Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Continuing from this morning with 2008 Carnegie International curator Douglas Fogle…[Photo at left: Thomas Hirschhorn waiting to happen.]

MAN: So did artists understand your theme, the ‘Life on Mars’ idea, or did you get some strange looks?

Douglas Fogle: When I mentioned David Bowie, 90 percent of the people laughed, got it, and said, ‘Oh my God, I love it.’ No one has not liked it actually. A lot of the people who are really into music loved it, they all get it.

I think the best contemporary art takes us to other worlds. It’s not a show about extra terrestrials, it’s a metaphor. When I discuss the idea around Pittsburgh I have to be extra-clear because the Carnegie has a science center. I always say that the theme was just an interesting way of hooking on to some ideas that could form a bit of structure for the exhibit.

MAN: It’s one of those ‘-ennial’ years in America: You and the Carnegie, the Whitney, Lance Fung is doing a show in Santa Fe, Dan Cameron in New Orleans. Given that biennials are whatever they are now, did you feel any need or impetus to re-examine what a biennial was, to re-create?

DF: No, I didn’t. The Carnegie International is really different. It has its own character. It’s comes along only every 3-4 years, so it’s not Documenta, but it’s not like the Venice Biennial either. It’s also the oldest one other than Venice, and Venice has the Carnegie by only six months. It has a legacy. It’s never more than 40 artists. It’s a third as many artists as I had in my group shows at the Walker, so each artist gets more room. I feel like the show, because of the ideas behind it, because of how I did the show: It’s an exhibition, it’s not a survey. [Photo: Pre-Barry McGee.]

It’s also like Munster and those kinds of places in the sense that it’s very much a show for the city of Pittsburgh and people here get very excited. It’s such a part of the history and the legacy of the institution. It was set up as a way for the institution as a way to collect — that’s how they wanted to build the collection, so there are always works bought out of the show and always work by artists you bring in before the show by artists you want to invite.

I don’t have anxiety about the form of the biennial, if you want to call it that, because [the CI] doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels like a big group show we’d have done at the Walker.

MAN: How is it very much a show for Pittsburgh? How is the city a part of the project?

DF: I’m on the circuit here. The assistant curator on the project and I are out all the time. We do stuff over at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh. And not just about the show, but interacting and doing crits. We’re trying to make ourselves part of the community because we are and we love it. I do as many studio visits as I can. I go give talks leading up to the CI around town and try to get people excited. We have had a series of great pieces on the local NPR station.

MAN: Do you know what you’re doing next yet? Aren’t CI curators expected to leave when the show does?

DF: No, there’s no booting out the door. It’s more de facto than any kind of written code. People do the show and then people call them. I have no future. Starbucks is always hiring.

The Carnegie International opens this weekend. The curator of the show is Douglas Fogle. For the first time the show comes with a subtitle: “Life on Mars.” Today I’ll feature a Q&A with Fogle and then I’ll have a roundup of Carnegie- and Pittsburgh-centric links. [Photo, with , er, accompanying explanation.]

MAN: What is the origin of the title and, well, why?

Douglas Fogle: It’s from David Bowie. “Life on Mars” is on the album Hunky Dory. The show has never had a title — it’s always had the title of ‘Carnegie International,’ and every show I’d done at the Walker had a title. There was a bit of a contact sport among my colleagues at the Walker with titling shows, and so I wanted to do one here.

For me the Bowie reference is important. I was a big fan as a kid, and he was a big influence on me in terms of art rock and art and rock. I learned a lot about visual art through music.

It was also a chance to post a question before [visitors] get into the show, to prepare you for where you are. The song sort of talks of a world – either a personal world or the world itself – spinning out of control and the protagonist asks if there’s life on Mars. It can be read in many ways: It can be hopeful. It can be utopian, or it can be ‘can we get out of this place?’, which is a darker reading.

When I wrote notes about what this show could be about, I thought of the Pioneer 10 space probe. It’s not a show about sci-fi or a space exhibit. I just loved that Carl Sagan and a bunch of scientists had put a plaque on Pioneer 10, a little drawing etched on metal of a man and a woman, a mathematical rendering of our place in the Milky Way galaxy, and a little diagram of the solar system. It’s a mini-Lascaux cave for the 20thC and it was strapped on the back of this thing that went up . It did its job, and was slungshot out of the solar system. it was the first object that went literally into interstellar space, the first man-made object to leave the solar system.

And so for me it became this metaphor for this human desire to connect with another person or another world in a way. That was sort of a tip-off point for me thinking about what contemporary art should and could be about. I ended up thinking it should be a show about humanity and have a human quality, that it should be about connections, about the idea of trying to connect with someone else. You don’t want artists to be Legos in your argument, but it’s helpful for the audience to have a loose way of engaging the show.

MAN: So how does ‘humanity’ and ‘human quality’ get into a show? What about the show is those things?

DF: Work being done by hand being emphasized. Unlike with Sol LeWitt – who I love – the art in the show doesn’t come from anything like a mathematical formula. It’s very much a medieval, Renaissance way of approaching it: Work made by hand or directly onto the wall, that kind of ephemerality. Like with Richard Wright, who’s doing a wall-piece. That kind of ephemerality – when you’re done with the show, you paint over Richard’s piece and it’s gone. A month’s worth of work by three people: It’s there for a moment and then it’s gone.

Continued: Part two is here.

Continuing from this morning…

MAN: Do you approach putting these shows together differently because you work at an encyclopedic institution?

Lisa Dorin: That’s an important consideration, first for practical reasons – in order to get to our ‘Focus’ gallery, visitors have to pass through Chinese, Japanese, Asian ceramics and sculpture, and in our own galleries you walk by de Kooning, Mitchell [right], Hesse, Pollock and so on even before you even get to the ‘Focus’ shows.  Sometimes we try to tailor aspects of our permanent collection to address our ‘Focus’ shows, but most often we let the shows stand on their own. No matter what we put back there, I can’t help think that there is a kind of dialogue between the collection and the shows. When artists come here for a site visit they tend to spend a lot of time with our museum’s collection and sometimes choose to incorporate their responses into their ‘Focus’ shows. I think it’s possible for artists to be awestruck or slightly intimidated by the context, especially if they’ve never been here before. But I think it ends up being a positive experience for them in the end. It maybe a challenge that encourages them to think about their own work differently. As curators, we definitely can’t help but think about the encyclopedic context when planning shows, but I don’t think we allow it to limit our choices.

MAN: I’m guessing that the institutional considerations that go along with being at an encyclopedic museum rather than a kunsthalle really changes what you can do too.

LD: It impacts it a lot. We have institutional constraints that have to do with the number of people who come through the museum every day, that have to do with museum policies in terms of conservation and safety for objects in the permanent collection that kunsthalles don’t have to deal with.

It sounds glib but, our registrars are typically used to working with dead artists, so when an artist invariably makes last minute changes, or when a month before the show opens, the work is still not finished, and they are trying to arrange shipments, it is challenging for them. Another example would be the William Pope.L exhibition [left] we just did. His initial proposal was a peanut butter drawing on the wall of the gallery. It’s something he’s done in other institutions, but never in an institution such as ours – it’s always been more in alternative-spaces or in kunsthalles. This was a challenge that I thought I might be able to overcome, but it turned out we just couldn’t do it for a number of reasons: Health and safety was the primary one, people with peanut allergies being in crowded galleries with gallons of exposed peanut butter on the walls. We did not have the ability to completely make the museum safe for all of our visitors, particularly for children.

We couldn’t overcome that, and we had to go back to the artist and work with him to find another proposal that we could do. So my job is often that of negotiator between the institution and the artist.

MAN: Do you go out of your way to work with artists engaging the present or the surrounding context of your city, or does that just happen?

LD: I don’t know that I seek it out, but it seems to have happened now a couple times, with Jana Gunstheimer and now the next show with Mario Ybarra Jr. opening at the end of May. He’s doing a new installation specifically for the ‘Focus’ show, and it will be engaging directly with the context of Chicago but bringing it back to his home context of Los Angeles, which is a theme in his work. He’s making connections between the two cities but, that happened a little bit by accident. I originally invited Mario because I thought we wouldn’t have any gallery space as we prepare to move into our new building. He was an artist I knew could be creative about doing a project in a different kind of context, but it turns out we do have gallery space and he’s doing a gallery show.

Last week I criticized a Hirshhorn ‘Directions’ show for being too commercial, for being a Chelsea show masquerading as a museum exhibition. My email lit up, so I decided to talk with the two curators I mentioned in this post. Today: the Art Institute of Chicago’s Lisa Dorin.

MAN: Do I have a point, do some of these mini-contemporary shows tend a little bit too much toward the commercial?

Lisa Dorin: I agree with you that museums do have – should have — the responsibility and the ability to do different kinds of things than what happens in commercial galleries. Ideally, we take advantage of that. I can speak for ourselves and say that our motivation is to try as much as possible to try to do something different than what people are going to see elsewhere, and to understand what our context can provide that other contexts can’t. In choosing the artists for each exhibition, that’s always in our mind. As long as we do that, I think the process is going to be successful for the artist, for us, and for the viewers too.

MAN: I also griped about the scholarship that is and isn’t done with these shows.

LD: With the ‘Focus’ shows there’s always been an accompanying brochure. It’s not a catalogue  so there’s only so much we can accomplish there – it’s a 2,000-word essay. We always do an essay, never just an interview with the artist. We always try to do something that situates the show both within the context of the artist’s other work and within the context of contemporary art more broadly.

MAN: Can you talk a little bit about how you go about picking artists for your ‘Focus’ shows?

LD: Our approach is a mixture of things. In fact, I think one of the most unique things about our ‘Focus’ shows: We do bring in international emerging artists,  but we also focus on more established artists, specifically, strains of their practice that people might not necessarily be familiar with. My colleague James Rondeau has done an excellent job of this with some of his recent ‘Focus’ shows including Michael Asher/George Washington, the Mel Bochner ‘language’ show and our current James Bishop show. [Bochner's 1966 Portrait of Eva Hesse is at left.]

MAN: I think that being at a big museum with a big budget and big obligations changes what a curator can do, how edgy a show can be, etc. Does being big change what you think you can do? Does being encyclopedic change what you can and can’t do?

LD: Yes, on both counts. But the ‘Focus’ shows are the one place in the museum where we can be more experimental and push a little more. The shows are smaller. The budgets are smaller than the other temporary exhibitions we do. In some ways that hems us in, but it also gives us more freedom because we can do things more quickly and less conventionally than the way other shows are done here.

MAN: And sometimes there’s a museum-wide theme into which your shows work: The way you did Kasmalieva and Djumaliev during the museum’s Silk Road project. [The image above is a still from Kasmalieva and Djumaliev's 2006 A New Silk Road.]

LD: I wouldn’t necessarily say I have a program I’m trying to fill. It’s rare that there’s such  a direct tie-in to the broader museum context. In a case like the Silk Road project, my mandate was to find a contemporary artist from that region. And I chose to find an artist, or artists, whose work engaged critically with the concept of the museum’s focus on the region. I think Muratbek and Gulnara’s work did exactly that and what we were able to do with that show was give them a chance to make a new work.

Actually, they’d been wanting to do large-scale video installation on the theme of the “New Silk Road” for a long time, and they hadn’t had the time or context to do it, so it worked perfectly. Since then I’ve not had that type of mandate again. We have a theme here this year, American art, and it just happens that the three artists we’ve shown this year are American: William Pope.L, James Bishop, and Mario Ybarra Jr. But that was an accident, it wouldn’t typically have been the case.

Part two is here.