January 31, 2008 10:14
Initial Public Offering
Angel of the North, Antony Gormley, 1998 / GATESHEAD COUNCIL
The Brits are getting up a full head of steam again over a proposal for a major public art project. I've already mentioned a few times my case of U.K. envy on this. It's not that we don't have the occasional outburst of public art here and there in the U.S. And there are operations like the New York-based Creative Time generating mostly temporary projects wherever they can. But nothing short of a project on the scope of The Gates in New York or the opening of Millennium Park in Chicago seems to generate the kind of media interest that the Brits manage all the time over the Turner Prize or the Fourth Plinth competition.
This time the competition is to create a public sculpture to mark a new transit center in Kent, with an ambition to create something comparable to the Angel of the North, the monumental Antony Gormley sculpture in Gateshead. (Which has never looked that good to me in photographs, so I keep reminding myself that you can't make judgments based on photographs. But if you could make judgments based on photographs......)
It's a complete grab bag of finalists for the Kent commission, including Mark Wallinger, who just won the Turner Prize and whose best known work is a painstaking full scale replica of a one man anti-war protest encampment in London, the French artist Daniel Buren, who specializes in fairly severe formal/conceptual exercises (like the utterly boring stripes he hung all over the Guggenheim in New York a few years ago), the figurative artist Christopher Le Brun, Richard Deacon, a form maker very much like Martin Puryear, and Rachel Whiteread, who's more interesting, to me at least, at large scale than at small.
Jonathan Jones, the critic for the British daily The Guardian, wishes the whole thing would go away. God knows making a fuss over the height of the commission is the wrong way to go about the job. But I'd be happy to see a competition in the U.S. every year that got submissions from people like Puryear, Judy Pfaff, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Mark di Suvero and what the hell, Jeff Koons.
Last thought — Jones is still glad at least that the finalists didn't include Ron Mueck. Actually, having seen Mueck's museum retrospective a few times last year, I'd like to see what he could do with a big public commission. Is there still a way to make a realistic figurative sculpture for a public site? He might be the one to do it.
January 30, 2008 12:56
Another Good Argument for Electric Cars
Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson, 1970 /JAMES COHAN GALLERY
There's a proposal to drill for oil in the Great Salt Lake in the vicinity of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, one of the definitive works of 20th century American art. The drilling will be underwater, but will require the construction of industrial infrastructure all around. (And yes, I know that Spiral Jetty was constructed at the edge of what was already a littered and abandoned industrial site. The operative term there is abandoned.)
The blogger Tyler Green has further details, but this is the main thing you need to know.
If you want to send a letter of protest to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling, the emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Please refer to Application # 8853. Every letter makes a big difference, they do take a lot of notice and know that publicity may follow. Since the Spiral Jetty has global significance, emails from foreign countries would be of special value.
Here's the catch — you have only until 5 PM mountain time today to place calls or send e-mails objecting to the project. That would be 6PM central time and 7PM eastern standard. (Ok, West coast, you do your own math. You can do it!)
January 29, 2008 11:35
Those California Museum Raids — The Trouble Moves East
It appears that it wasn't just California museums gaining from the work of Robert Olson, the alleged smuggler of Asian and Native American art who got five of them into hot water recently. In this morning's Los Angeles Times, Jason Felch is reporting that it appears Olson also did significant business with Barry McLean, a major collector of Asian Art and trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose collection is currently touring a number of smaller museums. (I wonder what Jim Cuno thinks about this?)
This interesting sidelight from Felch's story:
[MacLean's collection] was exhibited recently at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and was scheduled to go on display at Dartmouth College's Hood Museum on Feb. 9. When contacted Monday about the allegations, the Dartmouth museum said it had consulted with MacLean and canceled the exhibit.The revelations about MacLean's collection are likely to raise new questions about museums' willingness to exhibit private antiquities collections.
"We did not vet every piece in the show," said Stephen Little, director of the Honolulu museum and the former curator of Asian art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he first met MacLean.
"We have since made a conscious decision not to show private collections anymore," Little said.
Actually, I think that the days of touring shows of private antiquities collections are numbered, unless the provenance of every piece can be verified. That's a task that only the very largest museums have the staff to attempt — and not many of those have the stomach for it right now.
January 28, 2008 11:02
More Talk: With James Cuno
Let's wrap up that conversation with Jim Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, who's forthcoming book is Who Owns Antiquities? In the part I posted yesterday Cuno explained that he'd like to see a return to the system of partage, which was once the rule for archeological digs. Under that system, source nations — meaning nations where the digs occur, which could be Turkey, Egypt, Mexico, etc. — compensate the universities and museums that finance and provide most of the archeologists — and these are typically North American and European institutions — by sharing with those institutions what's found at the digs. Presently the source nations usually keep everything.
LACAYO: The governments of source countries have been very aggressive lately in pursuing their claims to antiquities. Italy is the obvious example but it's just one. Is there more that the U.S. government could be doing to advance the interests of U.S. museums, for instance by encouraging source nations to consider a return to partage? The feeling among a lot of museum people is that because the State Department wants the cooperation of source nations on high priority concerns like drug trafficking, terrorism, copyright protection, etc, it routinely grants their requests for the U.S. to impose import bans on antiquities from their territories.
CUNO: We know that these decisions are politically driven. The response of the U.S. to requests from Italy is actually made at the level of the White House, not at the level of the cultural bureaucracy but the level of the State Department. Our relationship with Italy has been important going back to the Second World War, with access to the Mediterranean, to the Middle East. They were even more precious during the Cold War and the current war with Iraq under Berlusconi. Of course we're going to respond to all this.
But I can imagine the government saying: "Look, it's in the interests of the citizens of the United States and it's our job as the government of the United States to protect the rights [of American museums and universties] to have access to that material. So we're not going to renew your request for [an import ban] for the third time [Lacayo: Italy has such a request pending] unless you make these materials available. And not just to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Getty museum where you have a quid pro quo. [Lacayo: What Cuno means is that as part of their agreement to return disputed antiquities, Italy promised these particular museums the long term loan of other objects.] But also to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Johnson in Omaha Nebraska, the Seattle Art Museum, to Detroit — all throughout this nation. The government holds that card, which is the authority they have to agree to the requests to impose import bans.
LACAYO: Could the universities that sponsor the digs do more?
CUNO: What if the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania said [to source countries] we are not going to assist with excavations unless you restore this system, by which we both benefited, of partage. The irony is that many of the curators at these university museums are among the most vocal in their support of these cultural property laws. But they could not now teach at, say, the University of Chicago, if there had not once been a system of partage, because they are teaching with materials that were excavated and brought over when there was partage.
LACAYO: What about the free market in antiquities? Many archeologists argue that any market in antiquities encourages looting, because the looters can sell their stolen goods to unscrupulous middle men, and the middle men know they can re-sell them to dealers and museums. Can there be a market in antiquities? Should there be one?
CUNO: More is lost to national disaster, economic development and war than is lost to the art market. Museums are a small part of this problem. if it's going to be stopped it can't be stopped by museums not acquiring.
Looting is a not a casual past time. It's desperate people in desperate circumstances who loot. They risk their lives. Museums recognize that there is a relationship between the marketplace and looting, and we want to distance ourselves from it as much as we can and still preserve these things that will otherwise be lost. How do you behave responsibly in this realm? There has to be a package of responses. One part of the package is partage. And another part has to do with allowing museums to reasonably acquire.
In related news, The Art Newspaper has this about the big trial about to begin in Italy of 70 accused "tomb raiders".
January 27, 2008 1:47
A Talk With: James Cuno
Jim Cuno / PHOTO: HARVARD UNIVERSITY
James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, was in New York last week. He arrived with the architect Renzo Piano for a press luncheon about the new wing for modern art that Piano has designed for the Institute. Before lunch I sat down with him to talk about a different topic, antiquities.
The Art Institute is not a big collector in that area and it hasn't been among the collections targeted by Francesco Rutelli, the Italian culture minister who's been demanding, and getting, so many things back from American museums. But Jim is a well respected spokesman for the concerns of the museum world generally. (And yeah, yeah, he's on everybody's short list of possible candidates to succeed Philippe de Montebello as director of the Met in New York.) In May he'll also be publishing a new book, Who Owns Antiquity?, which I've been reading lately with interest.
As I usually do I'll post this in parts over several days.
LACAYO: Museums that collect antiquities from anywhere in the world — the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Asia, Africa — are finding it harder to do that now because of the cultural property laws adopted by so many source nations. You'd like to see some changes in that area.
CUNO: The goal that we all have is twofold: preservation and access. It's clear to me that the current regime of retentionist cultural property laws — those that seek to retain antiquities within the jurisdiction of a modern state in which they are found, or are alleged to have been found — isn't working. Over the last 60 years there has been an ever increasing number of nations legislating and executing these laws. And over the course of time there has been exponential increase in the looting of archeological sites.
So if the intention is to protect archeological sites and the knowledge they contain, the laws have failed. What they are doing is driving this material underground into black markets, to foreign countries that don't respect the laws of the source nation. So clearly we have to re-examine those laws.
But the intention of those laws isn't to protect archeological sites. Their intention is to claim those properties as critical to the identify of the modern nation, on the one hand, and also to preserve those materials for the cultural tourism they attract. They are also a way to establish stature, a credibility in the world when one can't do it in other ways, by means of economic power or military authority or whatever.
LACAYO: So in your view what needs to be done?
CUNO: In the first half of the 20th century, before most of these laws were put into place, we had a different regime, the system of partage. Foreign archeologists excavated — scientifically — and shared the finds with the local authorities and the host institutions. The archeological museums of the great universities of the world — in the U.S. that would be the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania, Yale and Harvard — all were built through this system of partage. As were the local museums in Baghdad, Kabul and Cairo. Objects were excavated, preserved and shared.
Now we have a system by which it's virtually impossible to share archeological finds. Things have to be retained locally. Clearly that doesn't make any sense. If you were an insurer you wouldn't concentrate risk, you'd distribute risk. We know what happened in Baghdad, in Kabul. We know what happened in Berlin in the Second World War. We don't want all of these cultural assets that are clearly humanity's common legacy, not the legacy of a modern nation state, all in one place.
Anthony Appiah said something wonderful in his book Cosmopolitanism. He says, Look we don't know who made these Nok sculptures, these ancient sculptures that are found today in Nigeria. We don't know if they were made for royalty or for one's ancestors or on speculation. But what we know for sure is that they weren't made for Nigeria. Because at the time there was no Nigeria.
LACAYO: But what would be the incentive for source nations to go back to partage? After the success that Rutelli has enjoyed, there's no political advantage for the officials of some country to say: "Hey, let's give half of our stuff to foreign museums."
CUNO: If these things are important to the cultural identity of Italians, well, Italians don't only live in Italy. Italians live in New York City They live all around the world. If they're important to Italians in Italy they're important to Italians everywhere.
Secondly, if [these objects] are indeed crucial to the identity of Italy, then as cultural diplomacy you would want that material everywhere. You would want Italy to be represented everywhere as an important modern nation by virtue of its claimed legacy from ancient Rome. You would want that appreciated in Beijing, in Shanghai, in Mexico City.
The third thing is, there needs to be some high road recognition that these things are not only the property of Italians. They're really the shared legacy of humanity. These things that were made within the Roman Empire were made in a region far greater than modern day Italy but in a region a polity that was in contact with the rest of the known world at the time. Culture is this dynamic activity of making things out of contact with strange things and new things. There's no culture of consequence that was made in isolation.
LACAYO: Those might all be good arguments in favor of partage, but not incentives for source nations to adopt the practice. Are there concrete penalties or inducements to bring leverage on source nations to return to partage?
CUNO: One way has to do with archeological digs. Especially in Iraq and Egypt and parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia — those digs are done mostly by European and North American archeologists. Those nations depend on the scientific expertise and the financial resources of North American and European archeologists and sponsoring institutions, the universities and museums. If those archeologists were to say we're going to withdraw our expertise until you say you will reestablish partage — it seems to me they would respond to that. We could use our expertise and resources to force the issue.
January 25, 2008 4:44
New York, New York, It's a Wonderful Town
To coincide with this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, TIME's International edition asked me to write a brief essay/feature piece on the exceptionally large arts-related base of the New York City economy. I spend a fair amount of it talking about the chief threat to that economy, the phenomenally high real estate prices in New York that have stayed high even as housing in the most of the rest of the U.S. has cooled off and sometimes tanked. Those prices push out artists, galleries, performance groups and anybody else who forgot to get an M.B.A. and an invitation to Davos.
I bring that piece to your attention here partly because this morning I was forwarded an e-mail from someone at the e-mail address of the Rufus Corporation. That's the business arm of the artist Eve Sussman, best known for the video works 89 Seconds at Alcazar and The Rape of the Sabine Women. (The e-mail was not from Eve personally.) It illustrates what I mean by that threat. Here are some excerpts:
The live-work building located at 475 Kent Ave in Brooklyn's coveted waterfront neighborhood of Williamsburg was issued a Vacate Order by the NYC Fire Department on Sunday, January 20th at 7:30PM, the day before Martin Luther King day. Tenants were given until 1:30 in the morning to leave the building on a frigid January night.
475 Kent is a microcosm of New York City's cultural and economic activity with creative professionals generating an estimated $15 million in annual revenue. The vibrant community of 200 working artists - photographers, architects, writers, musicians, sculptors, filmmakers, designers, painters, printmakers, etc. is under attack.
The events on Sunday night were precipitated when the FDNY [Lacayo: that's the Fire Department of New York] inspected the basement of 475 Kent Ave. and “discovered” two 10' diameter metal canisters containing grain used for making Matzo....The presence of the grain resulted in a so-called “hazardous emergency” situation that gave FDNY and DOB [Department of Buildings] license to vacate the building.
Since the 1960's New York City's tacit urban renewal policy has been reliant on artist's moving into derelict buildings in less desirable neighborhoods.... 475 Kent is a prime example of this kind of turn-a-blind-eye urban renewal that has been a boon to the City of New York. A decade ago South Williamsburg was a dangerous neighborhood. Once artists take the initiative to live on the edge and restore and renew unused real estate in what were marginal areas the City becomes predatory. The transformation of Williamsburg by the artist community into one of New York City's most desirable neighborhoods encourages the city to move artists out as they calculate the tax revenue of luxury condo developers moving in. No one in any city agency cared about our health and safety ten years ago. Now that our building has become hot property the City is ready to muster all the powers of its many agencies to assist in the muscling of the property from the owners and the tenants.
For the record, I don't know any of the people who live — or used to — in 475 Kent and I can't vouch for the version of events as they describe them. But as a glimpse of the daily struggle in New York to keep space available for artists and creative businesses, it's worth passing on.
The blogger C-monster has a post with pictures about the same event.
January 24, 2008 3:12
Raiders of the Looted Artifacts
They got a rude awakening Thursday morning at four museums in southern California — federal agents on their doorsteps with search warrants. The agents who swarmed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and the Mingei International Museum in San Diego were looking for objects and records related to an investigation into an alleged art smuggler, Robert Olson, and Jonathan Markell, the owner of an L.A. gallery that specializes in Asian art, and whose gallery was also raided. The Art Museum of the University of California at Berkeley was also implicated. Jason Felch, the L.A. Times reporter who was one of their specialists on the various travails of the Getty in recent years, has a very speedy story on the Times website.
According to that story, more than four years ago an agent with the National Park Service presented himself to Olson and Markell in the guise of a new collector of Asian art. The warrants claim that the two men admitted that they dealt in objects looted from archeological digs and public sites and sold some to him.
The story goes on to say:
The warrants claim the men also introduced the agent to museum officials who, in dozens of secretly tape-recorded meetings, accepted donations of looted art with values inflated to help the sellers obtain tax write-offs. In the case of the Bowers and the Pacific Asia museums, the warrants clearly suggest that museum officials were aware that the objects were looted and overvalued and accepted them anyway.
LACMA, the Mingei and the UC Berkeley Art Museum all received similar donations from Markell or Olson over several years, the warrants say, but the documents are unclear about the extent to which museum officials knew of alleged theft or tax evasion.
Actually, according to the warrant, Markell told the agent that LACMA was "a stickler" for insisting on proper documentation of items that came into its collection, but according to the Times, Markell "also suggested that the museum had found a loophole to import restrictions on some items."
But I would say this is the money quote:
The alleged crimes described in the warrants continued amid and after the Getty scandal became public, suggesting some American museums have not changed collecting habits known to be illegal or at least questionable. The new allegations could also carry much more serious consequences for those implicated because they are being investigated by U.S. authorities on American soil.
Which may be another way of saying that the former Getty curator Marion True may not be the last American museum professional who has to do a kind of perp walk.
January 23, 2008 3:20
Damien Hirst Goes Park Avenue
School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, Damien Hirst, 2007/ DANIEL ACKER, BLOOMBERG NEWS
Since it opened last November I've been paying visits every so often to the Damien Hirst installation that occupies much of the glass enclosed lobby of Lever House. When it was completed in 1952, Lever House was the first glass and steel modernist office building on Manhattan's Park Avenue. It's now owned by Aby Rosen, a developer and Hirst collector who arranged for this installation, which has the not-quite-grammatical title: School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge.
It's a Surrealist-tinged title for an installation with Surrealist sources in the realms of dream, dread and disgust. It's also something of a catch-all of Hirst's recurring motifs. This time he's stuffed the space with 30 glass tanks filled with formaldehyde. Each tank holds a beheaded white preserved sheep, and each is placed on a gleaming stainless steel autopsy table. Those are arranged in long rows, to make an ensemble image that's both primal and antiseptic in a way that plays off of the vocabulary of glass and steel that Lever House, which was designed by Gordon Bunshaft, did so much to introduce to the American cityscape.
Hirst has also talked about the piece as an homage to Francis Bacon, which is plain enough, maybe too plain, from the pair of vertical beef carcasses on one end of the installation that flank a black umbrella, a reference to Bacon's great early canvas Painting that's on permanent display a few blocks away at the Museum of Modern Art.
Painting, Francis Bacon, 1946/ THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
And which in turn of course harks back to Rembrandt's great butchered side of beef.
Carcass of Beef, Rembrandt, 1567 /LOUVRE
There's also a shark in there, some medicine cabinets, Dan Flavin-ish white fluorescent tubes...anyway, a Hirst sampler. The installation is in some ways more effective than Hirst's single pickled shark-in-a-tank that's on loan now at the Metropolitan Museum. The science fiction gleam of all that metal in that glass lobby amplifies the element of death-denial that's crucial to HIrst's idee fixe about humans and their own mortality. And the sepulchral whiteness of the sheep, like the winding-sheet pallor of Melville's deathly White Whale, is a nice touch. But scale doesn't fully translate to impact here. It all feels too much like Hirst re-marketing some famillar brands.
Hirst gets villified as a cynic and God knows sometimes he deserves it. But as an installation artist he has his moments, even his brilliant ones. This isn't quite one of them. His problem may be that his cynicism makes his would be seriousness hard to credit. And that, in the war against cliche, as Martin Amis has called it, you can never be sure which side he'll turn up on.
January 23, 2008 8:40
A Talk With: David Hockney
David Hockney in East Yorkshire, 2006 / Photo: RICHARD LACAYO
I caught up with David Hockney recently by phone from Los Angeles, where he was supervising the re-installation of his 1987 sets for the LA Opera production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Hockney still keeps a home in L.A., but spends most of his time lately in Bridlington, a coastal town in East Yorkshire close to where he grew up, and where it's easy for him to pursue his deepening preoccupation with landscape painting.
Hockney Landscape, 2006 /Photo: RICHARD LACAYO
Two years ago I headed out there for a few days to talk with Hockney and to drive around with him to the places where he was setting up his easel. By last year he was assembling groups of canvases grid-style into larger images, a process that eventually led to Bigger Trees Near Warter, a single work composed of 50 smaller canvases that was exhibited last summer at London's Royal Academy of Art. At 40 feet long by 15 feet high, it may be the largest picture ever painted entirely out of doors.
Hockney with Bigger Trees Near Warter /Photo: AP
LACAYO: Do you still divide your time between L.A. and Britain?
HOCKNEY: I live wherever I happen to be. I'll be going back to Bridlington soon but I'm in L.A. now. I'm in Bridlington more of the time now because we're planning this big show.
LACAYO: Are you going to change the set design of Tristan in any way?
HOCKNEY: It didn't need changing. Most Tristans you see are virtually concert performances. I saw a production in Baden-Baden last year. Very good singing but nothing to look at. I was with a friend at the performance, telling him the Tristan story and he said "I'm glad you told me, because you can't tell anything about it from looking at this production." But you can tell the story from this one. In this one you see everything — castles, forests, ships at sea, daylight, night time. The sets are very simple in a way. But the ways that you can light them make them change.
Tristan und Isolde, sets by David Hockney /Photo: ROBERT MILLARDLACAYO: When I saw you two years ago you thought you might be involved with landscape painting for just a year, a single cycle of four seasons. But obviously you've stayed with it.
HOCKNEY: I think you can open up landscape painting. Most people would regard it as finished. I don't think it is. When we realized we could open up landscape painting on a large scale with the help of a computer, I got very excited.
LACAYO: Whenever I'm in Britain I'm struck by how much more visible British artists are to the ordinary public than they are in the U.S. You're a household name. A lot of younger British artists are famous, or at least notorious. And the newspapers follow the Turner Prize and the Fourth Plinth competition the way American papers follow the Oscars. Why do you think that is?
HOCKNEY: Britain is a very small country with a very large press. The United States is a very large country with a very small press. What I mean is you've got a competitive press in London, with several papers, so you get competitive coverage, competitive critics.
LACAYO: Two years ago, in a single six week period, two of your paintings in succession broke auction house records for your work. You weren't the seller in either case. In Britain do artists get a portion of the auction sale of their art even if they aren't the sellers?
HOCKNEY: I think it depends on where it's sold. If it's sold in London I think I do but I'm not sure.
LACAYO: Well one way to tell would be if the money appeared in your bank account. So you don't follow your own finances closely?
HOCKNEY: You know I don't actually. I have somebody else follow them who I trust. The great thing about Bridlington is that the three of us can live there like bohemians while the office is in L.A. You need an office somewhere, looking after everything, but the great thing is, that's off in L.A.
LACAYO: Last fall I saw a show at Tate Britain of Turner watercolors chosen by you. If you ran your own museum, what would you be thinking about these days?
HOCKNEY: We live in a somewhat confused time about imagery, partly because of confusions about photography. I think I understand now what it really was, just a blot in a continuum of picture making. And it's now finished. We're into another era with pictures. We used to assume that photography had a greater connection with reality because it depicted an event in time and space that took place in front of the camera. With digital imagery and photoshop, that no longer has to be the case. We're into a new era that we haven't sorted out yet.
Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the artworld, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?
LACAYO. How's your one man campaign for smokers' rights going?
HOCKNEY. I did an interview recently with the LA Times and said "I have noticed here in California that 25% of the advertisements on American television are for prescription drugs. That's what's replacing tobacco." People smoke to calm down, but now in this country you take drugs to do that. I'm a lone voice but I keep on it. I'm not giving up. Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
There's an interesting description of how Hockney produced his large landscape at the Royal Academy website here.
January 22, 2008 9:29
Last Talk: With John Elderfield
Let's conclude that conversation with the soon to retire chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
LACAYO: MoMA is always criticized for not staying hot on the trail of contemporary art. Recently your museum hired Kathy Halbreich, the former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, to become MoMA's first associate director, mostly to keep the museum current on new developments. Is this the presumed future management structure for MoMA, with a contemporary specialist in a high position, or even two heads of each department?
ELDERFIELD: This idea of having two heads of painting and sculpture had been voiced earlier. Clearly it's coming up again. But I believe that there's a strong feeling that it's impossible to do, or would be inappropriate to do. The only way would be to create a department of contemporary art, but that would make all the heads of departments — painting and sculpture, prints, photography, etc. — it would make them all historical departments. The dialogue between the historical and contemporary has been thought over ever since MoMA started. It's just built into the institution.
Perhaps things could be done better if all of the departments didn't have a kind of split consciousness. But equally I think it's good that people within each of the departments who are working on contemporary art have to justify what they are doing within departments whose mandate is broader. People here understand that when they propose acquisitions for the collection, those will go in among Cezanne and Matisse. Conversely, when they propose historical shows they have to face that these shows can't just be archeological, they have to speak to us now. That's healthy, but it's difficult.
But having somebody like Kathy to coordinate activities in the contemporary area is a good idea. The Modern shouldn't be a kunsthalle or a contemporary museum. But neither should it be a Frick of the Modern. It should be both. The exhibition work in areas of the past continues and needs to continue because each generation needs to be reminded of things. We've seen all of these things. But the kids in their twenties haven't.
LACAYO: What were you proudest of doing here in the years since you were named chief curator of painting and sculpture in 2003.
ELDERFIELD: I know that [Elderfield's predecessor] Kirk Varnedoe came to the the job wanting to do a series of three shows of relatively recent Americans, Pollock, Johns and Twombly, which he did do. I felt quite early on that I also wanted do three big exhibitions: Schwitters, which I did in the '80s, Matisse in the '90s and now de Kooning. But I'm also particularly proud of the three shows I did in the last year and a half. As they all came in I realized that they comprised a kind of manifesto.
The first one, "Manet and the Execution of Maximilian," was really my way of saying, "Okay, the museum's collections and programs traditionally start in 1880, but why does that have to be? If things from an earlier period are relevant to now, the museum should do them.
The second thing, and this is what the [Venezuelan painter] Armando Reveron show was all about, is that the Modern has really got to work outside the traditional canon. I particularly wanted to do a monographic show, because doing survey shows is the easy way out, particularly with Latin America. Who would do a show called "European Art"?
And the third was Martin Puryear, a really great mid-to-late career artist, but one who is not part of what you might call "the entertainment industry," who doesn't have the biggest dealers in the world. And in its contemporary programs I feel it's really important that the museum asserts its independence [from that]. As we know, the same people are always being done all over the world. Everyone talks about how we're in this new pluralistic era in art but we're not. In some ways it's more conformist now than ever. Whether this will change when the market bubble bursts I don't know. But it's really important that there should be a culture that encourages independent thinking.
LACAYO: Are there things that you feel still need to be done here?
ELDERFIELD: There's a lot of things relating to the collection. Over the past few years I've been doing a big review of our holdings. With American artists in the '60s the museum bought early work, with European artists they bought late work. There are some 60's artists whose career weren't followed and need to be. We don't have late Flavin.
LACAYO: What is the acquisition budget for your department?
ELDERFIELD: We have dues paid by the committee members plus interest from the endowment. That produces about $2 million a year.
LACAYO: So for something as expensive as Jasper John's Diver, do you go back to your trustees and ask for more money?
ELDERFIELD: Yes, and for works of historical importance we allow ourselves to deaccession. For Diver, [Robert Rauschenberg's] Rebus, we did both things, going to the trustees and also deaccessioning. But I wouldn't be comfortable selling something from the teens to buy something from the 1980s. If you look at Barr's book Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, at the back there's a list of works that were sold from the Lillie Bliss Collection — that's the founding collection — and of works which were bought with the proceeds. You go through this and [see some of the purchases] and you think, Really? The conclusion you take away is that it's extremely dangerous to sell historical work to buy newer ones. With contemporary things it's better to wait, even if you have to pay higher prices, because you're more likely to get things you'll want to keep.
January 18, 2008 7:05
Critical Condition
Blogger Tyler Green had a depressing posting today as part of a three part interview he's been running with Christian Viveros-Faune, the art critic of New York's erstwhile alternative weekly The Village Voice, now owned by a Phoenix-based chain. The depressing part is that it emerged from the interview that even while serving as a critic, Viveros-Faune is also the organizer or director of two commercial art fairs, Volta in New York and Next in Chicago.
Green lays out all the reasons why this represents a plain conflict of interest. For starters, Viveros-Faune can use his column to promote artists and galleries he will include in his fairs or punish them if they don't choose to sign up. So long as Volta and Next are commercial operations, this isn't even a gray area — you can't be directly involved with the profit-making end of the artworld and also pretend to write about it from a disinterested perspective. And the response of the Voice that Viveros-Faune's outside undertakings are "curatorial" utterly misses the distinction between organizing a show for a non-profit museum and for a profit making operation.
I'm not at all clear as to what Viveros-Faune means when he says "there is no interest in the art world without a conflict of interest". But I'll look on the bright side and take it as a first sign that he recognizes at least that there is a conflict of interest here. The next step would be to take it seriously.
I'll be taking a three day weekend for the birthday of Martin Luther King. Back on Tuesday.
January 18, 2008 12:45
Out the Door
After successfully re-claiming scores of Greek and Roman antiquities from American museums, the Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has made his first agreement to retrieve works from an American private collection. Shelby White, the New York philanthropist, agreed to return ten pieces from the collection that she assembled with her late husband Leon J. Levy.
The Leon Levy and Shelby White Court of the Metropolitan Museum of Art /METROPOLITAN MUSEUM
White is, of course, also a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She and her husband donated $20 million to finance the Met's newly expanded Greek and Roman galleries, parts of which bear their names. Some of the pieces she'll be returning to Italy were until recently on long term loan to the Met, which has already returned scores of ancient works from its permanent collection. Earlier this month it removed from its galleries the Euphronios krater — its last disputed treasure — or is it just the last for now? — and packed it home to Italy.
One interesting point here is that White, who always insisted that she and her husband had acquired all the items in good faith — and the Italians, for their part, have not claimed that they were involved in any criminal act — wanted the Italians to promise that they would never pursue items from her collection again. What Rutelli agreed to instead is that Italy would not lay claim to any additional objects that were included in a 1990 Met show drawn from the White/Levy collection, a show that some scholars suspect was full of items that may have been looted from archeological digs. But he would not rule out claims against other works that she owns if evidence should emerge that they were looted.
One ominous quote in the Times story from an unnamed person involved in the negotiations between White and the Italians: "The truth is, because she's lent so many of her pieces, she was very visible. Other collectors tend to keep their antiquities at home." What this might mean for future museum loan shows of ancient art is not encouraging.
One other ominous quote. Someone asked Rutelli whether Italy was looking into other private collections. "The coming year," he said, "will be full of surprises."
January 18, 2008 9:24
Marble in Motion?
David, Michelangelo, 1504 / GALLERIA DELL'ACCADEMIA
As a way of drawing tourists out of the absurdly congested center of Florence, Tuscan cultural officials are thinking of moving Michelangelo's David to a new theater under construction on the outskirts of town. The David has moved before of course. It was originally set up in the Piazza della Signoria, in 1504, and remained there until 1873, then the Florentines moved it to the Galleria dell'Accademia to protect it from the elements. And possibly from the Florentines, who broke his arm — as I recall it was with a bench flung from an upper story window — during riots in 1527.
It can't be denied that the tourist congestion problem in Florence is out of control. On my last trip, in the fall of 2006, the scrum in front of the Duomo was so bad I didn't even try. (Crowding at the Accademia is not so bad, thanks to timed tickets, which you can order in advance.) But would moving the David do much to change that? The Uffizi, the Bargello, the Duomo — they're all within a short distance of one another, and the tourists will still be pouring into the center of town to see them. And I thought this point by Jonathan Jones in the British daily the Guardian was worth making — that a relocation to the edge of town would just further a process by which the David has been tamed and domesticated, removed from its original meanings as a civic emblem, a symbol of a city prepared to fight to defend itself, sometimes even against its own oligarchs.
Of course a measure of devitalization is the fate of most art that lasts long enough to have its original context disappear. The wilder, Dionysian side of much Greek art is lost to us in the strictly Apollonian museum settings where we usually see it. And there's a light that goes off inside of devotional art when it's transferred from churches to galleries. Even Diego Rivera's peasant and proletariat murals will lose whatever political force they still possess as the twentieth century fades further into the past.
And who knows what future generations will make of Campbell's soup cans?
January 17, 2008 12:17
More Talk With: John Elderfield
Let's continue that conversation I started here two days ago with the soon-to-retire chief curator of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
LACAYO: Over the past twenty-five or so years we've seen incredible retrospectives, at MoMA and elsewhere, devoted to just about all the big names of the 20th century. Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Miro, Leger, Schwitters, Mondrian, Bonnard, Beckmann, Gorky, Pollock, Kline, Newman, David Smith, Guston, Warhol. Who's left? Is there somebody among the glorious dead who still hasn't gotten the big show treatment and deserves it?
ELDERFIELD: Obviously that's something I've thought about a lot here. I'm very much against the idea of simply re-running the 20th century in the 21st. There were people here who thought we should have done another Fauves show in 2005 and that we should do a Futurist show, and I was like, "I don't think so". It's got to be done on an individual basis, asking which of the artists of the past particularly speak to us now. Looking at it that way, there are some people whom one wants to look now at certain fragments of their work. Miro from the mid-1920s to the mid-30s. That's comparable to what I'm doing with Matisse or what I did with Manet.
But there's never been a Braque show. Juan Gris, there's never been a full Gris show. Joaquin Torres-Garcia, I really think that should be done. It's one of the things I would have liked to have done — and maybe I will.
LACAYO: My choice would be Matta.
ELDERFIELD: A longtime ago I think Bill Rubin did one of those, in the late '60s I think.
LACAYO: What about living artists?
ELDERFIELD: There are people like Robert Gober, whom we will be doing. And people who would be mid-career if they were still around, like Martin Kippenberger.
LACAYO: What about Louise Bourgeois? I recently saw the retrospective at Tate Modern in London, which was good, but I didn't think it was the last word.
ELDERFIELD: Well MoMA did one fifteen or more years ago, which I think had the advantage of having been done before the late expansion of scale [in her art], which I'm not convinced is to the benefit of the work. But this is a phenomenon we deal with, overproduction and a tendency to equate scale and importance.
January 16, 2008 11:11
Today in L.A. News
A few bits of aftermath from the decision by Eli Broad not to donate his collection to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
LACMA Director Michael Govan spoke to the Los Angeles Times yesterday. You can't blame him for putting the best face on things, but I find myself agreeing with a couple of points made today by blogger Tyler Green. First, it's hard to claim that Broad "never changed his story with LACMA" if he did indeed explicitly state in a 2004 interview with the L.A Times that he would be leaving part of it to them.
And though I know that Govan was just musing out loud, it's odd to hear a museum director say he's not sure that it matters whether his museum owns the Broad collection outright or merely borrows, as it now will, from the Broad Foundation that will control it instead. As the decades go by and we get a better grasp of which works of contemporary art are keepers, I would much prefer to have LACMA making the decisions about what parts of the Broad collection are important enough to merit continuing display. The Broad Foundation will presumably be invested for years to come in the idea that all of Broad's collection is of consequence.
This has been a problem with other legacy collections. For years the Hammer Museum was obliged to display virtually all of Armand Hammer's bequest, some of it terrific, some of it very dubious. And as anybody can tell you after a trip to the Barnes Foundation, even that famous collection has its share of misjudged acquisitions — Jules Pascin anybody? — but the terms of Barnes bequest makes it impossible for the Foundation to take anything off the walls. Presumably Broad's Foundation, which will exist, as it does now, largely to lend and circulate his collection, won't be operating with rules as confining as the ones that restrict the Barnes. All the same, a museum, which doesn't need to insist that everything a donor purchased was a tribute to his art historical foresight, is in a better position to make hard judgments.
Then the better news. LACMA has also scored a $10 million gift for contemporary art programs and acquisitions.
And this comes at the same time as the announcement that Zaha Hadid has been chosen to design the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Broad's alma mater, Michigan State. This will be Hadid' second American museum. The first, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, is an absolute beauty. So why doesn't she get more work in the U.S? The Broads deserve credit on this one.
January 15, 2008 11:19
El Anatsui(te) Spot
El Anatsui with Between Earth and Heaven, 2006/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Ghanaian-born artist El Anatsui has been exhibiting outside West Africa since at least 1990, when he first appeared at the Venice Biennale, but it seems to me that over the past year or two he's everywhere I go. So I wasn't surprised that one of his magnificent bottle-cap tapestries, Between Earth and Heaven, has just become the first contemporary African work to enter the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
It seems to me that with these tapestry wall hanging sculptures made from the detritus of global trade, with their plain reference at the same time to African kinte cloth, El Anatsui arrived at a perfect convergence of traditional craft and ironic postmodern consciousness, one that brings him every time to an outcome of old fashioned laugh-at-loud beauty. Last September I found a great example on the second floor of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, then ran across another a month later when I was ushered into the office of Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, who has one behind his desk. MacGregor said it does a wonderful light show all day in the changing registers of sunlight. And in June at the Venice Biennale there were two of the largest El Anatsuis I'd ever seen at either end of an immense dark brick gallery at the big international show organized by Rob Storr, the Biennale Director. They had the bounding surface incident of those poured pigment cascade paintings that Pat Steir was doing some years back, and the strangeness of a curtain for some West African production of the Ring cycle.
Which, come to think of it, would be an interesting idea.
The Met gets spanked all the time for not getting it right in the acquisition of contemporary art, but I don't know how they could have gotten it righter than this.
January 14, 2008 11:45
A Talk With: John Elderfield
Last month the Museum of Modern Art in New York annouced that John Elderfield, MoMA's chief curator of painting and sculpture, would be stepping down later this year when he reaches 65, the museum's compulsory retirement age. But in recognition of the fact that John is someone no museum wants or can afford to lose, he'll remain with MoMA as "chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture". Under that title he'll contribute to two large shows in the coming years. The first, which will focus on Matisse from 1913 to 1917, he'll co-curate with Stephanie d'Allesandro of the Art Institute of Chicago. It's scheduled to open there in March of 2010, then move to MoMA in July. The second, a full scale de Kooning retrospective that he'll curate himself, has no firm date yet.
Last week I sat down with John for a long talk about his tenure at MoMA, museum practices generally and his plans for the future. As I usually do I'll break this conversation into a few posts over several days.
LACAYO: Has anyone else had the title of curator emeritus at MoMA?
ELDERFIELD: Bill Rubin did. After he retired he curated the "Picasso and Portraiture" show.
LACAYO: When was the last big de Kooning show?
ELDERFIELD: In 1994. It was organized by the National Gallery in Washington and then came to the Met and the Tate. But it was a kind of fifty paintings show. I've hardly started working on mine. I'm still making lists in my head. But there's a great de Kooning Foundation that has good documentation of about 6000 objects.
LACAYO: And what will the Matisse show be about? How will it be different from the big show you organized in 1992?
Bathers by a River, Matisse, 1909, 1913, 1916 / ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
ELDERFIELD: I had actually vowed after that never to be involved in a Matisse show again. I broke that resolution for "Matisse/Picasso". However, the Art Institute invited me to Chicago to see conservation work they were doing on Bathers by a River. We thought it dated from 1913 to about 1916. But since the early '70s it's been known that a watercolor exists of this subject from 1909. It's now known that it was originally one of three pictures that Matisse thought [the Russian collector] Shchukin had commissioned from him, the others being Music and Dance. In fact, Shchukin had just commissioned two. Nobody's ever known whether Matisse actually started the painting in '09 or '10. Or whether, having done the watercolor, he decided, "Hey, I'm not getting to do this project". But then, after he came back from Morocco in 1913, figured he wanted to do a big composition and started work on it then. But it's become clear from conservation work on the picture that under that severe exterior is bright prismatic color.
LACAYO: So those could be remnants of his earlier fauviste palette?
ELDERFIELD: Yes, so it was started in 1909 or '10. And they've been doing amazing work in Chicago trying to understand how the picture evolved. So I said, "This is so great; we have to work on our Matisse's [at MoMA]. So we have already cleaned The Piano Lesson and are now starting to work on The Moroccans. And then the next thing, I said "We should do a show based on the teens, the great Matisse period, dealing with those five years from 1913 to 1917." It will be small, just 40 paintings.
LACAYO: What about a date for the de Kooning show?
ELDERFIELD: De Kooning doesn't have a firm date. The museum wants me to do it for the fall of 2010. I'm excited because de Kooning was one of he reasons I came to the United States in the first place. I was an art student in England and I had a friend who came back from New York with that Tom Hess book on de Kooning from the 60s. I saw it and said, "This stuff is so amazing; I've got to get to New York." I eventually met him a few times.
LACAYO: And he was still lucid back then.
ELDERFIELD: He was. It's so sad. He was an angel in the studio but he had no idea how to have a life. I recently re-read the [Mark Stevens/Annalyn Swan] biography and you realize that this poor guy was clueless.
LACAYO: I knew de Kooning was a heavy drinker but it wasn't until I read their book that I realized that there were some nights when he was literally blacking out on the Bowery.
ELDERFIELD: And this at time when most people thought he was the greatest living American painter. And of course one of the challenges of the show will be the late work [Lacayo: work dating from the time after de Kooning's Alzheimer's had worsened] and what to do about that. I've been following de Kooning pretty much forever, and I've seen most of the shows, but I've yet to see everything in the estate, which I'll probably be doing in the next couple of months.
January 11, 2008 1:02
Murakami. You Saw the Show. Now Buy the Handbag
Last thought on that Takashi Murakami exhibition in L.A. As mentioned yesterday, the big controversy when it first opened was over the decision to include a Louis Vuitton boutique as a gallery within the show — not just as a gift shop, but as an integral part of the show. (From which, let the record show, the museum would derive no income, which might compromise it's non-profit status. What a relief to know that the profit from those $900 hand bags would flow only into the deserving coffers of LVMH.) Actually the boutique is on a mezzanine level above the main exhibition floor, though it decants you back into a final gallery of paintings. Paul Schimmel, the MOCA curator who organized the show, justified the shop as an expression of Murakami's deliberate engagement with the world of merchandising.
Fair enough, but that opens two questions. One has to do with how odd it seems, once you understand the wellsprings of nausea, anxiety and loathing that underlie Murakami's work — I talked about all this at length yesterday — that he was asked to attach his work to luxury merchandise. You have to wonder what exactly he's thinking when he adds his little doodads to the Louis Vuitton bags, especially when you know that he thinks cute pop culture emblems are coded signifiers of anxiety and rage. Or are there two Murakamis? The angry guy who made the paintings downstairs and the irony-free cutie pie who puts little eyeballs on luxury goods?
By way of comparison, try to imagine Francis Bacon, another master conduit of nausea and one whom Murakami admires, being asked to "brand" anybody's anything. Notwithstanding that Bacon actually was for a while an interior designer, I don't think we'll be seeing the Bacon Home Collection anytime soon. (Though it might be fun. Maybe he could sell "Bloody Stools". In a set of four.) Louis Vuitton, of course, may not care about any of this. Their collaboration with Murakami has brought in hundreds of millions. And of course the people buying those bags probably never think about what Murakami's larger project is. But I have to wonder what Murakami thinks he's doing, in his heart of hearts.
Then again, even if they do know that Murakami's images are the work of a man who sees cute kitsch figures as little emblems of fear and disgust, Lous Vuitton would not be the only hip merchandiser to be using art as a way to play with the consumer's conflicted feelings about, well, consumption. Over in the U.K., Selfridges department stores have been collaborating with the American artist Barbara Kruger in a Christmas season tv ad campaign that plays off her famous 1987 screenprint Untitled (I Shop Therefore I Am) and other Kruger images. What began 20 years ago as a critique of consumerism, ends as an enabling device, allowing hip shoppers to address their own materialism through a sanitizing haze of irony, that all purpose postmodern defense mechanism. Ka-ching!
Last question. If a consumer transaction is in some way essential to the Murakami experience, and God knows the case could be made, why does it have to be one on the upper end of his merchandising universe? Doesn't that deny the experience to any visitor who doesn't have the disposable income for a $900 tote bag? (On my visit to the show last month I loitered around the LV boutique for some time, hoping at least to see someone else make a purchase — would that qualify as a secondary aesthetic experience? — but nobody treated me to the money shot.) Instead of a luxury boutique, why not have a gallery/salesfloor that sells any of the multitude of lower priced Murakami merchandise, t-shirts and so on? Weirdly, there was a gallery of those, in glass cases, but they weren't for sale.
All the same, there was some Murakami merchandise available in the Geffen's usual gift shop on the way out. As I picked through it I felt myself part of something larger. I just wasn't sure what it was.
January 10, 2008 7:48
More on Murakami
Okay, let's get back to that Takashi Murakami show at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. In an earlier post I mentioned that it had been better than I expected and sketched out some of the essential background on him and his work.
My Lonesome Cowboy, Murakami, 1998 — Image: Marianne Boesky Gallery
So what did I learn at that show? To begin with, that the way he uses pop culture is never one dimensional, though it's not always particularly original. Consider his large scale sculpture of a naked cartoonish boy shooting a stream of sperm that he swings like a lariat. (In a nod to Warhol Murakami calls it My Lonesome Cowboy.) No doubt it fascinated Murakami's lonely-boy nerd followers in otaku culture. But to some extent the joke is on them — the rest of us are looking at it as an emblem for the triumph of a fairly pathetic juvenile boy culture in Western capitalism. (And anyway, do the otaku boys know that Lonesome Cowboys is one of Warhol's soft core gay movies?) But the joke is also on us — juvenile boy culture really has triumped. And to place the whole thing within a longer, complicated tradition of both fine art and mass produced (and export) imagery, Murakami links the silhouette of the sperm stream visually to the hooking forms of the cresting surf in one of Hokusai's famous 19th-century prints.
That's a lot of compressed meaning for one masturbating elf-boy. But that boy, or the big breasted girls that Murakami produced around the same time, is also not so different from any other kind of post Pop Art that disorients and unnerves you by enlarging the accustomed scale of a familiar figure, like Jeff Koon's giant ceramic knick knacks from the '80s or Charles Ray's big women or for that matter, to go back to first-generation Pop, a Claes Oldenburg clothespin.
For myself, it's as a painter that Murakami is more interesting, and not just in work, like 727, that departs from his Superflat idea sufficiently to produce a multi-layered roughened surface that's supremely beautiful. Murakami associates the surface with both Japanese lacquerware and the speckled Oxidation paintings that Warhol and his friends produced in the late '70s by urinating on metallic pigment. (And let the record show that in good Conceptual artist form Murakami's clock-punching, calisthenic-jumping assistants do most of the actual painting. Hey, if I'm recalling correctly, it was Andy's buddies who did most of the actual pissing.)
727, Murakami, 1996 — The Museum of Modern Art, New York
For starters, for all that it grows out of cartoons and comic books, Murakami's work is in no way reducible to its pop culture sources. It has a graphic power that reproduction can't approximate. That's another way he reminded me of Roy Lichtenstein. Because Lichtenstein's comic strip paintings were based on reproduced images, you could make the mistake of thinking that you can get all you need to know about a Lichtenstein itself from a reproduction of the painting. In
