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!