October 31, 2007 2:00
"Rent" Control
Shibboleth/Doris Salcedo/2007 -- Photo: Tate
One of the first things I did in London this week was head over to Tate Modern, where the newest site specific work in the Tate's vast Turbine Hall, the Superbowl of contemporary art, is Shibboleth, by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. It consists of a crack that runs the length of the Hall's grey concrete floor, widening and deepening as it goes.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in San Francisco there's a similar piece by Andy Goldsworthy that runs up to the front door of the De Young Museum. Salcedo's has more visual drama than Goldsworthy's, which is more a hairline fracture than a crack. Her's is bigger, darker and it courses through that stupendous Turbine Hall space. But she's made the mistake of burdening it with a specific interpretation that short circuits any wider response from you. She's let everyone know that it's meant to represent the human divide of racism. That turns Shibboleth into a political cartoon, which not only confines its meanings but also happens to insist on a "meaning" that the appearance of the piece barely supports.
The crack could have been a way to speak to prevailing anxieties about cracks in the empire, or as a fever chart of whatever other fears are at large these days. Salcedo's school marmish explanation left me with nothing more to do than nod my head and agree that racism was bad, and, having grasped her classroom point, move on to the Louise Bourgeois show upstairs, where I was pretty sure nothing would be so simple.
October 30, 2007 6:30
Pandermalis: Part II
Let's finish up that talk with Dimitrios Pandermalis, who heads the new Acropolis Museum project.
LACAYO: I know you're familiar with the concept of the universal museum, the idea that great works of art are the common heritage of mankind and should be distributed among museums around the world. What do you think of that?
PANDERMALIS: I understand the idea. It's not really a modern idea, it's more an idea of the 19th century, a translation of the imperialism of the 19th century to the globalization of the 20th century. I would say, ok, I can respect that. But [as it applies to the British Museum] that museum already possesses certain [representative] pieces. Let me just mention a frieze from the same period as the Parthenon — they have a very good example of that kind of work. And in this case they also have all of the frieze, it's not fragmented. So they have something to show already.
LACAYO: Let me play devil's advocate. Precisely because the Elgins are so important, isn't it even more important that some part of them should be available to be seen outside Greece? This is an argument some people make.
PANDERMALIS: It depends on the viewpoint of art history. If we use the prototypes of the 19th century, we could say, "Why not?" We'll have different fragments in different museums. But today we make international efforts to reconstruct fragmented monuments. The Parthenon is the example par excellence of that effort, because it is so deeply symbolic. And because it's not possible to understand the frieze of the Parthenon otherwise. It's almost schizophrenic — you see a part of it in Athens and then to see the next part you have to go to London, and then back to Athens and then to London. The frieze is one unit. It's 160 meters, but it's one unit.
October 30, 2007 12:00
Quick Talk: With the Head of the Acropolis Museum Project
Dimitrios Pandermalis is the president of the New Acropolis Museum Project. (Until the museum opens, there's no one with the title of director.) Last week he gave me a tour of the new building. Then we sat down for a conversation about the new museum, the Elgin Marbles and whether the British should be persuaded to send them back to Greece. I'll post this conversation in two parts.
LACAYO: When did the government of Greece begin to think about a new museum?
PANDERMALIS: This goes back thirty years to 1976. The final effort started in 2000.
LACAYO: When you first began to talk to [architect] Bernard Tschumi about your ideas for the museum, did you say to him: "We want you to orient the building so that it will allow visitors to look directly on the Parthenon?"
PANDERMALIS: We said first of all that we have on the site an archeological excavation, and you have to protect that. And we want you to present the excavation like a huge exhibit. And then secondly that the Parthenon should be visible. This was very important to us.
LACAYO: Was the museum also thought of from the start as a means to express the desire to reunite the Parthenon marbles?
PANDERMALIS: There were two motivations. One was to present the materials of the Acropolis in an appropriate way. The other was to present the Parthenon marbles in a way that made that problem [that they're divided between Athens and London] visible.
LACAYO: In the top floor gallery where the Parthenon frieze and the metopes will be installed, you plan to display copies of the pieces of the that are still in London alongside the originals that you possess in Athens.
PANDERMALIS: The copies will be in a somewhat different color and covered with a mesh. And on some of the plaster copies we can put original fragments of the marbles that we have in Athens — for instance, the head of one of the riders — to demonstrate the fragmentation of the monument.
LACAYO: Would you also like to get back the small pieces of the Parthenon that are in places other than London, the ones in Copenhagen and the Vatican, for instance, or the fragments of the frieze and metope at the Louvre?
PANDERMALIS: Yes, the government has made efforts also to get these pieces. But the main thing is London.
LACAYO: How many visitors do you expect annually?
PANDERMALIS: More than two million. Today the Acropolis gets about one and a half million. And we believe the new museum will attract more.
LACAYO: Will there be an admission charge? The British Museum is free.
PANDERMALIS: That is still being decided, but we are thinking about a ticket covering the metro, the museum and the site [the Acropolis]. [A ticket to the site of the Acropolis is currently twelve euros.]
LACAYO: Earlier this year Greece suggested to the British Museum that the Museum might lend the Elgin Marbles to Greece for the opening of the new museum. The British response then was what it has been for some time -- that it was not possible even to consider such a thing until Greece formallly recognizes that the Elgin Marbles are the lawful property of the Trustees of the British Museum. Why not just agree to that as a first step?
PANDERMALIS: On that particular question only the minister of culture is authorized to give answer. But I can tell you it's a part of a complicated dialogue.
LACAYO: Have you proposed a loan show again to the British Museum?
PANDERMALIS: I have had informal talks with the British Museum. I think there is a possibility for cooperation, and on the basis of that cooperation we can also talk about the marbles.
LACAYO: So when you say cooperation, do you mean cooperation first on works other than the marbles?
PANDERMALIS: Cooperation is focused on the marbles, but it also means exchanges for temporary exhibitions in London and things like that. In terms of 21st century cultural policy, it's more possible now to do things through talks than in earlier centuries. We can really discuss the problem, to decide how to reunify the monument and discuss possible solutions. With the new museum I think we have a new basis to start these talks.
October 28, 2007 6:38
London Calling
Another day, another time zone. Late yesterday I caught a flight from Athens to London, to catch up with the fall shows here and maybe trip over that crack that Doris Salcedo has run down the floor of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. (Where's my lawyer!!) I deliberately postponed this trip until after the Frieze Fair, London's fall season art market blow out. With that out of the way, by late October it's possible in this city to focus a little more on the art, a little less on the market.
Which doesn't mean I'm having nothing but high minded thoughts on this trip. Artworld shoptalk in London right now is focused on the local version of museum director musical chairs, a subject we know all about in the U.S. The new focus is the search for a successor to Charles Saumarez Smith, director of the National Gallery, who abruptly resigned last March after five years on the job to become chief executive of the Royal Academy. The British papers figured Smith's departure stemmed from run-ins with Peter Scott, chairman of the Gallery's Board of Trustees, though not, it appears, over questions of exhibition policy that would matter to you or me. Then just this month, Scott also resigned, possibly because the other trustees had had their fill of the squabbling generally.
Smith came to the National Gallery from its next door neighbor the National Portrait Gallery, where as director he mounted a few shows that raised eyebrows for being too "populist", especially one of Mario Testino photographs of Princess Diana, Jerry Hall, etc. That show struck me as ok for the Portrait Gallery, which has never really operated to the standards of an art museum. It's purpose first is to get portraits of notable Brits, whatever the artistic quality, and in any case magazine photography is the portraiture of our time.
But if Smith had brought the same standards to the National Gallery it would have been a big mistake, the very mistake Malcolm Rogers, another former Portrait Gallery director, has made a few times as head of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. But the exhibitions Smith mounted were solid, even terrific, including a major gathering in 2005 of late Caravaggios and last year's all out treatment of Velazquez, a big success for the museum. (Though to be honest I preferred the quieter Holbein show over at Tate Britain.)
To find a replacement for Smith the National Gallery has set up a search committee that includes two trustees familiar to Americans -- Mark Getty, who's father founded the Getty in L.A., and James Fenton, the British poet and art critic who's a regular in the pages of The New York Review of Books. In The Financial Times this past weekend, Anthony-Haden Guest identified the "rumoured" front runners for Smith's old job as three former National Gallery curators: Nicholas Penny, now senior curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Gabriele Finaldi, now deputy director of the Prado, and Axel Ruger, now director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Haden-Guest mentions Malcolm Rogers, who was passed over for the job once before, as being on "the longer list".
Interestingly, the search committee was expected to have made its recommendation in September. "It is said", says Haden-Guest, "that the committee is deadlocked."
I'll have more on London, and on Athens, throughout this week.
October 28, 2007 2:55
The New Acropolis Museum
New Acropolis Museum/Bernard Tschumi -- Images: Courtesy New Acropolis Museum
I got a preview a few days ago of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. Any building has to accomodate its site, and for some the site can be a very delicate matter. (You've heard of the World Trade Center, no?) But I can't think of another building where the site has dictated the design as much as this one, and where the building has responded so adroitly. Then again, it's hard to think of a site that compares to this one in importance.
Actually, the Swiss-born, New York-and-Paris-based architect Bernard Tschumi had to answer to two demanding sites. One is the ground his museum actually rests on. Tschumi's angular design spearheads its way into a dense quarter of town at the foot of the Acropolis, a plot of land that was also a sensitive archeological dig. No surprise, stick a spoon into the ground anywhere in Athens and you have one of those.
The other site is the one his building addresses — the Parthenon itself, about 150 ft. above the museum and 1000 ft. to the north. Tschumi's museum is a kind of polemic in glass and concrete, conceived as an argument by the Greek government to bid for the return of the Elgin marbles, the Parthenon carvings carted off to London two centuries ago by Lord Elgin and now in the possession of the British Museum.
The Greeks still possess 36 of the 115 panels in the Parthenon frieze. A single long depiction of what's presumed by most scholars to be the Panathenaic procession, it once ran around the perimeter of the inner walls. They also have 39 of the 92 metopes, separate blocks that ran above the exterior colonnade and showed scenes from Greek legend. To display all of this as powerfully as possible, Tschumi has provided a multi-level structure around a concrete core that has the same dimensions as the perimeter of the Parthenon.
You might say that the first level of his building is the dig itself and the subterranean remains of an ancient town it uncovered. Into that delicate cavity Tschumi has gingerly introduced large concrete pilings, structural supports that allow the museum's entry plaza and first floor to hover over the site without dislodging too much of the findings below. Wide expanses of glass that are cut into the floor at several places allow visitors to look down into the ruins as they move into the museum.
The palette everywhere is steel and concrete gray, with mostly bare walls and blunt columns — Modernism speaking to its Classical roots at their most austere, but without simply reproducing the rectangulars of a temple. In fact the next two levels have trapezoidal floors for the lobby, shop and restaurant and for galleries that will hold artifacts from the Mycenean period to the early fifth century B.C., just before the Parthenon was begun.
What all of this amounts to of course is a complicated processional space that prepares you for the uppermost gallery, glass walled on all four sides, that will hold the frieze tablets and metopes. As I realized when I visited the Parthenon later the same day and again the next, your initial movements through the museum will subtly recall the walk up the Acropolis slope to the Parthenon at the top, one that nearly all visitors to the museum will also have made.
On the northern side of the glass-walled galleries you can look up to the Parthenon and see the southern face from which Elgin stripped nearly all of the metopes that he managed to get. On the wall behind you, the frieze panels will be organized in long lines that reproduce their original positions on the temple. The marbles that are in London will be represented in the appropriate positions along side them by copies covered with a fine mesh. These will be placed beside the marbles that the Greeks still possess, both to sustain the narrative continuity of the frieze, and of course, to serve as constant reminders of what's missing. It's here that Tschumi mustered his simplest means into his most well considered and powerful effect. The museum as optical device, the optical device as polemic.
Back outside, Tschumi's museum is also satisfying in the way of certain startlingly modern buildings inserted into old European city fabrics. Standing on the plaza outside the main entrance you see ancient Athens below you in those exposed ruins, the 19th and 20th century city around you and a 21st century building rising above you. If you know the elegant modernist box that Richard Meier designed to surround the Ara Pacis Altar in Rome, a treasure from the 1st century B.C., you know what I mean.
Until now the Parthenon marbles still in Greece were displayed in the old museum on the Acropolis. A few weeks ago workers began transferring them in crates by way of huge cranes to the new museum. Some of those crates are already on the upper gallery floor, but the marbles won't be fully installed for months. Early next year, while installation is still underway, the public will be admitted into the new museum, with an official opening set for some time in early 2009. Athens hasn't seen a thunderbolt like this since Athena last threw one. Will it carry out its assigned task, to summon the Elgins back? For once the cliche works so well it really can't be avoided. If you build it, will they come?
October 26, 2007 3:44
Art:21 — Art on TV? Could it Be?
Laurie Simmons/Lari Pittman/Judy Pfaff/Pierre Huyghe — Photos: Courtesy PBS
Before I left for Athens I previewed the upcoming episode of Art in the Twenty-First Century, the PBS series that starts its fourth season Sunday. If you saw the first three, you know it's the best thing on TV about contemporary art. Then again, it's pretty much the only thing.
Now there's a depressing fact. Except for Charlie Rose, who doesn't think it's strange to devote shows to Frank Gehry or Richard Serra, television mostly ignores art and architecture. (Ok, let's be fair to television. It's asleep at every wheel. Notwithstanding that it has all the time in the world to fill, it also largely ignores contemporary fiction. There was a time when Gore Vidal could appear on Dick Cavett and Truman Capote would turn up on The Tonight Show. Don't look for Michael Chabon or Toni Morrison anytime soon on Jay Leno. Once again, Charlie Rose — you the man.) And remember Bravo? I like Top Chef, too. Then one day I realized that foie gras and fashion makeovers are all that channel cares about anymore.
Art:21 not only visits the artists you want to know more about — in upcoming weeks they get to Jenny Holzer, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Robert Ryman and the all important photographer Robert Adams — the show actually gives you some sense of what they do and draws them out in interesting ways. Don't assume that's easy.
This week's program is called "Romance", a fairly loose category that lets it rope together Laurie Simmons, Lari Pittman, Judy Pfaff and Pierre Huyghe. Simmons is at a bit of a disadvantage. She's not talking about the postmodern photographs of dolls that first made her name. The focus of her segment is on her feature film, The Music of Regret, also made with dolls and puppets. It's hard enough to convey on TV what a painting or sculpture is about. The capsule version of an artist's film is like a very enigmatic trailer, though it helps that Meryl Streep turns up at one point to explain that Simmons' work is about "all the things that make us conspire to believe in these romantic ideas."
Pittman, Pfaff, even Huyghe — a trickier case — don't have the same problem. Though with all of them you wish you saw a little more of their earlier work as a way to establish the road they've travelled. (Pittman's new paintings flow out of what he did 20 years ago, but it would be good to see more of those.) But you still get a sense of these people as vital artists. And you see what they do. So that when Judy Pfaff turns to the camera and blurts out: "I love stuff and I love tools!" — you know just what she means.
Hey wait a second, wasn't I gonna talk about Athens this week? Ok, right, we'll get to that.
October 25, 2007 5:13
R.B. Kitaj, Ileana Sonnabend: R.I.P.
Cecil Court, London, WC2 (The Refugees), R.B. Kitaj, 1983-84 — Photo:Tate
Greece puts you in mind of the glorious past. Now I learn from yesterday's International Herald Tribune that two notable people have just become history. (Where, I would guess, the Trib may also end up before long, as more tourists get their news from CNN and their iPhones. Which will be a pity. Good paper.)
First to the American painter R.B. Kitaj, who spent most of his career in the U.K. He was born not far from Cleveland, but you could be forgiven for thinking he was a Brit. That's how he came to most of us, in the '60s, when his work arrived back to the U.S. on the same wave of British Pop that brought in David Hockney. No less than Hockney, Kitaj was there to prove that figurative art was still a vital force. But unlike Hockney he wasn't mostly interested in the here and now, except as contemporary means were a vehicle for coming to terms with the past. This is what I found fascinating about him. The flat colors and collage style imagery of so much Pop didn't seem to lend itself to reflections on history. Warhol, somebody I loved up through the late 60s, was incapable of dealing with the past. (If you've seen his godawful collaborations with Basquiat on The Last Supper, you know what I mean.) Likewise James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein. Their diction as painters seemed too modern to cast backwards.
But Kitaj realized that it's in a modern way, as a succession of broken, sputtering images, that we absorb history now. And that a canvas, properly packed, could hold the whole mental panoply. He was ironic in the old way, reserved, without being juvenile. He believed that reflections on history could still be one of art's purposes and I'm betting that art history will make more room for him later than we generally accord him now.
Then there's the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend. I never knew her, but in the 1980s I passed through her Soho gallery so often I felt like I did. From her I learned about Caroll Dunham, Ashley Bickerton (his great steel boxes covered with commercial logos as self portraits -- I still love those pieces) and Haim Steinbach, who did utterly dead pan and weirdly elegant rows of consumer objects on handsome shelves — Duchamp for the Age of Shopping.
I didn't need to learn from her about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, though she showed them too. It was of course her ex-husband, Leo Castelli, who had discovered them in the 50s. After the break up she and her next husband started her gallery in a building they shared with Castelli. (That always struck me as very civilized.) Eventually Mary Boone moved in across the street. It was the birth of Soho, or of that moment between the Soho of cardboard box factories and artists lofts and the chrome plated shopping mall it's reduced to now. Her very success as a dealer was part of the transformation. She leant glamor to the place when it was still grimy, but it was the glamor of a woman with daring, intelligence and genuine taste.
October 24, 2007 2:25
Private Practices
When I woke up tonight — yes, tonight, that's multiple timezone flying for you — I saw there was an internet dust up in a couple of places over something I said about the "History of the Snapshot" show yesterday at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. ( I forget, was that yesterday in the U.S., or yesterday where I am?) Fair points, so let me say something about the shows that museums give to individual collectors — "Snapshot", is one of those — typically the ones they're courting in the hope of gaining the collector's collection some day.
To start with what looks like Tyler Green's distaste for collector shows generally. In short, I'm ok with them. To begin with, in a world in which museums enlarge their collections mostly through gifts, not purchases — that would be this world — a certain amount of benefactor husbandry is simply what museums must do. This seems to me an acceptable compromise — and not just a compromise; I'll get to that in a minute — as opposed to say the museums that repeatedly give over whole permanent galleries to collectors who want to preserve their paintings in a replica of their original homes.
This is something like the point that Neal Benezra, the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was making to me a few weeks ago, when he warned against the simpler idea of separate collector galleries of even the more vanilla kind. I just came from Texas and another look at the more-than-borderline camp galleries at the Dallas Museum of Art given over to the collection of Wendy and Emory Reves, in which the good lady's very slippers are still positioned just so at the foot of her bed. To put it mildly, I love their their dining table settings but, uh, I find it hard to look at the art. Bigger museums than the Dallas have done the same, including the Met in New York.
Here's point two. Collector shows, as opposed to permanent collector galleries, are not necessarily a bad thing for museum visitors. I won't even get into the value of historical collector shows. Actually, I will — the exhibitions I caught up with at the Met in the last year devoted to the dealer/collector Ambroise Vollard and to the Clark brothers were fascinating. And if anybody in Italy wants to mount a show devoted to Cardinal Del Monte, the great early patron of Caravaggio, I'm on the next plane, no matter how bad the dollar is. (Don't ask.)
But contemporary collector shows are also part of the story. There were a couple of great exhibitions, both before and after his death, devoted to the photo collector Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe's mentor in all ways. (The first one, as I recall, curated by Wagstaff himself.) If there was ever a show devoted to the photo collection of the onetime New York dealer Daniel Wolf, before his holdings disappeared into the Getty, I missed it and I'm sorry I did. I saw a bit of what was left on a weekend visit with him in Colorado 20 years ago. And speaking of San Francisco, I didn't get to the big show they devoted a few years ago to the Anderson collection, which of course they would dearly love to inherit, but my bad.
The question over at Modern Kicks is whether I was right to assume that the curators of the National Gallery "Snapshots" show weren't free to include photos by Winogrand, Friedlander and so on if they wanted to. Also good question. I'll try checking in with them by e-mail.
Meanwhile, lots to do in Athens tomorrow, so back to sleep.
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October 24, 2007 4:04
Greetings From Athens
After that antiquities conference in Dallas last week, it seemed the only thing to do was to head off to Greece and see some of those antiquities in their native habitat. I'll be reporting in late tomorrow on the new Acropolis Museum and other developments.
But first, it was a long flight, so off to dreamland.
October 22, 2007 5:52
Snap Judgments
Unidentified/ 1950s — Photo: National Gallery of Art
Incredibly, I'm back on the road again, again. (Didn't I just get home?) I'll be checking back in tomorrow. But before I leave town I wanted to offer a comment or two on "The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888-1978," a new show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, which I caught an early look at a few weeks ago.
This is a show that needed to be done, not merely to trace the development of home photography from the introduction of the Kodak camera in 1888, but to remind us all that the snapshot was the crucial contribution to the universal image bank from which so much of subsequent art is drawn. What it fed into in particular was the great postwar photographic revolution of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, etc., etc.
They all worked with better cameras, mostly 33mms, but with a vision rendered cockeyed by their immersion in images from the primordial ooze of photographic folk art — birthday party pictures, kids playing in the yard, people holding cakes, goofing for the camera, whatever. The awkward poses in the typical snapshot, the vacant expressions, the odd juxtapositions of a head with a tree, it was all the stuff of a new kind of picture, one that unknowingly broke all the rules because the people who took them didn't know what the rules were, or even that there were any. Even Diane Arbus, with her grave and weighty portraits taken with a twin-lens Rolleiflex — no Instamatics for her — owes some of the strangeness to in her work to the demotic weirdness of the people she would have seen in snapshots all her life.
The National Gallery show, which was curated by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, has a wonderfully weird and funny (in all senses) selection of snaps. I only wish it had been possible to combine them in later galleries with a few examples of Winogrand, Friedlander and so on, to show how an anti-aesthetic developed into, well, an aesthetic. It may not have been possible to do that with this show because it's drawn entirely from the holdings of a single collector, Robert E. Jackson. But it stands on its own as a great adventure into the terra incognita that is us.
October 22, 2007 1:48
Last Thoughts on Dallas
Kimbell Art Museum/Louis Kahn — Photo: Kimbell Art Museum
I'm back from Dallas with a couple of final thoughts from my trip there.
1. First, about "The Future of the Past, " the conference I attended at Southern Methodist University. Most of it was focused on the split between archeologists on one side and museums, dealers and antiquities collectors on the other. There was a lot of talk about finding a common way forward, but I didn't see much evidence that there was one. I was left with the impression of two sides that have been stalemated for years over the central issue — can there be any justification for a private market for antiquities, so long as that market inevitably creates an incentive for looters to trash archeological sites in search of things to sell? For the most part, everybody agreed to disagree.
2. I stayed over in Texas for a couple of extra days to pay visits to the museums in Dallas and Fort Worth. You will not be surprised to hear that the Kimbell, the Louis Kahn masterpiece in Fort Worth, remains one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. But what struck me this time was the way it obviously served as inspiration for the two magnificent additions to the DFW area in recent years — Tadao Ando's Fort Worth Modern Art Museum and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, by Renzo Piano.
Fort Worth Modern Art Museum/Tadao Ando — Photo: Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau
Ando's museum, which is just across the road from the Kimbell, sits on a serene reflecting pool. The combination of austere structure and mirror-surface water is one that Ando has used before, most famously in his Church on the Water in Hokkaido, Japan. But it ocurred to me this time that Ando's Fort Worth pool was also a bow in the direction of the smaller pools at either side of the Kimbell, as well as the much larger plate of water that surrounds Kahn's great legislative assembly buildings in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Nasher Sculpture Center/Renzo Piano — Photo: Dallas Convention Bureau
As for Piano, he's been criticized lately for some underwhelming American projects, like his New York Times headquarters in Manhattan. But at the Nasher he produced one of the great buildings of his career. And though it's a fair distance from the Kimbell — an $80 cab ride, but hey, who's counting — his museum also addresses Kahn's, in this case by way of its (much more gently) vaulted galleries — a feature Ando uses as well — and its white travertine walls. It's Piano, of course, who's been tapped to design an addition to the Kimbell. (As a young man Piano actually worked for a while in Kahn's Philadelphia office.) One look at the Nasher and you understand why he got the job.
October 18, 2007 11:30
Go Ask Dallas
A brief report from the first day of that conference on "cultural property" I'm attending at Southern Methodist University in Dallas:
On the question of how to deal with antiquities, there's a big division in the artworld. On the one side are the archeologists, who think art collectors and museums should all but stop buying ancient artifacts, because it creates a financial incentive for looters to pillage archeological digs. Meanwhile, museums, collectors and dealers think they're the ones safeguarding ancient work, by caring for it and displaying it. Those all tend to be the same people who disagree along similar lines about the wisdom of laws in Italy, Greece, Turkey and elsewhere that declare pretty much everything discovered on their territory to be state property that can't be exported without approval.
The Dallas conference brings all sides together into (mostly) collegial discussions. Or if not discussions, at least proximity. Which in some cases must have taken some doing. So Torkom Demirjian, a New York antiquities dealer and passionate defender of the rights of collectors, prepared the audience for the presentation by Patty Gerstenblith, a De Paul University law professor well known as a defender of legal curbs on the trade by saying "Everything she says sounds great, but is completely wrong."
As it happens, when she took the stage Gerstenblith mostly just summarized for us the various international agreements and a few famous court cases that pertain to cultural property. I couldn't detect any errors. John Henry Merryman, the 87-year-old Stanford law professor who's one of the founders of the entire field of art law, surprised us all a bit by declaring that U.S. courts should not enforce against American museums and collectors the cultural patrimony laws of nations that block the export of almost all works. "Some of the legislation adopted in other nations would certainly be unconstitutional in the U.S.," he said.
After dinner last night we had a talk and slide show from Donny George Youkhanna, the former Director General of the Iraqi Museums and the pivotal figure in the vain attempt to protect the treasures of the Baghdad Museum in the opening days of the Iraq War. A sobering presentation, notwithstanding that at least some of the stolen work has been recovered.
He had one story that would be funny, if the laughs didn't come so hard. Struggling to guard their museum from thugs driving past waving Kalashnikov's out their windows, Youkhanna and his staff stood outside armed with clubs. Then somebody handed Youkhanna a satellite phone. On the other end of the call was the British Museum's curator of Near Eastern art. Youkhanna pleaded with him for help in persuading the Americans to position a tank near the door of his museum. The curator signed off and put in a call to his boss, British Museum Director Neil MacGregor. Who put in a call to Tony Blair's culture secretary Tessa Jowell, who put in a call to 10 Downing Street. From there it appears that a call went over to Washington, because sure enough, the tank eventually rumbled into place.
Just too late to do much good.
October 18, 2007 12:20
On the Road Again, Again
And again.
I just arrived in Dallas for The Future of the Past, a conference at Southern Methodist University about the continuing controversies over cultural property and just who owns it. Given the developments of the last year or so -- the successful claims by Italy for the return of antiquities in American museums, the decision by Yale to hand back its collection of Machu Picchu artifacts to Peru, the completion of the new Acropolis Museum in Athens as a way to put pressure on the Brits to turn over the Elgin Marbles -- it seemed like a good moment to convene with some experts. There's a world in motion here and it won't end with the victories by Italy.
I'll report back a few times from the conference, though maybe not today, which is a long and busy one. Which is why I'm here.
October 16, 2007 7:34
Quick Talk: Last Part of Benezra
Let's finish up that talk with SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.
LACAYO: Are there trends in the museum world that you fear? What keeps you up at night?
BENEZRA: One of the things I think a lot about is that there was a time when the values that museums held and the established patterns of behavior that museums acted upon were pretty well understood. There were shared values. Now the world is changing and it's impacting museums. It's not so clear anymore what those shared assumptions are. It's a little bit more of a free for all out there. When you don't know what the established acceptable behavior is, it's hard to know what to fall back on.
LACAYO: Are you talking about the occasional dumbing down of shows or about how museums cater to corporate sponsors?
BENEZRA: Could be either thing.
LACAYO: Do you have a policy about what you will and will not do to accommodate a corporate sponsor?
BENEZRA: We would not be a mouthpiece for a corporation, we would not do a "brand". We have a BMW in the museum now. [Lacayo: This is a car that Eliasson and his team stripped down and remade as an art project that comments on global warming and internal combustion engines. To view it visitors have to put on blankets and enter a refrigeration unit. It's a long story] But this car can't be sold. By making it, Eliasson was challenging the very nature of what a car is today.
LACAYO: What one thing would make your job easier?
BENEZRA: I wish the government would reassess this fractional gift thing. This was something that was not broken and didn't need to be fixed. There was not abuse. Certainly not here there wasn't.
And something has to be done about insurance. We're in earthquake territory. We're in a 10-year-old building that's as rock solid as could be. But because of our geography, we're having a terrible time with insurance. This spring we had the Brice Marden show from MoMA and the Picasso and American Art show from the Whitney both here at the same time. The insurance value of the art on loan to us at that time was close to a billion dollars. We had such an insurance problem. There's a federal indemnification program for international loans. What we're lobbying very hard for now is that the indemnification program should work for domestic loans as well.
LACAYO: One of your earlier jobs was "coordinator" of the Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson Collection, one of the richest collections of modern art in the Bay Area or anywhere in the U.S. Your museum, which already has a gallery dedicated to works on loan from their collection, would no doubt love to inherit some or most of it some day. You no doubt felt the same about the collection assembled by Don Fisher, the founder of The Gap stores, who's on your board of trustees. But Fisher made a decision last summer to put most of his collection into a private museum that he hopes to build in the Presidio. Do you have a line in your mind as to what you would do to convince a big donor to leave his or her collection to you? Separate galleries? Their own curator? A guarantee to show everything they leave all the time?
BENEZRA: We don't have a set of rules. I think there is an understanding here. If you walk through our building you see a gallery dedicated to Clyfford Still. That collection came to the museum around 1980, when the museum was at a different point in its history, and the collection was not yet what it has become. It made more sense then to say, ok, we'll always dedicate that space to Clyfford Still. He made a very generous gift, and we brought it in and it's been a perfectly good thing.
Whether we would want to do that at this point in our history — I think we don't. What we don't want to become is a museum that's a collection of collections. You can't tell the story that way. You walk into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and you learn the history of modern art — as they wish to tell it, but there's an attempt to tell a story there. If we were to have a wing dedicated to a particular collection or collector, we couldn't do that. We would become a different kind of institution.
One thing about Don Fisher that I've come to really appreciate is that for 20, 25 years now he has not just accumulated that collection, he's been the curator. He has space in the corporate headquarters where he hangs those pictures. And he takes incredible pleasure in this independence that he has as a curator. Don is at a point in his life where the last thing he wants to do is give up that pleasure. As a human story it makes perfect sense to me. Do I wish that collection were here? Absolutely.
October 16, 2007 1:31
Brad Cloepfil's New Museum of Arts & Design
Brad Cloepfil, whose firm Allied Works Architecture is designing the new Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) in Manhattan, took me on a tour yesterday of the still unfinished building, which is expected to open its doors next September.
This is the same project that set off a huge preservation battle in New York a few years ago because it required largely demolishing an Edward Durell Stone building from 1965 that was either an icon or an eyesore, depending on who you asked. Actually it was both, and should have been preserved for just that reason — it was an outstanding example of a now mostly despised undertaking, the attempt made in the 1950s and '60s by Stone, Philip Johnson and a few others, to press Modernism and historicism together into a white marble gift box. As pretty much everyone must know by now, the critic Ada Louise Huxtable once called Stone's building a "palazzo on lollipops" because of the way its street level columns developed on top into circles. But the styles we dismiss today tend to be the ones we re-examine tomorrow.
As I wrote here a few months ago:
Stone's building, with its white marble and its references to Venetian Gothic, certainly didn't play by the standard Modernist rules. But his search for a way to bring the past back into architecture is something that we now understand as a legitimate part of the 20th century story, even if he didn't always produce results that we can appreciate — yet. His forays into historicism may look kitschy to us now. Beaux Arts, Victorian and Art Deco architecture all once looked disposable, too. Now we cherish them all. Which is why I suspect the day will come when we'll wish we had that palazzo back, lollipops and all.
That said, the deed is done. Stone's building no longer survives as an example, good or bad, to the future. Meanwhile there's the new building to consider. Cloepfil did the subdued but nicely proportioned new galleries for the Seattle Art Museum, which I wrote about briefly a few months ago. And here's a lengthy and sympathetic reading of his career from Andrew Blum in Metropolis. At this early stage the MAD building is in no state to review, but I'll provide a description of it's emerging form:
Cloepfil has gutted the interior floors of Stone's building to produce full floor galleries — a good idea considering the relatively small footprint the building occupies. On the outside Stone's marble has been stripped away and replaced with a surface of fritted glass and glazed terra-cotta panels that will respond to daylight with a mild iridescent shimmer. The most prominent visual element of the new design will be the windows, a 30-inch wide switchback path of glass that winds across the exterior like a Pac Man warpath, opening views all around the galleries to the Columbus Circle area and north across Central Park. Inside it will even cut across the floorplate in several places.
The consistent complaint against Stone's building, which originally held Huntington Hartford's Gallery of Modern Art, was that it was almost windowless. Natural light was admitted mostly just at the corners. Cloepfil's scheme has the obvious advantage of bringing light back into the galleries while providing an an ever varying view frame from inside.
Above the galleries will be floors dedicated to art education, an event space and a top floor restaurant with wide views over Central Park. Cloepfil has removed the loggia that Stone had provided to push the restaurant floor out fully to the building facade.
As for those "lollipops", Cloepfil's ceramic wall will come down almost to street level, but he has kept the old columns. I guess you can have your lollipops and eat them too.
October 15, 2007 5:21
More Quick Talk: With SFMOMA's Neal Benezra
Indigo Blue, Ann Hamilton, 1991/2007 — Photo: SFMOMA
Here's a bit more of my conversation a few weeks ago with SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra.
LACAYO: The art market, of course, has been going off the charts. What's been the impact on your ability to collect? Museums get most of their art by way of gifts and bequests. But they also purchase.
BENEZRA: That's changed. We used to shop. Now it's impossible.
LACAYO: All the same, you spent about $2.1 million last year on acquisitions, which would be almost ten percent of your operating budget if it were counted as part of that budget, though it's not.
BENEZRA: We get that money partly through the acquisitions committee. If you're a member of the museum at a certain level you can join that committee. You pay an annual amount that creates a budget of about $1 million for our overall acquisition program. Each department also has separate committees that raise additional money.
Also, Phyllis Wattis, our great benefactor, when she died, left money to establish an acquisitions budget for painting and sculpture. We have not used any of that money yet. That will be our first serious endowment fund.
LACAYO: Madeleine Grynsztejn, your senior curator of painting and sculpture, just arranged the purchase this summer of Indigo Blue, a sizable Ann Hamilton that's now on display in your permanent galleries. But Hamilton is a living artist, with prices that are lower than Pollock's or Miro's. Can you shop in the market for 20th century modern art, as opposed to contemporary?
BENEZRA: It used to be that museum people could go to an art fair and compete. Now we're much more in the job there of advising our collectors, to advise them to buy certain pieces that we hope will come our way.
LACAYO: Everybody complains about the change in the federal tax laws governing fractional gifts. [This is an arrangement whereby collectors give a museum a partial ownership interest in a work, with the right to display the work for a part of each year, while the collector takes a partial tax break.] Has that had a big impact on you?
BENEZRA: We have more fractional gifts than any museum in the country, something like 800. That change has had an unbelievably negative impact on our acquisition program, a profoundly negative impact. The difference in the number of gifts from one year to the next has dropped off by 80% or something.
LACAYO: What about deaccessioning? Is that part of what you do? Or maybe you don't feel you have that many things worth getting rid of.
BENEZRA: Oh, we do. I came here from the Hirshhorn, where we had a very active deaccessioning program. I know that deaccessioning is the third rail of American museums. You have to be very careful how you do things. But I've seen how it can be done well.
LACAYO: Have you done any in the last year?
BENEZRA: Yes. We don't deaccession anything by living artists. What we have been deaccessioning are things from outside the scope of our collection, 19th century work, and things of such low quality that they just were not being seen in the galleries. It's a significant number of objects, but they're not major objects. I think we may have deaccessioned one Matisse drawing last year, because it was just not up to our standards and we have significant holdings in Matisse. The things that we've been deaccessioning are not newsworthy.
October 14, 2007 10:08
Quick Talk: With SFMOMA's Neal Benezra
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
When I was in San Francisco recently to see the Olafur Eliasson show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) I sat down for a conversation with SFMOMA's Director Neal Benezra. We talked about museum expansion, acquisitions, deaccessioning and how it feels to have one of your own board members decide he's going to take his collection and put it in a museum all his own.
I'll post this interview in a few pieces over the course of the week.
LACAYO: Practically every major museum in the U.S. has expanded in recent years, or is about to. Your's hasn't.
BENEZRA: I just did a chart for my board of trustees showing how we're falling behind in square footage. We have 52,000 square feet of gallery space and we are rapidly falling behind. When they designed this building in '93 or '94 our permanent collection was not what it is now, qualitatively or quantitatively. When we moved into this building we were doing mostly special exhibitions, but now the collection has grown enormously.
When I came out here one of the first things I did was ask our director of exhibitions to tell me what percentage of the building was used for special exhibitions and what percentage for the collection. And it was something like 70% for exhibitions and 30% collections, which is wonderful if you're a kunsthalle, but not if you're a museum.
So yes, we need more space, because we need to show more of the collection. And because there is so much art in so many homes in this community. Outside of New York there is more great art in homes in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the country.
LACAYO: Charles Schwab, of the investment firm, just became chairman of your board. Are you planning to start a capital campaign?
BENEZRA: That's something we're talking about and thinking about.
LACAYO: You have a beautiful building here by Mario Botta that it would be hard to add on to, especially since there are no empty lots adjacent. Would you consider what the Whitney is planning to do in New York and build a second SFMOMA at another location?
BENEZRA: I think it's better if you can stay centralized. Remote locations don't usually do too well. And we do have some real estate here. The entire site was not built. There's some possibilities for us in this neighborhood.
LACAYO: What's the creative part of your job? You have the last word of course on whether the museum does or does not do a show. What else?
BENEZRA: I don't get too involved on the acquisitions side, except for the major acquisitions. Where I get very involved, because we don't have a chief curator, is with curating the exhibition schedule. I have to make sure that we're running a balanced ship in the sense that most of our curatorial people are contemporary people and we cannot be strictly a contemporary program. So we also do a Matisse sculpture show. We did the Picasso and American Art show, shows that are more historical. I'm here to make sure that's there's balance chronologically and aesthetically, because our curators are so contemporary in outlook.
October 11, 2007 5:55
J.M.W. Turner in Washington, D.C.
Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight/Turner, 1835 — The National Gallery of Art
I made it down to Washington a few weeks ago to catch an early look at the phenomenal Turner show that has since opened at the National Gallery of Art. I'm still rubbing my eyes. It's very large, the largest Turner exhibition to be seen in the U.S. in over 40 years. And it's absolutely smashing. It was a famously fascinating career arc. To his contemporaries, or at least some of them, it seemed that as he got older his powers decayed, even to the point of madness. To us, now, it seems as though that's when his powers were unleashed.
Here's a link to my review in the new issue of Time. Later I'll add a link at this post to a slideshow we'll be mounting on Friday with 15 of Turner's paintings.
UPDATE: Here's that slideshow.
October 11, 2007 12:16
Alexandra Boulat: 1962-2007
Alexandra Boulat
Earlier this week, the French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat died in Paris. Boulat was one of the founders of the photo agency VII and her pictures often found their way into the pages of Time. Around the end of every year I collaborate with Time's photo editors on the special issue devoted to Images of the Year. Last year we were so impressed by Boulat's work in Gaza that we devoted a separate portfolio to her. We might just as easily have done the same in earlier years for the pictures she took in Afghanistan, Kosovo or Beirut.
Kosovo, 1999, Refugees flee fighting — Photo: Alexandra Boulat/VII
Boulat had a gift not only for images of war and turmoil, but also for the intimate side of people's lives. It was Robert Capa who said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." She was close enough in more ways than one.
Afghanistan, 2001, An Afghan family prepares the body of an eight-year-old boy for burial. The child died from cold in a refugee camp near Herat. — Photo: Alexandra Boulat/VII
You can see a slide show of Boulat's pictures here. And a very readable tribute here from Tim McGirk, one of Time's Middle East correspondents, who often dashed aound with her.
October 10, 2007 2:38
Cut to the Crack
"There is a crack, a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."
The line is Leonard Cohen's. It came to mind yesterday when I noticed that for her new installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has produced a lengthy and widening crack in the Tate's concrete floor.
Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo, 2007 — Photo: Tate
I was reminded immediately of another crack, produced a few years ago, half a world away. In San Francisco recently I made a trip over to the De Young Museum, where the first thing you run across, literally, is Andy Goldsworthy's Drawn Stone, a crack that procedes from the roadway in front of the museum, through the courtyard and up to the front door, along the way passing through a couple of large stone slabs used for outdooor seating.
Drawn Stone, Andy Goldsworthy, 2005 — Photo: De Young Museum
Salcedo's piece is about racism and cultural divides. Goldsworthy's, of course, is about tectonic plates and the San Andreas faultline. (Actually, it was originally called Faultline. Did the title make somebody at the museum nervous?)
In any case, I don't know if all of this represents a trend, or just proof that great minds crack alike.
October 9, 2007 4:53
Kara Walker at the Whitney
Darkytown Rebellion, Kara Walker, 2001 — Collection Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
I made it over to the Whitney Museum this morning to preview Kara Walker's mid-career retrospective. You might say that Walker has just one subject, but it's one of the big ones, the endless predicament of race in America.
The Whitney show, which debuted in February at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, includes Walker's smaller works on paper, wood and canvas board. These are mostly watercolors and mixed media pieces that are like laboratory experiments in converting psychic energy into charged imagery. There are also two rooms set aside to screen the animated films that Walker has been making in recent years. If you manage to see the show before it closes Feb. 3 — it moves later to L.A. — set aside the 16 minutes it takes to watch 8 Possible Beginnings, Or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker, which calls on everything from Balinese shadow puppetry to Disney's version of Uncle Remus.
But inevitably the centerpieces of the show are Walker's now famous cut black paper silhouettes. Some of them are individual images on canvas, but more commonly she combines a cast of antebellum plantation characters into panoramic wall pieces. These form a phantasmagoria of whites and blacks copulating, farting, defecating, floating, giving birth and suckling one another, always locked together in the mutually degrading transactions of master and slave.
Walker's wall pieces represent the return of the repressed with a vengeance. She has a gift for finding her way by unexpected routes to uncomfortable places. A great deal of banal, hectoring, finger wagging political art was made in the '90s, but her cut paper silhouettes were nothing like that. With their wit and craftsmanship, their shrewd appropriation of old story telling techniques and their fearless and pitch perfect combinations of terror, anger and low comedy, they were some of the most unforgettable work of the last decade.
The question remains whether Walker's now familiar practices and preoccupations can sustain her for another decade or more. But there's no question that she's made something powerful and original from them so far. It was because of the wall pieces in particular that earlier this year, when my esteemed editors asked me to propose an artist for the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people, I knew right away who it should be.
October 9, 2007 4:04
The World's a Hard Place for a Picture These Days
First that Monet gets punched and ripped in Paris. Now this. The attack actually took place last week, but only made it into the New York Times today.
Wasn't it the Europeans who were supposed to be the guardians of culture?