Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

One of the most assertive curatorial decisions in MOCA’s 30th-anniversary exhibition is the mixing of painting (and sculpture) with photography. Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt and Robert Frank haven’t been shunted off to their own galleries or to their own floor as you see at encyclopedic or modern museums, their work is installed next to and across from paintings by Rothko, Tapies and so on. From the first two galleries of its 30th-anniversary show, MOCA, which likes to think of itself as America’s most significant contemporary-forward art museum, is saying that from the 1950s on the pursuits of artists with cameras and the pursuits of artists with easels are intertwined. While it’s a curatorial point that at first seems friendly and inclusive, by the end of MOCA’s Grand Ave.-based presentation of art from 1940-80, MOCA’s curators make plain why they started mixing photo and painting from their start.

This approach is particularly striking because as a visitor walks through the first galleries at MOCA’s Grand Ave. building, where art up to 1980 is installed, the paintings are colorful, abstract and devoid of people. The black-and-white Arbuses, Levitts, Franks and so on nearly always have people in them and the pictures are about those people. Part of MOCA’s point here is that representation did not leave art during America’s abstractionist heyday, it just went somewhere else.

Even as abstract painting gives way to sculpture, expressionism, pop and so on, the photographs stay full of people: Garry Winogrand shows us parades, space-shots and Vietnam-era tumult. Nan Goldin captures lonely lusties finding company. Lee Friedlander takes to the streets and photographs people while hiding in plain sight. [Above: Friedlander's New York City 1968, 1968.] Larry Clark finds young people with whom something seems to be wrong. And so on through Wallace Berman, William Wegman and more. People, people people.

Then, suddenly, MOCA has installed a wall of photographs with no humans in them. Their impact is astonishing. Because they are photographs without people, they are photographs about us, about our collective actions. These pictures aren’t about what people are doing,  they’re photographs about what a people has done. The installation is Lewis Baltz’s The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, Calif. In MOCA’s presentation of the story of contemporary art, it’s a big moment, an artist’s pushing a medium forward into a bigger-picture place. Baltz seems to have believed that to take a step toward a more conceptual use of his medium that he had to purge pictures of what they were best-known and most-used for: people. (I discussed the story Baltz was telling in New Industrial Parks here and here.)

Baltz didn’t realize this on his own. By the 1970s painters’ use of photography was almost 100 years old. But in MOCA’s presentation the visitor can see that painters were using photography similarly to how Baltz was: They purged photos of people so as to open the door to conceptualist point-scoring.

Not far from New Industrial Parks is Richard Artschwager’s 1967 Untitled (Tract House) [above], a painting in acrylic on Celotex, an industrially produced building material used to insulate tract houses. Artschwager isn’t just painting a house, he’s making an art object in one of art’s most lasting, permanent media, painting, and he’s doing it by using a relatively new material that is intended to make permanent humans’ incursions into new, often harsh landscapes.

A 1964 Malcolm Morley, Boat, uses the medium through which centuries of Europe’s cardinals, popes, dukes and kings declared their wealth and import — painting — to portray a way in which America projected its Cold War might: a battleship.

Also nearby is John Baldessari’s classic 1966 This Is Not To Be Looked At [left], a painting of an Artforum magazine with a Frank Stella on the cover. Baldessari’s canvas argues for progressiveness in art, that abstraction is out of ideas and that painting may (or may not…) be too.

As Baldessari uses a photograph to say that a common object, an art magazine, is not to be looked at, Baltz uses photography to say that a common object that we often ignore — boring, bland industrial parks — should be looked at and considered more often. Baltz is turning Baldessari’s cheeky formula on its head — and he makes something new out of his medium in the process. It’s a chapter in the story of contemporary art that MOCA didn’t begin to tell in the galleries surrounding New Industrial Parks, it’s a dialogue that MOCA set up by including photography from the beginning of its collection presentation.

Only on MAN: The Smithsonian American Art Museum is considering selling early-access tickets to the upcoming exhibition “Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” MAN has learned. The show opens on July 2. [Image: SAAM/National Portrait Gallery.]

Typically SAAM opens to visitors at 11:30am and stays open until
7:00pm. As at all Smithsonian museums, admission to SAAM is free. The ticket charge under consideration for “Telling Stories” would allow visitors to enter the
exhibit between 10:00 am and the museum’s normal opening time. SAAM
spokesperson Laura Baptiste said that no decision has been made, but that the museum is considering the pay-for-early-entry idea as a “crowd-control measure.” She said that the charge
would recoup administrative costs associated with opening 90
minutes early, such as security.

Two sources told MAN that the charge discussed is around $18.50. A SAAM spokesperson said that no decisions have been made about what the fee might be. and that the Smithsonian administration has already approved the idea. A Smithsonian Institution spokesperson had not returned MAN’s call as of publication. Smithsonian Institution spokesperson Linda St. Thomas said that the Castle has met with SAAM about the idea but has yet to approve it. “It hasn’t been signed off,” she said. “It would have to be signed off by the Secretary himself.” [This post was updated at 2:15pm EST, after the Smithsonian Institution's press office returned a voicemail.]

The only Smithsonian museum believed to have charged fees related to exhibitions is the National Museum of Natural History, which charges adults $6 for entrance into its butterfly pavilion. According to the Washington Post, NMNH also charged for admission to the 1997 exhibit “Amber: Window to the Past” and to 1990’s “Dinamation’s Dinosaurs Alive and in Color.”

As the Smithsonian has faced increasing budget pressures — especially related to the deferred maintenance of Smithsonian facilities — the question of whether Smithsonian museums should charge admission has become a hot topic. At a 2006 Congressional hearing, Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) suggested that the Smithsonian charge admission and suggested a $1 fee. The Washington Post reported that the then-No. 2 administrator at the Smithsonian, Sheila Burke, told Congress that the Smithsonian Board of Regents had considered charging for admission three times and as recently as 2002, and that the board had rejected the idea each time.

At the same 2006 hearing Burke said that four Smithsonian museums are legally prohibited from charging admission: the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Portrait Gallery, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The National Portrait Gallery shares a building with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is not clear how the SAAM fee under consideration would be impacted by the National Portrait Gallery’s charter.

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) also rejected the idea at a 2008 opening meeting of the Smithsonian’s board.

The Smithsonian is a quasi-federal institution. Its federal appropriation for fiscal year 2010 is $761.4 million. The institution is about 70 percent federally funded. The remainder of the Smithsonian’s expenses are covered through trust funds (which include contributions from private sources such as corporations and philanthropy) and Smithsonian-generated revenue (such as sales at museum shops, restaurants, Smithsonian magazine, etc.).

Related: On Friday, MAN will feature a Q&A with SAAM director Elizabeth Broun.

• This is an appropriate, thoughtful way for collectors to share their collections.
• So weird that I must link to it: George Washington, made out of snow, in 1913, in the Amon Carter’s collection.
• Tryharder has lots of installation shots of MOCA’s 30th-anniversary show. Lots and lots.
• The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Eyelevel blog features an interview with Toby Jurovics, the curator who has launched the first Timothy O’Sullivan show in 30+ years.

Yesterday the Met emailed more details on its 2010 exhibition schedule. As I noted on Twitter, the Met announced it will host its second fluff show of Old Masters drawings in just over a year (in 54 weeks, actually).

Related: On the occasion of the NuMu embarrassment, Met director Thomas Campbell presented his specious, strawman-creating position on fluff shows.

“I gave a big chunk of my collection to the Hammer and didn’t even get a catalogue out of it, which I guess makes me a sucker. But in the end a museum is about curators actively engaging art and the audience over an extended period of time. It shouldn’t be about my prowess at shopping.” — Los Angeles-based collector Dean Valentine, a member of the Hammer Museum’s Board of Overseers, commenting on a Facebook post in which he agreed with MAN’s position on “fluff shows.” (I’m reprinting it here with his permission.)

Fluff shows are back in the news: Front-page New York Times headlines and public embarrassment be damned, the New Museum is going forward with a questionable show of a trustee’s private collection. LACMA and the National Gallery of Art have fluff shows on their 2010 schedules and the Corcoran recently announced a real estate deal with collectors they’re planning on fluffing later this year, a deal that raises questions about the integrity and independence of the museum’s programming.

The NuMu situation has been well-chronicled here (and elsewhere) and there’s not much new to add. I’ve also repeatedly criticized the NGA for its reliance on these shows, including the show coming up later this year. The developments worth recapping are at the Corcoran and at LACMA.

The Corcoran’s recent decision to give private collectors (Don and Mera Rubell) an exhibition at the same time the Corcoran has cut a multi-million dollar real estate deal involving those same collectors remains perplexing. The Corcoran’s left-hand, right-hand routine calls into question the wisdom of the Association of Art Museum Directors’ most recent defense of fluff shows [Image.]

In an open letter released by AAMD in January — that is, before the Corcoran’s machinations became public — AAMD president and Michael Conforti publicly defended AAMD’s position in favor of these exhibitions: “While museums must exercise responsibility in displaying works owned by private collectors as museum directors we should not retreat from organizing exhibitions from private collections as we fulfill our public mission.”

Actually, yes museum directors should, and the Corcoran situation provides a strikingly clear example as to why. The Corcoran’s business dealings with the Rubells makes the exhibition look like
pay-for-play; the twinning of the exhibition and the multi-million-dollar deal allows the museum’s public to wonder whether art is on view at the Corcoran because curatorial inquiry has determined it is of substance and import or because some rich people were clever enough to know how to play an opaque game. The show was never a good idea, but as the museum began negotiating the real-estate deal it should have immediately canceled the exhibition.

Museum associations exist to prevent rogue museums from taking actions that sully the integrity of the field. The public should be confident that art is on view in American art museums because scholars, curators and related professionals believe it is important, not because some rich person had access to galleries that can help establish the importance of their acquisitive taste or the value of objects they have purchased. Especially in light of the Corcoran situation, Conforti and AAMD should re-examine the association’s policy.

LACMA announced on Friday that it will present another exhibition determined by donor rather than curatorial inquiry: a demonstration of the taste and spending ability of LACMA trustee
Lynda Resnick and her husband Stewart.

The Los Angeles museum has given ‘fluff shows’ — exhibitions of private collections offered because of the celebrity or wealth of the collector and not for reasons grounded in scholarship or independent curatorial inquiry — to both Cheech Marin and Eli Broad. It has even fluffed a celebrity magazine: Vanity Fair.

In 2007, when LACMA opened the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Christopher Knight explained why the debut show — made up almost entirely of Broad’s purchases — was inappropriate for an art museum, especially a museum substantially funded with public monies:

As an exhibition, it’s incoherent — a counterfeit permanent collection that is actually a temporary loan, on view for a year. The only prominent link between Leon Golub’s flayed Expressionist paintings of chilling Third World torturers, Roy Lichtenstein’s cheeky high-style cartoons and Ellsworth Kelly’s shaped abstractions made from pure color is that the Broads bought them all. The collectors’ taste is the show’s subject, not the art. The misdirection of visitor attention is a primary reason that major museums, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, maintain a commendable policy of not showing private collections.

A year later, on the occasion of the Marin show, Knight again called for LACMA to fix the problem:

It’s about the art museum’s curatorial independence, which a single-collector show substantially forfeits. (In Saatchi’s case, the forfeiture was nearly complete.) We rely on art museums for free and thorough scholarship, which follows wherever the curatorial nose leads. But single-collector shows privatize that public museum role — publicly funding it to boot…

Marin recently told a [Los Angeles] Times reporter that, back [in 2001, when a show of Marin's collection traveled the country], the reason given for the refusal was that the museum did not present individual private collections. But a month before the “Chicano Visions” tour was launched in San Antonio, LACMA opened the show “Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Contemporary Art From the Broad Collections.” With work amassed by influential LACMA trustee Eli Broad given a splash, it would be reasonable to assume that Marin might have felt — shall we say, suspicious?

Broad’s private holdings are also now back at the museum, again on temporary view. Marin’s private holdings are next door, at LACMA West. Doubling down might be fun at the blackjack table, but it’s lousy exhibition policy. A no-private-collections rule at LACMA, like the ones at MoMA and the Met, is long overdue.

And now LACMA is preparing to show a trustee’s private collection. Shame. Again.

Ever since I posted this news about Lewis Baltz and an upcoming presentation at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve been thinking about how artists make work that ‘reads’ from left-to-right, the way words on a page do.

Art historically this technique (if that’s what it is) probably descends from illuminated manuscripts. But in the post-war era, I think the progression starts with Robert Rauschenberg (see: Rebus, 1955) and James Rosenquist (see F-111, 1964-65) and then later includes Christian Marclay (see Video Quartet, 2002) and Baltz. Other examples? Tweet me.

As I’ve noted recently, Lewis Baltz’s work has been included in an increasing number of museum exhibitions lately, an apparent indication that curators think Baltz’s oeuvre — especially his early, Western work — is ready for re-examination. (Baltz’s 1974 masterpiece, The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, Calif. is currently on view in MOCA’s 30th-anniversary collection installation, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and selections from the series are on exhibit as part of the New Topographics redux, which just opened at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz.)

The last solo presentation of Baltz in an American museum came in 1998, in a MOCA Focus show… at least until later this year. In September the Art Institute of Chicago will launch an exhibition of Baltz’s early ~1967-73 ‘Prototypes’ series. The AIC will also commission the production of a 1992 Baltz, Ronde de Nuit (above), a 39-foot-by-7-foot cibachrome-mounted-on-aluminum installation that had its American debut at MOCA in 1998. (It was first show at the Pompidou in Paris.) The piece consists of seven photographs installed as if on a giant movie-screen. The pictures are of various surveillance sites and the people who work at them. Some of the pictures are reproductions of images pulled from security cameras and others are pictures Baltz took of equipment in the surveillance offices.

Two of the three editions of the work are already in museum collections, at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and at the Kawasaki Prefecture Museum in Japan. The AIC is also working with Steidl to publish a substantial, career-spanning Baltz catalogue, the first of its kind to be published in English.

Related: Me on the New Topos redux and its excellent catalogue. Why are the New Topos pictures so full of power lines? Considering New Industrial Parks, part two. Baltz in the collection of the Art Institute.

As I noted yesterday, in his landmark The New Industrial Parks near Irvine, Calif. Lewis Baltz absorbs many of the dominant art-making influences of the 1960s and 1970s and then uses them to wince at the way Americans have used Western lands.

Core to Baltz’s Southern California-based project is an indictment of the planning of the region. As Baltz well knew, efficient land-use was not a priority of developers or governments. Growth was king, impact was comparitively unimportant.

Consider Baltz’s prints: Each is wider than they are tall, a shape that mimics the short, squat buildings Baltz photographs, buildings that minimize the square footage allowed by their footprints. Baltz wasn’t the only New Topographics photographer to allow land-use policies to guide his photographic decisions: Joe Deal’s pictures of the changing American West are squares. The shape of the homestead plots into which the federal government divvied up the American West were also square. The states into which the West were divided ignored natural divisions such as rivers and watersheds in favor of right angles. Both Deal and Baltz use the land-use decisions of others as conceptual guides for their projects.

A good example is South Wall, Mazda Motors, 2121 East Main Street, Irvine (above, detail below), which is on view now at MOCA and which will go on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston tomorrow. It’s a short, squat building shown in a short, squat print.

Baltz’s wince doesn’t stop there: The lawn in front of the building is a non-native grass species planted for the purpose of cookie-cutter beautification. It joins with a couple of rocks that have been placed on the concrete slab on which the building is likely built to create a mini-fiction of landscape. This fictional landscape sits on the development that obliterated the actual landscape.

As if to remind you that he is a landscape photographer, Baltz makes sure to include the most traditional mainstay of landscape art — the horizon line. However, Baltz does it with a twist, a twist required by the industrial park he is photographing. Because this short, squat building is ‘in the way,’ Baltz can’t give the viewer a traditional horizon line, the one in front of the artist. Baltz maintains his landscape photographer bona fides by using the building’s reflective glass front to show us the horizon line, the Santa Ana Mountains, that are behind him. This is how beauty is filtered by an industrial park.

Even Baltz’s choice of the series’ title is a commentary on land use: Many of the pictures in New Industrial Parks were taken in Costa Mesa, Calif., others in the nearby suburbs of Tustin, El Toro and so on. Baltz could have titled the series “The New Industrial Parks near Costa Mesa, Calif.,” or “The New Industrial Parks around Orange County, Calif.,” but he didn’t. Baltz included the word “Irvine,” in his title, a reference to the Irvine family that once owned a third of the land in Orange County, and the family that helped turn Orange County from an agricultural cornucopia into poorly planned suburban sprawl.

A quick summary: For many years the Corcoran had planned to move the Corcoran College of Art and Design to the historic Randall School building in Southwest Washington. Yesterday the perpetually financially-strapped Corcoran announced that it was selling the building to a partnership that includes the Rubell family. The new owners will develop the purchase into a hotel and private residences. (According to the Corcoran, the Rubells are also planning a 20,000 square-foot “museum.”) [Image: Randall School.]

Later this year, the Corcoran Gallery of Art will be hosting a show from the Rubells’ collection, an exhibition curated by Rubells.

The last line of the Washington Post story on the deal is a classic case of burying the lede: “Officials said the exhibition is not related to the sale.” Really? When an art-museum-and-school is preparing to exhibit a family’s private collection at the same time it is cutting a real estate deal with the owners of that collection (and curator(s) of the show), the arrangement deserves significantly more journalistic examination than a toss-off at the end of a story.

Note: In a note signed by the “Rubell Family,” the Rubell Family Collection website has described the work in “30 Americans,” the show that will go to the Corcoran, as “art we own.” I’ve requested clarification regarding whether the work is owned by the family or by the family’s foundation (or both). Update, 10:51am EST: The Rubell Family Collection has confirmed that the work in “30 Americans” is owned by the Rubell family and not by the foundation. I’ve updated the post to reflect this.