Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Look for a blockbuster week coming up on MAN. Among the highlights: I’ll be posting from Seoul, South Korea; Art Institute of Chicago curator James Rondeau on art and 9/11; Chinati and the Judd Foundation prepare for Open House weekend; and excerpts from Michael Auping’s just-released book 30 Years: Interviews and Outtakes. I usually can’t stand books of artist interviews, but this one’s a blast.
In an unrelated story: In the last year the art blogosphere has grown enormously and obviously my blogroll hasn’t kept up. It’s time for a re-build. Look for that in the next week or two.

I’ve posted a good bit about how I don’t buy into the ‘crisis in criticism’ theory. I think that the bigger ‘problem’ is in arts reporting. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones begins the discussion here. He could have added plenty more tired tropes: Auction stories, market stories, outsider artist stories, artist-makes-art-on-a-corn-chip stories…

And so it has degenerated to this: Christoph Buchel finally speaks about the MASS MoCA mess. And how? With a childish retort. MASS MoCA speaks too: Through a blog post that should be required reading for any grad student that is considering being a curator. Oh ye young Harv(B)ard-ians, learn from their experiences.

So far most of the pontificating I’ve read in print and online about the Buchel/MM extravaganza has been about the merits of the legal case or about the ‘When Is It Art?’ question. Most critics and observers have chosen sides. After all, this is a case that positions the little guy — The Noble Artist! — against the big institution — The Museum as The Man — and that kind of mano-a-mano set-up lends itself to horse-picking.

But both Buchel and the museum are in the wrong; both sides have behaved badly. More importantly, they’ve each served the other and their shared public poorly — but not for the reasons you think. Nevermind whether MASS MoCA should have shown the unfinished whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Honestly? I don’t care. Nevermind whether Buchel made unreasonable demands. Creative types have done that since the beginning of time. Museums show things, artists always want more: Both characters are playing true to type.

MASS MoCA’s mistake was not saying ‘no’ or ’stop’ before it reached this point. Maybe the mistake was not saying ‘no’ when Buchel’s name came up in a meeting. Every curator or dealer — every single one — that I know that has worked with Buchel has found him to be impossible. The museum had to know this going in and still failed to work out an iron-clad agreement with the artist regarding mutual expectations and obligations for the installation. (In fact there’s still no agreement about how this thing got started: MASSMoCA director Joe Thompson told me that the museum and Buchel agreed to an iron-clad budget: “It was explicit, and it was agreed upon,” Thompson said in email.  Buchel’s attorney, Donn Zaretsky says there was no agreement.)

Buchel’s mistake was not showing enough respect to the institution and the small army of people who worked to help him realize his vision for the piece. (To put it another way: MASS MoCA’s mistake was institutional, Buchel’s mistake was lacking humanity.) In the end, he didn’t deserve them. An institution and a town were willing to spend time, money, energy and space on him and instead of realizing he was in a situation that near every artist would kill for, he spat on them. He needs to be sent to the corner for some quiet time. And probably will be: What museum would go near him after this?!

Finally, MASS MoCA and Buchel should both read this book. It’s called What Makes a Great Exhibition? It was published last year by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. It’s not just for curators, it’s for artists too. It provides wise advice on dealing with institutions, advice that often applies more broadly.

Kathy Halbreich, who recently retired as director of the Walker Art Center is going to MoMA to become an associate director. Halbreich will lead the museum’s contemporary art curatorial group and will work to improve contemporary art offerings at MoMA and PS1 via both acquisitions and exhibitions.
In a related story, when MoMA director Glenn Lowry leaves the museum, a highly qualified in-house successor is in place.
Related: Carol Vogel follows MAN.

Don’t miss this essay-masquerading-as-blog-post from Errol Morris. It touches on Sontag, the Crimea, Roger Fenton, and order. From 2004: My review of the Fenton retro at the NGA.

My favorite work about 9/11 is Shirin Neshat’s film installation Tooba. I first saw it when Neshat gave the piece its American debut at a lecture at the American Federation of Arts in 2003. I remember leaving the event with my date and feeling obliterated by what we’d seen. I wrote about the piece on MAN about a year later (more on that later today), and then in 2005 I wrote a long feature about Neshat for the Los Angeles Times. These excerpts come from our conversation for that piece, which took place in NYC early in the summer of 2005.

Green: Where were you when it happened?

Neshat: I was right by the World Trade Center. My son was in school right near there, a couple of blocks away. I was on my way to do some editing [on a piece] and I looked in that direction. I looked up and someone said a plane had an accident. Not long after that I saw people jumping out of windows.

Green: In the days and weeks that followed, how did the attack affect you? [Ed. Here it's worth pointing out that in 1996 Neshat made her last visit to Iran. When she was leaving the country she was detained at the airport by state forces. She wasn't exactly arrested, but, as Neshat says, she was held "just enough so that the message was that I shouldn't re-enter." For the next five years she longed to return. She says that she had a "grand vision" of going home and making art.]

Neshat: I became even more vulnerable. I was worrying about my son, worrying about the future, worrying about where to live. I wondered if it got to the point where we were not so welcome here. Philosophically I felt this new fear over my head. I thought about leaving, but I didn’t know where we’d go

Green: So you said that you, like everyone else, fled north, north of SoHo where you lived. When did you get back?

Neshat: What was really traumatic the next day was the thing about looking Middle Eastern. Police had barricaded the whole area south of Houston and we had to pass every time and show IDs. I was surrounded by Iranian people and I was scared.

Green: And so at some point you decided to make art about 9/11.

Neshat: I had been thinking about what I wanted to do for Documenta. But the truth is, prior to that I had thought a lot about going to Iran and going to my father’s ex-farm. [Ed: Neshat's family owned a large farm of mostly fruit trees outside of Qazvin. It was taken away from them by the government after the Islamic Revolution.] I had really romanticized about a big project, about how Documenta could be about my reunion with Iran. It had to do with my father’s farm.

I thought it would be beautiful that I could make my first work going to back to Iran, that I could go back to this farm and this would really symbolize the conflict between the government and my father. The farm is literally dying because they wouldn’t let him water, and they wouldn’t let him care for it. So for me this garden this farm became the omen that was for me very metaphoric. So I called my brother and he was trying to work my visa out to come. And then 9/11 happened and I just said I don’t want to come to Iran. I said, ‘Forget this romantic idea.’ I’m never going back there.

Green: So the garden in Tooba…

Neshat: I stayed with the garden, not the farm.

Green: I wrote about this on MAN a while back, about how Tooba was about 9/11, but I haven’t read about that view of it anywhere else. Was I close?

Neshat: It was very much about 9/11. What’s interesting is that 90 percent of people missed the whole point about how it was connected to that. It had everything to do with that. Very much consciously. Obviously it was bit of a reminiscence about what I’d been thinking about Iran, but it really took form after 9/11 as a film installation about paradise, about sanctuary and the need for security, and that tree being the epitome of a savior or a paradox. It is about you and me and about how everyone in the crowd desperately wanted to be safe, all of us running looking for some kind of sanctuary.

The most important American artist of the present is Andrea Zittel. Right now America is involved in a war that has everything to do with how we live our lives, our insatiable, mostly unaddressed need for oil to fuel our sprawl, our agriculture, and our industry. The world’s greatest challenge is climate change, a catastrophe toward which we are racing because for decades we’ve been unwilling to reconcile how we live with how future generations might live. Andrea Zittel’s work addresses these issues in a way no other artist does: She examines how we live, how we use the land, whether we must use it the way we do, whether we must live our lives with such disregard for whomever comes next. She offers clever alternatives that are functional, and, well, beautiful.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has recently acquired one of Zittel’s A-Z Homestead Units (2001-2005). Expect it to be on view when LACMA opens its new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in 2008.

I tend to think of Zittel as the latest in a very specific line of post-Vietnam artists: There is Robert Smithson, who revealed to us how we use the land, the impact we have on it, and started us thinking about placing human events, sites, objects in geologic time. William Garnett, Robert Adams, Joe Deal and other ‘New Topographics’ photographers came along and showed us — in a much more personal way — what suburban expansion was doing to the landscape. Now Zittel. This is from a piece I did about her for Black Book magazine:

In the middle of A-Z West is Zittel’s home, a white cabin tucked into the middle of the hill, and about the size of three Hummers parked next to each other. The only tree I can see on the hill — and one of only two trees I can see in what must be a 200-square-mile panorama — is planted right in front of the house. I recognize a lot of the stuff strewn around Zittel’s acreage: A-Z Wagon Stations, an A-Z Work Station, an A-Z Travel Trailer Customized by Miriam and Gordon Zittel, an A-Z Homestead Unit, an A-Z Yard Yacht, and The Regenerating Field. I’m only slightly disappointed not to see Zittel’s most humorous product, A-Z Thundering Prairie Dogs, in the desert. (Of course, prairie dogs live on prairies, not in deserts. I think.)

And why the A-Z Everything? Zittel gave herself a brand name because when she called industrial suppliers, no one took seriously a high-pitch-voiced girl named Andrea. When she told them that she was calling on behalf of A-Z West, they assumed she was legit. A-Z West has even joined the Joshua Tree Chamber of Commerce.

Zittel drives up in her Subaru. She is tall, skinny, and is wearing an A-Z Fiber Form Uniform (Fall) made out of grayish-brown merino wool. She has big eyes, straight blonde hair, and a jaw line that seems made for life in a windy desert. She welcomes me into the cabin as if we’ve known each other for years. “I wanted a house without other homes around it,” Zittel says, as we enter her living room.

“How’d you find this one?”

“It took a few trips,” she says. “It’s an original homestead cabin from the 1930s. There’s nothing more fun than driving around looking for cabins in the desert.”

Related: Zittel’s survey show is on view (barely) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Stranger’s Jen Graves on the show there.

**From late Friday afternoon: The St. Louis Art Museum’s (only) deaccessioning mistake: A fine Jean Metzinger.**
In the second and third parts of my Q&A with MoMA curator Ann Temkin about 9/11-impacted/influenced art, Temkin and I talked about how there has been a recent profusion of art about degeneration and decay. I’ve written about this topic dozens of times before here, including to say that I was surprised that there hadn’t been a museum-level group show about it.
This past summer there was: Phantasmania, curated by Elizabeth Dunbar at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. It was a good show made up mostly of work by barely-30something artists with only a solo show or two under their belts. As a result the show feels a little too 25th Street, a bit like processing-in-progress. There were no elegant, mature considerations of fear a la Pittman or anguish a la Neshat, but there was plenty of confused angst. That matches what I’ve seen from young artists in, say, their second Chinatown or Chelsea shows, but it seems a little underambitious. Too often in Phantasmania, say in the work of James Benjamin Franklin or Anna Conway, the artists seem to still be figuring out what to say or how to make a tight painting. Jon Pylypchuk’s self-consciously slapdash installations are termite art ’supersized’ for terriers. And Jules de Balincourt may someday become more than an American Neo Rauch, but not yet.
Still, within a narrow slice of a narrow slice, Phantasmania presented a coherent look at a generation of late 20something/early 30something artists who have grown into artistic, er, early-age during two American wars, unprecedented global climate change, and persistent (if occasionally both exaggerated and ignored) terrorist threats and how they’ve responded.
And perhaps I quibble. True: Dunbar tapped into something that’s going on artists’ studios. Her catalogue essay is unusually readable. Her wall-text was clear and coherent. (Given most of what I’m forced to read from curators, these things surprise me.) Among the shows’ highlights:
John White Cerasulo’s dark, romantic, mysterious, uncomfortable paintings of implied grotesquerie. They hint that something’s not quite right and provide the viewer with a clue or two as to what it might be: In Untitled, Essex Island a man wearing a cape stands on an iceberg. The moon shines through clouds or fog. His right arm seems deformed in some why. Why is he there, how did he get there… In Untitled, Middlesex County, but from Waterbury (above), a man seems to be resting his head on a table, between two glasses with flowers in them. He stares vacantly into the distance. It is vaguely uncomfortable to look at him in what is a difficult, personal moment. Something’s wrong, but what? Cerasulo’s scenes are creepy enough to rise above his clunky brushwork, but in time… (Both of these images are from Sandroni Rey and both are substantially, annoyingly lighter than the actual paintings.)
Angela Fraleigh’s big paintings of vacant lust and decay. (That’s all consequence as soon forgotten above.) Fraleigh is one of plenty of painters who appear to be fascinated with the Hummerized decadence of American society. Like Ken Weaver, Fraleigh channels her observations into big, debauched paintings that combine the excesses of the Roccoco with Tiepolo-esque cheesecake and big, wet, lush swaths of abstract painting. (Weaver does it with orgies, cleavage and Caligula-esque sex scenes.) Like Cecily Brown had to early in her career, Fraleigh is still reclaiming the sexualized female figure from de Kooning’s objectification of her, but that’s OK. She’s worth watching (so too her website).

This is the best painting that the St. Louis Art Museum is deaccessioning: A Jean Metzinger landscape from 1916-17. It’s the only Metzinger in SLAM’s collection and it’s been on view regularly and lately, from 2002-2006. (I’ve also just seen images of the Lhote, the Utrillo and the Harpingies. Not worth your bandwidth.)
I think it’s pretty hard to get worked up about SLAM selling some little-seen, fourth-rate Matisses and Renoirs, the kind of paintings that just aren’t museum-quality. But this Metzinger is a different story, a mistake.
Related: The SLAM sale: the Cassatt; the Braques, the Matisse, the Renoir, the de Vlamnick, the estimates.