which is why it is difficult to address the question of authority in relation to the middleman. But on the other hand—and this is the other aspect of the middleman—we must bear in mind the colonized infrastructures of the past and the present. The middleman is not just somebody who quietly follows, but also one who can be a part of basic infrastructures. In This Sex Which Is Not One the feminist thinker Luce Irigaray talks about woman as a go-between, as having functioned as “an infrastructure, unrecognized as such by our society and culture ... everything depends on their complicity: Women are the very possibility of mediation, transaction, transition, transference—between man and his fellow-creatures, indeed between man and himself.” 4 It looks like the middleman can be more than one who, like capitalism, arrives when everything is ready. And infrastructures, of course, can convey many different desires, depending on their composition. The flows we put in orbit can be mere ornaments, but they can also be big waves or columns of rising air, staged to go somewhere in order to see what they collide with. In a lecture he gave at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle, England, almost exactly two years ago, Hans Ulrich Obrist stated his curatorial priorities: “[what is important is] how within curatorial practice and also within institutions one can bring back, against the background of an obvious acceleration, new forms of slowness. How can we re-inject slowness into velocity?” 5 We’d like to deconstruct this statement, because even though it is a criticism of the speed of productivity—certainly a relevant point—it still assumes that it is up to curatorial authority to slow things down, that it is up to the middlemen to perform the operation of “re-injecting slowness.” The curator, or the middleman, can speed things up and slow them down again. Now, which subjectivity injects slowness? From the above statement, the curator appears to be a kind of harmonizer. Can he also be a radicalizer, and if so, how? In any case it seems like the curator is free to choose different producer identities and different sets of operations for himself. Moreover, curators can decide what institutional format, or metaphor—archive, laboratory, platform, etc.—to work with.
But we shouldn’t isolate the curator’s professional identity in its pragmatic subjectivity. Let us try for a moment and think beyond this specialized role and have a discussion about the cultural location of mediation. The subjectivity of mediation—the middleman—is the subjectivity that brings us modernity. We are the ones through whom information travels. Often, you hear us curators urge pushing the envelope, urge new strategies to engage with new audiences, art practices, and ways of using the institution. The curator is professionally curious, looking for new ways and “tools” to implement these new strategies with. We want to question this notion of the curator as someone always waiting to be filled with new knowledge, new qualifications—in other words, the middleman as a receptacle. The figure or the concept of the receptacle is something recurring in discourse about avant-garde curatorship: The curator is one who is “learning from art and artists,” and a “pedestrian bridge between artist and audience,” to quote Maria Lind and Alexander Dorner. A migratory subject who is filled up by new meetings, new cities, new information. The curatorial mind is like a palimpsest, like Freud’s magical pad, the metaphor that he uses to describe the unconscious: it is covered, only to be erased, but something discernible always remains underneath. The curatorial mind is accumulative and erasing. How do the intentions of curatorial subjectivity translate to this manifest-and-erased knowledge? Today, production gets organized in shorter and shorter sequences through the discontinuous reinvention of institutions. In the networked society, every nodal point in the network is a go-between for flows, for material in movement. The cultural critic Bülent Diken has written that “network power is about the capacity to escape; its instruments are fluidity, liquidity, and speed. In ‘liquid modernity’ power lies in the ability to ‘travel light.’” 6 With this in mind we would like to quote the curator Francesco Bonami from his catalog text for the recent Manifesta 4: “To call Manifesta an exhibition is misleading [...] Because of its fluid structure when conceived and its mobile whereabouts it is impossible to identify Manifesta with a particular place or identity.” Presumably without wanting to, Bonami has here given us a very precise definition of authority as it today exists in its pure and amorphous form: it simply can’t be pinned down. We don’t know what form authority has or where it resides; it refuses to be identified. In the networked society, traditional parameters of evaluation have disappeared. What do we put in their place? When we use the term mediated sign-material, we want to talk about what exists under certain conditions: signmaterial that exists due to economical, ideological, or psychological interests and therefore always exists somewhere else too, namely in the context of these interests. Obviously, sign-material is always already pr oduced. We ought to focus on how to understand the significance and potential of mediated sign-material as a matter of fact. As a representative figure for this we want to propose the sign-materiality of the echo—the echo itself with no reference to the source, because a reverberation process produces a version of the source that is also a division: you end up with two different structures. A production of an echo that is deliberately promoted exposes a desire to produce something else by producing the divisions of versions. The production of an echo is a way to escape the authority of the source and therefore makes an implicit promise of change and difference. As we take it that this style of mediation-production is very much the raison d’être of the middleman—because sign-material is brought into a state of flow that enables a takeover of control—we again arrive at the question of how to relate to these gestures of promise and desire produced by the operations of the middleman. In other words: how do we trust the middleman? How do we trust ourselves as middlemen? The middleman, this agent of mediation-production, probably entered western civilization in the early eighteenth century, in the era when capitalism became articulated between global markets. However, here we would like to ask this question in a different way: how and when did civilization start to trust the workings of middlemen as cultural agents? How and when did a middleman gain power on his/her own terms? We would like to suggest that the work of Phil Spector in the early 1960s is such a turning point, in cultural/aesthetic mediation-production, which is the frame of this discussion. Interestingly, Spector’s rise coincided with what has been described as “rock’s lost weekend” (that is, 1959–64; from the decline of Elvis to the global breakthrough of the Beatles). 7 Spector was onto something different from the mythologies of the Bard. He didn’t perform, he rarely composed (he merely forced his autograph onto compositions), and still he became a star name in popular music. What he did do was to produce music in a very all-embracing meaning of the word. Born in the Bronx, New York, and partly raised in Los Angeles, Phil Spector established himself as a successful freelance producer by the age of nineteen, producing hit records for the Top 10 world of popular music. He formed his own record company (Phillies) by the age of twenty-one and took absolute control of all aspects of the music he produced and released. Composers and musicians were hired on a freelance basis—performers were constructed and renamed over and over, whether as solo or as group artists—and recording techniques and studios were developed to suit Spector’s sound production style: the Wall of Sound.
So, Phil Spector produced a sound—a style of music production. It has to be noted that the pop music of Spector was at the time regarded as highly disturbing as the songs were about teenage trouble and the sound was like “plastic”—not real—music, but a symptom of the times. He was very much aware of this and defined himself as a rebel, both in the sense that he gave teenage sensibility a cultural form and also because he transgressed the workings of the music industry. This double gesture combined the ambition to take over the means of production and to generate a public flow of adolescent desires, that were at the time very much excluded from the public sphere. What is of great importance here is that Spector didn’t operate by the means of dialectics; he didn’t establish an antithesis (a counter-cultural/subversive form) but aimed to gain impact on the “Top 10” world of popular culture. What he did was to establish a new synthesis of the means of production and we suggest that only a middleman could take on such an operation, as the ability to deal with all aspects of production is needed to gain authority. The authorship of the middleman is the control of the flow of production. There is no claim for autonomy in Spector’s Wall of Sound—it is merely a staged flow of desires that echoes a certain cultural sensibility. Accordingly, when this sensibility changed and Spector’s production style was adapted throughout the music industry, his powers declined. That is the sad fate of the middleman: as soon as you lose control of the flow, you’re replaced. The question of “style in production” might be the thing to take us further in this discussion of the middleman. The art historian Ina Blom has made some interesting remarks on style in contemporary art in her essay “Dealing with/in Style” (2001). She finds that discourses of style have vanished due to the influence of the terminologies of conceptual art and institutional critique, which regard discussions of style to be a simple question of reference and formalism. What she points out is that there is a “productive ambiguity of style in much recent art,” which cannot be represented in the before mentioned discourses. “In [...] these discourses [...] style functions as a marker or a symptomatic formation, which seems to pulsate around oppositional figures such as singular/general, subject/system, art/the everyday. It would perhaps be just as relevant, then, to focus less on what style is, it performs a kind of double gesture that both produces these divisions and renders them uncertain.”8 The point made here is that a contemporary discussion of style should “focus away from the postmodern notion of diversities of style in favor of an attention to the diversity—or the multiple operations—of the object of style itself.” This is a production of difference and ambivalence that has much to do with the present postmedia situation of art production, where formal media categories are no longer relevant and where productivity defines itself in terms of “project,” “situation,” or “event.” To take Ina Blom’s remarks a bit further, we find that her analysis of style applies very well to the overall look of many recent group shows. Curatorial work as well should be regarded as an agency of style that “performs a kind of double gesture that both produces [...] divisions and renders them uncertain.” A patchwork of mediated signmaterial, staged to produce differences. In this way, Obrist’s ambition to re-inject slowness would represent a desire to stage differences of velocity, and Bonami’s description of Manifesta exposes a desire to authorize ambiguity. Now, the most empathetic way of striking up a relationship with the multiple operations of the object of style—or should we say the multiple operations of the flow of style—would be one of interpretation rather than one of mapping. With a desire for interpretation, one has the chance to comprehend and maintain difference, whereas mapping—inherent to the concept of the postmodern style palette—is a gesture of archiving that is potentially inimical to invention. The mapping subject controls flows by making them irreversible in isolated domains, while not considering him/herself as part of that domain. Therefore, to us, parameters of trust hinge on the historicity and materiality of the way a flow is styled. How else do you evaluate the composite flows and your own role in the flow when you are part of it? Domains have to be opened up, roles switched around, and levels of experience synchronized in order to establish relationships and cede control. In conclusion, we are not suggesting that the middleman is to be reduced to a producer of symptomatic formations (something that has been a point in the critique of curatorial work), but rather that the middleman establishes an authority in the control of the flow of pr oductivity. In other words, the middleman is an author—and the author is a middleman—who exposes a desire to stage mediated sign-material, thereby producing a certain subjectivity.
Parts of this essay were presented at the conference “Polyphony of Voices” in Krakow, Poland, in October 2002. Andreasen and Bang have been collaborating on critical essays on practices and discourses surrounding contemporary visual art since 2000. As curators they are currently preparing The Echo Show, which will take place at the Tramway, Glasgow, in autumn 2003. 2 Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (1972), quoted in Claudia Büttner, Art Goes Public (Munich: Verlag Silke Schreiber, 1996), 221. 3 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 261. 4 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, quoted in Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 36. 5 The Producers (Newcastle: Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, 2000), 23. 6 Bülent Diken, “The Aesthetic Critique of Capitalism and Transpolitics of Immigration.” Conference paper, Under Construction (Helsinki, 2001). 7 At press time (May 2003) this discussion takes on a certain tragic resonance due to Spector’s arrest in February. 8 Ina Blom, “Dealing with/in Style,” Critics’ News (Helsinki, 2001). 1
from left to right: Lars Bang Larsen, Matthew Higgs, Michelle Grabner, Renny Pritikin, and Fred Wilson at Curating Now, November 13, 2002 photo: Shane Aslan Selzer
i work for history
David Robbins Michelle Grabner read from a screenplay-in-progress by artist and writer David Robbins. These excerpts offered the responses of Lycra Duvall, curator at the Center for Contemporary Acquisitions, in attendance at an art opening. Look how they keep their distance. That’s fine. Let them fear me. They know that Lycra Duvall has drawn a line. They know that History and she have an arrangement—the sort of arrangement which licenses her to sit in a darkened conference room at the Center for Contemporary Acquisitions gazing at the projected slides of an altogether minor artist who stands nearby promoting his creations, her impatience with his presentation mounting, her attention quite understandably wandering from his babbling to the genuinely important meeting to be held later that day with a group of collectors, licenses her to turn to him and ask him, point blank, whether he actually considers what he’s doing to be a career. Sure it was a hard question to ask, but those of us who are history’s deputies are fully authorized to ask hard questions. Authorized and obligated. Just last week, that feisty Michael Applicatta character had the cheek to assert—to my face—that art history is a fiction, invented in order to justify and reinforce the transactions of the art marketplace ... How tiresome. Yes, Michael, a curator does work with just a part of the big picture, but that’s hardly the same thing as equaling an outright fiction. A person can only work with what has become known. The evidence. Which is always and only a portion of what has been produced during a given historical period. God! A Lycra Duvall grows so weary of explaining that art history is always a partial history, that we do have the evidence and the evidence is real, as real as this strand of pearls circled about this beguiling throat. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs—not only is the evidence real, the evidence is in fact all anyone has to go on. How can that possibly be characterized as a fiction? Something that is known is never a fiction. A Lycra Duvall is a successful curator because she understands that her power as a curator is predicated on her skill in advancing your sense of the power of the evidence while suppressing your sense of the fiction. This is not a skill possessed by all. I can’t seem to get used to how unfamiliar with beauty so many artists seem. So many artists mistake the merely weird for the beautiful. So many settle for the weird ... the transgressive ... the subversive .... That, or they settle for personal adventure! As though personal adventure were sufficient excuse for creating something that has forgotten beauty is its goal! Who’s Martha? Really, you don’t know? Don’t tell me history has already forgotten Martha McCoy! Head cheerleader for “post-professionalism”? Author of Strategic Shrugging, and Assert the Power of Caprice ? Well, then I’ll tell you. Artists were to abandon New York, LA—abandon the centers. The real action was now in the provinces, supposedly. Why an artist should want to go from being an insider to an outsider artist, when the normal
progression is completely in the other direction, this is beyond me, but be our guest, Ms. McCoy, move out of New York. Move to Omaha. Move to Shreveport. What’s that? You detect a shade of anger? How astute. My show— Style, Structure, I dentity, Politics, Gender, Context, Issues: A Reconsideration —was only the most important show that year. And Martha? “Not in the mood,” was little Martha’s reply to my invitation—after which she turns around and shows the piece I’d requested in some gallery in a suburban Youngstown strip mall! Why, Martha? “Liked the organizer’s phone manner.” Well, that one was always on the nasty side anyway. “Curators are art dealers who lack the guts to open galleries,” I remember she asserted once, publicly, when we were empanelled together. Why is it people are always advising other people to relax? Not if you keep instructing me to, I can’t! Anyway, that’s all in the past. Martha’s hopelessly ’90s. Professionally, we’re under no obligation to consider her contribution for another twenty years. In the meantime there’ll be plenty of opportunities to conspicuously overlook Ms. Martha McCoy. Unfortunately, an artist has all the time in the world. They either have a date with history or they haven’t. If they do, they can wait us out. They have forever. Not a privilege that’s extended to the curator, may I point out. We don’t have the luxury of forestalling an intimacy with history. A curator has to make the most of a proximity to history right now, while she’s still drawing breath. During her lifetime. Why do I put up with the pressure? If I had a Raymond Pettibon for every time I’ve asked myself that very question.... It certainly isn’t the money, I can tell you that. Fame? Please: I can hang a retrospective in the time it’d take the layman to name a famous curator. Whereas everyone remembers the artist. No, the reason is quite simple. Simple and beyond reproach. Lycra Duvall has a responsibility to beauty. She has always felt an obligation to identify, to protect, to advance beauty. All her life she has felt close, personally close, to quality things. Lycra Duvall works for history. Demanding? History? Between the egos of the trustees, the museum director, one’s competitors, the artists ... —honey, a diamond would feel the pressure.
David Robbins has had more than thirty solo exhibitions of his work in the United States and Europe, and he is the author of numerous essays and satires. Since 1997 he has frequently collaborated with Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam on video projects. In May 2003, their video, One Mother’s Love, was exhibited at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, Chicago.
between the audience and the stage
Matthew Higgs I recently turned thirty-eight. Before moving to California at the end of last year, I lived and worked in London for almost fifteen years. Before that I studied as an artist in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for three years. And before that I lived in a small market town in the Northwest of England called Chorley. Chorley made me. It defined who I am. In the late 1970s—my youth—Chorley was down on its heels. Chorley had—and probably continues to have—a lack of self-confidence. A predominantly working-class community, Chorley had grown up around the textile mills established in the late-Victorian era. By the time Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, Chorley’s once-proud manufacturing heritage (with its accordant legacy of trade unionism) was already long gone. My youth was dominated by the specter of unemployment, by the specter of Thatcherism. Beyond a handful of pubs there was little or nothing to do. I had four close friends, brought together by a shared passion for the then-developing independent music scene that had emerged in the aftermath of punk. I f Chorley did have one thing going for it, it was its proximity to Manchester and Liverpool. Manchester and Liverpool would provide me—more than any schooling ever would—with my primary education. For those not from the northwest of England it is hard to describe the importance of these places during the years between 1978 and 1981. There existed a skeptical pragmatism, nurtured through years of economic neglect that was as palpable as the gray skies that hung over our heads. From the estranged perspective of Chorley, the London of the Sex Pistols and The Clash, the London of 1976 and 1977, was a foreign land. (At that time I didn’t actually know anyone who had even been to London.) Manchester in the late 1970s was home to Joy Division, The Fall, and Factory Records; Liverpool home to Echo and the Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes, and Eric’s nightclub. I ultimately became interested in art through an interest in music. Obscure references on record sleeves induced my curiosity for the Situationist Internationale, the Dadaist milieu of the Cabaret Voltaire, the twisted literature of William Burroughs and other avant-gardes. In 1979, aged fourteen, I started a fanzine. Inspired by the proliferation of independent publishing and fueled solely by teenage enthusiasm, my fanzine was to provide me with a line of communication that went beyond Chorley’s claustrophobic limitations. Despite its modest circulation I soon found myself implicated in an informal network of like-minded correspondents from across Britain, Europe, and eventually the United States and beyond. It was a community of sorts. Certainly the first I had encountered outside of my immediate circle. Aged fourteen, the world suddenly got larger. Today, when I am asked to talk about my practice as a curator, writer, publisher, and (sometimes) artist, I always refer back to this time. For me it is important to publicly acknowledge how and why I became involved in working with artists. There is no consensus as to the role of the curator, just as there is no definition as to what constitutes
art. In struggling toward rationalizing my own practice, the closest I have come is in the possibility and potentiality of working “between the audience and the stage.” The reference to a “live” context is as intentional as it is explicit. All exhibitions—whatever form they might take—are “events,” ultimately dependent on their relationship with an audience, with a lived experience. My own experience as a teenager, in fact the reason why I started to write, publish, and distribute my fanzine, was born out of a frustration with the traditionally passive role consigned to the audience while simultaneously acknowledging no personal desire to perform on the stage. Between the audience and the stage, between the spectacle and its reception, there exists, I believe, a “space,” a tangible if indefinable space in which to operate. It is in this “space” that I am interested, and it is this “space” that I continue to negotiate. I have always enjoyed organizing things. While publishing my fanzine I would simultaneously organize gigs in my hometown—bringing the mountain to Mohammed, if you like. Later, while studying art in the mid-1980s, I started a nightclub in Newcastle with a friend from art school. Each of these endeavors was born out of a necessity. Born out of a desire to make something happen. To fill a void. To alleviate boredom. To make life more interesting. My involvement with art, and with developing projects with artists, emerges from exactly these same desires. I’m interested in “gaps,” in the spaces, situations—and sometimes individuals—that are neglected or overlooked for one reason or another. The monolithic institutions with their accordant bureaucracies hold no fascination. If nothing else they are too unyielding, seemingly unable to act responsively. In 1993, after a six-year, self-reflexively inactive period, I initiated a publishing project called Imprint 93. Indebted as much to the do-it-yourself aesthetics and strategies of fanzine culture as it was to the earlier methodologies of, say, fluxus or the mail art movement of the 1970s, Imprint 93 was a vehicle, an agency, through which I could both commission and distribute artists’ projects. Despite me being the sole proprietor, my project was essentially a collaborative act—an accumulative project: the sum of its parts. Its motto: “Imprint 93 celebrates other people’s ideas.” Realistic in its ambition, Imprint 93 operated on a minuscule budget, supported for many years by my income from a part-time administrative job in an advertising agency. Imprint 93 was an attempt to rationalize my ongoing interest in contemporary art while negotiating the everyday practicalities of living and working within a specific context: namely, London in the early 1990s. The “local” is often depicted pejoratively, invariably aligned with suspect nationalistic tendencies. I don’t subscribe to this view of the local. A sense of locality and an acknowledgment of the responsibilities (and limitations) that go with working within a particular community are at the center of my practice. An acknowledgment of the specificity of a particular context and how its particular (and peculiar) nuance impacts upon individuals and cultural production continues to motivate me. Much has been written about the London art scene of the 1990s. Mythologized through the acronym “yBa” (young British art/artists), the real story of British art’s passage through the 1990s has yet to be written. Contrary to its received history, there existed a spirit of adventure and exchange. Despite, or in spite of, often conflicting interests, a genuine sense of dialogue existed. Artist-run spaces, artist-led initiatives, artists’ collectives, collaborative projects, and individualistic gestures were proliferating. Each in their own distinct way struggling toward a redefinition, a reexamination, a reconsideration of what constituted a public threshold for the presentation and dissemination of art. It was, in the best sense of the word, amateurish, run largely by enthusiasts. Improvisatory and ad hoc, it survived and thrived outside of any commercial imperatives. These determinants impacted upon my publishing project. Distributed by mail and free of charge, Imprint 93 published some sixty projects. Its hybrid form allowed it to represent my, often catholic, tastes in art: from, at one extreme, the brutal and often maudlin poetry of punk musician Billy Childish, to the tragicomic conceptualism of Martin Creed at the other. Imprint 93 operated in the manner of both a parasite and a virus. Parasitical inasmuch as it was realistically aware of its dependency on the context of the art world for its legitimacy; viral inasmuch as it arrived unannounced, unsolicited from an ostensibly anonymous source. In the early 1990s few, if any, people in London were publishing and distributing new work by artists in this way. Imprint 93, by default, had the territory to itself. It distinguished itself through a lack of alternatives. Imprint 93 afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with a generation of artists, of roughly a similar age, at an early stage in their practices, establishing mutual working relationships that persist to this day. This sense of continuum, the necessity for an ongoing dialogue that goes beyond the momentary status of a particular project or “event” is critical to my practice as a curator. Over the last ten years I have realized some one hundred projects with artists, either independently or through the agencies of public or private organizations. From their outset each project is determined by the specifics of its context. Curating remains a largely intuitive act. My job—if it is a job—is to establish an appropriate response to each given situation. Consequently each project is different—determinedly so—demanding an entirely distinct rationale. Of course this might sound like stating the obvious, but the reality is that most exhibitions are still instigated, administered, realized, and received according to models established decades ago—models increasingly inappropriate to current artistic production. This “consensus” or status quo has increasingly led to the homogenization of exhibition culture. A culture that aspires to a kind of visual Esperanto, the results of which are invariably empty spectacles drained of any specific nuance, inflection, or dialect. In 2000, the British artists collective Bank imagined a scenario in which all of the publicly funded galleries in London would be forcibly closed down—in turn, taking all the money from “… those curators & status-mongers & bureaucrats & moneymen & managers.” According to Bank’s vision, those monies would then be redistributed “… to ARTISTS, who would set
up loads of temporary, more exciting spaces for lots of artists to show in. There’d be much more art around because the money would go so much further than it does now as it wouldn’t be spent fuelling the careers of all those who pretend to be the friends of artists but are really their lazy, powerful enemies … JUST IMAGINE ALL THAT ART! It would make London a phoenix reborn from the ashes of bureaucracy!! LET’S DO IT!!!” This might seem a little dramatic, but I can sympathize with Bank’s position. (Indeed, why restrict it to London?) The contemporary art world is too professional. The increasingly bureaucratized role of the curator should—as Bank identified—be the cause of some concern. Curators do not initiate shifts in culture—at best they can merely respond to the new directives initiated by artists. The artist should be privileged at all costs. Artists are among the last great amateurs. My dictionary locates the origin of the word “amateur” in the Latin for “lover.” Nowadays the amateur is a maligned figure—often little more than a byword for contemptible ineptitude. But in our increasingly professional and bureaucratic art world we should learn to cherish the amateur, learn to celebrate those rare individuals motivated by enthusiasm and love. From the inspired Victorian philanthropist Sir John Soane, whose incredible museum in central London remains unburdened by the typical hierarchical notions of value and taste, to the recent projects of the British artist Jeremy Deller, the spirit of the amateur is alive and well. I once contributed a list of ten exhibitions that I wish I had curated to a fanzine ( The Poor Pony, issue 1113: The Liaison). A significant number of them are exhibitions curated by artists, and I would like to speak briefly about one of them by way of a conclusion. Jeremy Deller recently completed a yearlong residency in the Bay Area with the publication of his Capp Street project After the Gold Rush, an idiosyncratic guidebook to California. Deller operates loosely within the relatively recent trajectory of the “artist-curator”: a slippery coalition, whose numbers would surely include such seminal figures as Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, and Claes Oldenburg. Deller’s ongoing project proposes a radical reappraisal of conventional assumptions about both artistic and curatorial practice. Unconvention (1999–2000)—while not typical—is illustrative of Deller’s approach. Essentially a group show—for which I wrote the introductory catalog text— Unconvention was devised specifically for the short-lived Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff, South Wales. Unconvention emerged from an earlier Deller project, T he Uses of Literacy (1997). The Uses of Literacy was a display of artifacts—drawings, paintings, poetry, and prose—produced by fans in response to the historical and cultural interests and obsessions of the Welsh rock group the Manic Street Preachers. Described by one of its participants as “… a poetic record—seen through often extraordinary images—of the screams, sighs, and whispers of some remarkable young people…,” The Uses of Literacy encapsulated and prioritized the latent creativity of its teenage authors. The Manic Street Preachers, more so than any other British band, have continually sought to contextualize their intentions through references to other artists and writers. For their fans, the band has, in turn, become a kind of parallel education: providing them with access to images and literature denied or suppressed by conventional schooling. Rejecting conventional curatorial wisdom, Deller assembled an exhibition from the viewpoint of a rock band, rather than from an art historical, theoretical, or thematic perspective. The resulting exhibition provoked visual juxtapositions as unlikely as they were profound: key works by Lawrence Weiner, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Martin Kippenberger, Pablo Picasso, and Jenny Saville were displayed alongside documentary war photographs by Robert Capa, Kevin Carter, and Don McCullin. Archival sections devoted to the Welsh miners’ fraternal involvement in the Spanish Civil War sat alongside the complete literature of the Situationist Internationale. For its opening weekend, Deller invited numerous local organizations—from Amnesty International and the Campaign against the Arms Trade, to fanzines produced by fans of the band—to set up stalls amid the artworks. Reminiscent of a radicalized village fete, the opening weekend’s events concluded with an impassioned speech by Arthur Scargill—president of the National Union of Mineworkers—and a stirring performance by the Pendyrus Male Choir, singing songs of passion and resistance, songs originally sung in the mining communities of South Wales. Each artwork, each organization, each document, each individual was accorded an emotional and intellectual equanimity. The usual distinctions between “high” and “low” cultural artifacts were abolished. Unconvention was one of the most context-specific “artworks”/exhibitions I have encountered. It engaged explicitly and unashamedly with the social, cultural, and political legacies of its constituents—the people of South Wales—mediated through the agency of a local contemporary rock band, which since its inception has sought to address the discrepancies and injustices that exist in society. That some four thousand people attended its opening weekend made it all the more remarkable, not only validating Deller’s enterprise but vindicating his persistent belief that art does not and cannot exist in isolation. Jeremy Deller operates as a catalyst. Working literally “between the audience and the stage,” Deller’s art is an art of democratization: one that demystifies and liberates the construction of meaning, empowering both its audience and participants alike. Ultimately Unconvention consolidated my own persistent belief that art does have the potential both to illuminate and to transform our experience and expectations of life, without patronizing its audience. It reinforced the necessity for self-determination that I had encountered as a teenager in the independent music scene of the late 1970s. In amplifying and privileging mutuality, Deller served to remind us that only together can we confront and challenge orthodoxy and that together we must accept responsibility for our own destiny. Or as the Bristol band The Pop Group once said, “Where there is a will, there has got to be a way.” “Between the Audience and the Stage” is a revised version of a text originally commissioned by Catherine Thomas for her anthology of contemporary curators’ writings, The Edge of Everything (Banff, Canada: Banff Centre Press, 2002).
Peter Fillingham, Installation of Window and Untitled photo: Kate Fowle
notes toward a curatorial portrait of
2002 Renny Pritikin ybca
When SFMOMA was rehoused in 1995, the architect of its new building, Mario Botta, frequently stated that he saw the museum as the new cathedral. This set the curatorial team at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts pondering about the architectural metaphor for our ambition for this institution. We aspire to be a different kind of public site, perhaps a really comfortable bus station or a really cool mall. That is, a place where you can hook up with the means to get you where you need or want to go inexpensively or get turned on to the newest stuff without having to buy it. If you go to a baseball game you will always see at least one thing you’ve never seen before. We’re seeking to design a museum experience that’s equivalent; a place where it is safe and fun to hang out and meet or watch or learn from a wider-than-usual variety of people for a few hours. In those kinds of places we feel unselfconscious, interested, comfortable, relaxed, ready to spend some time, never sure exactly what might happen, open to possibility. The site has a context and meaning, but it is open-ended, rife with potential. We’re talking about the life of the mind being understood as a good scary choice, an escapade.
It’s a given that most curating in contemporary art is of artists, not art; perhaps the next step is curating of not just artists, but projects and institutional alignment. We can identify in a rough way four areas of activity at YBCA that put that evolution in thinking to practical use. These include:
1. the “lively mix” of community-based pop culture and contemporary art 2. multidisciplinary approaches, including Centerfest theme projects 3. remodeling the museum for the new century with the whole of visual culture in the mix. For example, in our bicycle culture show (or boxing, or surf culture, or hip-hop, or comics, or tattoo, or halls of fame, et al.) we were able to achieve diversity and a wonderful variety of materials: Latino teens’ low-rider bikes, artist bikes, designer abstract bikes, prison-made bikes, and state-of-the-art commercial mountain bikes and progenitor cruisers from the ‘40s. 4. repositioning the institution as a catalyst, a shape-shifter, a resource, a good partner, “solving more problems than we create” Okwui Enwezor, the curator of the most recent Documenta in Germany (2002), said, “I want to make a distinction between curating within the canon and curating within culture. ... That is, to curate within culture is to see art in a totality that is not simply bounded by art history. It is there that we begin to make room for new forms of knowledge, new possibilities for articulating different types of intelligence that are unruly and cannot be disciplined by the academic world.” He is arguing for expanding the universe of the kinds of art we look at beyond the academy and outside art history. I have found in my practice that if we open up the gates that far it just doesn’t make sense to then continue to exclude the greatest percentage of our society’s visual production, which is generally referred to as visual culture. Things we make that are beautiful, interesting, emblematic, informative, worthy of scrutiny, that are not art or considered art generally. We are not equating this material with art; we’re saying that the question of whether it is art or not is not the driving force for us, all the time. It is this insight that has led Yerba Buena to produce exhibitions that are one consistent thread in our programming, that are manifestations of what people are actually doing and making and getting excited about in our communities. The number one rule you’re taught in curator school is not to go over the line to thinking you’re an artist. I think in most cases, and certainly within traditional practice, that is true and important. However, in order to take on these kinds of projects it is necessary for the curator to take a more active stance. I don’t know if it is an artistic practice, but it is more of an artistic practice than merely exercising connoisseurship. It probably is close to being an oldfashioned impresario, crossed with the newer notion of a facilitator. In our experience, putting on such projects involves responding to and/or assembling teams of community aficionados/experts as consulting curators. This can’t be overemphasized because they often are the ones who push us to think of different approaches—beyond art about bikes or by bikers, why not show bikes themselves or keep pushing the idea and show bike-related ephemera like patches and ‘zines and outfits? Also it is vital to engage partners such as fringe commercial supporters (comics stores, bike stores), relevant political groups (San Francisco Bicycle Coalition), new audiences (subscribers to bike newsletters, Critical Mass enthusiasts), non-art institutions (environmental groups), academics (UC Berkeley professor Iain A. Boal’s “Bicycle Roots”), including also other arts groups, media sponsors, et al., ad infinitum. So the idea that has been radical for us is working with cultural participants to create an opportunity to celebrate their achievements. We can guide their enthusiasm and expertise with our ability as outsiders to edit and bring to bear our knowledge of display, organization, marketing, etc., as well as access to our facility and whatever financial resources we can muster. The image is of an institution that is no longer monolithic and stable, but rather involved in a constantly shifting network of alliances, projects, communities, supporters, and partners. Our goal is to have an institutional identity that is as contingent, in flux, fugitive, self-renewing, complex, and evolving as any individual’s identity.
Fr e d W i l s o n Although an ever-changing phenomenon, museums move imperceptibly, almost glacially. And as they move, they absorb new ideas along the way, freezing them and fusing them with their own established ways of doing things. In my own practice I’m interested in mixing genres, communities, popular culture, art and artifacts, etc., in a more fluid way, and I’ve been doing this for quite a while. At the time I created Mining the Museum, 1992, at the Maryland Historical Society, major art museums rarely made exhibitions that challenged the master narrative of the great white male artist as genius, or group exhibitions of “treasures and masterpieces.” When they had previously tried organizing unusual exhibitions, such as Primitivism in Twentieth-Century Art, 1984, organized by William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, or Magiciens de la Terre, 1989, organized by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Pompidou Center, Paris, they were roundly attacked from all sides, sending many into retreat. Though I agree with the critiques of these exhibitions I do not agree that this was an indication that museums should give up trying to break out of the stale environment they had become and maintain their status quo, as some would have liked. I’m interested in how mainstream museums take in new curatorial ideas and then regurgitate them for the public. Although my ego’s not so big as to allow me to take complete credit for all new ideas, I do feel like the work I’ve done over the last fifteen years has had some impact on museums. Curating internationally is going through a welcome change, but the road is a bumpy one. Curators in major museums are trying to diversify their exhibitions and do things in ways that were unheard-of only fifteen years ago. I think what’s going on in international exhibitions, organized mainly by independent curators in alternative museums and spaces, seems to display an understanding of what’s at stake socially and culturally. Many national museums, however, have recently been engaging the public with exhibition schedules that try to both organize exhibitions in a traditional way and create shows that mix things up a bit, with, in my opinion, varying degrees of success. For the most part what I’m seeing makes me nervous. I would like to mention a few exhibitions that stand out in my mind as ones whose problems are very emblematic of the state of contemporary exhibition making in major American museums, and in this way instructive. Some of the curators are, I think, fantastic and I always believe that we can grow by making problematic exhibitions. So this critique is not intended to slap hands, but rather to encourage learning about things by doing them. The first exhibition I want to mention is Black Romantic, 2002, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, organized by Thelma Golden, a really gifted curator. Golden presented black artists engaging in the art world and those who work outside the mainstream but often have a great deal of success within a black art market. All representational, a great deal of the art was illustration or design based, focusing on popular themes relating to African-American culture. This work was shown alongside artworks of subtle and complex African-American subject matter and visual invention, and I believe that the curator acknowledged the distinction between the two in her essay, albeit in an oblique way. Due to that and the way the exhibition was set up, it seemed to be an uneasy mix of an ethnographic study and the usual type of art museum display based on aesthetic quality. It is confusing to create an exhibition in an art museum partially around a cultural phenomenon and partially around the artworks’ aesthetic value, rather than combining the two. Forefronting cultural phenomena over visual interest is reminiscent of an anthropologist’s—rather than an art curator’s—approach to exhibition making. Actually, I’ve been seeing these anthropological/art exhibitions a lot lately—they have become something of a cultural phenomenon in themselves! Of course I am interested in an anthropological way of curating, but it might be best to be clear about what constitutes examples of cultural phenomena that are instructive but lack vivid visual excitement, and what is worth a second look as particularly interesting art and visual culture. Without clarity of intention this approach can miseducate the public. An example of a successful visual art presentation that really struck me can be found at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. This museum is very clear about including current indigenous artists’ works in its contemporary art galleries. While they might not be working within the international artmaking that we are more usually presented with, the museum sees these artists as contemporary and therefore part of the dialogue about contemporary art, and it exhibits them alongside their European-descended Australian artistic peers. That a similar dialogue has not taken place in recent years in American museums is to me a huge oversight, to put it mildly. This is not only a problem of curating interesting exhibitions and the need to invigorate them, but also a clear indication that there are artists who are being systematically overlooked.
And race is not the only area of oversight. Although you do see one or two so-called outsider artists occasionally included in exhibitions—such as the mind-blowing carnival costumes in Beau Monde, 2001, at SITE Santa Fe and the gorgeous African-American quilts in the last Whitney Biennial, 2002—these are the exception to the rule due to fearless curators. Outsider artists’ relationships to current art practice—the fact that they are working in contemporary times—is somehow not enough for them to have a dialogue within exhibitions of contemporary artists working in what I call “the international style.” In fact, I’ve had ongoing conversations with outsider artists in Georgia and North Carolina, who over the years have told me how they have to “act dumb” around collectors, who don’t want to know that these artists actually communicate and compare notes. So they have to act like they are really alone, working in a wilderness of their own minds. The other exhibition that reminds me of Black Romantic is the Norman Rockwell exhibition at the Guggenheim, New York, 2001–2. The museum used the hackneyed “artist-as-genius” mold to present an artist eternally popular with Americans, but ignored the obvious questions that might surround Norman Rockwell’s work. To me this is an appropriation of what has been going on in alternative art exhibitions to insincere ends. Choosing a subject ignored by the “high art” community, but one of mass appeal, and recasting an insider American illustrator as an “outsider” artist could have been brilliant, if the museum confronted the complexity of the choice and educated its audience, rather than just count the cash at the door. I think probably where the curators of the Rockwell show went astray was in not really saying what they were trying to do, whereas Thelma Golden did. Part of the problem is that (unfortunately) the public doesn’t expect a dialogue about society, fame, multiple art markets, and parallel art worlds when they go to museums. Ironically, they don’t even expect to have to grapple with aesthetics. The public expects one truth, the highest quality, and one way of thinking about an artist. This expectation was created by the art market and is supported by the major museums themselves. They create “masterpieces and treasures” exhibitions, which decide for the viewer what great art is, without explaining why (visually), and they organize shows touting the artist-as-genius, as if “he” (quotation marks intended) were just born that way. This dumbs down the public to believe they do not have to actively engage their own critical instincts, flex their own connoisseurship muscles. They are not given the tools to understand that they have a role in their own aesthetic and cultural development. In an art museum, ignorance is not bliss—and should not be. A museum could honestly explain who the curators are, and how the environment within and without acted as the catalyst for its choice of exhibition. It could discuss the philosophical concerns that determined its decisions. Simply opening up the process of exhibition making for the public to understand might go a long way toward diffusing any frustration. Occasionally major museums do flip into exhibition-as-dialogue mode in an effort to remain current with contemporary exhibition-making trends, leaving the public to wonder, “Well, are we supposed to think this is great art? Is this what the museum thinks? Who should we trust?” and causing further confusion. For example, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized an exhibition for the millennium called MOMA 2000, which combined the art and design of various departments of the museum, again with mixed results. The one problematic gallery I particularly remember is the one where they combined works from the Painting and Sculpture Department with the Design Department, pairing a Joseph Beuys felt suit with a designer suit. The meaning of the felt suit, even though explained on the label, was evacuated from it because of the visual relationships being built up around the room. The visual almost always cancels out attempts to modify the meaning with label text, if there is an inherent strength in what you see, especially if the text and image are at odds. In contrast, a similar type of exhibition they did that really worked well was Ensor/Posada, part of Modern Starts: People 1999–2000. Here a seemingly simplistic visual connection—between the use of cadavers and skeletons in the work of the Belgian expressionist James Ensor, and that of his contemporary, the Mexican folk artist Jose Guadalupe Posada—was supplemented by a very complex case for the relationship between the artists and their work, which was extremely satisfying. The first exhibition at the new MOMA QNS, for me, presented a similar problem albeit on a smaller scale. It was called Tempo and each room had a theme. One room entitled “Time Elapsed” was a show about artists’ use of time in their work. It used the visual to a fault, presenting works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cildo Mereiles, Matthew McCaslin, Andrea Zittel, and several other artists, all of them using clocks, so that it really felt like a clock store in there. The meaning of these works was, again, completely lost, because in the desire to have a theme and maintain visual cohesion, the conceptual underpinning behind these objects that made them more than clock studies just disappeared. Beau Monde, the SITE Santa Fe exhibition organized by Dave Hickey, was hands-down the most beautiful exhibition I have ever seen. It had art, it had so-called crafts, it had folk/popular culture, and the exhibition architecture itself was designed to inform your reception of the art. However, the beauty of the installation and the beauty of the art rendered meaning subservient, nothing had to be culturally important or intellectually stimulating; though outside of this context, they were. Everything was beautiful and colorful in the extreme, so visually dazzling it had a numbing effect, subverting at least a good part of the artists’ intention. This to me was the most problematic and reactionary use of what we’ve been doing with contemporary exhibition making in the last twenty years. The exhibition included Ellsworth Kelly paintings paired with Ken Price ceramics, New Orleans carnival costumes next to a Jessica Stockholder sculpture, Bridget Riley paintings, a Josiah McElheny glass installation, etc. It included works that had some inferences of pornography, some inferences about the dark side of childhood, but you didn’t think about any of that. It was like eating colorful cotton candy: you whomped it down and then wondered, what did I eat?
California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) MA Program in Curatorial Practice 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 www.ccac-art.edu Editor: Leigh Markopoulos Production Manager: Erin Lampe Design: Richard Chang Printing: Valencia Printing Event Conception: Kate Fowle Thanks to: Søren Andreasen, Nancy Crowley, Peter Fillingham, Michelle Grabner, Matthew Higgs, Lars Bang Larsen, Eric a Olsen, Renny Pritikin, David Robbins, Shane Aslan Selzer, Eric Wesley, Fred Wilson, and Jonathan Yorba. ©2003 CCAC MA Program in Curatorial Practice and the authors All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, including photocopying and recording, or any information or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
