TEFAF is as well known for putting on a spectacle as it is for its rigorous vetting process. To ensure that collectors can buy with highest confidence, a committee of 175 experts in various categories painstakingly examines each work for authenticity, condition, and quality. They employ XRF technology, and TEFAF was the first fair to incorporate The Art Loss Register. Furthermore, the fair is by invitation only: a gallery must have a fine pedigree in order to participate. Official categories include paintings, antiques, modern works, manuscripts, classical antiquities, haute joaillerie, design, and paper-based works. I was surprised at the diversity I encountered within these areas: modern sculpture, Uruguayan equestrian gear, Renaissance leather wall panels, Chinese porcelain, Iznik tiles, seventeenth-century metalwork, Japanese prints, Australian aboriginal art, and contemporary ceramics.

Though the fair’s calling card is Old Master paintings, the exhibition design boasted a modern flair, with sharp edges, sweeping high walls, a color palette of black, white, and gray, and a large-scale contemporary work adorning the entrance (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Entrance hall of TEFAF 2013 featuring Joanna Vasconcelos’ piece, Mary Poppins. Photograph by Harry Heuts.

With a nod to the host country, enormous vases of fresh tulips were placed in every aisle to contrast the hard edges. The avenues and squares were named for familiar Western landmarks: Sunset Boulevard, Place de la Concorde, Piazza di Spagna, and Champs-Élysées. There was no connection, however, between the themed street names and the stands lining them. In fact, each booth strove to distinguish itself from the others by means of texture, installation, mood, and architecture. One gallery had two floors at its disposal, other galleries required visitors to wend their way around precious antiques and into dim corners, as if recreating the act of exploring a cabinet of curiosities. Still others were washed in pastel-mint hues or bedecked in rich embossed velvet, and many galleries could not resist the clean white cube. Several exhibitors ingeniously displayed iPads programmed with slide shows of manuscript pages, artists’ books, and photographic albums, a clever technological option for museums.

A hidden gem at this year’s TEFAF was one such album, “Photographs from the Life,” containing 75 images by Julia Margaret Cameron at Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs (asking price $6.5 million). Each work in impeccable condition, preserving both sharp detail and atmospheric softness, sequenced together in a series of moving portraits that are Cameron’s hallmark, making this a piece a worthy investment.

The relatively new paper section successfully attracted foot traffic thanks to a mini-exhibition of Van Gogh drawings strategically placed for this purpose. Galleri K, also in the paper section, instantly lured people into its stand with staggeringly detailed large format photographs by Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Demand (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Image of visitor in front of large-format photographs at Galleri K. Photograph by Loraine Bodewes.

In the modern section, Sperone Westwater mesmerized onlookers with its display of dazzling pieces by Damien Hirst, Ali Banisadr, and Nabil Nahas (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Stand of Sperone Westwater gallery. In the forefront is Damien Hirst’s mandala-like composition of butterfly wings.

One had to edge her way through the masses huddled before a wall of Goya lithographs at Frankfurt-based gallery Kunsthandlung Helmut H. Rumbler. Belgian artist Fred Eerdeken, represented by Patrick Derom Gallery, provided a quirky element to the show with his refreshingly simple concept of creating words in shadow by means of wires implanted in a wall.

The sheer variety of the show, elegance of the exhibition design, museum-quality condition and installation of the pieces, and juxtaposition of genres united to create an atmosphere pulsing with excitement. Several dealers and assistants whom I queried about this year’s TEFAF responded with enthusiasm and positivity about sales and interest from buyers. There was a slight whiff of disappointment that only a fraction of the private jets that usually fly in were present, but I was told by one dealer that the smaller attendance assured the presence of serious, committed collectors. Although some areas, such as nineteenth-century art, seemingly disappeared during the throes of the recession, the Old Masters and modern and contemporary art remained fairly impervious to it for the usual reasons: collectors turned to art as a secure investment, stable in comparison to stocks, and attractive for its accumulation of value. Judging by this year’s fair, the art market is more than thriving, with TEFAF announcing its plan for a joint venture with Sotheby’s in China, “TEFAF Beijing 2014.” Thus, despite concern about the economy, the sentiment at TEFAF was captured by a decorative pillow resting in an Old Masters’ stand: “Never economize on luxury.” A motto for next year’s TEFAF, perhaps?

David Lindberg, 45T Chinese Purple, mixed media, 2012.

The LUMC sits conveniently within two minutes walking distance from the main train station of Leiden. The front entrance hosts a hulking work à la Donald Judd that points to the Dutch heritage of achievement in the arts, medicine, and technology. Upon entering the building (and breezing past this monumental eye sore) one walks directly alongside or is perhaps even drawn into a gallery for contemporary art. The open gallery space encourages visitors to see the entire hospital as gallery—its walls extend to the surrounding halls.

Anna Thalius Benus, untitled, 1993, main entrance.

LUMC’s gallery space, located on the ground floor.

Yet despite the hospital’s admirable efforts, the collection remains largely invisible, at least on a conscious level, to the masses of preoccupied passers-by. Not surprisingly for a large-scale institution, the simple act of viewing the art presents a physical feat—the collection spans three buildings, twists along stairwells, and adorns hallways with no end. It is exhausting to grasp in its entirety. Furthermore, there is no cohesive theme, no sense of orientation, no numbering system, and precious little wall text. Admittedly, the LUMC has handily developed a Kunst Route (art map) to help navigate the hospital’s halls and to elucidate a handful of works. But I like to think that the hospital collection is intended for organic experience, for there to be an element of surprise and discovery, and for viewers to be encouraged to make their own connections between works (when they are looking). Besides the occasional gem tucked away in a hidden corner, the art typically spruces up the lounges, stairwells, and elevator banks, all places where people tend to congregate.

And sprucing up is in dire need here: as part of an effort to dilute the hospital atmosphere, the LUMC embraced bona fide institutional décor, complete with fluorescent lighting; shiny, bright floors; stiff seats; and exposed-pipe ceilings. Art provides a welcome rest from the overwhelming sense of industrial mass-production. The fact that the LUMC incorporates works of art instead of mere reproductions adds a much-needed human element to the complex.

A main hall lined with sculptures.

That human touch comes in the form of wood grain peaking through ink in a woodprint, a delicate drawn line, or lips curling into a smile in a photograph. It is found in fundamentally human emotions that are reflected in the art work; by association, the LUMC becomes a human-friendly place. But daring to handle human feeling means portraying images that can be dark, bleak, and confrontational. The LUMC, surprisingly, does not back down from this challenge by omitting such work. Hanging unassumingly in a stairwell that receives much foot traffic is a large format black and white photograph of a white boy pointing a gun at a black girl. Such a work is unfathomable in a hospital in the United States. But in the LUMC there is no uproar, just a flick of the eyes in its direction. As a work that is provocative, rich, and complex in emotional evocation, it performs its duty of counterbalancing its vapid setting.

Peter Martens, New York, photograph, 1976.

Martens piece in stairwell.

On the ground floor of the second main entrance, a print depicts a partially obscured female figure clasping the hand of an unwilling, clearly angry young girl. Eerily, the red grid overlaying the entire image lines up on the girl like a target. The work expresses rebellion: of the childish sort against authority figures, and the general sort against white picket fences and superficiality. This could have been a picture of a happy mother and daughter, both primly dressed and standing before a picket fence, an image of domestic bliss. But instead, the obstinate girl pulls the composition off its axis. An image so fraught with anxiety and quiet rage in a hospital will certainly not achieve the effect of soothing viewers. Rather, this work provides an outlet for those who identify with the young girl being dragged where she does not wish to go.

Vanessa Jane Phaff, untitled, silkscreen, 2002.

Seemingly out of the way but just as well frequented as lower floors, the eleventh floor lounge areas are graced by drawings of a sexualized girl. The works, though small in scale, pack a punch of raw energy with splotches of paint, sketchy frenetic lines, and watery black ink pooling on the paper’s surface. The various textures and medium alone are inextricable from human creativity and production. Thematically, the drawings portray youthful lust, playfulness, careless lounging and contemplation, and seem to form a narrative about a particular young woman. Yet these experiences and emotions are common to the general population and easily accessible, stirring memories or inciting imaginations about future events in one’s own narrative.

Michael Kirkham, untitled works, mixed technique on paper, 2003.

Michael Kirkham, untitled, 2003.

Not all work in the art collection is representative. An abstract print by Jons Geurts features an undulating hand-shaped form, surrounded by floating elliptical shapes and set against a grainy light blue background. Reading this image as a hand, it is raised in a gesture of good will and good health. With this work more than any other, the art serves as an avatar for the large corporate body that is the LUMC.

Jons Geurts, untitled, printing ink and oil paint on paper, 1994.

Various genres are represented nicely at the LUMC, but portraits by and large compose the bulk of the collection. The message is simple: individuals matter. In wandering the corridors, people see themselves reflected in unique works of art. Uniqueness is a critical concept for the LUMC art collection to emphasize because in such a dwarfing building it is all too possible to lose sight of being more than a number. The portraits represent people of various walks of life, ages, religious beliefs, and cultures, important factors if the hospital wishes to make its richly multicultural staff, students, patients, and visitors feel welcome.

Rosemin Hendriks, untitled, charcoal on paper, 1997.

A notable portrait painting by Marlene Dumas is located around a corner and can only be viewed obliquely. Those approaching from one direction will see the work, which is a brooding image of a man’s mustachioed pale white face emerging from the shadows. Much can be read into this sinister piece, titled Die Broer (“That Brother”; 1986), but it is difficult to get a good vantage point in order to do so. This may be a practical measure more than anything else: it is one of the few works hanging without plexiglas and understandably the curator would not want to risk incidental harm that a prominently-situated work surely incurs.

Marlene Dumas, Die Broer, 1986, oil paint on canvas.

Though leaning over a railing and straining my neck to better view a painting attracted looks that were warranted, it was strange to sense that lingering in front of art with a camera and notepad was out of place (I am an art historian—this is what I do). During my successive trips to the hospital to view art on quiet days or during the middle of the lunch rush, I rarely spotted as much as a brief glance at the works. Unlike in those sacred museum halls and the silent white cubes of artistic contemplation, here, art takes a backseat and is digested unconsciously or accumulatively. It functions subliminally to help tone down the building’s sterile corporate character. The LUMC collection injects individuality into a place that would be utterly dismal and bleak without it; and considering that it is a care institution, it is critical to the welfare of the hospital’s patients and visitors to provide this visual relief, even if it works silently in the background.

Installation view of Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at MoMA PS1. Photo by Matthew Septimus.

Ken Johnson’s controversial review of Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, currently on view at MoMA PS1 through March 11, has become nothing less than an art world scandal, sparking a deluge of denouncements from readers, an open-letter and petition against the New York Times backed by prominent artists, critics and art historians, and even an attempted rebuttal on the art critic’s Facebook page, with continued debate in the comments section. Some of Johnson’s most problematic assertions focus on questions of originality and “quality,” each clearly sited in the historical standards of high Modernism. “Black artists did not invent assemblage,” he protests. “In its modern form it was developed by white artists like Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, David Smith and Robert Rauschenberg.” Later, the critic attacks the use of socially-engaged themes during a period in which art was supposed to be purged of realism and representation: “The art of black solidarity gets less traction because the postmodern art world is, at least ostensibly, allergic to overt assertions of any kind of solidarity.”^[1]

These accusations would be relevant if Johnson’s concerns were shared by the exhibition’s curator, Columbia Professor Kellie Jones, but Now Dig This! is not intended to de-throne Duchamp and Rauschenberg. Jones presents Now Dig This! as an art historical survey of the African-American cultural scene in 1960s-1980s Los Angeles; she frames the exhibition as an arrangement of episodes rather than a singular narrative. Each gallery focuses on a different theme, style, or institutional network, thus allowing the viewer multiple points of entry into a wide body of artistic and historical material. Johnson’s attachment to the master narrative of Modernism is the first (and perhaps most innocuous) interpretive error of his review, revealing the degree to which this evolutionary historical model remains deeply ingrained in our thinking.

Now Dig This! is an exhibition about pluralism, both in its content and in its curatorial framing. Jones demonstrates how certain popular techniques or styles such as assemblage and Post-Minimalism were reconsidered and filtered through diverse individual subjectivities in the 1960s and 70s. This is, of course, a period dominated by Minimalism and hard-edge abstraction. Yet Now Dig This! reveals several instances in which an informed attention to material formalism converges with social activism, achieving a new form of expression. This is art that can break down the boundaries between “art and life” while remaining rooted in social experience.

If we are able to conceive of art history as a rhizomatic network of ideas and influences, rather than as a singular evolutionary progression, we should have no trouble understanding the ways in which artists such as Betye Saar, Dale Brockman Davis, and John Outterbridge are actually not so epistemologically anathema to the accepted twentieth-century art history. For example, in The Rise of the Sixties, Thomas Crow contextualizes Saar’s work, along with that of Dennis Hopper and Ed Ruscha, within the alternative West Coast cultural scene, demonstrating the plausibility of simultaneously diverse artistic output.^[2] We know that multiple stories can be told about any artist, city, or movement, yet Johnson feels that Modernist history is somehow threatened by the revisionist expansion taking place within its terrain.

During my own tour through the exhibition, I couldn’t help but detect some degree of foreshadowing for Johnson’s misinterpretation, which is echoed in the complex historical circumstances from which many of these works emerged. One of the most important contextualizing political events within the designated period was the Los Angeles Watts Riots in 1965, which inspired reconsideration of art’s role in the midst of turbulent social change. The rebellion unfortunately allowed the media a chance to color the Watts neighborhood as dangerous and violent, as a place to be avoided. Half a decade later, and in response to this persistent negative public image, the filmmaker Ulysses Jenkins set out with a Sony Portapak camera to document the 1972 Watts Festival, which commemorated the 1965 riot, and to portray the neighborhood as a creative, thriving, and proud community.^[3]

Still from Ulysses Jenkins, Remnants of the Watts Festival, 1972-3.

Still from Ulysses Jenkins, Remnants of the Watts Festival, 1972-3.

The grainy black-and-white footage provides an intimate view into the real lives of Southeast Los Angelenos at the time, featuring optimistic festival attendees who testify to its positive atmosphere. One woman from Lincoln Heights, for instance, enthusiastically proclaims to the camera, “We’ve got here all colors, all races, this is beautiful! This is the start of what can really be America, if we all stick together we can make it …I am very proud of this festival today, and I hope that in the future we can have more of this!” The film aims to provide evidence against the negative image of a rebellious, isolated black community. In a way, the film itself seems an apt parallel to art history’s concurrent marginalization of socially-engaged artists. Like Jenkins’s work, Now Dig This! counters our misperceptions of the enormous creative production that took place alongside popular artistic currents within this period, both in black Los Angeles and the wider American art scene.

Other works throughout the exhibition present complex art historical positions, dialoguing with mainstream artistic styles at the same time that they express more “subversive” themes. Betye Saar’s assemblage sculptures operate within the material legacy of Dada, while engaging themes of gender and racial identity, mysticism, and the power of images. The upper register of Black Girl’s Window (1969) is lined with picture boxes containing symbols derived from tarot, palmistry, and astrology, and formally invokes earlier neo-Dada works such as Jasper Johns’s Target With Plaster Casts (1955), which similarly embeds symbols denoting violence, the body, and perhaps encoded autobiographical and psychoanalytic elements. Saar’s work is equally rooted in her personal and cultural history; Black Girl’s Window incorporates an antique daguerreotype portrait of her Irish maternal grandmother, paying homage to feminine and familial memory at the same time that it reminds the viewer not to see identity as so starkly black or white.

Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window, 1969. Mixed-media assemblage. Image courtesy Artsconversations Archive.

Jasper Johns, Target With Plaster Casts, 1955.
Encaustic and collage on canvas with objects.
Collection David Geffen, Los Angeles.

In the center of a gallery themed around the emerging institutional networks for the black Los Angeles artistic community rests a large suitcase spilling over with ephemera. Dan Concholar’s Suitcase (1980) is a literally a “found” object; belonging to the artist’s mentor Charles White, it was discovered in the archives of the New York gallery “Just Above Midtown (JAM)” in 1979. Newspaper clippings, slide transparencies, art supplies, and works on paper were contained within it, and Jones arranges the open luggage as if haphazardly strewn over its podium. Described in one review as a “microcosm of the entire show,” the work utilizes a Duchampian style of display, presents artifacts pertaining to the African American art scene, and stresses the importance of contemporary engagement with the archives of art history.

Dan Concholar, Suitcase, 1980. Photo by Jillian Steinhauer for Hyperallergic.

Johnson’s review favors the aesthetically intricate and politically subtle works in the show, heralding David Hammons’s Bag Lady in Flight (1970) as the strongest piece. It is hard to argue against his praise of the work, a poetic mediation of form, material, and social reality, but we must also acknowledge the importance of issues of representation that often precede the use of abstraction and conceptualism. The same cycle can be found in early feminist art in America, post-Cultural Revolution art in China, and apartheid-era art in South Africa. Try as we might to isolate creative innovations from social context, art has long been an important agent in promoting cultural change, and Modernism’s flight from social commentary is just one of many important historical currents that took place in the 20th century. Now Dig This! presents 140 extraordinary artworks that can enhance our understanding of these transformative decades in American history, and provides a model for an art history that considers the multiplicity of motivations that drive artistic creativity.

David Hammons, Bag Lady in Flight, 1970. Photo courtesy The New York Times.

Left: Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2006. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 90 × 53 in. (228.6 × 134.6 cm). Collection of Mark Grotjahn and Jennifer Guidi. © Wade Guyton. Photograph by Lamay Photo. Image courtesy whitney.org.
Right: Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2006. Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 89 × 54 in. (226.1 × 137.2 cm). Private collection. © Wade Guyton. Photograph by Lamay Photo. Image courtesy whitney.org.

Wade Guyton is, in many ways, an art historian’s artist. He engages with the questions that get us going: questions of aesthetics, medium specificity, and the iconography of modernism itself, not to mention the very directness with which he prompts his viewers to wonder what’s “relevant” in art today. Lots of ink has been spilled attempting to define Guyton’s artistic practice, and many have asserted his status as a painter. A painter who, despite his use (primarily) of Epson inkjet printers and tabletop scanners, tips his hand both by very consciously employing that ur-signifier of painting—canvas plus stretcher bar—and by articulating the limits of his medium. Guyton’s current retrospective at the Whitney (on view October 4, 2012 to January 13, 2013) gives us an opportunity to re-examine these interpretative strictures and consider the work through the varied art-historical lenses that it demands.

Guyton is an artist who engages in diverse modes of artistic production: one who very intelligently picks and chooses the sly winks he makes toward the history of twentieth-century art, in all its forms. He does this both literally (his use of modernist abstraction from the likes of Martin Kippenberger, Mies van der Rohe, and Sam Francis as the ground for his printer drawings) and conceptually (in taking on questions of methodology and ontology that haunt these various media). Self-admittedly, Guyton makes sculptures, paintings, photographs, and installations, though he is much more comfortable employing these descriptors in reference to the works than in reference to himself (painter, sculptor, photographer). One way to parse Guyton’s artistic practice, then, might be to read it through these varied histories of art. Foremost among these concerns for Guyton’s work, it seems to me, is photography.

Immediately and emphatically clear upon encountering many of Guyton’s pieces is that he uses contemporary technology: the computer, the scanner, the printer, and basic image manipulation programs. His vocabulary of X’s, U’s, dots, bands, stripes, and blocks comes directly from the software of our everyday technological apparatuses, like Microsoft Word, while the vocabulary that doesn’t—the ripped-out book pages showcasing high modernism; a book’s endpaper or dust-jacket—is nonetheless mediated by the printer’s marks or the scanner’s lens.

The scanner is a dumb technological device insofar as it needs an operator; it reads and captures only what is placed atop its clear glass bed. The camera does something similar, framing and recording only what it is asked to see. In both cases the product can be said to be subjectively documentary. Both assert, “This happened.” The photograph records a lived, historical moment in time; the printout records what was once on Guyton’s scanner and/or computer screen. (Especially relevant in this regard are drawings, mostly from 2011, in which Guyton printed out whatever was on his monitor, often a story from nytimes.com, in a self-reflexive conflation of these two documentary assertions. Further noteworthy is that the first image in the Whitney’s catalog is a screenshot of Guyton’s desktop. Sunday, 4:16PM.)

Camera is to scanner as photograph is to printer painting, all its misalignments, spatters, and empty spaces included. For both the camera and the scanner, the medium in question is dispersed. Painting is to paint as photograph is to light, to chemicals, to camera. Guyton’s hand is present in the selection, the framing, the culling, and in on the content of the screen: the juxtapositions, layerings, tonalities, saturations, and enlargements. These latter processes bear striking resemblance to darkroom edits; burn, dodge, superimpose. In this sense, despite the scanner’s proclivity to capture everything it sees, Guyton’s post-scan edits—like the photographer’s post-snap edits—work against this “generosity,” so the image conveys, to a higher degree, the author’s intentionality. The photographic image disappears momentarily to some mysterious place between the photo paper’s exposure to light and its bath in a chemical fixer, just as it does between Guyton’s hitting PRINT and waiting for his Epson 9600 to spit out the image. The artist relies on happy (perhaps overdetermined) accident and the confidence of experience while operating in this blind spot: graininess and exposure on the one hand, drips, starts and stops, smears, and misalignments on the other. The image winds itself through a complicated matrix of technological leaps and transfers.

Left: Wade Guyton, Untitled (In the steps of the master), 2002, felt-tip pen on book page, 9½ x 7¼ in. Collection of the artist. Image courtesy Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, exhibition catalog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012): 53.
Right: Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2002, felt-tip pen on book page, 11 x 9¼ in. Collection of Candy and Michael Barasch. Image courtesy Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, exhibition catalog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012): 55.

The printer-scanner analogy and the dispersal of the medium emphasize another crucial factor, alluded to above: what Lee Friedlander has called “the generosity of photography.” The camera (or scanner) records whatever is in front of it, whether desired or not. The operator’s inability to control these factors results in a commensurate dispersal of authorship. As Friedlander put it, the camera “records everything it sees, whether you like it or not”:

I only wanted Uncle Vern standing by his new car (a Hudson) on a clear day. I got him and the car. I also got a bit of Aunt Mary’s laundry and Beau Jack, the dog, peeing on the fence, and a row of potted tuberous begonias on the porch and seventy-eight trees and a million pebbles in the driveway and more.^[1]

In the face of this “maddening generosity,” the photographer is faced with the choice to snap the photo or not. Doing so validates the photographer’s acceptance of Friedlander’s
“generosity,” or his further resolve that what is captured is worth it—is just as interesting. Either way, the artist is interested in the whole of what is captured; the begonias are just as integral to the image as are the visual components of the main event.

Some of the rarest among Guyton’s oeuvre are the works that show his hand, in the traditional sense of the phrase. These are a small group of drawings of felt-tip pen on ripped out book pages from 2002, and I think they are key to understanding his theoretical practice. In one (Untitled (In the steps of the master)), a black-and-white image of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, Guyton has sketched a tiny “X” on one of the windows, careful, despite its miniscule scale, to stay within the confines of its architectural geometry. In another (Untitled), a mid-century interior rife with plants and overstuffed bean bag chairs from the likes of Architectural Digest circa 1955, Guyton has enacted a similar move. A large black “X” in marker covers the entire composition, yet this time Guyton ignores the borders of the image, or the confines posed by the image itself. Instead, the extremities of the dominating black letter spill over into the page’s white margins, in what constitutes a crucial conceptual shift for Guyton. Now, he is leaving the apparatus of the citation intact; he is interested in the whole page; he is operating within the limits of the source in its entirety.

Transferred onto his printer works, this logic looks something like his Untitled Epson UltraChrome inkjet works of 2005 (below). The whole page makes it into the work, complete with pagination, and in reverse, as if accidentally inverted on screen or in the scanning process. And if you missed that cue, Guyton plops a white circle over the image (printers render white as no output—a blank space—here showing bare linen primed with white gesso), forcing the viewer to acknowledge the contrast of the crisp, clean white against the dirty yellow of the book’s faded page. The artist’s updated, twenty-first century invocation of Friedlander’s “generosity” stares us in the face, as it does throughout his oeuvre. Elsewhere, we see the frays and rips in the paper of the dust jacket Guyton scanned for the fiery “U” paintings (Untitled, 2006).

Left: Untitled, 2005, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 52 x 36 in. Collection of Candy and Michael Barasch.
Right: Untitled, 2005, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, 51 x 36 in. Collection of Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins. Images courtesy Scott Rothkopf, Wade Guyton OS, exhibition catalog (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012): 68.

All this is not to say that Guyton is a photographer (though in a very literal sense, he is). Rather, I suggest that Guyton reveals his own conceptual practice through making work that addresses the essentially conceptual questions of diverse artistic practices. His work offers up a dialogue that is less about the strictures of medium specificity—i.e., articulating the limits of painting as such—than it is about Guyton’s selective appropriation of the philosophical apparatuses of those media upon which his work draws. In every case he is working within a set of parameters (the length and contours of Breuer’s Cesca chair’s steel frame, or the width of the printer multiplied by two as limit for the width of his canvas paintings, for example), but crucial for his printer works is that these limits are partially determined by the artist, partially determined by technology. Relative to photography, my aim here is to suggest how we would be well served to read Guyton’s work through the various art historical discourses that the work itself invokes, offering, perhaps, one lens through which to understand Guyton’s own assertion that while he makes paintings, he is not a painter.

1. Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 78. Quoted from “Friedlander” brochure accompanying the exhibition of the photographer’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 5 – August 29, 2005.

This year the Silberberg Lecture Series is focusing on “Violence as a matter of disciplinary concern.” Violence is a recurring theme within the history of art and its various manifestations help set the tone for the understanding of a period or a particular artist precisely because it is a thread of humanity that can be represented with such variety. Chiu’s lecture thus was an inquiry into the theme of violence in contemporary Chinese art.

Like Chiu’s book, Chinese Contemporary Art: 7 Things You Should Know, her lecture took a simplified approach to the topic and was geared towards people who have little background or knowledge of Chinese contemporary art or China. As an introduction to the topic, it traced a broad overview of the theme of violence in Chinese Contemporary Art and its historical context, arguing that depictions of violence remain mostly an undercurrent in Chinese contemporary art.

Her title, “Art + Politics in Chinese Contemporary Art,” hinted at the way in which Politics can be directly or indirectly related to violence within Chinese art and society. Obviously this is not the only connection to be made when speaking about violence within Chinese Contemporary Art, but it is a strong place to start. Chiu choose the cultural context of the Cultural Revolution as her departure point, ensuring that her audience had at least some awareness of that traumatic period for many Chinese families and the widespread cultural destruction that occurred in the name of progress by “destroying the four olds.”

The Cultural Revolution is just one of many violent events in the last fifty years for China. By organizing her lecture chronologically and centering it on the aftereffects of the Cultural Revolution, Chiu brought up the concept of “generational ruptures.”

And that is perhaps the most interesting issue brought up by her lecture. China has been changing so rapidly as a country and has experienced so many significant political, cultural, material and artistic transitions that its people have had very distinct childhood, adolescent and adult life experiences. While there have naturally been some constants to a childhood in China, knowing the generation to which a person belongs can provide rich insight.

Artistically this plays out very clearly. For artists it can give you insight into their training, international experience, cultural and historical awareness and the issues that they wrestle with through their artwork. With groups of artists coming of age simultaneously, their works naturally have dialogue with each other. Connections can be made to specific cultural events and the way their generation interacted with these events.

The difference in generational experiences has also affected the art world in China through its role in the Chinese artistic diaspora. The artistic landscape and the international character of Chinese contemporary art is shaped by the move away from China by many artists who have risen to prominence and their subsequent return to China and the art world there. A following blog post will look further at the internationalism of contemporary Chinese art.

During the question-and-answer session, Chiu became more specific, highlighting the lack of recent historical awareness of different generations and delving deeper into thornier issues such as violence in Chinese art. While she had argued for the artistic aftereffects of the Cultural Revolution, Chiu acknowledged that many Chinese young people have little to no awareness of its history by recounting a story from her recent visit to the only museum in China dedicated to the Cultural Revolution, which opened in Shantou city, Guangdong province, in 2005. While in the museum, she overheard a group of teenagers ignorantly ask, “What is this?” This history is not being taught in the schools and unless the older generations are talking about it, the younger generation can easily remain ignorant. This is where art across generations can come in and speak to the silences of their recorded history in China. Art can stand in remembrance and give testimony to all types of violence.

Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World at El Museo. Image courtesy Art in America.

Nearly a decade in the making, the show most notably puts forth an expanded consideration of the Caribbean beyond its traditional geographic limits. Basin countries such as Venezuela and Colombia, as well as portions of Central America and the Gulf states, are represented, and their inclusion broaches topics that begin to reveal the fluidity and porosity of the region. The consideration of European traveler artists as well as references to the contested political and economic influence of the United States begins to undo many stereotypes about the Caribbean, contextualizing it as a site of prolonged contact, exchange, and hybridity.

In keeping with such a broad focus, the show maps the Caribbean thematically, taking the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 as a rough starting point but coalescing around six general themes. As the unofficial beginning of the exhibition (since closed), the Studio Museum predominantly looks at the historical facets of the Caribbean with two categories that center on issues of perception, presentation, and identity: “Shades of History” considers the role of race from the Revolution to contemporary class inequalities, while “Land of the Outlaw” explores utopian and dystopian stereotypes. For its part, El Museo introduces questions of commodification and self-determination, with “Counterpoints” tracing the transition from agriculturally-based export economies to those of petroleum and tourism; “Patriot Acts” serves as a political corollary that engages notions of national and cultural identity. But the largest installment is at the Queens Museum. “Kingdoms of This World,” taking its title from the 1949 novel by Alejo Carpentier, links the historical legacy of colonialism with popular religious traditions that embody both hybridity and resistance. It brackets the comparably smaller but no less extensive “Fluid Motions,” which focuses on the theme of water to addresses the geographic and economic specificities of island and coastal life.

Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Image courtesy the New York Times.

Any of these themes would make for a fruitful, complex exhibition; taking in six of them proves a daunting task, and one that is hampered by the decision to use salon hanging in the installations. With works clustered together on the walls in all three museums—most pronounced in the Queens Museum, which features an open, two-story atrium—the effect is one of sheer profusion. To a certain extent such a hanging may be required given the limitations of space. The geographic, chronological, and stylistic juxtapositions produced by the salon style, however, indicate that it was borne less out of necessity than of curatorial choice.

At times these contrasts are quite effective: at El Museo, for example, a wall of paintings by self-taught or “intuitive” artists faces an assortment of more Surrealistically-minded work, bringing to light the fraught relationship between European expectations and New World practices and traditions. More frequently, however, the effect is one of over-stimulation and imbalance. Works hung at eye-level receive a visual advantage over their counterparts hanging five or ten feet above, and this implied hierarchy obscures some of the most noteworthy pieces of the entire show, which are lost in the din. Edna Manley’s Prayer (1936) and René Portocarrero’s Cuban Carnival (1953) at the Queens Museum are two particularly dismaying instances.

René Portocarrero, Cuban Carnival, 1953.

Much more problematic is the dearth of explanatory text that would help guide the visitor through such a dense accumulation of objects. Remarkably, for an exhibition that purports to resuscitate a forgotten history for an audience previously unfamiliar with these works, it offers little to no information that would facilitate understanding. “Shades of History” at the Studio Museum contains, somewhat inexplicably, works by the Scottish artist Joseph Bartholomew Kidd painted after John James Audubon. No explanation is given for the inclusion of Kidd’s depictions of woodpeckers, whether they be a sly reference to Audubon’s birth in Saint-Domingue or an example of a taxonomic approach to the natural world akin to the systematization of racial categories.

Indeed, the viewer is very much left to his or her own resources to navigate and make sense of a dizzying array of work that ultimately raises more questions than answers, ironically glossing over some of the complexities the curators hope to reveal. “Shades of History,” for example, reduces the convoluted racial dynamics of the Caribbean to a black-white binary that neglects the entire history of the indigenous Taíno people, not to mention the presence of Asians. “Kingdoms of This World” fares even less well, as it is the section that most explicitly evokes some of the most well-known, persistently reproduced imagery of carnival and popular traditions. The general invocation hinders a nuanced discussion of the richness and plurality of faith and practice in the region, flattening the Caribbean into a single entity characterized by an aesthetic of color, dance, and hybridity that veers dangerously close to stereotype. This is a stunning turn for a section that elsewhere includes documentation of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s The Couple in the Cage (1992-93), which parodies and explodes such portrayals. In the face of these contradictions, the thematic framework threatens to collapse into an unfocused smattering of objects that seemingly have little or nothing to do with one another.

A photograph of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, Couple in the Cage, 1993.

Yet perhaps Caribbean’s unrelenting resistance of narrative works, strangely, in its favor. To be sure, this is an exhausting, frustrating show, but it is also a fundamentally impractical one. Caribbean will not be the final word on the subject, but that is in part because it has proven that a definitive summation will never be possible. The fact that it was mounted in the first place constitutes a major victory in terms of visibility and awareness, and if this review has been harsh it is because—perhaps unfairly—there is so much at stake in this curious exhibition, which works far better in theory (and in book form) than in practice.

Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World at the Queens Museum. Image courtesy Art in America.

If the exhibition verifies anything, though, it is that the Caribbean functions more as an abstract concept than a single, concrete culture. No single visit or single exhibition will ever fully encompass it, and by breaking the show up into three venues it encourages repeat visits, multiple considerations. Its very lack of coherence destabilizes any preconceptions a visitor might have of the region, and that may well be its most lasting legacy. The exhibition works best when it tests the limits of those preconceptions, as it does most quietly and poetically in Melquíades Rosario Sastre’s The Fleet (1984), an artistic intervention that places foam ships—or are they islands?—in the bay of Robert Moses’s celebrated Panorama of the City of New York (1964), itself a Caribbean city. It is a subtle reminder that the Caribbean is not limited to easily digested tropical scenes but is instead much more elusive, and much more difficult to pin down.

Roxana Marcoci, Curator of Photography at MoMA

I applied to Columbia and the Institute and The Graduate Center and I was admitted to the three of them. In the end I was really interested in studying with Kirk Varnedoe, Robert Rosenblum, and Gert Schiff. The Institute was known at the time as being this beacon of serious art history, while places such as the Graduate Center—where Rosalind Krauss was teaching—were known for their strength in critical theory. Kirk Varnedoe, who became my sponsor in the PhD program, offered at the Institute one of the very first colloquia on the intellectual history of critical theory. I think that even Kirk was learning as we were. That colloquium was significant because it was overarching. It included everything from the Russian Formalists to Structuralist and post-Structuralist theory to postmodern theories. I mean, we covered the Shklovsky group and Barthes and Saussure and Derrida and Lyotard and a lot of the texts were just being published or translated at the time here in the States. It was a very important turning point for the Institute because there wasn’t anything like it.

Kirk taught a seminar on Minimalism, and we talked about a triumvirate of influences: Brancusi, Duchamp and the Russian Constructivists. I did a seminar report about Brancusi’s impact on the Minimalist generation and conducted a series of interviews with a number of artists such as Carl Andre. Also in 1995 there was a large-scale Brancusi retrospective [Constantin Brancusi, 1876-1957] that was done by the Centre Georges Pompidou by Margit Rowell in collaboration with the Philadelphia Museum of Art when Ann Temkin was there. Ann and Margit collaborated on this retrospective, which was very interesting because there were two completely different shows. Margit decided to install the work based on morphological relationships: the series of The Newborns, Sleeping Muses, The Endless Columns, Mademoiselle Poganys, all together in the various materials and over time so you’d see the evolution of the body in space from something that was more naturalistic to something that looked like a propeller. Ann Temkin actually organized the exhibition very much like Brancusi himself installed the work in the studio, based on installation views and Brancusi’s photographs.

So my dissertation [“Site of Contestation: Constantin Brancusi’s World War I Memorial,” 1998] started as seminar report. Then I decided that I would go back to Romania to do some research in the archives. The archives were being held in Târgu Jiu, which is this peripheral town not far away from Brancusi’s birthplace where in 1937-1938 he was commissioned by a group of women to do a monument to WWI heroes. I did the research and uncovered a lot of unpublished source material which then was incorporated into the dissertation, but I realized that my interest was to talk about Brancusi as one of the very first public sculptors of modernism because he did this monumental work in Târgu Jiu which is very little known, but which contains the seeds of so much of his thinking. It’s a monument that is made out of four important sculptural works: the Endless Column, the Gate of Kiss, the Alley of Chairs, and the Table of Silence, spread on a one-mile long axis that traverses the city from one side to the other. I became very interested in the contested critical reception of this monument. Brancusi came to be seen as a decadent bourgeois artist by the new communist party, who criticized the fact that he was living in Paris, that he was aligned with the avant-garde, only to in 1958, after Brancusi’s death, recuperate him as one of the major national artists. A lot of the dissertation dealt with the work—with its significance in 20th century art within sculpture and public art—but also the history of its critical reception. Then a last chapter dealt with Brancusi’s impact in contemporary art practices, based on the interviews that I did with various artists.

After I finished the dissertation I spent a year writing and teaching. Then in 1999 there was an opening at MoMA for a curatorial assistant of Painting & Sculpture, and I was asked if I would like to apply for the job. My very first exhibition was a centennial retrospective of Alberto Giacometti. Anne Umland and Carolyn Lanchner were co-organizing that show with two curators from the Kunsthaus Zürich. It was the perfect way to start a curatorial career. Really, the best introduction to curatorial work is to do a major exhibition like this centennial retrospective which was a collaboration with a European institution—after that I thought that I could do any other show.

Teaching is a much more solitary endeavor; curatorial work is an infinitely more collaborative practice. I was an adjunct professor, and as I was finishing my studies I was going from a class with fifteen people to working in an institution with 750 employees, with thirty different departments. And exhibitions are comprehensive: from the conceptualization of a show, to its touring, to seeing the objects, to enlisting the scholars you would like to contribute, to displaying the work, to various panels and educational programs, symposia and all of that. It’s a very public process, an engagement with a much broader group of people—more diverse, more international.

At the same time that I was working on this exhibition I did two personal shows here at MoMA. In 2000 the Museum organized MoMA2000, looking to the new millennium. The Museum decided to put together exhibitions from the collections that would be cross-departmental. So my show was called Counter-Monuments and Memory [2000]. It was an exhibition that dealt with memorials to some degree but monuments that go against the conventional tenets, because monuments often seal the mnemonic process. I contributed an essay to Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA since 1980, which was the accompanying anthology. I got my first reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere, so it was like this was my exhibition. And at the same time MoMA PS1 had an international program of artists in residence and curated their exhibition at the Clocktower downtown. The Clocktower had not been used for many years and it didn’t even have electricity—we certainly didn’t have a floor plan—yet it was one of the most absolutely engaging and rewarding shows. It was based around a series of installations, some of them new commissions. So in parallel with the Giacometti retrospective, which was my primary responsibility, I worked on these other shows during my weekends. I wouldn’t have dared to work on them during regular office hours but it was extremely important to do something of my own.

Four years later I was promoted to assistant curator, but I moved to photography. I never thought that I would move to photography; I was more trained in painting and sculpture but I was very curious about all mediums. I believe in the porousness of mediums and I believe that artists don’t think in terms of straight, ghettoizing, medium-specific disciplines. Since I joined the museum it’s just a different institution. Now there is a lot of collaboration between curators among various departments; back then it was a like a federation with different countries. I think that the reason why [Chief Curator of Photography] Peter Galassi enlisted me to join this department—he was interested in someone to focus on the postwar contemporary period and he wanted someone with a background that was broader than pure photography. I think he realized the direction that the museum was going at the time. So when I joined the department I proposed two exhibitions. One was a photography exhibition, a retrospective of Thomas Demand [2005], and one was Comic Abstraction: Image-Breaking, Image-Making [2007], a thematic show about the notion of humor in abstraction which included everything but photography: painting and sculpture and video installation and even sound installation but no photography. From the very beginning I made sure that I could continue working in a trans-media mode.

Roxana Marcoci at the opening of Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today.

I think that The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today [2010] was, of my exhibitions, memorable on many accounts—it covered the entire history of photography but it basically dealt with how one medium interprets another medium. In fact, it started with the Institute, with Brancusi. What I did not mention is that although my focus was on Brancusi’s sculpture I really came to understand him through his photography. In the photographs, Brancusi calculates the angle of incidence so the flash really hits the polished bronze and explodes the gestalt. You think of Brancusi as this purist, Platonist sculptor, but he wasn’t. And this you see either by visiting the studio or by looking at the photographs; you rarely see it in looking at museum installations, unfortunately, which are more purist than Brancusi was. So for many years the photographs were considered flawed because they were superimposed, they had multiple exposures, they were blurred, but today they are considered a very important part of his work. For me that was the starting point for this exhibition, then it went back to the advent of the photographic medium, to 1839, and covered the whole history up to today.

Original Copy was a major show with extensive research and a substantial catalogue. It was a show that traveled to Kunsthaus Zürich, had a great critical reception. There are exhibitions like that, then there are exhibitions like the Olafur Eliasson show that I did here in collaboration with Klaus Biesenbach [Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, 2008] which was so challenging on so many other aspects: it had installations here and at MoMA PS1, and it provided a new set of issues to deal with. The recent Sanja Ivekovic retrospective was a page-turning moment for our institution because it’s not the kind of show that we normally do here: she is not a known factor, not a known artist and yet she is an artist who’s been in five Documentas—more than Joseph Beuys. Perhaps it’s also the right moment now to devote this exhibition to a Croatian artist who emerged in the 1970s. There is so much interest in recuperating this strong work, in looking into histories other than mainstream, western-centric histories. That was a difficult show to do not just institutionally but also working with her because she is a self-made person without galleries, very strong-willed, very smart and very tough. That’s the beauty of it: each show poses a really different set of questions and opens different perspectives.

I don’t think that you can rest on your laurels, not ever. If I could choose between being mortal and immortal in a literal sense I would choose immortal, although it must be terribly painful. But I am endlessly curious about what will happen to curatorial practice in the future. There are just so many changes that have occurred in the last ten years since I’ve been here. There is so much focus now on process and performance, on ephemeral modes of art practice that were before never being considered as being part of a history of art—certainly not a museological history, maybe they were part of the history of art because you could study them but you could not show them—they were background material. You didn’t know how to collect them and here we are collecting them and showing them. And I would just love to do more exhibitions and re-think the ways that we are doing what we are doing constantly. There is a much more interactive, social aspect that brings art more into life, more into politics, more into other disciplines and other fields than ever before. There is more contamination than ever. And I have always thought that everything is interrelated.

Robert Rauschenberg, Cy + Relics, Rome, 1952. Gelatin silver print. Photo copyright the Rauschenberg Foundation.

“[…] he mistook the curtains of the window of his room for a canvas, and he kept describing what he was painting: the colors, shapes, and shades.”^[3]

On broad empty surfaces, marks begin to show—indicative of fragility, a sense of loss? Or expectation? Thought-full? Thought-less? Mannerisms coincide. A type of gestural painting that emerges out of contradictions. Too much, I felt, too much pathos. Yet architectonic enough to let that pathos live, consume, burn out. “The Fire that Consumes All before It” he wrote in a 1978 painting. The type of art that requires more of the viewer, becoming manifest only after the first impatient encounter is past.

In museums I often grow impatient. It happened with Twombly every single time, while secretly I was flirting with those scratches and scribbles and grays, seduced by the casual violence of raw color stacked atop the fibers, the mad mess that verged on spilling onto the clean white gallery walls. That whole magnificent period in the ‘50s during which his life and career intersected with those of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns intrigued me. Likewise, his subsequent move to Italy: rare expat, never to return from a strange form of self-imposed exile.

Cy Twombly, Tulips, Rome, 1985. Dry-print, 17 x 11 inches (43.1 x 27.9 cm).

I happened to be in Vienna in 2009, at the time of a retrospective of his work at MUMOK. On one of the walls was a small series of dry-print Polaroid transfer photographs he took at different points in life. Sculptural pieces arranged on work tables, paint splattered on the floor of what looked like a domestic space, especially when placed next to images of flowers, food, shoes: the artist’s studio. I wish I could find the exact sequence, but most examples will do. The dissolved color on the print made sense. So did the soft immateriality of film, objects partly diffused, merging contours, certainly nostalgic.

I’m not convinced by the argument that Twombly used photography to work through problems pertaining mainly to painting. In general I find such verdicts rather artificial, especially in the case of an artist who often used paint as if it had the roughness of stone, carving at it with the wrong end of the brush. Someone who used white paint to cover sculpture, suturing the impermanent seams as if they were bits fallen off of ancient sculptures dug up during the Renaissance.

While Twombly’s paintings are expansive, monumental (best seen in the permanent installation at the Menil Collection in Houston), his photographs are concentrated, focused, detailed. Like real, tangible landscapes the paintings spread in the space outside the frame. Indeed, they unpack the same notional spaces that cave in, in the photographs.

Yes, in so many ways, because of those photographs, I now imagine Twombly as a Postmodern Renaissance master, whose paintings open windows onto the world. “The world” not necessarily as it “is” or as it “seems”—whatever definition of essence and appearance you might choose—but the world as it encodes, at it builds itself up in ciphers, crisscrossed by myths, nightmares, dreams, and poetry. And somewhere in that experience there is a true celebration of materiality, which cannot be easily contained—the heavy lightness of paint.

Cy Twombly, detail of Untitled, Lexington, 2001. Wood, plastic, pulp and printed paper, plaster, synthetic resin paint, and acrylic, (39 x 40 x 29.8 cm). Collection of the artist.

It was a tumultuous summer for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which became embroiled in controversy following the forced-resignation of highly respected chief curator, Paul Schimmel. Dissent on the board reached a feverous pitch and culminated in the resignation of all four of MOCA’s artist board members: Barbara Kruger, John Baldassari, Ed Ruscha, and Catherine Opie. Director Jeffrey Deitch and billionaire donor and Life Trustee Eli Broad received the brunt of the blame and accompanying criticism, with many decrying the dismissal as an indicator of a new, less intellectually rigorous direction for the museum. Frequently lauded as providing some of the most ambitious and intelligent exhibitions in the country, MOCA now faces charges of descending into a pit of sensationalism and fluff.

In the midst of this drama, MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary featured a show that characterizes the type of exhibitions that have earned MOCA a reputation as a forward-thinking, ambitious institution. Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 presented a groundbreaking, in-depth look at the myths and realities of the Land art movement. Simply presenting a museum exhibition of works typically associated with the outdoors was a provocative move on the part of curators, Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon. The nearly 200 works by 100 artists ran the gamut from photos, videos, performance, and drawings, to sculptural installations involving materials such as rocks, dirt, and growing grass. In taking a revisionist stance, the curators re-evaluated four central misconceptions surrounding this specific moment in 20th century art-making, thereby presenting a more nuanced perspective of this fascinating period.

Micha Ullman, Messer-Metzer, 1972. Courtesy the artist. Image courtesy MOCA.org.

To begin, Ends of the Earth challenged the notion that Earth art was a distinctly and quintessentially American movement. This characterization has been bolstered by the relationship of Earth art to the desert of the American Southwest. While Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969-70), located in Utah and Nevada respectively, are seminal works in the Land art canon, they are by no means representative of the movement as a whole. In reality, the early days of Earth art encompassed artists living, working, and altering landscapes around the world. This international context is particularly well highlighted by the interactive map accompanying the exhibition featured on MOCA’s exhibition website. By clicking on an artwork title near a Google Map-like globe, the screen zooms to a bird’s eye view of the locations of interest. From Micha Ullman’s Messer-Metzer (1972) on the Palestinian-Israeli border to Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s House Project (1974) situated on a lava field in Iceland, the locations are as diverse as their manifestations.

Hreinn Fridfinnsson, House Project, 1974. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Image courtesy MOCA.org.

Furthermore, the exhibition questioned the entire proposition of the desert as an isolated, uncultivated landscape, located far outside the parameters of urban life. In post-World War II America, the desert was heavily exploited for scientific, militaristic, and entertainment industry pursuits. Artists such as Adrian Piper readily responded, as evidenced by his Parallel Grid Proposal for Dugway Proving Grounds (1968), made as a reaction to an accidental gas leak caused by a U.S. Army test ninety miles outside Salt Lake City. The perception of the desert as a blank canvas was therefore more of a carefully cultivated utopic fantasy than factual reality. Moreover, many artists worked directly within urban contexts, producing Earth works in city centers. Carlos Ginzburg, for example, created a “hidden aesthetic experience” in the dense city of Buenos Aires by placing giant placards reading “Tierra” in a vacant lot visible only from the ninth floor of a nearby municipal building.

Carlos Ginzburg, Tierra, 1971. Courtesy the artist and Henrique Faria Fine Art, New York. Image courtesy MOCA.org.

In tandem with uncovering the fallacious romanticizing of the desert, the exhibition sought to overturn the notion that Earth art was anti-establishment and anti-art market. Rather, galleries and patrons played an essential role in developing this art form. To demonstrate this point, two early Land art exhibitions were recreated within Ends of the Earth: Earthworks at Virginia Dwan Gallery, New York in 1968 and Earth Art at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art at Cornell University in 1969. Together they illustrate that the relationship between art institutions and Land art was established early and played a pivotal role in promoting these artists. Land art would have never flourished without the support of an art system that commissioned, marketed, and later maintained these works.

Finally, the curators proved that Land art is not just a sculptural medium, but one deeply tied to and informed by media-based art forms. The sheer number of photographs and videos that made up the exhibition were evidence enough of this assertion. Indeed, many of these seemingly documentary objects were originally created as distinct works of art with the intent of being exhibited as such. In addition, the public dissemination of the Earth works imagery played a critical role in aligning this art with popular culture. Peter Hutchinson’s The Paricutin Project (1970) was funded by a major publication, Time Magazine. Time flew Hutchinson to Mexico where he laid 450 pounds of breadcrumbs around the rim of the Mt. Paricutin volcano. In exchange, the magazine garnered exclusive rights to the aerial photographs chronicling the subsequently molding bread. These photos were published in the June 20, 1970 issue of Time, thus deftly disrupting any ideas about Land art being outside mainstream media or cultural channels.

Peter Hutchinson, Paricutin Volcano Project, 1970.
Courtesy of Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf. Image courtesy MOCA.org.

While some may argue that Earth works can only truly be experienced in situ (“art’s answer to Disneyland” quipped Robert Morris), the exhibition made a compelling case that the physical site is just one expression of oftentimes extremely complex projects. This complexity has been recently highlighted with the obstacles and controversies surrounding Christo’s Over the River project for the Arkansas River in Colorado. This September a judge put the project on hold following legal challenges by an environmental activist group. In light of these difficulties it was even more impressive to see the wall of papers documenting Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Australian project, Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet (1968-69), in Ends of the Earth. Letters, textile samples, insurance forms, and many other forms of ephemera speak to the sheer force of organizational, administrative, and diplomatic effort required to pull off these feats of artistic landscape transformation.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Coast—One Million Square Feet, 1968–69.
Collection of Christo. Image courtesy MOCA.org.

Ultimately, Ends of the Earth succeeded because it revealed the complexity of the Land art movement throughout the 1960s to 1974. For every work that epitomizes the conventional brash, bold, masculine notions about Earth works, there is one that draws its power from extreme subtly and delicate inventiveness. The exhibition pushed against ideas long accepted as fact to present alternative views of art history that are complicated, nuanced, and at times, messy. These are the types of shows that propel our understanding of art and the ways we think about art into new territories. While the loss of Paul Schimmel may signal a new era for MOCA, one can only hope that the museum’s dedication to bringing such insightful exhibitions to the public continues to endure.

By Sarah Zabrodski

For someone interested in Los Angeles art, Pacific Standard Time (PST), the Getty Initiative that connects over 60 Southern California cultural institutions and museums in an 11-month exploration and celebration of postwar Los Angeles culture, feels like a limited-time offer for an all-you-can-eat buffet. I have been visiting my parents’ home less and less over the past few years, feigning adulthood, but the advent of PST has rekindled my interest in visiting the old ancestral stomping grounds. This school year (2011-2012), I am capitalizing on my family connections and making three trips to Southern California—over Thanksgiving break, winter break, and in February for the CAA conference—to take in as much of PST as possible. Here, I’ll report on my pilgrimage in a series of three posts.

Santa Barbara on 26 February 2012

Itinerary: 2 exhibitions, 4 CAA panels
Money spent on parking: $8
Money spent on public transit: $33
Money spent on tickets: $5
Tanks of gas: 1.5
Freeways traveled: the 134, the 101, the 210, the 57, the 5, the 60, the 10
Exhibition catalogs purchased: 1
Tchotchkes purchased: 0

Having never attended CAA officially, I felt that it was time to get my art historian wings this year, since the conference’s presence in Los Angeles meant that I had a free place to stay and the chance to visit a few last PST exhibitions. Also, the panels themselves were amenable to my purpose, with many sessions and papers focusing on the postwar Los Angeles art world, and sometimes PST specifically. Others have written better—and funnier—accounts of their time at the conference, so I’ll stick to the official story. (Just to say: the LA Convention Center has terrible food options.)

On the first day of the conference, Wednesday, 22 February, my agenda opened with a bang: a panel simply titled “Pacific Standard Time” [$16.50 Metrolink/Metrorail]. The papers given were all by PST insiders: Jenni Sorkin and Lucy Bradnock, Getty research fellows, and Richard Meyer, who curated an exhibition. Director of the Getty, Andrew Perchuk, joined them for the panel discussion. Sorkin’s paper, “An Even More Gendered History of the Woman’s Building, 1921-1991,” treated what I’ve labeled as one of my favorite exhibitions, Doin’ It In Public at Otis. She discussed the history of the women of Chouinard, the Woman’s Building, and Cal Arts, as well as the various educational environments and pedagogical strategies emphasized by the institutions. Bradnock presented “Portrait of the Artist as an Amateur: Wallce Berman’s Pop,” describing Berman and Ed Kienholz’s “reluctance toward mastery,” which she portrayed as part of the larger West Coast Pop emphasis on craft and the subjective. She made a good argument for the persona of “the amateur” as a factor in the LA Pop/assemblage world, although I think its distinctiveness in West Coast Pop is more complicated when compared to both East Coast “amateurs” such as Warhol and West Coast “professionals” such as Ruscha.

Meyer, Associate Professor at USC, spoke on his experience curating the MoCA exhibition Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles. After guiding us through his process and the gallery results, Meyer ended with a sort of exhortation. He wondered what it would look like if art historians started practicing “site-specific scholarship,” and reminded listeners to be mindful of both what objects were originally, and what they have become—the art in PST is not all “Art,” as he explained it. The panel discussion was lively, and picked at a theme that had emerged from all three papers: “feeling into form” in Los Angeles, which Bradnock pithily described as “not being embarrassed by affect,” or the allowance for earnestness and the subjective personal experience. There was a whiff of compensation to the tone of the panelists, understandably, as they lamented how art history continues to return to the trusty canon instead of bringing new material into it (Perchuck) and that PST should change the conception of all American art, not just the constructed NY/LA dialectic (Bradnock).

Weegee, The Gold Painted Stripper, ca. 1950.
International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993, © Weegee/International Center of Photography/Getty Images

I had no Los Angeles panels to attend on Thursday—I was too busy gawking at the Rosalind Krauss extravaganza—but Friday brought two [$16.50 Metrolink/Metrorail]. First, I went to what turned into one of my favorite panels of the conference, “Finish Fetish Sculpture from Los Angeles 1960s-1970s: Conservation Dilemmas.” Robin Clark of MCASD, who curated Phenomenal, presented “Light, Space, Surface: Poetics and Practicalities in the Display of Finish Fetish Works of the 1960s and 1970s.” She introduced some of the main Light and Space artists—Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, De Wain Valentine and Robert Irwin—and described the complicated and differing viewpoints of the artists on damage and re-fabrication. Andrew Perchuk gave a paper called “Light and Space: Specialty Shop and Hi-Tech.” Perchuck placed due emphasis on the workshops and technological advancements that made these artists’ constructions possible, and talked about “re-skilling” as an unusual, West Coast direction in 1960s and ‘70s art. Monica Steinberg, the sole graduate student, presented “The Real and Reflected Self: Finish Fetish and the Alter Ego,” in which she described Larry Bell’s persona “Dr. Lux,” and read the implications of reflection, both introspective and physical. Rachel Rivenc, Assistant Scientist at the Getty, presented a technical viewpoint in “The Artist as Maker: Materiality and Authenticity,” impressing the art historians in the room (at least this one) with graphs and charts and terms we’d all left in high school chemistry, while persuasively explaining the opportunities and limitations imposed by each artist’s production and materials. Last, John Griswold, owner of Griswold Conservation Associates, further investigated the ethical issues and concrete decisions (eg. subtractive vs. additive) made about “finish fetish” objects in “The Lens of Authenticity: Strategies for Retaining Evidence of Original Fabrication While Conserving Finish Fetish Objects.”

The panel discussion was engrossing; I almost (almost!) made a comment. I’ve mentioned previously that I’m not a fan of the term “finish fetish,” but in the context of this panel it was somewhat helpful because the focus of all participants was how to care for, display, and even theorize works with pristine surfaces. One reason that this panel was so successful was that it presented a widely divergent roster of professional viewpoints. Clark and Perchuk were concerned with the objects and their materials in an art historical and exhibition sense; Steinberg theorized, as any good graduate student would, and offered a case study of how to consider the works anew; Rivenc and Griswold reported from the field, as it were, and did a good (and humorously exasperated) job reminding us that at the end of the day we stop talking and make a decision, either doing or not doing something, which significantly affects the artwork.

The next panel, “Los Angeles Writes Itself: L.A. Art Journals from the 1960s to the Present,” featured participants of the L.A. art publishing world, including editors and founders of High Performance, X-TRA, and a recent site I’ve enjoyed, East of Borneo. Although a lot of the session was anecdotal, the contributors sufficiently outlined the compounded trials and exhilarations of publishing independently, circulating materials in the art world, and doing both in Los Angeles when the audience for their journals had to be gathered and solidified.

On Saturday I drove up to the final day of the conference [$5 parking] and attended the morning panel “Pacific Standard Time and Chicano Art: A New Los Angeles Art History.” While many of the panels (I won’t say “all”) I’d attended at CAA had been energetic, this one became, shall we say, spirited, partly because of its heavy-hitting panelists. First, Ruben Ortiz-Torres, Professor at UC San Diego, presented “MEX/LA: ‘Mexican’ Modernism(s) in Los Angeles,” noting that while PST included some Chicano art, the damage of years of neglecting Mexican and Mexican-American art has not yet been undone. Chon A. Noriega of UCLA gave “X Marks the Spot: LA Xicano and Art History,” in which he described his experience from the point of view of the Chicano Research Institute’s (CRI) involvement in PST, which included four exhibitions and two catalogs. The original four institutions brought on to PST were MoCA, LACMA, the Hammer, and CRI, and Noriega spoke eloquently about not wanting people—the Getty or the viewers—to feel like they had been “let off the hook” by one token Chicano art exhibition because that community and those who study it don’t just have “one thing to say.” Next, Terezita Romo, from the San Francisco Foundation, talked provocatively on stylistic hegemony and the damage of terms like “identity politics” and “hybrid art” in “Curating in the Chicano Art Rearview Mirror: The Mexican-American Generation.” Romo pulled no punches, and her talk affected me more than any other I heard at CAA, as I grappled with my response to her accusation.

Artist Sandra de la Loza spoke about her incisive project at LACMA in “Mural Remix: An Artist’s Intervention into the Discourse of Chicano Muralism.” She tried to widen our conception of muralism in Los Angeles, away from big-name attractions by Siquieros or others to the graffiti vigilantly pursued by the city and to the hidden murals of local communities that move beyond the stereotypical political to the psychadelic, the religious, the abstract, and the fantastical. Last, Karen Mary Davalos of Loyola Marymount presented “What Does Inclusion Look Like? New American Art Histories,” tracing the reception history that has moved from periodization to expansion to insertion without losing the separateness tacitly performed by the hierarchy of adding something to something else; she acutely pointed out the complete lack of PST involvement in East Los Angeles, an area full of Chicano communities. As Noriega said, the body of work by ASCO, as in the retrospective at LACMA, is “recognizable” to the art world. But a large amount of Chicano art would be less familiar to the traditional art historical canon, pushing and challenging its priorities and definitions.

There were three PST exhibitions that I really wanted to see, but I ended up only having time for two of them (the third was Clay’s Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos, 1956-1968 at the Scripps Gallery). On Sunday, a friend accompanied me the two-hour drive up to Santa Barbara for Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art [free Sunday entry; $3 parking]. The exhibition focused on two museums, the SBMA and the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum, both directed at one point by Thomas W. Leavitt.

Included was work by artists who had been shown at the museums in the ’50s and ’60s, making the case that these institutions were championing local artists long before PST. The show was organized formally: a “Gestural” room included John Altoon and Karen Appell; a Hard-edge room included John McLaughlin, Helen Lundeberg, and Karl Benjamin; etc. In the largest room certain work seemed to be stretching the definition of “local” artists–Motherwell, and Tobey specifically–but mixing it in with Sam Francis, Larry Rivers, Ed Kienholz, Beatrice Wood, and Llyn Foulkes motioned towards the ultimate goal of PST exhibitions: bringing postwar Los Angeles work to the point of no longer needed “Los Angeles” as a modifier.

Jan Stussy, The False Accuser, 1968. Mixed media on masonite, 48 × 48 inches. Collection of Woodbury University.

My PST grande finale was L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, from Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy at the Pasadena Museum of California Art [$5 student entry; free parking]. This show, which displayed work by 41 artists, brought to light postwar figurative work, mainly by painters, that dealt with a “boldly honest, stripped-down view of humanity in its rawest, most elemental state” and made an argument for the “ongoing relevance of expressionism.” This survey exhibition does a lot to expel the viewpoint that postmodern Los Angeles art is all aesthetic lights and pristine resin–many of the works are grotesque and visceral and squirm-inducing. Political and physical, it offers a separate trajectory for postwar art, speaking more to Daumier and the German Expressionists than the Constructivists and De Stijl artists.

This is probably the place where I am supposed to make an overarching declaration on the success or failure of PST, and what it means for the field of art history. But this piece is too long as is and, frankly, I’m not in the mood. I’ll just say this: It was an ambitious and flawed and vital initiative. It set out to accomplish everything, and actually did accomplish a lot. It fostered collaboration between LA-area museums, funded and published substantial scholarly research, aired well-known and under-known artists, often together, and gave California artists, scholars and the public a forum for dialogue about issues like regionalism, influence, hegemony, materials, environment, and Hollywood. The Getty is planning a 2013 continuation of PST, albeit smaller, which focuses on architecture and urban planning. And the art historical parade rolls on.