Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens at the Phillips Collection

Let me begin by saying that I've always loved Man Ray... his aesthetic, the mood, the suave and the surprise. And I can appreciate the Modernists' periodic obsession with "primitive" art for its effects on their formal abstraction, the increased knowledge and circulation of non-Western art and the coincidental recognition of living artists and performers of African descent in the US and Europe, bastions of whitewashing and paternalism, etc. Yet something remains askew - the Phillips underlined effectively the ethical shortcomings and dilemmas of Man Ray and the Modernists' patronage of African and non-Western art... whether intentionally or not. The fetichizing of the African body, from the buxom female to the male endowment was taken out the context of spiritual metaphor and into cultural ideals, as seen in Man Ray's series of Black celebrities posing with a contemporary Africanized female bust in positions of seduction and longing. The Phillips displayed the West African and Oceanic artifacts from the European collections of the 1920s and 30s, both in the Modernists' photographs, and in the flesh - well, wood - behind glass casings, with labels detailing their ethnographic origins and cultural uses. Alongside the sculptures and amulets were the Modernist perspectives and archives, labelled as artistic endeavors, their details explained in terms of aesthetics and artistic legacy. What wasn't addressed was the divide between these two perspectives, the ethnographic and the artistic. Without taking a stance, it was crucial for the exhibition to address the very crux of the Modernist mission - to see these works as art, as secular inspiration and creative beauty - not necessarily in the exotic, Orientalist sense or that of "low-culture" craft, but in terms of the politics of exhibiting themselves. The white patrons of African Art were shown among their collections, but little mention was made of the actual collecting practices, or how this African Art was extracted. The fetichization of the African work of art was indeed catalogued, with myriad forms of archiving by artists such as Man Ray himself for the European collectors, in European reviews and art newspapers... but the Phillips did nothing to dispel the ongoing politics of this fetichization, rendering the Modernist pedestals within their very own galleries.

Buying immortality

Robert Hughes speaks to Alberto Mugrabe: on Hirst, Prince and Warhol

Boom: China's art market

Fee Fi Fo Fum - China's art market is growing by leaps and bounds, especially since the government lifted its ban on the ownership and sale of pre-communist art. Just this week, the volume of sales of "traditional" art in Hong Kong surpassed that of the US or Britain, and with average sale prices around "90K and records like $11M for a Qianlong-period throne, China has become the world's third-largest art market, according to the Economist.

I'm sure there are piles, and soon mountains, of literature on the subject of recent Chinese art history, but considering there's none in my textbooks, allow me to muse... The historiography of Chinese art must take a different, windier path than that of the linear, capitalist Western model of Church, European patrons, artist-client duo and artist-institution relationship... Other than court-ordered portraiture and the Queen's favorites, and the 1934 New Deal art funding flush in the US, state intervention in the arts has been a backseat driver. Indeed, some of the West's greatest movements have been founded in dissent and rejection of the state and status quo. Yet China has controlled not only the preservation and distribution of its ancient art, as well as the production of new art, it has controlled its markets so severely that any comparison with Western art history would end at the beginning of Robert Frost's poem: the road forks and we'd head down the road not taken. Furthermore, the tight control of publication and academics in Communist China must have influenced historiography, so that any sources since the 1920s would be seen through the lens of state pressures, rampant censorship and severe mistrust of intellectuals. That being said, now that the ban on pre-communist art has been lifted, so has the veil of mystery and not only should we re-evaluate the myriad of styles lumped together as "traditional" since 1920, but also we can begin to see contemporary creation in new lights. Although the recent spike in art market prices and circulation has concentrated heavily on the older art, it will be interesting to see where sales in contemporary lead... as I've often heard, art, like money, goes where it's taken care of. The middle and upper classes of new Chinese consumers may very well pick up the sales, but for now it looks like contemporary chinese art is the baby of Western institutions and Eastern pride - with buyers taking the art out and into the world. Will the Western and Eastern roads meet at the bank, then? Where will their histories cross, and how will we look back?

Economist article

UPDATE: another article in the Economist brilliantly underlined my point by showing how Western business is booming in China's art market, establishing ties and grabbing parts of the auctioning market by bypassing government limitations. Article link, Nov 28th, 2009

Shock of the New?

Dakis Jannou's collection is to be displayed on all 3 floors of the New Museum with prime artist of his collection, Jeff Koons, as "guest curator".

“Maybe it is a fantastic collection, but the museum is a public trust: nonprofit, tax exempt and government supported,” said Noah Kupferman, a former specialist at Sotheby’s who teaches a course called Fine Art as a Financial Asset at New York University. “It is supposed to be an independent arbiter of taste and art-historical value. It is not supposed to surrender itself to a trustee and donor whose collection stands to be enhanced in value by a major museum show.”

Rare gift for the public to take more than a peek into Dannou's extensive collection? Seized moment for the appreciation of the private collection's value in a time when museums "have to get creative" with all-expenses-paid shows? Albeit any other collection in the hands of Koons would probably end up looking private, this one raises questions of public trust and insider trading. Beyond Jannou's position as a trustee of the museum, his unequivocal remark that, "Some people may think some things. For me, it’s a nonissue. I know who I am and what I am doing" begs the question whether the museum has any say, and the even more shocking musing - does the museum still want a voice? Art and artists have long left the codes of the mummifying halls of history, the norms of the white cube, the acropolis of the art gods - to make golums and destory golums of their own - yet the art world remains art's community of practice. And in lean times, it is a community that debates as it watches the New Museum and many others nod to lined pockets... while Sotheby's recent auction estimates on Modern masters are outstripped in the $millions.

Is this brouhaha of political revolution? The evidence of a smooth economic takeover? They say, "Capital goes where it's wanted, and stays where it's well treated." (Walter Wriston, former CEO of Citibank). Perhaps the art world is not so different.

"In discussing the New Museum show, several museum leaders cautioned against what Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described as “overly puritanical” judgments about “the delicate dance” between museums and collectors."

Is this post-modern multiplication of possibilities? Really new ideas for new art? Or the new face of the oldest idea?

The response from the New Museum:

Boundaries and Scales

Doctors Without Borders was implemented as a networked response to a global need. Museums without Borders, the locus of the Center for Future Museum's recent research, is a networked reality needing a global response.

“A prominent futurist has said that forecasting isn’t a means of predicting the future, but rather an effort to discover what you need to do now to help shape the future. We think Museums & Society 2034 will help museums make a better future for themselves and society,” pronounced Elizabeth Merritt, founding director of CFM in the press release for the Association of American Museum's May 2009 conference in Los Angeles. Concerned with the new interconnected reality of the young 20th century, AAM is asking whether "We can be a community of museums without borders," citing the technological advances of Internet 2.0, the hopes for more porous boundaries between international museum professionals, and the motivation to cater to a global audience sharing new access and shared concerns (environmental, local, communal). Sharing business models, streamlining operational models, catering to the "new meanings of diversity", the AAM's concrete goals for the museum are indeed "mindful" of its position as an important actor in the processes of social reproduction, setting the stage for creativity and living in the future. But are they really without borders? Even bringing in new audiences, the art world and especially its institutions are nonetheless inherently hermetic. Connectedness doesn't erase the boundary between the outside and inside of the museum window, whether it's through the computer screen, at international festivals and fairs, or in the boardrooms. It seems, rather than breaking boundaries, the new museum is changing scales. From the local to the global, technology has widened its purview, but the excluded remain those in underdeveloped countries, those objects of anthropological exhibitions rather than generators of the next great operational model. Boundaries remain between subject and omniscient shapers of the social fabric. But the AAM is right - "Museums are positioned to be among society’s most active participants in this new interconnected world. We represent history, culture and knowledge and are trusted sources of relevant, valuable information. We are dynamic manifestations of societal views and communities. Museums can be the connectors and bridge-builders, helping visitors of all ages, backgrounds, nationalities and locations

better understand one another." If we assume this to be true, than the museum has the ability, nay, the responsibility to do more than change scales from local to communal to urban to regional to national to international to global. It's in the last jump, from international to truly global, where lie the greatest challenges. How to go beyond the network of technology nodes, knowledge centers, urban captive audiences to truly reflect a global audience? How to avoid the erasure of those parts of the world community that are just as concerned with health, education, history, culture and representation, yet without the safe lilypads of museums to alight on from New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, etc?

New Museum

Although it's stacked in sections, the experience of the New Museum is one of continuity, where visitors flow through the spaces smoothly. As a project conceived by a curator, every aspect seems to exemplify its function as a "site of ongoing experimentation and questioning of what art and institutions can be in the twenty-first century, [...] devoted exclusively to contemporary art" (from the manifest). At the far end of the lobby, a glass-walled gallery makes the art visible before the tickets are even bought, yet separates its visit from the milling bookstore or café to preserve the quality of its observation. The pink and white neon Silence = Death piece draws the viewer down a sunken staircase from the lobby to the lower level's Donor Wall, a conceptual mapping of culture's philanthropists and shapers ("Target: 10M" - "France: 3.2M" - "Hamas: 1.5M") - where one can read the fine print (quotes on giving from great writers and thinkers) while waiting for the green-walled elevator to the upper-level galleries. These pillar-less rooms are lit from skylights and fixtures in a high ceiling that avoid any glare on the glass table-tops displaying Emory Douglas' Blank Panther lithographs on the 2nd and 3rd floors, and prevent shine on David Goldblatt's large photographic prints of post-Apartheid South Africa on the 4th floor. The staircase between the two exhibitions is the centerpiece for Rigo 23's installation, where the viewer passes a cell marked with the year of the Panthers' liberation and ascends the staircase lined with prison bars to the open jail gate and into the Goldblatt show on South Africa's own tenuous "liberation". This spiral path upwards brings the viewer across galleries-in-the-gallery for video viewings (surviving Black Panthers narrate over archival images) and smaller grouping of works (black-and-white images of South Africa under apartheid also by Goldblatt) - parentheses of space smoothly articulated within the larger tour. Ending in the "sky room", the visit displays the rooftops of Soho and the Lower East Side to the wind-whipped visitor, bringing the works in the exhibitions home to the reality of their context - New York, its contemporary issues, and this site for its contemporary art.

The 6th-floor "education center" was temporarily closed during my visit, yet its current project, "Museum as a Hub: In and Out of Context" describes itself as "a partnership of arts organizations looking to pursue experimental methods of exhibition, communication, and collaboration, and considers the consequences of being part of a “hub”—what it means to displace conversations and activity from elsewhere to New York".

How will museums show art made on the internet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/arts/12iht-rcartech.html?ref=design

On the internet?

Speaking of technology and donor egos: the Royal Ontario Museum has some of the most technologically branché galleries of any museum - their list of donor names is digitalized (as are their labels in the galleries of scientific artefacts, etc) and touch-sensitive, so that interested visitors can pop-out more information and photographs of individual donors rather than marvel at the brass polish on the granite wall of obscure names and titles in most museums.

http://www.overdrivedesign.com/portfolio/viewCasestudy.asp?id=1

NGA Recognize!/Fondation Cartier, essential focus, but with blinders

This week's viewing of the NGA's show, Recognize! on graffiti art and hip-hop culture was an interesting view into a museological attempt to address the aesthetics and dynamics of an artistic culture that has recently left the debate of artistic validity (in the art history sphere) to be considered a curatorial challenge and a necessary topic to address. It's one of many such attempts in the last decade, from the Grand Palais' Le Tag to the Fondation Cartier's Né Dans la Rue, to the Hammer's show in the Beautiful Losers (a great show).

Because the debate on the genre's legitimacy took so long to close out, presenting the fast-moving, sometimes hermetic and sometimes crosspollinating practice seems to seek a balance between tying in a historical perspective, citing origins from Keith Haring and Basquiat but then leapfrogging to a survey of contemporary practices, in an almost catalogue-like style, like an 18th-century throwback to the cabinet of wonders (like the Fondation Cartier's vitrine of train-conductor keys used to get into the train-holding areas by graffiti artists, and the jumpsuit Jon1 used to look like an employee, or the mountains of Montana spray-cans - http://fondation.cartier.com/) or one of those provincial science-wonder shows, from World Fair freaks to today's fairground reptile or insect terrarium exhibits ("Extraordinary! Creepy! Come see it! - parking lot next to Costco, off the A-42!").

Nonetheless, being immersed in the Fondation Cartier's dark rooms, walls covered in temporary graffiti made for the exhibit and hordes of hipsters swayed by hip marketing to attend the opening was an experience more than an education, which is one way that museums like the NGA and the Fondation Cartier attempt to address these somewhat pigeonholed issues, if their videos and websites are any indication of their approach.

I didn't get a chance to see Recognize! in person, I'm sad to say, but I'm hoping the video doesn't do it justice. Oblique references to and glimpses of David Sheinbaum's photography and Nikki Giovanni's poetry were outpaced by long monologues of the curators' personal experiences. The only shots of fine art were of Kehinde Wiley's paintings, which served as bait in the video rather than participating in an articulated thesis or idea. Being the Smithsonian's first show on graffiti/hip-hop culture and simply recognizing its existence aren't quite replacements for saying something about what's being shown. Wiley's work references hip-hop culture, of course, but it's also about art itself. Rather than having someone say the show was about "How hip-hop has influenced the art world.", why not show it in the actual works themselves? Wiley's juxtapositions and overlays of high and low culture, hiphop icons and renaissance codes, riffing on everything from court portraiture to religious icon writing to music culture posters seem to say so much more. Why turn them into pretty pictures to fit a context? Why not bring the rest to its level? Recognize that!

Reading in parallel with the Pinakothek's Moderne as described by the Schjeldahl, being "hip" isn't always a miss. It seems that sensibility to the environment, architectural or pop cultural, is key to setting the tone and marking the moment, rather than being outdated upon arrival.

On the technology side, however, the Fondation's website is a great counterpoint - with videos, bios, and tours in a simple, borderless black-on-white template, one can even choose an alphabetical letter and see scores of now recognized graffiti names and their variations on that letter, in a graphically striking way, and with stills of their work from the cities to boot.

Week I

“The display of powerful objects in vitrines and the desire to make use of their energy for a didactic exhibition displaces them and makes them enigmatic.” Baumgarten, Unsettled Objects – 1968-9

In many ways the museum is a mash-up or petri dish of Bourdieu's concepts of the social and political power dynamics of the art world. As the field of production and value-creation, the "neutral space" of the museum's White Cube (O'Doherty) and institutional structure is in fact highly connected to the fields of class, power and economics. The increasing self-reflexivity of museums and their curators have led to reexamining of collections and practices both internally through carefully researched exhibits and development projects, and from outside sources such as artist curators, scholars and educators. By making room physically, financially and and in their schedules for such interventions, rather than simply housing work or validating the position of agents in the art world, museums have in some ways created a new breeding ground for art. By commissioning Stephen Antonakos to cover the exterior of the Fort Worth Art Museum in Texas with 10 outdoor neons in 1974, the then-director Richard Koshalek

increased the museum's dynamism and visibility despite its galleries being booked for the next three years.

Yet museums' efforts to address criticisms of out-of-touch elitism often put them in a tenuous position between maintaining their "power to consecrate [...]" and allowing the artist, curator, public and critic to dig up their skeletons and expose their not-so-neutral inner workings. Hans Haacke's Taking Stock made relevant the infiltration of corporate interests in the collection process, and led to the resignation of Charles Saatchi from the Tate's board. While John Baldessari curated Ways of Seeing from the 90% of the Hirshhorn's collection which remains in storage, pieces such as Janine Antoni's chocolate bust in the series "Lick and Lather" were kept from circulation, and thus cultural reanimation.

And a new wave of criticism abounds for those trying to lift the current economic damper by turning to more market aware schemes... Even the plans

for a string of museums designed by Gehry in Abu Dahbi, Vien

na and other places has been put on hold by trustees and financial gaps. That being said, not all private projects are sell-outs, or impossible models for public institutions - e.g. Di Rosa Preserve Nonetheless, some managed to strike a balance between financial sustainability, transparency and the dynamic artistic avant-garde... like MOCA's Temporary Contemporary, leased for 1$/year from LA, also initiated by Koshalek when he was Director there - originally a hardware building, it was incidentally redesigned by Gehry. Or the Hirshhorn's AfterHours, geared towards younger audiences and a great media plug. Once the museum is admittedly no longer 'just' the White Box, thinking outside the box can be a springboard for institutional change.

Of artists working outside of the museum and gallery, my mind wanders to the lecture-conferences of III (Institute of Important Ideas) by young artists Chloé Hervé & Louise Maillet in Paris - a traveling performance taking the audience along fictitious routes, e.g. the path of a crime novel hero, as a part of the geography of popular culture, "explained" in an "expert" way - much like the position taken by Fraser in Museum Highlights, reversed. III's performance takes the art crowd out, mimicking the layman's perspective on the

myths of their urban geography - rather than mimicking the museum expert to the average museum-goers.

Considering the Punta della Dogana's opening a

t the most recent Venice Biennale 2009 - I'm wary of monopolistic collectors of commercially acquired fortunes like Hen

ri Pinault, but to see the astounding space created by Tadao Ando and the presentation of works by the likes of Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, even Murakami, one can only wonder if - by considering along the lines of our first reading that aesthetic beauty and the

ultimate,

validated aesthetic is the only one that should enter a museum - one must consider then that the most "legitimate" or validated location and association for such works (outside of the strictly museum context) should be such in a space - though it pains me for some reasons that it be in such private circumstance... and 20euros to enter!