Peter Halley, The Grave, 1980. Courtesy Peter Halley's website.

Halley began his lecture by discussing his move to New York City in 1980 and a linchpin piece, The Grave, that helps unlock the iconographical implications of his work.  The minimalist painting depicts a stark whitish rectangle resting on a black ground with a sickly yellow background.  The isolation of death comes through clearly.  Looking back at this work from 32 years ago, Halley revealed that the piece’s deadpan style harbors a “touch of emotional depression.”  It is hard not to imagine that the painting bespeaks the profound loneliness of a transplanted artist amidst the bustling, crowded streets of New York.

As Halley continued his lecture, he described how the gravestone morphed into a prison, drawn not figuratively but simply, as a rectangle with three slim vertical lines through it.  Representing both the grid of the city and a single apartment in a skyscraper, Halley’s prison invokes a sense of feeling trapped.  In a particularly elegant comparison of modern urban life vis-à-vis earlier historic times he described his thoughts on the “death of nature.” As Halley sees it, people in today’s society are cut off from the natural world: one can no longer go out into nature as a “sure-fire referent anymore” or a place to escape the stress of daily life.  (From a personal perspective, I can agree with him. Every day on my commute to school I deliberately take the C train uptown so I can walk across the park and enjoy a few minutes of relative solace, away from the chaos of Manhattan streets.)

Peter Halley, Day-Glo Prison, 1982. Courtesy Peter Halley's website.

Shortly after the appearance of prisons in his paintings, Halley described how he began to include Barnett Newman-esque “zips” that he calls “conduits.”  These conduits started out tentatively, as in Prison with Conduit, in which they do not encounter any obstacle but rather run horizontally across the canvas.  Quickly, however, they began to link shapes together.  His rectangular and square shapes began to converse with the edge of the canvas (read “the rest of the world,” in general) or with one another (read “individual to individual”).  The isolation of the gravestone gave way to a connected world. As he stated in a 2009 interview, “The connectivity between people is the basis of the pleasure of life to me.”  One could posit that Halley’s work began to change as he began to build friendships in his new city.

Peter Halley, Prison with Conduit, 1981. Courtesy Peter Halley's website.

Halley described the conduit as the type of relationship possible in the modern world of increased alienation due to technology.  For Halley, technology ties people together but without the close bonds wrought by the face-to-face interactions of yesteryear.  During the 1980s he was referencing telephones, television and radio;  in today’s digital world, his words and paintings seem to be even more relevant, as evidenced by stories such as that of Tyler Clementi, investigated in a recent New Yorker article: “The Story of a Suicide: two college roommates, a webcam, and a tragedy.”

Peter Halley, Two Cells with Conduit & Underground Chamber, 1983. Courtesy Peter Halley's website.

The artist stated that his early icons—the gravestone, the prison, and the conduit—formed the foundation for his later work.  As he says, he began to play with these forms and brighter colors with a “childlike” sort of thought process and his works became “wackier.”  While certainly his work may not appear “wacky” compared to the galaxy of subjects taken up by other contemporary artists, there is a joyous quality to his luminous colors appropriated, paradoxically, from videogames.  It is almost as if Halley finally embraced the bustle of New York and feels at home in it.

If you’re planning to attend the conference, you can support your colleagues and classmates at the following panels!

Happenings: Transnational, Transdisciplinary
Wednesday, February 22, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 403B, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Guerrilla Tactics and International Happenings: An Expanded View of Brazilian Art of the Late 1960s and Early 1970s
Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

The Interconnected Tenth Century
Wednesday, February 22, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 404A, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
China among Equals: Recontextualizing the China-Abbasid Trade Connection in the Long Tenth Century
Hsueh-man Shen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Internationalizing the Field: A Discussion of Global Networks for Art Historians
Wednesday, February 22, 12:30 PM–2:00 PM
West Hall Meeting Room 501ABC, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Townhouse Gallery “Archive Map” Project
Clare Davies, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

From Camp to Visual Culture: Accounting for “Bad” Art since the 1960s
Wednesday, February 22, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 404A, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Good Ideas Done Bad: Neil Jenney’s Bad Paintings
Matthew Levy, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Theorizing the Body
Thursday, February 23, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 403B, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Body of Work: Stylization and Ambiguity in the Benin Plaque Corpus
Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, New York University

Towards a Rock and Roll History of Contemporary Art
Thursday, February 23, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 409AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Chairs: Matthew Jesse Jackson, University of Chicago; Robert Slifkin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Sense of an Ending: Spiral Jetty and the Stones at Altamont
William Smith, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

New Research in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Saturday, February 25, 9:30 AM–12:00 PM
West Hall Meeting Room 511BC, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Old Meets New: Classicizing Visions in Diego de Valadés’s “Rhetorica Christiana”
Laura Leaper, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Soldier Ecclesiasticus: Images of the Archangel Michael in New Spain
Niria Leyva-Gutiérrez, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

New Scholars Session
Saturday, February 25, 12:30 PM–2:00 PM
West Hall Meeting Room 501ABC, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
The Garden Landscape and the French Interior
Lauren Cannady, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

(Re)Writing the Local in Latin American Art
Saturday, February 25, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
West Hall Meeting Room 501ABC, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
“Un Espacio Abierto”: Metaphors of Space and Community in
Mexico City’s “Temístocles 44″
Emily Sessions, New York University

Manuscripts without Moorings, Objects and Their Origins: Stylistic Analysis or Stylistic Attribution?
Saturday, February 25, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
West Hall Meeting Room 501ABC, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
Medieval Spanish Painting at the Crossroads: Stylistic Pluralism in the “Liber Feudorum Maior” of Barcelona
Shannon Wearing, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Situating Expanded Cinema in Postwar Art Practice
Saturday, February 25, 2:30 PM–5:00 PM
Concourse Meeting Room 409AB, Level 2, Los Angeles Convention Center
“We Must Build Our Theaters in the Air”: Jaime Davidovich
and Public-Access Cable Television
Sarah Johnson Montross, New York University

Buddha, Probably Amitabha (Amituo), Tang dynasty (618–907), early 7th century China, hollow dry lacquer with pigment and gilding, 38 x 27 x 22 1/2 inches (96.5 x 68.6 x 57.1 cm).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Before 1900, antiquarians and Chinese collectors did not value sculpture as they did painting, calligraphy, and antiquities (ancient bronze ceremonial vessels). The reasons for this were many, but most important was that sculpture was associated with laborers, not with the literati or imperial courts that produced landscapes or bronzes. In addition, large-scale sculpture did not lend itself well to the habits of viewing and exhibiting within the gentlemanly circles of Chinese collectors. Antiquities and scrolls were shown in the small courtyards of learned men, and sculpture was appreciated only through historic copies of rubbings taken from the inscriptions and dedications carved underneath or beside early Buddhist sculpture.

However, during the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) an intellectual movement calling for more scientific methods encouraged scholars to go into the interior parts of China, where monumental stone architecture and sculpture were plentiful, and visit the sites where these prized rubbings were made. Excursions like those to the Longmen Guyang cave joined sculpture and inscription for Qing antiquarians and they began tentative collections of Buddhist statuary.

At around the same time in the 19th century, the predominant Western view of Buddhism and Taoism as idolatry was repudiated by their inclusion in the World’s Parliament of Religions, and these two newly sanctioned faiths began to serve as “brackets for knowledge” of Chinese sculpture. Imperialism and the trend for global collecting led wealthy Europeans like Henri Cernuschi and Émile Guimet to amass vast amounts of East Asian objects, including sculpture from China. While Cernuschi displayed his objects as curiosities in his mansion, Guimet’s Chinese sculptures were exhibited in a museum of oriental religions – not as art but as ethnographic specimens.

Soon thereafter, Sinologists like Maurice Paléologue and Stephen Bushell published books on Chinese art (in 1901 and 1904 respectively), including sculpture among their categorizations. Abe argued that these initial classifications of Chinese art into painting, bronzes, and sculpture were not inherent to the works themselves or to the Chinese antiquarian framework. Instead he posited that the values of modernity, positivism, and the evolution of form were imposed upon these objects, leading to the periodization of art for the first time in China as well as in Japan. It was only after the rise of modernist principles in China that the terms wenwu (antiquity) and meisu (fine art) first come into use.

Abe brought his lecture to a close by drawing connections between ‘Chinese sculpture’ and figures of high Modernism. He noted that Roger Fry linked modern Western art to the art of various other parts of the world under the aegis of abstraction, as did Clive Bell in his book Art in 1913. Abe concluded that the idea of Chinese sculpture is in fact a Modernist idea, and that even today scholars continue to approach Chinese sculpture via the Modernist understanding of sculpture as a class of art objects. Indeed much of the original meaning and function of Chinese sculptures is lost when we encounter these works in a museum setting. The spiritual and cosmological agency of a Buddhist statue, extricated from its cave in central China and from its original episteme, can be subsumed by a formalist reading of the Western sort. This, however, begs the question: can one ever overcome his or her own historical situation? Is looking with Michael Baxandall’s “period eye” an achievable exercise?

It is not likely that Abe believes we can move past our own contemporaneity and immerse ourselves in the epistemological setting of Chinese sculpture before the Qing. Instead, by highlighting the foreign nature of the current systems of knowledge that bracket Chinese art, Abe suggests an alternative, perhaps even more authentic, method of approaching the art of China. By unraveling the categories we use to understand the objects we encounter in the present, we are forced to address the fact that these classifications are not universal and that they come with surreptitious judgments of value. In opening up the discussion of all types of pre-modern art by questioning the underlying structures of knowledge that run throughout art history, Abe points the way to a re-calibration of our practice as art historians that is more inclusive and, in the end, more interesting.

From left to right: Robert Brennan, Marci Kwon, and Lauren Jacobi at the 2012 IFA In-House Symposium,
January 27th, 2012. Photograph by Nita Roberts.

Robert Brennan began the symposium with a compelling and thoughtful paper called “Modernism in the Age of Automation: David Smith in Italy.” Brennan argued that David Smith’s 1962 Voltri sculptures reflect a crisis of modernism in the arts precipitated by the so-called second industrial revolution of the 1950s. In the Voltri series Smith welded together found industrial remnants in order to create sculptures that evoke the human form and allude to art history in a way that is both critical and modern. Brennan treats the components of the sculptures as signs—signs that often signify the human, or at least the relics of humanity, in industrial production that had become increasingly automatized by the early 1960s. I found Brennan’s semiotic approach very effective and, though I usually cringe at psychoanalysis, I was even relatively convinced by his assertion that the Voltri sculptures represent an aesthetic sublimation of human anxiety and desire caused by the dual modernist-industrial crisis. Brennan received warm praise from Professor Nochlin and interesting questions from Kopcke and Slifkin, who both wanted to know more about the role and context of the spectator. My only critique is that I wish Brennan’s voice had been as strong as his argument! Perhaps I have been spoiled by the more intimate round-table format of our seminar courses, but I truly strained to hear Brennan and the other two presenters. Professor Kopcke apparently agreed with me, and took a moment at the end of the symposium to admonish everyone for not speaking slowly or loudly enough.

With Lauren Jacobi’s clever and well researched “Money and Merit: The monti de pietà in Early Modern Italy,” we remained in Italy but moved back in time about 500 years. I found this transition a bit jarring, but so goes the non-thematic symposium. Based on a tremendous amount of original research, Jacobi proposed that changes in monti di pietà architectural style and decoration illustrate the evolution of the monti from Christian charity lenders to institutionalized banks. As a note, the term is now sometimes used to refer to pawnshops. Jacobi’s research demonstrated that the monti underwent a physical transformation in the seventeenth century by adopting more monumental architecture and using the imago pietatis as prominent building decoration. These external and iconographical changes prompted a change in the people’s conception of the monti, institutions which were at once economic and religious, secular and sacred. Jacobi finished by investigating the roles of two early modern cultural systems as they intersected in the monti: Christianity and mercantilism. Both systems involved the exchange of symbolic tokens in order to broker an understanding of abstract concepts such as salvation and wealth, and, as Jacobi argued, a monte di pietà was one of the places in which this exchange took place. While Professor Nochlin brought up an insightful point about the later interaction of money and religion in the context of Protestantism, I found myself stuck on one point in particular. Jacobi mentioned that all monti capped their loan interest rates at 5%. Now, why can’t we just reinstate the monti di pietà for graduate students?

With Marci Kwon’s ambitious “‘Just Free Yourselves’: Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI China,” we shifted gears both chronologically and geographically, moving to 1980s China. Using documentary film footage from the Rauschenberg archives, Kwon reconstructed and reinterpreted the controversial exhibition. Instead of construing ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange) as an episode of Western paternalism or an instance of Chinese artists merely copying Rauschenberg’s example, Kwon created a kind of transcultural translation metaphor. She asserted, “ROCI China is not a static exhibition but a literal and figurative conversation between Rauschenberg and Chinese artists.” Over the course of this dialogue, Rauschenberg learned from and was influenced by the Chinese just as several Chinese artists absorbed Rauschenberg’s ideas. Kwon elegantly noted that the ROCI China conversation was characterized by the successful translation of some ideas and the “untranslateability” of others. She carefully avoided the word “influence,” but, perhaps problematically, used words like “guided,” “shaped,” and “affected” to describe the impact of Rauschenberg’s exhibition on an entire generation of Chinese artists. Still, Kwon wisely emphasized the ways in which Rauschenberg incorporated Chinese ideas in his work, such as in Summerhall, and the ways in which Chinese artists metabolized and adapted Rauschenberg’s lessons in their work. Thus, Kwon succeeded in maintaining the always-difficult assertion of truly two-sided exchange.

Overall, I was quite impressed by the quality of the research projects and the clarity with which the students presented their work. In addition, I thoroughly enjoyed Professors Nochlin and Kopcke’s candid comments, as well as customary cheese board that followed the symposium. I had hoped the student audience would be a bit more vocal, but must confess that I too remained silent. Nonetheless, a job well done to all and a hearty congratulations and good luck to the student selected to represent us at the IFA—Frick Symposium in April!

Editor’s Note: Congratulations to Robert Brennan, who has been selected to represent the IFA at the IFA—Frick Symposium on April 20th!

Our conversation began in the center of the Grey’s main gallery, surrounded by examples of each of the various phases explored by Soto between 1950, the year of his initial departure to Paris, and 1970, a culminating moment in his career following his first Paris retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the realization of his famous Penetrables.^[1] With a Cézannesque-Cubist rendering of a Venezuelan landscape behind us and an optically challenging Plexiglas piece to our right, I asked Brodsky to start at the beginning: why did she choose to study the work of Latin American artists in post-war Paris?

Jesús Soto. Sin título (Paisaje) {Untitled (Landscape)}, 1949. Oil on canvas. 21 5⁄8 x 18 7⁄8 in. (55 x 48 cm). Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Jesús Soto. Sans titre (Structure cinétique à éléments géométriques) {Untitled (Kinetic Structure with Geometric Elements)}, c. 1955–56. Paint on wood and Plexiglas. 24 x 24 x 9 3/4 in. (61 x 61 x 25 cm). Private collection © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Explaining that her interest in Venezuelan art is rooted in her personal history (her father arrived in the country in the 1920s, and Brodsky was a first-hand witness to the country’s booming arts scene in the 1960s), she also admitted to a certain selfishness in picking her topic. “When it was suggested that I like the location where I would be spending time doing research, I of course picked Paris,” she joked. Though originally interested in artists working in the City of Lights between the wars, she took the advice of her advisor, Professor Edward Sullivan, to look into more recent generations. This prompted her to realize the relative lack of scholarship on the post-war art scene. In fact, although her research originally focused on the careers of Soto, the Argentine Julio Le Parc, and Brazilian Lygia Clark, Brodsky insists that more work needs be done in relation not only to Latin American artists from this period, but also to the post-war Parisian art scene in general, which has largely been eclipsed by that of New York in terms of scholarship.

Brodsky’s description of the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s as a “hotbed of activity” is chronicled throughout the exhibition via Soto’s countless associations with other artists, who range from Marcel Duchamp and Victor Vasarely to Soto’s particularly close friend, Yves Klein. Klein’s presence is in fact particularly resonant in many of the works on display in which Soto incorporates his friend’s eponymous International Klein Blue. Supplementing such works, a video on the Düsseldorf-based collective Group Zero is on loop in the Grey’s downstairs space. Featuring a cameo by a guitar-playing Soto, this video reveals the range of the artist’s international contacts. (“I hope everyone watches the film; it’s very tongue-in-cheek, but it shows the diversity of radical approaches used by artists in Europe at the time,” Brodsky stated.) However, while Soto shared many ideas with other artists and movements, he never aligned himself with any particular group. Drawing upon my own research on Cuban artists in the 1930s, as well as the example of the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-Garcia, who refused to side with either the abstractionists or surrealists during the 1920s, I questioned Brodsky about her thoughts on how this might relate to these artists’ identities as Latin Americans. Although wary of casting Latin Americans as exotic Others, we both considered whether a certain sense of displacement may have given such artists the beneficial freedom to move between different groups and ideas.

Continuing our discussion about notions of identity, I mentioned that I was fascinated by moments in the show when subtle references to Soto’s Venezuelan nationality were revealed in his seemingly cold, geometric abstract works. For example, I found Soto’s Ecriture series, initiated in 1962 and composed of floating rods and wires suspended before a striated plane, to be even more evocative upon learning that they were created during a period in Latin America that is often referred to as the “decade of silence” due to widespread government censorship. Comparing Soto’s position as a Venezuelan artist firmly entrenched in the international scene of Paris to that of contemporary generations of artists who question such identifying terms as “Latin American” versus “global,” I asked Brodsky if she had a sense of how Soto may have characterized himself. Although initially answering in the affirmative to both positions (“Soto was a Venezuelan artist who wanted to be considered an international artist—which he was”), Brodsky then referred to a quote by Soto’s compatriot, the artist Alejandro Otero. Responding to the Argentine art historian, Marta Traba, who famously evaluated the art of Latin American nations based on their perceived receptiveness to or defensiveness against Western artistic practices, in 1963 Otero pointed out the inherent racism of her theory, noting how not all Venezuelans are the same: “There are many Venezuelas that Marta Traba cannot distinguish between, and one of them is precisely the one that Soto represents in committing himself to a search devoid of any localism.” Thinking back to our original question about artists’ associations, Brodsky mused, “Ultimately, I think artists want to be artists. I don’t believe that national boundaries are what define art.”

Jesús Soto. Petite écriture noire {Small Black Writing}, 1968. Paint on wood and metal with wire strings. 29 1/8 x 55 1/8 x 6 1/4 in. (74 x 140 x 16 cm) Collection Hélène Soto © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Moving away from such lofty discussions toward more practical matters, I questioned Brodsky about how the idea for a Soto show at the Grey Art Gallery had first come about. Had she anticipated curating a show while writing her dissertation? Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey, had long been interested in a show focused on the Venezuelan artist’s career. While acclaimed Soto expert Ariel Jiménez had originally been involved, the project eventually passed into Brodsky’s hands as a result of her dissertation work. Tailoring the show to her own expertise on Soto’s lesser-known years in Paris, Brodsky acknowledged that she originally had conceived of the show as a “transnational dialogue.” Featuring art by both Soto and his “artist-friends,” Brodsky had wanted to exhibit works from Soto’s private collection, the core of the Colección Fundación Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela. However, she realized that while Soto’s name is widely recognized in both Venezuela and Paris it remains little known in the United States; accordingly, she felt that he “deserved” to have a show dedicated to his production alone.

Acknowledging that her dissertation research must have prepared her well for curating the exhibition, I asked if she had been surprised by anything that she learned during the show’s production. With an enthusiastic “Yes,” she related how she had been particularly struck by the material presence of the works. Revealing her admiration for Soto’s art, she spoke passionately about “the physical presence of many of the works. Even some of the smallest ones seem full of power.” Bringing me towards Sin titulo (Composicion dinamica) [Untitled (Dynamic Composition)] of 1950-51, Brodsky explained how, based on catalogue illustrations, she had not realized the three-dimensional aspect of the panels until she saw the physical object. Then, moving into the area of the exhibition dedicated to Soto’s serial compositions, she pointed to the diversity of materials used in various works, calling my attention to the sequins which make up the black dots in Points blancs sur points noirs [White Points over Black Points] (1954), as well as the fact that in Sans titre (Etude pour une serie) [Untitled (Study for a Series)] (1952-53), some of the dots are painted on, while others are glued to the surface. “I am looking forward to the IFA Conservation Center professors and students coming to evaluate these works,” she expressed.

From the curatorial perspective, Mural (1961), a monumental work that takes center stage at the Grey, was one of the most challenging pieces to install. Measuring almost 10 x 16 feet and weighing over a ton, it required the construction of a special crate and accompaniment by a courier from Venezuela to transport and install the work. Soto made the mural during a trip home to Caracas for a solo exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes, following an invitation by the politically dissident group El Techo de la Ballena to create a work in one day. Mural is divided into two sections. On the left, debris ranging from pipes and wire to hair and even a broom are embedded in tar against the mural’s black background. On the right, similar pieces of wire and metallic plates are soldered onto a raised structure that hovers over Soto’s characteristic black-and-white striated background. Representing a confrontation between a Nouveaux Réalistes style work and Soto’s earlier aesthetic, the mural has only been exhibited outside of Venezuela once: at Soto’s 1997 retrospective at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume.

Jesús Soto, Mural, 1961. Paint, wire, and mixed media on wood. 109 1/2 x 194 x 24 3/8 in. (278 x 493 x 62 cm) Fundación Museos Nacionales, Galería de Arte Nacional–Archivo CINAP, Caracas © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

Asked whether she had any advice for IFA students who might one day find themselves curating an exhibition with works coming from areas of the world that present challenges similar to those posed by Venezuela, Brodsky was adamant about the importance of communicating one’s passion in the field: “Ideally, I would also recommend doing primary research and personally meeting the artists and curators involved. It’s very easy for someone to say no to you on paper. But once you meet them and form a relationship it is much easier to have their support in realizing a mutual goal. To make the exhibition possible, I traveled to Venezuela where I met with collectors and institutions. Once they were assured of my commitment to the artist, I found that no one went back on what they had promised.”

Speaking with Brodsky amidst Soto’s artworks, her commitment to furthering the understanding of his and other Latin American artists’ careers is clear. Before we parted, I asked her about a quote by Soto that she included in her exhibition catalogue. The quote reads: “I consider Art with a capital A (and I use the term unashamedly) not as a way of speculating about beauty, but above all as a form of knowledge, a kind of sensitive thought embedded in the general context of a culture that it directly helps to create.”^[2] As the presenters of artworks, curators and art historians also help to create a certain form of knowledge, I suggested: What do you hope was your contribution in curating Soto: Paris and Beyond? Thinking for a moment, Brodsky then responded that what she wanted was for viewers to come to the show without pre-conceived ideas about Soto or his art. “I want them to come in and truly engage with the art—which, after all, is what I believe forms the basis of Soto’s own artistic practice.”

On February 3, 2012, Brodsky will be featured in conversation with IFA professor Edward Sullivan at an NYU event hosted at La Maison Française (16 Washington Mews) called Soto and Latin American Artists in Paris. Respondents will include Temkin and IFA students Sean Nesselrode, Rachel Kim, and Amelia Langer.

Professor Wu Hung hosting the Director's Seminar, March 29th, 2011. Photograph by Nita Roberts.

Robert Brennan: That might segue into another issue we wanted to discuss: the relationship between curating and teaching. We were curious about the role of teaching recent art in China and in Chinese universities, and to what extent they’ve gotten involved in making that part of the curriculum, part of university life, and whether universities have relationships with museums like they do in the States.

Wu Hung: I probably don’t know the whole picture because everything moves so fast in China. In my day there was no art history. My department was the only art history department in the entire country, and my class had ten people – that’s it. Art history in China was then basically in museums with connoisseurship. Only from my generation did people begin to study art history. Many people still don’t know what it is today. But now most universities have a particular department – they don’t call it art history, they call it the “discipline of art” or “art studies” or something like that. It includes art history and aesthetics, studio art and design. Both practice and curatorial, conservation. Somewhat like here, plus painting, printmaking, filmmaking. At some universities [in the United States] there’s a combination of studio art [and art history], but [in China] it’s more: anything having to do with visual art. [In the Chinese] model, art history is just one of several things. It’s not as prominent as it is here. Here art history is a pretty powerful humanistic discipline and very influential, in a way. But there it’s really just one of many possibilities. There are some schools that try to push art history. Some people have started here and now return to China and try to create that model.

So that’s one kind [of model] within the general, large universities – these comprehensive kinds of university settings. Then [there are] the art academies: you know, like Zhejiang, now called the China National Academy of Art, Art Academy, or the Beijing Central Academy. These kinds of academies also have [something] like a school of the humanities within the art academies. The art academies, in the past ten years, have grown into humungous institutions. In my day the Central Academy of Fine Arts—I graduated there—only had 150 students, 200 teachers and staff members. So it was tiny… But right now the same school every year takes in about 1500 or 1800 students of different kinds: painting, drawing, new media, including conservation, museum studies, and art history. All of these schools are just becoming bigger and bigger in China. Quite chaotic, I have to say. But there’s also a lot of energy. There are a lot of young people who want to study the arts, art history, or something. So again it’s quite different from here. They still need a lot of teachers. You can imagine, when you have a lot of students, you need good teachers from good schools. So different universities try to attract the teachers, people studying abroad.

RB: And are there people writing on art since the late ‘70s in an academic way, as an established practice? Or do you think that’s more in journals and criticism?

WH: That’s an interesting question. I can’t say now, but you know, Master’s theses and PhD dissertations are probably still predominantly in older art. I feel, now, that contemporary art is accepted. But most people, older scholars, still don’t feel very comfortable with it. And even here, you know, still some schools feel that contemporary art is not very suitable for PhDs. They have their own reasons. So it’s not just China…

RB: We were also curious about the role of the art community outside China in the development of Chinese contemporary art, and we were kind of surprised at the wide range of places that played a really prominent role: France, Germany, Australia, Japan, the US. Do you think there has ever been a kind of center, from the Chinese perspective, in the international art world? And if so, how has that developed, as certain artists move to one place or another? Has it shifted?

WH: For Chinese artists?

RB: For artists and critics in China.

WH: I feel it has been changing. Even from this course you have a sense of a shift in the landscape. [In] the ‘80s [the Chinese art world] was definitely all in China; very few people travelled outside. In the ‘90s there was a huge shift. In Paris there was really a powerful group…[but during that time] China didn’t produce a really powerful international curator. So domestic Chinese artists who were doing outside exhibitions really had to rely on [curators like] Hou Hanru [who was working in Paris]…So there was a sense of power outside China.

The United States is more academically oriented. There are some curators here, but not like in Europe. In Europe with this biennial, triennial – somehow a network emerged there. Here you have someone like me or other people, even artists like Xu Bing, who were more like working individuals. They didn’t form a cluster or a power group like in Paris. In Berlin there were a few people, but [they] didn’t form a group. Then the landscape shifted again, so that’s during the ‘90s. [Consider for example the 48th Venice Biennale, curated by Harald Szeemann.] Even today you talk about Cai Guoqiang: the curator was so powerful and really could now show not only Cai Guoqiang, who got the big award [at the 48th Venice Biennale], but also more than like fifteen Chinese artists during that particular Biennale – a really high [number] – brought there by Harald Szeemann.

Around 2000, a lot of people returned to China. It actually started in the mid-‘90s: Zhang Dali, or someone like Lin Tianmiao, Wang Gongxin – some people already began to return to China. But after 2000 many, many people returned to China. Some, like Xu Bing, finally returned to China for good. Other people, [like] Cai Guoqiang, are still [in the United States], but spend more and more time [in China]; they make work there. So today there’s kind of a new feeling, like you belong [laughter]. So after 2000, this overseas picture…somehow this notion had weakened or almost disappeared. The other day I saw a Chinese artist in New York. We didn’t discuss him [in class], but he’s quite interesting: very early political pop person, probably even earlier than Wang Guangyi. He said that, now, there are very few Chinese artists here. Chinese artists have sort of moved back, or they lead some kind of complex lifestyle that they design for themselves.

To answer your question, probably things are shifting. As for the center in China, probably Beijing is a center, just [due to] the sheer number of artists. And in Shanghai, there’s a different style but still it’s very powerful. But probably Shanghai is more event-oriented. There’s the Shanghai Biennale, or the Shanghai Art Fair, or the Shanghai Expo. So there are many, many shows, but in Beijing it’s more throughout the year. Shanghai also has more of these private art museums, more than Beijing.

RB: And what about art schools? We saw that in the ‘80s people at the Zhejiang Academy and places like that [played a leading role], and of course the Central Academy. Are there any academies like these today?

WH: Hard to know. Even so-called contemporary Chinese art – the notion is a little bit murky: a lot of commercial art, a lot of good painters, a lot of video artists, but there isn’t a sense of a movement or challenging something. Really each person is challenging something, but you don’t sense this huge front somewhere, or the separation between these people. A lot of the avant-garde returned to school and are now professors, like Zhang Peili.

Holly Shen: Do you think that the institutionalization of art, which has been such a widely discussed issue regarding contemporary art in the West, is also a major issue in China? Do you think that its development has taken similar directions?

WH: Chinese art is still so intertwined with Chinese society. Now the academies are part of it. Most artists, once they’ve left the academy, become freelancers, really part of the society. I feel a lot of their inspirations, or whatever they want to do, are really influenced by China at a particular stage. So now the situation in China is quite different from the ‘90s, and the ‘90s again very different from the ‘80s. The ‘90s was urbanization, building – crazy. Now you don’t see a lot of ruins, scars, you don’t see a lot of high-rises, but the market has gotten so strong. So, I feel, after 2000 the market has really become the most important force in contemporary Chinese art. So many younger students immediately find a commercial gallery. Then they emerge with some good artists. The situation is different from the ‘90s. Yes, it’s institutionalized, but there are just so many factors. You don’t feel there is a front. You feel there are many individuals and many schools; some are very good, and they all train artists. But there’s no guarantee that the people from one school must be better or immediately have some kind of privilege. Also, you don’t sense that each particular school has a particular ideology. You can say that Zhejiang, the National Art Academy, still tries to push new art forms, new media and a lot of cutting-edge kind of stuff. The Central Academy still tries to emphasize basic training, classical kinds of education. But still, when you have Zhan Wang and Liu Xiaodong at the Central Academy, they’re still pushing and training interesting students.

So I don’t have a very clear idea about contemporary Chinese art. My work now, curatorial work, is more focused on individual artists. Older artists, they’re under pressure, actually. They have to reinvent themselves. You can feel this kind of anxiety; they’re very nervous. That’s an interesting issue.

Carrie Wladis: What kind of distance do you need to have to look at contemporary art? There doesn’t seem to be a movement or a front coming forward – but do you think you need a distance, a temporal distance, like ten years or something before you can turn back? The critics in ’85 [i.e., the ’85 New Wave art movement] were intensely self-aware. Do you think that is a matter of taking a kind of distance?

WH: I think as art historians, when you’re making a judgment you definitely need some kind of distance. If you want to see a bigger picture, of course you have to move slightly further. That’s for a historian. But for a curator, I feel, you cannot. You cannot, say, wait five years and say, “I see some movement.” That is more like an art historian at a museum; sometimes they do a big show and they have that mentality. But a curator, I feel, should be very sensitive. Some people sense something—some happening; probably they don’t even have a name for it, just something new, something different. That’s the beginning. So you have to see a lot, and you have to know history. As a curator you must know history, otherwise how can you know what’s new? When I started to do Transience I didn’t really think there was some kind of “domestic turn” or something like that. I was just fascinated by Yin Xiuzhen’s work – so different from [previous] painting, reacting to day-to-day life… Eventually, only later, I realized there was something bigger. So that’s something, I believe, that’s different from ’85. Because in ’85, there was an avant-garde mentality – they were making a movement. I didn’t make a movement [laughter]. I was more like an academic. So I feel there’s nothing wrong. That kind of creating is like an artwork; artists and critics belong to the same army, creating something. My position was, geographically and in terms of occupation, quite different. But probably in China now there are still younger people that try to create this. For example there was an exhibition, very interesting, called “Loud Noise.” It was created about four or five years ago by some very young people in Beijing, and it travelled to different cities. It was a very big show – more than a hundred artists, and very young. It was a pretty serious show. The curators who were involved are now historical…

Marci Kwon: I have a question. I think one thing looking at the reserve shelf: you have written so many books! How are you so prolific? Writing takes a really long time.

WH: I feel that as an academic it’s slow. I don’t encourage you to write and publish immediately. You have to take it seriously, especially if you pursue an academic career. People take your first book very seriously, so it should be very solid; it should really demonstrate your thinking, not just information. I tell my students, when you think about the dissertation, there are two different approaches. The old way is that you just write it as the last step in your academic training. So basically, you write it for your advisors. If they say “yes” then you’re off, and you write your new study. That was the old way. I just feel it’s wasteful, because then you have to spend five years to revise. When you revise it and polish it up, it might be better, but also you lose a lot of energy. I feel, today, there’s a lot of publishing. It’s better to see the dissertation as a book. You need to have a structure, and you write for certain people. If you write just for your professor, you write in a particular way. If you write for a larger readership, then you have to think about it in a certain way: that’s not to say that you make it simple, but you have to make it understandable. So that saves some time. Sometimes you can save like three years! [Laughter] But then, I think then you can work with other types of writing. The dissertation or academic monograph is just one type – you have many different types. One person, I hope, can produce different things; otherwise it’s just very boring. So for shows, you just have to immediately write something. Maybe it’s not that scholarly, but maybe there can be more energy – there are other virtues. Or you can imagine something in between. You get a group of people together to do something and it’s all possible. That’s the key.

HS: I read some of your work when I was in Professor Shen’s ancient Chinese class, and I’m wondering when you really started becoming passionate about or enamored with contemporary Chinese art. I read, in particular, The Double Screen, which I thought was fascinating, about the motif of framing a picture on a screen, the scroll format. And then all of the sudden it seems there was a vast changeover [in your work, from ancient to contemporary]. So was there a moment when you knew you wanted to shift your focus, or was it a slower, more organic process?

WH: The difference maybe is not that big. Of course in terms of subject matter [they’re] very different: that’s a thousand years ago; here’s the contemporary. I feel, to me, they are connected. So in my mind I don’t have like a two-tier brain… [Laughter] But still, I feel your question deserves an answer.

I came [to the US] in 1980, so in 1979 I was [in China]. I belonged, like maybe you did when you were younger, to this sort of avant-garde group. Even during the Cultural Revolution we had these kinds of little, what we called, salons: we read forbidden books, listened to forbidden music like The Beatles – whatever you could get. And painting. In our generation, even before the Xing Xing (Stars Group), there were groups in China for underground poetry. So I was in it, but I was not a scholar. After I moved here I shifted gears. I entered Harvard and became a student, so that was the past. But I still was connected. In the ‘80s in New York we founded the Overseas Chinese Artist Association. I was part of it, so we were connected. In ‘80 I did quite a few shows at Harvard of Chinese art, but at that time most Chinese art was not here. I did the first American show of Chen Danqing at Harvard – a very small show. We just carried the paintings there and hung them on the walls. We drove from New York and tied a lot of paintings on the roof, and when we started [the car] all the paintings came off [laughing]. So back in ’80 it was like pre-history.

I became really serious and began to organize a bigger exhibition with [the Art Institute of] Chicago, and that was when I moved to Chicago. But Harvard was very difficult, including in the early 1990s. In ‘91 I went to China and we had this Travelling Documents exhibition that Wang Li organized. After ‘89 a lot of art was banned, so we organized this Documents exhibition with the Chinese avant-garde. We had a group, including Professor [James] Cahill [of UC Berkeley]. Each person put in about $100 and we [made copies of all of the work] to have a show here [of the reproductions]. We brought them back and Harvard said, “No, no, no, we don’t want to show it. It’s not real, not to mention that it’s Chinese art.” That was a terrible feeling. Chicago was much better. The Smart Museum went for it immediately. They saw the quality of the work. So that was part of the attraction to the Chicago job.

Also at that point in the later ‘90s, not just I but quite a few people began to sense this difference between Chinese art history and western art history. In western art, by the late ‘90s, basically most or more than half of professors, and maybe more than 70 percent of students, were studying modern art, basically eighteenth-century and later. So earlier periods had become less prominent than modern and contemporary. But non-western art, by the late ‘90s, was still maybe 95% pre-twentieth-century. So I realized that there was a huge difference, not just in terms of geography—east and west—but actually of time. It seemed like the west was modern, and other people, they were history. So I saw this. There was a self-conscious push to change priorities a bit: more shows, put it on the map – not just me, but other people were doing that too. So I feel that we became more self-conscious.

Robert Brennan: The first thing we wanted to ask is what it’s like to work with museums in China, and if there are differences between working with museums there and working with museums here.  In general is there anything that comes to mind in that regard?  

Wu Hung: Chinese museums… I was part of [that field] a long time ago, before I came to this country. That was in the ‘70s, so it was a very different situation.  Now I think it’s changed tremendously, but that time was very interesting.  It was during the Cultural Revolution.  We were assigned jobs with the museum.  I was in the Forbidden City.  Actually it was the largest museum in the country, called the Palace Museum… That museum is quite different from other museums because it’s an architectural complex, and there are people who study architecture and renovation, and there are the archives from the imperial house.  There are many divisions.  So I was part of the younger staff, first in painting and calligraphy, and secondly in bronze and stone carvings…very interesting, very traditional.  And although it was during the Cultural Revolution, inside the Forbidden City it was timeless, almost.  Of course we read the newspaper, heard Mao’s speeches, but there was this timeless quality. You close the gate, and you really don’t know which century [it is] — you’re there.

So, thinking back, you also learned a lot from older people, basically connoisseurs. I was in those two departments: painting and calligraphy and bronze.  Each had older people who were not really art historians in our modern sense…some of them came from very rich family backgrounds, like in the 1930s in Shanghai.  Because of family connections they could see a lot of paintings.  There were also a lot of people who collected paintings themselves, and painters. So that was one type of person.  Another type was the antique dealer.  Before 1949 they worked in the different antique shops.  They knew what was genuine and what was fake, so you learned a lot from those people.  So there was that kind of environment: entirely different from the Western museum.

RB: So did you have “curators”?

WH: We didn’t call them “curators,” just basically a division. There was a head of a division, each division with ten or twenty people. We’d go into storage and check, and also organize small exhibitions, writing captions, doing a lot of day-to-day work. But occasionally there was a major exhibition project, so each person could engage. So you got to handle a lot of things. That was the best part, thinking back now. Every day you could handle the paintings. How do you open the painting; how do you see the painting? Of course you imitated the older people. They were very graceful, you know, not clumsy. Also those things are very fragile. So how do you see the painting, and the bronze? Which part is significant? The quality of the patina… You heard the language they used – very interesting.

Right now I also work with some new Chinese museums, especially contemporary art museums. Actually I’m working on a project to develop a new kind of private museum in Shanghai. It’s contemporary. It’s new, open, not totally governmental. So how do you develop this kind of thing? It’s very interesting in China. In Beijing I have a stronger connection with a museum called the Today Art Museum. It was initially founded by a private real estate developer about 15 years or longer ago. He was one of the earliest. Many [museums] have disappeared. This one stayed and continued to develop. So it’s interesting to see the model. In China they still don’t encourage foundations, because foundations, from the government’s point of view, very easily become places where people can do evil things, hide money or launder money, or whatever. They don’t encourage these foundations. So where can these private or unofficial museums get financial support? Of course some private collectors can give some money, but that cannot be the sole basis – it’s just impossible. So for the Today Art Museum, and for many art museums, that’s the most important thing: how to get a financial basis that we can [sustain] every year, planning ahead about three years for big shows. Then it really starts just like it does here: you have some endowment, you have some money, you’re sort of secure, and then you can do something. So that’s very important.

Professor Wu Hung hosting the Director's Seminar, March 29th, 2011. Photograph by Nita Roberts.

Another thing that’s very important: in China they don’t have permanent collections of non-Chinese art, both old and new. That’s quite different from here. At the Met or the Guggenheim you have that kind of permanent collection. So how can you envision a new kind of museum? You’re sort of forced to imagine: can you have a really great museum or a great exhibition hall, a great gallery, without a permanent collection? And that is actually an interesting thing to think about, because the universal museum, the comprehensive museum, is really a product of imperialism, from the colonial period. Now we are in a new period. It would be impossible to [create] this kind of museum [now]: you cannot take things from Egypt. So countries like China, India, or Brazil [must ask]: how can we build new museums? That’s an interesting question for you to think about.

[The Today Art Museum in Shanghai] is still in the planning and design stage. I hope to bring [something] a little like the Getty [Research] Institute – this model – to China, because the Getty is relatively new and young. When the Getty was founded people tried to imagine the collecting, the exhibitions, and the research as almost coupled. It was a research institute. Your professor, Tom [Crow], was there as the director. The Research Institute and the [J. Paul Getty] Museum had almost equal status, headed by important scholars. So this model, for me, is quite good. Because otherwise, sometimes the museum has a research department or the museum has a curatorial department, so research then becomes secondary, just to serve the exhibitions.

So I think the Getty would be interesting [as a model for Chinese museums]. And even now the Research Institute also has a collection, like photography archives. So research can be related to exhibition or collection, but not necessarily. Research can also develop in its own direction.

Dianne Nelson: Would that focus on Chinese art?

WH: This Shanghai [museum], because it is based in China, [would focus] primarily Chinese art. There is actually one collector–I think very good–who is also collecting non-Chinese art. So we have some people who gave him some advice. In the summer we have a seminar, with artists, critics, collectors, and the director has something called the “Bali conversations.” So we go to Bali, sit around like this and talk – it’s pretty good [laughter]. Last year Zhang Xiaogang was there; Liu Xiaodong, Huang Zhuan, Huang Du, and the director at the National Museum of Singapore. And the year before you had Uli Sigg, a collector. We just talk about everything.

So it’s entirely different from this governmental planning. And even very different from here [in America]. Here, you know, like MoMA: this is really like a very powerful, very old institution. It’s also a big bureaucracy, and there are layers and layers. China is still, I feel – there’s some virtue in this kind of versatility at the beginning. So China now is more involved in this kind of different type of museum planning and operation, and what kinds of exhibitions you can do.

Here I feel my position is basically more like a … I have closer ties in Chicago, with the art museum there, because I go to the meetings and acquisitions. But basically, I’m primarily a teacher so I function as, like, an independent curator. So that’s different from someone inside. I’m not in the department, but we collaborate on these different [projects], including here at MoMA or at the ICP. So it’s sort of outside, gives you freedom to work with different museums. But I feel you cannot really take it as your primary job, because it’s totally unreliable. This kind of independent thing — you cannot earn a living, so be careful [laughter]… If you really want to become an independent curator you have to become one of those more international kinds, like organizing biennials, triennials, one after another. Probably Hou Hanru, he was. Right now he’s a professor and director at the San Francisco Art Institute, but before he came to this country, about three years ago, he had been really a professional curator. One year I asked him, and he said he organized about one hundred shows. So he can really support a family [laughter]. Basically every three days you curate a show.

Marci Kwon: Do you find that you get different kinds of ideas when you’re working as a curator as opposed to an academic? How are those two processes different for you?

WH: As an academic, basically you produce books. You produce students. That’s what you’re talking about with production: writing articles. You’re basically a writer, a teacher. As a curator, of course you also compile and write catalogues, but people still see exhibitions as the main product. And the exhibition doesn’t stay — it disappears — so you actually leave very little if you don’t leave a catalogue. A lot of curators do a lot of shows, but very few objects survive. It’s quite a different thing. But because I’m a teacher and a writer…basically, to me it’s fifty-fifty: the show is fifty; the catalogue is fifty. The catalogue will be different [from the exhibition], because the show is visual and spatial and so can only present something in a different way. You cannot write [the exhibition] out in words. But a catalogue primarily is essays or sometimes a book. Transience was [an exhibition] catalogue, but I prepared it as a little book. So I believe each person can create different styles [in making] these combinations: writing and exhibitions. I feel [in] working with different museums [that] each is different. You have to explore how to collaborate.

Stay tuned for the second half of IFA seminar students’ interview with Visiting Professor Wu Hung. Also, visit the IFA’s Vimeo page for video of Professor Hung’s three-part lecture series, “Reading Absence: Three Moments in Chinese Art History.”

Las Palmas Dr. in Fullerton on 21 November 2011

Itinerary: 10 exhibitions, 1 panel
Money spent on parking: $26
Money spent on tickets: $10
Tanks of gas: 2.5
Freeways traveled: the 10, PCH, the 60, the 5, the 91
Exhibition catalogs purchased: 1
Tchotchkes purchased: Corita mugs ($52.50 for four)

My November trip to PST was only four days long, so I packed in as much as I could, the priority being exhibitions that would close before my next trip. This emphasis made for a diverse and surprising itinerary.

On Friday, 18 November, my indulgent mother picked me up from John Wayne Airport, and on the way home we stopped by the University Art Gallery at UC Irvine to see The Radicalization of a ‘50s Housewife: A Solo Project by Barbara T. Smith [$2 parking, free entry]. This was not a great exhibition with which to inaugurate my mom’s PST experience, which I realized as soon as we walked in and saw a large dildo on a podium. The show is organized in two parts: the front gallery is dedicated to ephemera and props from Smith’s performance, Birthdaze (1981), and the back gallery contains earlier work by Smith, along with more personal items such as newspaper clippings and family photos. The “radicalization” of Smith is clearly conveyed through the juxtaposition of her early life as a debutante and young wife and her 1981 performance, which concluded with a Tantric sex ceremony. Smith was (and is) a pioneer of feminist performance art, and her work is featured in several other PST exhibitions.

Robert Irwin, Untitled (1968), acrylic lacquer on plastic
The famously precise Irwin would develop an ulcer if he saw how this piece was installed.

Friday was “Malibu day.” I brought my sister with me on this trip, and we drove up the coast to Pepperdine University for California Art: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation [free parking, free entry]. Pepperdine is one of those Southern California schools that makes you simultaneously hate and envy its students, who stroll up and down the hills with shiny hair or meander past in BMWs. The Weisman family has long collected art by Californian artists, and in some ways the Pepperdine exhibition of their holdings seemed almost too enthusiastic, as if curatorial joy at having finally secured widespread interest could not be contained. Pieces were crammed into every corner—even above the thermostat and by the elevator. Several of the works shown were major pieces, including one of Robert Irwin’s discs; paintings by John McLaughlin and Mary Corse; sculpture by John McCracken and De Wain Valentine; works on paper by Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, David Hockney, and Ed Moses; and the exhibition icon, Yellow-Blue (1965) by Craig Kauffman. Unfortunately, the “finish fetish” of the works (NB: that is the first and last time I will use that phrase in these posts) was not kind to the Pepperdine galleries, which have stained carpets and bad lighting, and the quality of the work undermined the venue in which it was shown.

David Hockney, A Lot More of Ann Combing Her Hair (1979), lithograph
Installed in a corner next to the elevator of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art.

That afternoon, I dragged my sister to a discussion event at the J. Paul Getty Museum unambitiously titled “How Los Angeles Invented the World” [$15 parking, free entry] to stalk hear my advisor, Thomas Crow. The event was divided into three panels: “How Los Angeles Created the Good Life,” moderated by Crow and including author Kirse Granat May, historian Eric Avila, and curator Jennifer Watts; “How Life Imitated Art,” moderated by critic Reed Johnson and including film directors William Friedkin and Thom Andersen, historian Richard Schickel, and critic Kenneth Turan; and “The Past and Future of L.A.’s Global Image,” moderated by radio host Warren Olney and including film directors Wim Wenders and John Singleton, writer Richard Rodriguez, and architect Eric Owen Moss. Crow’s panel dealt with issues of popular culture and image dispersal, tracing how California became an ideal for mid-century Americans of what it meant to live well (oddly enough, having appropriated some Midwestern ideals in the process, and sometimes utilizing them to represent or capitalize on the paranoia of the Cold War period). The second panel was, in my opinion, a complete disaster, as it devolved into old-chap nostalgic back patting and competitive obscure referencing. The third panel moved outward and onward, attempting to understand what Los Angeles’s global image has been and what its place will be in the future. As a former Angeleno, Wenders offered the analogy of a giant feedback loop: L.A. creates a portrayal of itself, simultaneously disseminating it and consuming it. That representation and its reception then affect the city’s self-image, which is immediately adjusted based on this recent consumption in a never-ending pattern of revision.

One of the main obstacles that PST has been facing since it was first publicized was made manifest during the event’s Q&A time. Several audience members began their comments with the equivalent of a biographical GPS, locating themselves within the Los Angeles community as having “been born and raised in Silver Lake” or “lived in Westwood for twenty years.” Many of these speakers were defensive about their own conception of Los Angeles based on unique experience, particularly in comparison with the bogeyman of NYC. There have been charges of “boosterism” and “regionalism” leveled against PST, the most distasteful of which was quoted from the mouth of Dave Hickey in a New York Times article (the article itself was subject to some funny commentary). While PST exhibitions and representatives should avoid blind promotion, the entire point of the initiative is to introduce a corrective to the art historical canon, and the audience is not just New Yorkers. I lived in Southern California from infancy to adulthood and had never heard of many of the artists about whom I am finally, voraciously, learning.

Some of these artists I discovered in an exhibition consistently ranked among the best in the initiative: the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface [free parking, free entry <25]. On Sunday I packed my mother into the car again and made the pilgrimage down to San Diego. (As an aside, the northernmost exhibition in PST is in Santa Barbara, and MCASD is hosting the southernmost. My parents happen to live at the ideal center point, two hours from each of these extremities. Considerate of them!) I will resist the urge to ramble at length about this fantastic exhibition, since alumna Sarah Zabrodski has written a thoughtful piece on it already. Just to say, if you attend any PST exhibition, all three venues of this exhibition should be in contention—and take a companion with you. Experiencing the phenomenological affects of Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor and Eric Orr’s Zero Mass with my mom was priceless, even though they made her slightly nauseated. Also, MCASD knows how to install an Irwin.

The next day was a marathon of seven exhibitions, visited all by my lonesome. First I made the drive out to Santa Monica to see Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artists Space Movement at the 18th Street Arts Center [free parking—good luck finding it, free entry] and She Accepts the Proposition: Six Women Gallerists in the Sam Francis Gallery of Crossroads High School [free parking, free entry]. These two small shows proved gems, both. She Accepts the Proposition was a small but very strong show, presenting archival documentation and art to highlight some of the female gallerists who kickstarted the Los Angeles art scene. Collaboration Labs consists of a room with three video screens and a console in the center, and viewers can watch the videos at their discretion. I chose documentation of the performance In Mourning and Rage by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz-Strauss (1977); Conan the Waitress by Mark Addy and Graham Dent (1983); and Satellite Arts Project by Sherrie Rabinowitz and Kit Galloway (1977). While I was enjoying the hilarious camp of Conan the Waitress, a man came in and sat for two minutes. Before leaving, he asked me how many exhibitions I’d seen as an excuse to let me know that he’d visited thirty-six; presumably, he left so quickly so he could knock another show off his checklist.

ASCO, Walking Mural (1972).
Photograph by Harry Gamboa, Jr. (printed 2011). Courtesy LACMA.

Traveling from the small and obscure to the vast and institutional, I made the last stop of my day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) [$9 parking, $10 student entry]. The museum is hosting five PST-specific exhibitions, but I was especially eager to see ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987 before it closed. The show exhaustively covered ASCO’s activities throughout the fifteen years of its existence, documenting performance, video, and installation pieces that grapple with issues of Chicano politics and identity. Walking Mural (1972) recasts a stereotype of Latin American art, and provided a fruitful dialogue with the one-room exhibition Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza, also at LACMA. Sandra de la Loza’s digital “remix” deals with the history of muralism in a millennial iteration, as her filmed subjects create and recreate murals on their own bodies.

California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way” is a major PST exhibition at LACMA that includes furniture, clothing, album covers, a car, and even a reconstruction of the Eames’ living room as evidence of the state’s prolific mid-century production of influential design. It reifies the arguments present in Crow’s Getty panel about the utopian vision of California that was presented to the world, but the show also accounts for the underbelly of fear regarding nuclear war and Communist infiltration. Another show, Maria Nordman Filmroom: Smoke 1967 – Present, displays the artist’s film in two iterations and is accompanied by a sculpture outside in the plaza. But the work that grabbed me most strongly was the subject of the remaining LACMA exhibition: Kienholz: Five Car Stud 1969-1972, Revisited. Kienholz is famous for his gutsy and evocative assemblages, often created with found furniture and objects such as chicken wire, mannequin parts, or Halloween masks. Five Car Stud uses full-size cars and plaster casts to create the haunting scene of a black man being castrated by a group of white men, and it is as affecting as it sounds. Hushed visitors wander through the tableau, witnessing the scene and leaving footprints in the dirt as evidence of their presence and unavoidable complicity.

Ed Kienholz, detail of Five Car Stud (1969-1972), courtesy LA Art Diary.

In the tradition of travelogues, the intrepid sightseer records his or her observations and impressions of exotic places and fantastical events to a distant audience. Pacific Standard Time comprises many sites, requiring a dedicated viewer to traverse multiple freeways and the affiliated traffic to see even a minimum of exhibitions. This trait has been listed as a fault, but I don’t agree with that interpretation. Instead, the diffuse nature of the institutions exposes PST to the greatest possible audience: someone living in Palm Springs, Long Beach, Claremont, or any other number of southern California cities and counties can see her local PST show, which may then open her up to the plethora of other exhibitions. I believe a more pressing concern than fractured geography is that the majority of these exhibitions are not traveling, but instead are being packed away as soon as PST ends. The limitation of the initiative is not dispersal but time, and the distance with which to be concerned is not between the exhibitions but between the exhibitions and the full scope of their potential audience. As the program winds down through the spring, the sense of urgency increases: to capitalize on this opportunity with publications and research, and to prevent PST from proving only a flash in the pan with no lasting effect on the discipline.

In Part 2, I’ll recount my adventures at over 20 PST venues from December 2011.

Bruce Nauman, "Green Light Corridor," 1970 (installation photograph, 2008). Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

Most of the work included in Phenomenal was created not in San Diego, but in the Los Angeles region well over 100 miles away. This trend makes the MCASD location a somewhat puzzling choice. Yet over one-third of the works on display are drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, and a handful of works are site specific to MCASD. Moreover, the La Jolla location overlooks the ocean, making it an ideal vantage point from which to contemplate the effects of light and space on Californian artists.

Eric Orr, "Zero Mass," 1972-1973 (installation photograph, 1975). Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

In Eric Orr’s Zero Mass (1972-73), for example, “viewers” enter a seemingly pitch-black room where a large loose paper wall encircles the space and acts as a guide around the installation space. Only after a significant time spent bumping blindly around the room do one’s eyes adjust and subtly allow the silhouettes of the surrounding people to become clear. The wall label refers to this sensory field as “the corners of your perception.” Without question, Orr’s work prompts a different sort of visual acrobatics than one experiences when looking at a painting or sculpture.

Bruce Nauman, "Green Light Corridor Looking Out on Sky & Ocean at La Jolla," 1971. Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

Robert Irwin, "1° 2° 3° 4°," 1997. Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

James Turrell, "Stuck Red," 1970; and "Stuck Blue," 1970. Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

James Turrell, "Afrum (White)," 1966. Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

De Wain Valentine, "Diamond Column" (1978). Image from Robin Clark, ed. "Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface." San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2011.

The works in Phenomenal have a magical double quality to them. They can be simultaneously transparent and opaque, as well as reflective and absorptive. Some works play with singularity and multiplicity, while others are sources equally of shadow and light. It hardly bears mentioning that photographs utterly fail to capture the essence of these works and their potential to alter light, space, and our perception of these elements. For anyone traveling through Southern California this season, Phenomenal is a must-see. Go not only to learn about this underrepresented slice of Californian art history, but also to be transported outside of our normal realm of viewing and seeing. Leave behind all preconceived notions about the boundaries of perception, and prepare to enter a world in which the barrier between real and surreal dissolves.

Sarah Zabrodski received her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU in 2011. She writes at emergingartcritic.com.

Owen Hatherley’s Militant Modernism, published in 2009, is a work of contextual and social architectural history that reexamines the knotty discourse of the “death of Modernism.” Hatherley maintains that the Left Modernisms^[3] of the twentieth century comprise untapped guidebooks that could provide our contemporary society with clues as to how to build a less dystopian future. Hatherley argues aggressively, through un-mined and unexpected examples of architecture, design, film, and political events, that Modernism is not merely the chapter in history followed by Postmodernism, but is in fact an overarching Utopian social scheme. We can therefore recognize the spirit of Modernism in past, present, and future.

Cover of second issue of Wyndham Lewis's Blast Magazine, July 1915

Ivan Zholtovsky, MoGes Power Plant, Moscow, 1926. Photograph by Richard Pare.

Militant Modernism excels as a work of contextual and social history. Hatherley’s approach is one that aligns well with my own methodological leanings and how I consider contemporary issues in architecture and urbanism. This book review can in a sense be viewed as a framing device for future posts. Through captivating and fresh examples, Hatherley’s book demonstrates why the provision of social context, particularly in architectural history, ought to be non-negotiable. Ironically, a quotation from Wyndham Lewis’s architectonic (read: formalist) perspective most cogently explains why this should be so: “Architecture is the weakest of the arts, in so far as it is the most dependent on the collective sensibility of the period . . . if the world would only build temples to machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect.”^[6]

Kat Koh is a PhD student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She studies 20th century architecture, focusing on built structures of the Russian avant-garde and architectural photography.