Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

Arts critic and filmmaker Robert Hilferty died over the weekend. There’s more here and here.

I came to know Robert when we were both writing for Bloomberg. We became fast friends and kept in touch over the years. I wrote about art (or tried to) and Robert wrote about music, theater and film. Back then Bloomberg’s culture desk was a ridiculously difficult place to try to do anything approaching good or accurate work, and without Robert’s humor, good cheer and ability to handle the boss I never would have lasted as long as I did. In part because Bloomberg — for whom Robert wrote for five-plus years, at least — has yet to run an obituary or remembrance, I thought I’d share a Robert story here.

I particularly recall a late afternoon Robert and I spent in the Marc Newsom-designed eatery at Lever House, in New York. Neither of us were restaurant critics, but our boss decided that we should each end our next review with a dining recommendation. As a result, I was impelled to join a review of Jean Helion at the National Academy of Design with a Cafe Sabarsky recommendation and a look at Tony Oursler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a visit to Lever House’s restaurant.

Robert and I thought the assignment was weird, our boss’ latest way of saying to us that I don’t care about your knowledge about your field and critics are disposable dilettantes who can write about anything, so just do what I tell you. Bloomberg had a dining critic and we were sure he’d rightly feel like we were stepping on his toes if we took the assignment seriously, so we decided to see how quirky a Bloomberg-mandated endorsement of the chosen eatery we could create.

With a totally over-the-top, campy mission in mind, we chose Lever House Restaurant, a Newsom design straight out of a Sean Connery-era James Bond film. We yukked it up good, made jokes about whether SPECTRE was listening to our conversation, guessed about whether the average age disparity between male customers and their dates was over or under 30 years, and so on.

Sometime over the course of looking at the dinner and drinks menus Robert hit upon how we should handle the assignment: I was the one who was writing up this meal, so I should order a drink that was completely incompatible with my entree and then present the pairing as the world’s most natural duet. (Of course this plan left Robert eating something sensible and tasty.) Here’s what I wrote:

I ended my art crawl at the Lever House Restaurant, a hyper-air-conditioned cavern designed by Marc Newson, a Brit who designs everything from eateries to watches and utensils with a sensibility that is simultaneously retro and futuristic.

Lever House Restaurant is in that vein: If Disneyland’s Tomorrowland, which opened three years after Lever House, had included an jet cabin of the future, this is what it would look like. Several of the dining areas are even recessed into what look like over-sized airplane windows.

A friend and I supped over foie gras (for me) and poached turbot (for him). He accented his meal with a wine from Long Island, while I couldn’t resist a summery watermelon-puree margarita. Our early dinner cost $125.

Washing back foie gras with a watermelon margarita was vintage Robert: Cloying, knowing, and completely silly fun. If you’re in midtown tonight, order it up and think of him.

As expected, the Rose Art Museum trustees have sued Brandeis University over Brandeis’ attempts to dismantle the Rose and to sell off (at least) parts of its collection. If there’s a surprise in the news (which broke late yesterday) it’s that the Rose board chair Jonathan Lee and his co-plantiffs are also suing Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general who was apparently unwilling to stop Brandeis from looting the Rose. I’m taking this week off, but here’s what you should read:

• The Globe story;
• Greg Cook;
• MAN’s two-part February Q&A with Lee, in which Lee saber-rattled, effectively presaging yesterday’s suit; and
• The myth of the must-$ell.

• San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic John King should be an adviser to the Fisher family: Here’s where King thinks the FishMu should go.
• A Richmond Times-Dispatch video feature shows off a new Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquisition of German expressionism. (The Emil Nolde is especially fantastic.) The Amon Carter adds to its notable photography collection by scoring a key Edward Sheriff Curtis portfolio set, says the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Chris Vaughn.(Error in terminology mine, not the FWS-T’s.)
• The LAT’s Suzanne Muchnic reports that recession or no, many Los Angeles galleries are expanding.
• Richard Lacayo reviews James Ensor in Time.
• In the LAT, Diane Haithman has the 30-years-lost story of Billy Al Bengston, the LAT food section and the trompe l’oeil steak.
• No major journalism outlet does a worse job of covering art than NPR. The latest evidence is here.
• In case you missed it — and while NPR was busy covering the scene at Michaels — MAN is the only outlet to cover the newest potential threat to Spiral Jetty.

Earlier this year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art decided that it’s costume and textile collection had a lot of stuff it didn’t need, so it deaccessioned. The museum then sold the objects on Feb. 8-9 at auction. Among the buyers was artist Robert Fontenot, who purchased seven lots, about sixty objects in all.

Over the last few months Fontenot has been deconstructing and re-purposing those objects for a project he calls ‘Recycle LACMA.’ He used a packet of 1961 Barbie sewing patterns to turn a LACMA-deaccessioned Korean women’s garment into doll outfits. Guatemalan trousers are now teddy bears. A Korean wedding skirt, which cost Fontenot $73 at auction, became a garment bag. My favorite might be this 1950s brocade evening dress (left), which Fontenot wisely turned into an umbrella (below). Fontenot even found ways to meld LACMA’s ex-collection with a 1972 Datsun, potholders, and a dog bed (with a built-in doggie bone).

For now the project is documented at Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA blog, but Fontenot told me that he’d like to put together a gallery show of the objects. Even better: Fontenot would love to show the works at LACMA.(Fontenot has exhibited in both Los Angeles and New York, at spaces such as Elizabeth Dee, Andrew Shire, QED and Mark Moore. Tomorrow LACMA curator Rita Gonzalez will feature Fontenot’s project on LACMA’s Unframed blog. I’ll post a link here and on Twitter.)

Fontenot is working in a long tradition of artists re-using something old — say a panel painting — into something new — like a newer panel painting. And Fontenot’s project reveals a particular respect for objects: For centuries
artists have been inspired and motivated by previous art and have
included references to their forefathers’ art in their own work. Fontenot is
similarly motivated, but instead of including just references in his
work, he makes his work out of the actual objects that inspired him. (For centuries artists have tried to metaphorically usurp the work of their forefathers, a concept that Fontenot has taken a step further by leaving metaphor out of it altogether.)

But what makes Fontenot’s project so clever, so much fun even is that his work is rooted in institutional critique. That part of the project is so fundamental to Fontenot that he’s stitched LACMA’s accession number for the ‘original object’ into each new object he’s made.

The ‘new institutional critique’ is one of the smartest strains of recent contemporary art. It builds on a genre that was pioneered in the 1970s by artists such as Michael Asher and Fred Wilson, artists who made intensely conceptual work about museums, art about how museums installed art, exhibited art and so on. Their work revealed (and continues to reveal) how
narratives and history are created out of the collection and display of
objects.

More recently artists have examined not just collections and
installations, but the full range of ways in which museums operate: The
John Erickson Museum of Art
(‘founded’ by Sean Miller) extends the focus of institutional critique
to membership departments and the nature of traveling exhibitions.
HoMu, Filip Noterdaeme’s Homeless Museum of Art examines the intersection of ethics, Big Money and Big Art.

Fontenot has added deaccessioning to the list of museum practices examined by institutional-critiquing artists — and he’s shown that institutional critique doesn’t have to appeal only to the brain, it can appeal to the eye too. (Even the best Wilsons and Ashers revel in didacticism.)

Which isn’t to say it’s not plenty smart. Fontenot’s project argues that carefully considered collection-culling is the natural order of things, that a museum’s toss-offs can be fuel for artistic creation. Fontenot’s work is a tacit approval of institutional process: When Fontenot remakes a BBQ apron he’s suggesting that the old item was correctly deaccessioned, and that he’s making a new object that might better fit that space in the museum’s galleries, storage locker, collection catalogue and so on. His project says that deaccessioning is normal, motivational, inspirational… and useful.

Previously on MAN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) at the Baltimore Contemporary.

Related: Such is the appeal and accessibility of Fontenot’s project that even writers known more for singing lusty odes to museum directors than their interest in contemporary art have picked up on his project.

• Geoff Edgers reports that the ICA Boston has found a simple route to attendance success: Show artists whose work doesn’t require audiences to read acres of wall text. Seems obvious, but we all know curators who fall in love with long, art-explaining press releases (that they then translate into wall textese), instead of with artists or with artwork.
• I love the way LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes the broad, big-picture approach to discussing the import of late photographer Julius Shulman. Hawthorne also penned a more personal remembrance of Shulman. From MAN: Some early Shulman biography. Contrast it with his photography… what a century!
• A couple weeks ago I noted that 99.4 percent of the art in the National Gallery of Art’s American galleries was made by white people. In the weeks since, several people asked me why I opened the post by quoting Pat Buchanan. Answer: More loudly than anyone else in American semi-public life, Buchanan clings to a view of early American history that includes and acknowledges only white people, typically white men. Buchanan reminded us of his bizarre views this week. The only other place in mainstream American life where I see Buchanan’s America is the National Gallery. That says something, doesn’t it…

Continuing from yesterday’s post about Bruce Nauman’s 1981 sculptures South America Triangle and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D.: … Both sculptures reminded me of American behaviors that I’d read about in the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross report
that concluded that the Bush administration tortured detainees. They
reminded me of American-made horrors that fill every chapter of Jane
Mayer’s chronicle of Bush administration extra-legal detention and
torture, The Dark Side. 

I started these Nauman posts by posting a strikingly direct example of how Nauman’s work recalls Bush-Cheney-era torture techniques and environments so presciently that they provoke intense discomfort. It’s tempting to engage Naumans that directly, especially 1974’s Double Steel Cage Piece. But Naumans also abstract experiences and environments in ways that can be just as uncomfortable: References absent specifics can be even more uncomfortable than the space created by Double Steel Cage Piece. 

Nauman’s two great 1981 sculptures, South America Triangle and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (above) are minimalist abstractions: The I-beams may refer to confined space. The hanging chair is ominous. Nauman’s sculptures are an affecting gateway toward thinking about how the United States tortured detainees during the Bush-Cheney administration.

On Tuesday I began these posts about Nauman by quoting Abu Zubaydeh’s testimony to the International Committee on the Red Cross regarding his treatment at the hands of Americans. For the sake of continuity (I could quote passages regarding many other detainees), here’s New Yorker writer and The Dark Side author Jane Mayer on America’s treatment of Abu Zubaydeh (she spells his name slightly differently than the ICRC does):

“Zubayda’s ‘hard time’ began when he was locked into the ‘tiny coffin’ for hours on end, which he described as excruciatingly painful. It was too small for him to stand or stretch out, so small he said he had to double up his limbs in a fetal position. Because of his recently healed injuries, he described this position as particularly agonizing, since it caused his wounds [suffered upon capture] to reopen. He described the box as black, both inside and out, and said that it was covered in towels, which he thought was an effort to constrict the flow of air inside. While locked in the dark interior, he had no way of knowing when, if ever, he would be let out. But he related that most of the sessions lasted less than a day at a time, and were started and stopped during the course of one week. A source familiar with Zubayda’s account described the tiny coffin box as “unbearable, most terrible.” Article 21 of the Third Geneva Convention — which applies to all prisoners of war — specifically prohibits such forms of curelty, which are classified as ‘close confinement.’ “

South America Triangle presents a confined space, and because of its shape it feels particularly aggressive. And then there’s that hanging chair, a particularly eerie stand-in for a person, or for what might happen to a person confined to a chair. From the New York Review of Books, here’s journalist Mark Danner’s description of some of the treatment to which Abu Zubaydeh was subjected:

A naked man chained in a small, very cold, very white room is for
several days strapped to a bed, then for several weeks shackled to a
chair, bathed unceasingly in white light, bombarded constantly with
loud sound, deprived of food; and whenever, despite cold, light, noise,
hunger, the hours and days force his eyelids down, cold water is
sprayed in his face to force them up.

One of the difficulties about having a national discussion about America and torture is that the torture techniques the United States used during the Bush-Cheney regime are so far from the experience — even the imagination — of most of us that it’s hard to understand just what we did. Mainstream news outlets such as National Public Radio, the New York Times and the Washington Post even refuse to refer to American torture as ‘torture,’ a bizarre mis-locution that takes Americans a further step away from just how cruel and depraved the behaviors carried out in our nation’s name really were.

Nauman’s sculptures don’t fill that void. They don’t explain how we became a nation that tortured or what we did to other humans. They certainly don’t spotlight the way the Bush-Cheney regime broke American and international law — fortunately journalists such as Mayer and Danner have patriotically filled in those blanks. Still, the Naumans provide us with a crucial gateway toward some of those answers, toward understanding. Here’s hoping both 1981 sculptures are on view again soon.

Earlier this week: Bruce Nauman’s Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America’s torture of Abu Zubaydeh. Bruce Nauman’s hanging chairs, part one.

Related consideration of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn, the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two, the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler’s ‘The Gray Drape.’ 

Nauman in Venice: In addition to this website,
the Philadelphia Museum of Art team responsible for the 2009 U.S.
pavilion has contributed to a Nauman-in-Venice catalogue. You can buy
it here at 35% off.

On Nauman: Accounts of Nauman’s literary interests and inspiration can be found in an essay by Neal Benezra in Bruce Nauman, edited by Robert C. Morgan, and in Please Pay Attention Please, a collection of Nauman interviews and writings edited by Janet Kraynak.

In 1981 Bruce Nauman read two books that took his work in a stark new direction: V.S. Naipaul’s The Return of Eva Peron and Jacobo Timmerman’s Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. The Naipaul is a collection of non-fiction that examines the ways in which some societies become unable to evolve beyond their painful pasts, pasts that include colonialism, slavery, ecological plunder, and institutionalized, state-sanctioned violence. It is an intellectual, multi-generational examination of legacy, an attempt to explain unhappy outcomes. Timmerman’s book is blunter, an account of how the Argentine military imprisoned and tortured the author. It includes detailed descriptions of how Timmerman was bound to a chair and tortured with electricity.

Inspired by what he read Nauman created two sculptures, South America Triangle (1981) and Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (1981). South America Triangle (above) is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and has not been on view in several years. Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned, D.E.A.D. (below) is owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. It was not included in the AIC’s initial Modern Wing installation. Neither is on view as part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Nauman presentation at and around the Venice Biennale. Regardless, it was the PMA’s Nauman project that started me thinking about these works, especially as details about the Bush administration’s torture regime have become public, and as word of Vice President Dick Cheney’s instructions that the CIA hide certain programs from Congress were revealed by the New York Times’ Scott Shane.

Nauman’s sculptures were not about the United States. In 1981 Nauman couldn’t have had any idea that America would become a kind of modern-day post-colonial force in two occupied states, Iraq and Afghanistan. He couldn’t know that 20 years on America would become a nation that engaged in extra-legal detention, a country that stuffed detainees into private jets so as to whisk them around the world to places where they could be brutally confined, tortured and, in several cases, maltreated to the point where they were killed or died. In 1981 Nauman’s sculptures were about what happened to other people, people such as the Trinidadians, Argentinans, or Uruguayans in Naipaul and Timmerman. Today I look at Nauman’s two 1981 artworks and I think about what the United States did in its fanatical, unprincipled pursuit of terrorism suspects and in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the things that makes art imperative is this: During its lifetime it can jump beyond its inspiration to become about us.

South America Triangle and Diamond Africa are variations on a theme, loaded with abstractions that hint at sinister, totalitarian behavior. In both sculptures steel I-beams create small, harsh, spare, controlled and controlling spaces. Both feature upside-down chairs hanging in the middle of the I-beam structure, references to a person who is lost, trapped, and tortured — or a stand-in for many lost, trapped and tortured people. All of the elements of Nauman’s sculptures hang in mid-air, a metaphor for a nether-world that might be inhabited by cowed colonial subjects or post-colonial people ruled by a dictatorial or other kind of unjust regime.

The two pieces are masterpieces of suggestion, raised eyebrows in steel and cast-iron. On one hand, there is nothing overt in either of them. On the other, what else could they be about, but the misuse of a human, the institutionalized infliction of terror. Both sculptures reminded me of American behaviors that I’d read about in the 2007 International Committee of the Red Cross report that concluded that the Bush administration tortured detainees. They reminded me of American-made horrors that fill every chapter of Jane Mayer’s chronicle of Bush administration extra-legal detention and torture, The Dark Side.  

Continued here.

Yesterday: Bruce Nauman’s Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America’s torture of Abu Zubaydeh.

Related consideration of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn, the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two, the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler’s ‘The Gray Drape.’ 

Nauman in Venice: In addition to this website,
the Philadelphia Museum of Art team responsible for the 2009 U.S.
pavilion has contributed to a Nauman-in-Venice catalogue. You can buy
it here at 35% off.

On Nauman: Accounts of Nauman’s literary interests and inspiration can be found in an essay by Neal Benezra in Bruce Nauman, edited by Robert C. Morgan, and in Please Pay Attention Please, a collection of Nauman interviews and writings edited by Janet Kraynak.