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June 21, 2011, 9:07 am

A ’steampunk movie’ at the St. Louis Art Museum

Author Lee Sandlin’s “Wicked River: The Mississippi When it Last Ran Wild,” a smart, delightful, fast-paced bit of summer non-fiction beach-reading, begins this way:

“One of the most popular art forms in nineteenth-century america was the panorama. A panorama was an oil painting done on a gigantic scale — so gigantic that the first sight of it would make spectators gasp… Some panoramas were so big that special halls had to be built to display them.

The subject of the typical panorama ran to the spectacular and violent… the most popular — and by far the largest — panoramas were of the Mississippi River.”

Typically these panoramas were displayed on scrolls in front of the audience so as to give the illusion of passing scenery. The scroll passed in one direction, say ‘downriver,’ for the first performance of the day, and back to the first reel, ‘upriver,’ for the second. The painting would typically be gas-lit and accompanied by piano or organ music and a dramatic reading of the history passing by — not to mention a few jokes and some tall tales. It typically cost an adult 25 cents to attend the two-hour show (the equivalent of $6.50 today). Children were half-price. Think of panoramas as an early mass entertainment, a kind of original steampunk movie. Even Queen Victoria is said to have enjoyed a Mississippi River panorama show.

According to Sandlin, in the early 1850s there were five different Mississippi panoramas on tour throughout the U.S. and Europe. Each one was advertised as the biggest painting on the planet. None of those five paintings has survived. Only one Mississippi River panorama is left, a 348-footer painted by an Irish Philadelphian, John J. Egan. It is now in the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum.

This summer SLAM has installed that painting, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley (c.1850), in its main exhibition space, where a team ofconservators will work on it six days a week. The painting — and the conservation team — will be on view until August 21.

According to an essay by art historian Angela Miller in the Summer-Autumn, 1994 issue of American Art, the Egan is also one of just two known 19th-century artistic images of Mound Builder culture in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. Miller  reports that it was typically exhibited with a “cabinet of Indian Curiosities” which handbills that advertised the panorama claimed included 40,000 relics from 1,000 Native American mounds. The St. Louis panorama was commissioned by a one Montroville Wilson Dickeson, a Philadelphia doctor who was the first person to conduct archaeological research on the mounds. Dickeson apparently hoped to make enough money showing Egan’s painting that he could conduct further digs in the Mississippi Valley. (The Cahokia Mounds, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis in Illinois, are the remnants of the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico. The mounds are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.)

Last week I spoke with Paul Haner, SLAM’s painting conservator about the job ahead. Janeen Turk, a senior curatorial assistant at the museum, joined us. [Image at top: Haner and Turk with the panorama, courtesy SLAM. ]

MAN: Give us an idea of what you’ll be doing with and to the painting, over what kind of period of time period, and what it will require.

Paul Haner: The plan is this: We’ll have it in the gallery for 10 weeks as our summer exhibitionthen we’re doing the same thing next summer, another 10 weeks. [Image: Egan, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, c.1850. Scene 1.]

I have a private conservator friend here from Philadelphia helping me and then we have three students who are helping. So hopefully between five of us working six days a week – every day but Monday, that is, not all five people on it at all times but at least two or three all the time – the plan is there but we’re a bit unsure about how long it will take. There is a different degree of damage and loss throughout the scroll, so we’re just kind of working our way through and we’ll see how long it takes for an average panel.There are 25 scenes. We want to get up to 12 or 13 by the end of the summer. After this exhibition. we’ll move the apparatus to an adjacent gallery which won’t be open to the public. It’ll just be like a storeroom, but we’ll be able to set it up and work on it over the winter if we have to.

MAN: Compared to traditional oil paintings of the period, say a George Caleb Bingham, was your painting made to last?

Paul Haner: The fabric that carries the scenes is kind of a medium-weight cotton fabric. It’s comparable to a normal painting canvas, except that typically easel paintings were on linen and this is just cotton. I think that’s probably because that’s what was available in Philadelphia in 1850, where and when the panorama was painted. The construction is quite something: It’s made up of two forty-six inch pieces with a seam running horizontally along the middle, and then along the top it has a two-inch heavier piece like a hem. Along that heavier piece it has grommets in it every 12 inches. That’s what holds it along the top edge, with little hooks. Historically, it would just scroll across from one roller to the other one. [Image: Egan, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, c.1850. Scene 9.]

The paint is very atypical too. It’s called distemper and it’s basically animal-glue binder with dried pigment. It’s a water-based paint that remains very water-soluble. It’s almost like watercolor.

MAN: It flakes off easily?

Paul Haner: Oh yes. It’s applied very thinly. I think it’s very much the style of theatrical scene painting. Probably a similar material was used for that. The fabric doesn’t have any preparation, no priming, the scenes are painted directly on the cotton fabric. It’s built up in layers, but it’s still very thin.

The main problem with the thing is that because of all the movement and the scrolling and the rolling it up numerous times, there were a lot of creases and wrinkles formed in it. Where the creases are, if they’re hard creases the paint became very dry and brittle. Most of the paint loss is along these creases, where the panorama gets folded. Over time, the paint just falls off from mechanical use.

I don’t really know how long these things were expcted to last. We don’t really know. We know it was shown in Philadelphia and that it was painted in Philadelphia. We don’t know if it traveled across the country. Maybe it didn’t get shown so many times, so that’s why it lasted. Some scenes have kind of minimal damage and one or two have a lot more damage. There’s one scene that makes us wonder if this was always shown indoors or if it was shown outooors too. There’s once scene in pretty bad shape: Maybe it was shown outside and it rained? That’s the kind of catastrophic thing that could have done the kind of damage we see in one panel. [Image: Haner with Panorama. Courtesy SLAM.]

But all in all, it’s remarkable it’s lasted this long. The colors are still bright. The surface is not noticeably dirty. There are a lot of old repairs, small tears or creases. Someone tried to do re-touching on the worst damages and we have to improve on those. The thing is so sensitive that you can’t really take old restorations off.

MAN: Has anyone ever conserved one of these before? I mean, I’m sure the Metropolitan Museum of Art has worked on its John Vanderlyn panorama, but that’s a circular and not a scrolling panorama. It’s a different deal.

Paul Haner: I know that a couple summers ago, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, at the Clark Art Institute, where there’s a regional center for conservation, they treated another panorama that’s 800-feet long. [Ed.: That painting was The Moving Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress, painted by Edward Harrison May and Joseph Kyle in 1848-1850. It's in the collection of the Saco Museum in Maine.] Ours is “just” 92-inches high and 348-feet long. I spoke to a couple of colleagues who worked on the one there just to talk about materials and such.

They didn’t do theirs in a public space or even in their own studio. It was too big. They did it in a warehouse, some place where they could open up the entire thing. They had to do a different treatment too, involving different materials which required solvents. You can’t really expose people to that stuff. They were able to do the whole thing in one summer.

So ours is pretty different. All our materials are water-based so the colors we’re using are like watercolor crayons. The drier you can apply the re-touching to the surface the better, because the original paint is so soluble that if you had a brush with watercolor paint, there’d be too much water in the brush. When you touch it to the surface of the painting, the water would migrate into the canvas and stain the paint. It makes little tide lines. So we have had to work out different ways to get the paint on the surface. [Image: Conservators with the scrolling platform the museum had built for Panorama. Courtesy SLAM.]

MAN: As you work on the painting, do you see any signs of the way it was used, as popular entertainment? Cigar smoke or anything like that?

Paul Haner: Not really. There are a few areas where water got spilled on it, which we can tell because there are damages a couple feet long and two inches wide. They go from top to bottom. So something dripped and disovlved the paint. And there’s wear-and-tear at the bottom edges, but that’s just from its touching the floor as it scrolled.

Janeen Turk: It seems like most of the panorams were shown indoors. Thre was often a speaker giving some kind of lecture or narration along with athe panorams. We know a little bit about what that must have been like from some of the advertisements that have survived with the panorams, which describe the performance shown with the scenes. That gives us some clues. The owner of this one published a series of articles about his adventures along the Mississippi River valley and you can get a sense for his interest in the imagery from the articles.

MAN: I couldn’t help but think that the museum’s decision to conserve the painting in public kind of harkens back to what the painting was made for. Was that your idea? The museum administration’s idea?

Janeen Turk: I didn’t think of it that way but it’s a great opportunity for the public to see it. It will be changing scenes on a weekly or biweekly basis and it’s free, so people will be able to see it multiple times.

Paul Haner: I hadn’t thought about that. It’s fun because people are very interested and we get a lot of good questions. We have a Q&A period every day and we get a lot of people for that. People are excited about it. There are a lot of text panels and computer interactive things in the galleries. We’ll also have a wall on which there will be photographs that show all 25 scenes in a row, complete with descriptive information about each scene. [Image: The platform on which Panorama will be conserved, exhibited. Courtesy SLAM.]

MAN: Has it ever been shown at the museum?

Paul Haner: It’s been in storage since 1953. I think it was put on view and displayed as it was historically scrolled in 1950. In 1953 the museum purchased it from the University of Pennsylvania and I’m not exactly sure how many times it’s been on view here since, but it’s been out on loan twice, once in the 1970s and then in 2005 or so in Minneapolis, where they showed just one scene. They had an exhibition on Mississippi River-related objects and they borrowed Bingham paintings and they wanted this, which was quite a production.

MAN: So this painting is almost 400-feet long and probably pretty darn heavy. I understand you or someone else at the museum is designing and manufacturing a gizmo so that the work can be seen?

Paul Haner: Yes. We had a local place make us a motorized armature, meaning that the painting can be vertical or it can lie down horizontally so we can work on it. It’s not mechanized so that the painting will continually in the galleries or anything – the painting is too fragile to be able to do that any more. [Image: Egan, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, c.1850. Scene 21.]

Instead – and the reason for this whole project – in 2014 when our American galleries are reopened, we’ll be moving American to different galleries. They’ll go on the third floor of our Cass Gilbert building, where modern art is now. So we had a very nice, extruded aluminum framework case made with two large 30-inch-in-diameter scrolls at either end that carry the panorama and that scroll it across the flat surface.

Janeen Turk: The idea originated with Andrew Walker, who is now the director of the Amon Carter. The layout has not been completely resolved yet but the panorama demands a certain amount of space. The scenes are 14 feet wide and they’re seven-and-a-half-feet tall.

With the whole apparatus, with the rollers and the motor and all, it’ll weigh 4,000 pounds. The electric motor by itself is 1,100 pounds.

Related: Author Lee Sandlin will speak at SLAM on July 21 and 22. The rest of SLAM’s panorama-related programming is available here.

Posted in Collections, Conservation, Q&A | 5 Comments »

May 23, 2011, 12:28 pm

Q&A with Hugh Davies on Ai, the US response

Last week the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego became the first significant U.S. art museum to organize a community-engaging public protest of China’s imprisonment of artist Ai Weiwei.

On Friday afternoon I talked with MCASD director Hugh Davies about his museum’s response to China’s imprisonment of Ai and about how it differed from the response of other museums that are conducting ‘business as usual’ with government-controlled Chinese art museums.

Davies has been at MCASD for over 25 years and is a former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. As you’ll see below, he’s more outspoken regarding another museum and another museum director than I’ve heard a museum boss be in quite some time. [Image: Ai Weiwei on the occasion of a visit from MCASD donors, trustees and curators in November, 2010.]

MAN: How did MCASD come to the decision to do something public in protest of Ai’s detention?

Hugh Davies: As a museum, we had first come to know Ai Weiwei’s work at Documenta in 2007, by way of the chair piece he did there. It was just a brilliant piece, and very hard to pull off. It was very effective, all those empty chairs all over Kassel.

So we’d been interested in his work and had seen pieces in group shows. So when we made a trip to China [last November] with some trustees and collectors, we made it a priority to visit his studio. As it turned out, that visit was on our first morning there. After flying the entire previous day, every single person in our group got up at 6:30am to make it to Ai’s studio, the only time he could see us. As you know, his English is very good, having spent a decade in New York and all of us were thrilled at the chance to see the new things he was working on. We arranged to acquire two of his chairs for our permanent collection. Over a period of six months we arranged for shipping and all that sort of thing.

Since the chairs arrived back in March, we’ve been following the incarceration with increasing concern. There have been no charges brought against him. [Ed.: On Friday evening, after Davies and I talked, China formally charged Ai with tax evasion, charges that were immediately criticized as trumped-up.] It was very troubling to hear of his wife’s report of his condition, but I don’t think it would take long in a Chinese prison — or any prison — to have your spirit broken. So who knows what conditions prevail in that form of detention?

MAN: I’m sure plenty of museum groups and curators have visited Ai’s studio, but now that you’ve done a 24-hour public protest, I find myself kind of surprised no other institution has done something similar. As I understand it, you drove a ton of San Diego and Los Angeles media coverage to the issue; art museum effectively used as bully pulpit.

Davies: It was instigated by Kathryn Kanjo, our chief curator, who suggested to us that we have to do something to draw attention to Ai’s plight. I was traveling and I sent an email back to staff asking, ‘Why don’t we hang a banner like the Tate?’ Various staff members replied and said that we need to brainstorm and come up with something a little stronger.

Rebecca Handelsman, who runs our communications department, and our new curator of education Cris Scorza came up with the idea of a sit-in bcause they thought it was a symbolic way of showing solidarity with the artist. We hoped it would rally our members and the art community and generate some press. Along with many others, my wife and I sat  in those two wooden chairs for an hour. They’re similar to the marble chairs we acquired. We had people sitting in the dark in the museum throughout the night. On one hand it’s like meditation. On the other hand it’s like being trapped, and can you imagine being in jail for 43 days without knowing what your fate might be. [Image: Davies and Lynda Forsha at MCASD's protest.]

It drove attention to Ai the way we hoped it would: The local NBC affiliate covered it. Our local PBS station, KPBS, covered it. The local newspaper and its non-profit rival have  been covering it too.

MAN: Do art museums who have relevant collecting or exhibiting foci have a responsibility to do something or to say something or to organize something when a prominent artist’s basic human rights are violated by an authoritarian regime? Or is it more complicated than that? I’m particularly struck by the contrast between how MCASD has responded to China and by what the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is doing and how its director Alex Nyerges answered questions about China and Ai last week here on MAN.

Davies: I keep thinking about what the equivalent would be. I think it would be if our country had put Andy Warhol in jail or if Banksy or Damien Hirst was put in jail. This is the best-known artist in China. So it’s a very troubling move. The art world, as you and I know, is a very small world. [Image: Ai Weiwei during a visit from MCASD donors, trustees and curators in November, 2010.]

Or think of it this way: We’ve shaken Ai’s hand and we’ve visited him in his home. Last year we went to Ellsworth Kelly’s studio and did the same things. The idea that Ellsworth Kelly could be put in jail…?! It’s astounding how primitive china is at this stage.

So, to have a museum director comment that an exchange of exhibitions has nothing to do with Ai because it’s about art history shows a pretty thin [consideration] of the role artists play in making art history. I don’t think you can compartmentalize these things.

Knowing I was going to speak with you I was thinking of analogies. Obviously you can point to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany when artist were imprisoned without charges and this is the same thing.

In terms of how we respond I think the better example is apartheid South Africa. In response to that situation, Westerners organized cultural and sports and economic boycotts. Some people said that’s not fair to South Africans to make them be more withdrawn from the world community, but the opposite proved to be the case. Pressure at all levels brought about change. I would hope that more museums and more galleries and more collectors and more artists would join a boycott and bring pressure to bear. It can only help. The fact that the U.S. Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, is calling Ai’s detention an outrage and that an art museum director or directors aren’t willing to do that is very confusing. [Image: Ai Weiwei, Marble Chair, 2010. Collection of the MCASD.]

MAN: The VMFA has come under some examination for acting ‘business-as-usual’ with China. Meanwhile, you, a contemporary art museum and not a historical art museum, have done something. Is part of what goes into how various institutions react the difference between being an historical art museum and being a contemporary art museum?

Davies: I don’t know about that. They have a very strong contemporary program in Virginia, a highly regarded contemporary curator too. I can see it would be perhaps more in our DNA, as you say, but if you work in any kind of art museum you understand the role and the importance of artists. All art was contemporary once. If you’re preventing artists from making their work, if you’re silencing artists voices  by imprisoning  them without charges and trumping up charges of economic crimes or pornography or whatever the case may be, you can’t  ignore those things. They are related.

This is a very small community of artists and museum directors and dealers and auction houses. When on of the most important antagonists, one of the most important creative people in the world – he was even on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world [the Ai entry was written by the then-US ambassador to China] – you have to take note and respond.

I can only speak for myself and my institution: We are aghast that this has happened and intend to protest as best we can. My prediction is that increasingly other museums will as well. I’ll be very surprised if Michael Govan and LACMA don’t do something soon, same also Annie Philbin [at the Hammer] or Jeffrey Deitch [at MOCA]. [Image: Ai Weiwei during a visit from MCASD donors, trustees and curators in November, 2010.]

Sure, it’s hard to be in the position of a museum and to have spent three or four years arranging something with the Palace Museum and to have this happen, but to ‘ostrich’ and to ignore the context is not a responsible thing to do culturally.

It’s about the exchange of personnel as much as about the exchange of art. The idea of having an exchange of staff is… it gets to what you asked [VMFA director Alex Nyerges] about propaganda. I wouldn’t go myself.

Posted in Q&A | 4 Comments »

May 19, 2011, 9:57 am

With Ai detained, should VMFA deal with China?

Last week, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced that the VMFA will be the first museum to exhibit its collection in the Palace Museum in Beijing. (The dates for that exhibition are to be determined.) The Palace Museum, which is part of the Forbidden City complex, will reciprocate by sending an exhibition of its collection to Richmond in the summer of 2014.

The VMFA announced the deal with the Chinese as China’s detention of Ai Weiwei was in its second month. The arrangement prompts the question: Is it appropriate for an American art museum to be engaged in this kind of transaction with the Chinese when the Chinese have demonstrated their hostility to — and fear of — their country’s most internationally prominent artist? [Image: Alex Nyerges, via VMFA.]

Earlier this week I talked with VMFA director Alex Nyerges about his museum’s arrangement with the Chinese. I started by asking him to describe the scope of the two museums’ exchange:

Alex Nyerges: Let me give you the big picture of what is actually a pretty interesting and amazing relationship. The part of the agreement that we made front-and-center was the exchange of collection exhibitions, but clearly the heart-and-soul of it is a much broader and deeper partnership between the Palace Museum and the VMFA. It’s really predicated on the simple notion of collaboration and sharing. First is the exchange of personnel from each of our institutions at two levels: One, where we introduce everybody from our head of exhibitions design, to our head of conservation, to people in other areas of the museum to the Palace Museum for a week, two weeks, relatively brief visits. And then the same thing happens from the Palace Museum. Part of that is in preparation for exhibitions, but part of it is on the basis of having a collegial exchange of ideas and processes and approaches and the rest. Then we’re going to exchange longer terms for three-month segments, such as having someone, say a paper conservator for example, to have a three-month residency at the VMFA working with our people on works of paper of Chinese origin.

Then the most public part of this partnership is that the Palace Museum curators will come to VMFA and curate an exhibition from our great treasures. Our initial conversations have been focused on American collections and European decorative art collections — we excel in French art nouveau furniture, English silver, Tiffany and Faberge. Basically we’ll have the entire museum at their disposal to essentially mine, to do a ‘highlights of’ or ‘treasures of,’ depending on how marketing people package it later. We’ll be doing the same from the Palace Museum side. Our curator, Li Jian, will spend time [in China] and do research, so that the focus [of the show at VMFA] is more finite than a ‘best hits’ kind of show. We’re going to do something much more from a scholarly perspective than that. [Image: Palace Museum, Beijing, via Flickr user Wilson Loo.]

MAN: For how long have you been working on this?

Nyerges: This has been in the  works for two years in terms of serious conversations, but really we started talking with them three years ago. We have a couple of other projects in the development stage in China that aren’t actual projects yet, in Shanghai for one.

MAN: As you know, Ai Weiwei has been detained by the Chinese since April 3. Did your staff and your board talk about whether it was appropriate to make deals with the Chinese at a time when China has imprisoned the Chinese artist who is best known internationally?

Nyerges: Maybe to answer the question backwards, it hasn’t become a policy question for the board at all. On a practical level in terms of the staff, certainly Ai Weiwei’s arrest was a topic of conversation, but quite simply our partnership and relationship with the Palace Museum has nothing to do with the Ai Weiwei situation whatsoever.

We’ve signed on with a memo of understanding for a long-term exchange. We’ve concluded it’s a relatively straightforward approach by our two institutions. By continuing this relationship, we are helping to bridge the gap of understanding and  appreciation between China and America, whether we’re talking Chinese culture in general, and Chinese art in particular. For every misconception there is about China in our country, there are an equal number of misconceptions in the US. We think the good that comes of this outweighs any other consideration. [Image: Palace Museum, Beijing as seen from Jingshan Park via Flickr user thewamphyri.]

MAN: Are you concerned that the VMFA’s exhibition/deal with China could be a propaganda coup for the Chinese, that the Chinese government can point to a deal such as this one and say, ‘Look, prominent American museums aren’t concerned about our treatment of Ai if they’re making deals with us’?

Nyerges: No, never once would that thought have crossed my mind.

It’s an interesting thought though, because our conversation and our partnership with with the Palace Museum predates all this by several years. [The conversation about Ai] is not a conversation that’s come up between us. We’re two institutions that are both governmental agencies – we’re part of Virginia and they’re part of the national patriomny there in China — and we deal with each other on art-historical levels. We focus on that as an important educational vehicle for our respective audiences. Speaking for my counterparts in Beijing and for that matter anywhere, their focus is about art history, education and cultural exchange. So I guess they probably would be equally surprised by the question as I am. [Image: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts via Flickr user rvaphotodude.]

MAN: The United States doesn’t have a culture ministry or a culture-focused cabinet agency, which is a little unusual among Western democracies. That means that individual museums and such are effectively ambassadors of a cultural sort, independent entities that conduct a particular part of our nation’s foreign policy on their own. So when an American art museum deals with the Chinese government, what are its moral or ethical obligations? Should an art museum consider anything outside the exhibition it offers to Beijing and the exhibition Beijing offers to the US?

Nyerges: Certainly in our case, working with our museum colleagues across the entire country of China, they are as thoroughly professional and modern in their practices and outlooks as any art museum in the US — or anywhere in the world.

The history of art in China is an important facet that is often neglected. If you look at traditional art history programs, which are Eurocentric, one of the things I’ve enjoyed starting when I was the director at the Dayton Art Institute was starting to bridge that lack of understanding.

So no, it’s no different. We did two major Chinese exhibitions when I was in Dayton. Working with our Chinese colleagues is easier than any international relationship, and we’ve been involved in a lot. We have not encountered a single piece of red tape in all of those years. Not in the local, provincial or cultural bureau level. [Image: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, via Flickr user mimmyg.]

The lack of understanding between the two countries always encourages me to do more in terms of working with China. I love the country, I love the history. The people could not be more wonderful.

When the Olympics were awarded to Beijing I was in China working on something. In the newspaper, a reporter had gone out to where they were going to build one of the Olympic stadiums and went to talk to a man on the street, one of the fellows with the whisk brooms. The reporter walked up to him and said, ‘Have you heard about the Olympic bid?’ The guy said, ‘It’s wonderful.’ And the reporter said, ‘Aren’t you concerned that people will come here and there will be police on every street and military patrolling and don’t you think the foreigners will be frightened?’ The guy kept sweeping and said, ‘No, this isn’t Chicago or New York.’

I have to say that I’ve been in little villages in the middle of the desert and I’ve been to virtually every major city in China. I go out in the morning at 5:30 or 6:00 to run and I run past soldiers marching and police on corners. All ti takes is one ‘ni-hao’  and their faces light up and they try to say, ‘Hello’ back in English. The friendliness and openness of the Chinese people is amazing.

Posted in Q&A | 13 Comments »

April 13, 2011, 9:01 am

Q&A with Sarah Boxer on Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne, a Romanian artist who joined the European migration to New York after the Nazis rose to power in Germany, died Friday. She was 100. [Image: Sterne, New York, 1956, collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.]

For years — even decades — it was near-impossible to see a Sterne in an American museum. Then, about six months ago, that began to change. Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of paintings and sculpture, included Sterne in “Abstract Expressionist New York,” and Sterne’s inclusion drew some measure of attention. The Toledo Museum of Art also has Sterne on view in a collection installation. And in December, Sarah Boxer wrote a semi-profile/semi-essay about Sterne for the New York Review of Books. Don’t miss it. Yesterday I called Boxer and we talked about Sterne.

MAN: As you say in your New York Review of Books essay, in 2003 you found yourself in front of Hedda Sterne with a tape recorder. Why did you want to talk to her, how did that happen?

Sarah Boxer: I had done the obituary for her husband, Saul Steinberg, for the New York Times, and I heard that she really liked it. I did not get to meet her at his memorial service. Someone said to me that it would be great if you two could meet. So I tried to set it up, and as it turned out it took a couple years. At the time I think I was thinking of doing a book on Steinberg, so a lot of our conversation had to do with that.

She was a fabulous talker. It was an amazing place to be, in her home, surrounded by her stuff and her Diary was on the floor. [Boxer on Diary, from NYRB: "A large carpet of raw canvas lay on the floor, with handwritten lines organized into the squares of a grid. This, I realized, was Sterne’s Diary from 1976, and a perfect emblem of her: a dense fabric of words, drawn with intense concentration, left to be obliterated underfoot."] I also saw these white-on-white drawings she did. Her eyesight was beginning to go, but she was totally keen. Her mind and her memory were sharp, sharp, sharp. Luckily I had thought to bring a tape recorder. [Image: Sterne, New York No. 1, 1954. Collection of the Toledo Museum of Art.]

MAN: Did you walk on Diary?

Boxer: I have a hard time walking on even Carl Andres! I do it, but… so no, I didn’t really walk on Diary either. She did. She said, ‘That’s why it’s out, for that!’

Phyllis Tuchman did a great interview with Hedda Sterne 30 years ago. Sterne talks about about her past and she seems to disown almost everything that is in the past and is very much for the idea of drawing as exploration and discovery and seeing. She’s very big on vision, on being forward-looking.

In fact, she was so much focused on being forward-looking that I think there’s a way in which she didn’t sort of take care of or shape her image. She said the worst thing that ever happened to her was the photograph of ‘The Irascibles’ in Life magazine in 1951 [below right], but I think if it hadn’t been for that photograph, nobody would know who she is! I think Hedda felt that it hurt because the associations she thought were false. She didn’t consider herself an abstract artist. She thought basically she was discovering America and drawing America as she saw it. She didn’t think she was an expressionist, she thought she was an anti-emotive artist. She also felt like the men were peeved at her because they thought her presence, a woman’s presence took away from the seriousness of their mission.

When people talk about her now, they say, ‘Who does she paint like, like Rothko? Or Kline?’ I think that’s what she most minded about the photograph is that she didn’t think anyone should be shown together. She didn’t believe in group shows. That could be from her aversion to that photograph. Ironically, she’s received a lot of attention in the last year or so thanks to a group show, her inclusion in MoMA’s ‘Abstract Expressionist New York.’ That’s become the most common way to see her work, in group shows.

MAN: When I look at her work now, I see distilled infrastructure, networks. Am I looking through a particular, influenced-by-2011 lens,, thinking about now, when ’systems painting’ is commercially successful and curatorially blessed, or did those things interest Sterne 60 years ago and am I responding to that?

Boxer: Well I see them too, but I’ve probably got the same lens that you do.

One of the things I think that was special to her, that is kind of related to what you’re talking about, that lattice-like style is that she used a lazy susan to paint, she painted in the round. She used spray paints and some of the look has to do with her methods.

I don’t know whether she saw herself doing that. I think she was interested in the way structures looked to her. One of the things she was most interested in was machinery and highways and things that did have a kind of look. But I think there was always something anthropomorphic going on; I think her sort of abstraction actually remained more surreal more than anything else.

Though she said she gave up surrealism after leaving Romania, I think that was her abiding method and look. She’s got some similarities to early Rothko and Gorky – a lot to Gorky. I don’t think she would say that, but I think that’s running through the work. Even Diary is very surreal. If you read those passages, it’s just like surrealism. [Boxer quoted this passage in her NYRB piece:

an animal on matto grosso has big flat feet which produce a musical sound as it walks and a trunk with which it sucks butterflies on the wing. its mane is very thick and it always runs away from the color blue.]

MAN: I don’t think we usually think of light as moving through American painting of that period, but I think it sure does through her canvases. Kind of like it does through Matta.

Boxer: I never heard her talk about him, but she did talk about light. She did say at a certain point that she became obsessed with light. She went to the Murano glass factory and studied just glass and refraction, reflection, light and symmetry. She was very interested in light itself, but she never talked about Matta in particular or anyone like that. But definitely, that was one of her preoccupations. [Image above, left: Sterne, New York VIII, 1954. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.]

MAN: It seems to me that we talk about Kline’s work or Gottlieb’s work, but that women of that period tend to as much be Jackson Pollock’s wife (Lee Krasner) or a key social presence (Helen Frankenthaler). There is much genderist discourse.

Boxer: When somebody asked me, ‘Who’s Hedda Sterne, I’d have to start with that photo, or ‘She was married to Saul Steinberg.’ She was very much an artist of associations. You say, ‘Who does she paint like? Rothko? Or Kline?’, and I think that’s what she most minded about the photograph.

I was just looking at MoMA’s book, “Modern Women,” and there’s only one tiny mention of her! Just in passing, as being in a show that was put together. She was just one in a list. She didn’t even make this huge volume of women artists! [Image: Sterne, Third Avenue El, 1952-53. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

MAN: Was she part of the scene, part of the group? The other day someone described Helen Frankenthaler to be as part of the social glue of New York abex. Was Sterne that too?

Boxer: She was very close to Rothko, especially in the last years of his life. The things she said about him, she would sort of say like he was just very sad, very unhappy, which I guess is generally known. She told these stories that were kind of cruel to him. She was close to people, but it was a one-on-one thing. I don’t know if it was glue for the whole group, but yes, she had relationships with each of them individually.

She said she doesn’t sort of buy the whole idea there there is much group feeling among artists anyway. It’s all temporary. As long as its for a purpose, there’s friendship. Other than that, they’re all kind of loners. These associations that they have are just kind of mutually beneficial – and then they end.

MAN: Compared to her peers, she’s in a very small number of institutional collections. The Met has a couple, MoMA, the Carnegie, the Hirshhorn, a few others. Any idea why so few?

Boxer: I think that places that don’t have big collections, they don’t say, ‘Hey we don’t have a Hedda Sterne!’ I think it sort of comes down to this: If you look at her work, you can see things running through it. She didn’t create a ‘logo style’ and I think that museums look for that. They look for continuity and brand recognition. Sometimes her painting is really more like drawing. That could be another reason she’s not in many museum collections. Maybe she comes too close to Gorky and Hesse? Some of her paintings, I think, like the one that is in MoMA, in  ‘Abex New York,’ really held its own. I thought it looked great. [Image: Sterne, Number 31, Vermillion Machine, 1952. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

MAN: Do you see any evidence of her impact in more recent painting? I mean, I think about the Krannert’s Machine 5 and I think about Sarah Sze or Judy Pfaff or even Julie Mehretu. Lee Bontecou must have looked at her work, all those machines! Her fifties paintings have a sense of geometry that we come to recognize in Richard Diebenkorn, but I don’t know that he was looking at a lot of New York painting much after the late 1940s. And I swear I see some of her in Christopher Wool black-and-grey abstractions, but I don’t think I’ve ever read Wool cop to that.

Boxer: She had a great sense of geometry and was interested in balance and symmetry. It’d be interesting to see what she would have done with sculpture.

Yeah I can see that definitely, the interest in machines and balance, yeah a kind of complicated, almost Rube Goldberg sensibility. Eva Hesse drawings sprang to mind too.

Posted in Collections, Q&A | 1 Comment »

February 22, 2011, 12:33 pm

MAN Q&A with Pepe Karmel, part two

This morning I began a two-part Q&A with Pepe Karmel about Jackson Pollock’s landmark masterpiece Mural (1943). Karmel teaches at New York University. He was the co-curator of the 1998 MoMA Pollock retrospective.

MAN: As we discussed in part one of our Q&A, Mural is enormous. So Pollock makes this massive painting in 1943 and then doesn’t approach this scale again until 1950. Why not?

Pepe Karmel: I think part of it may have been practicality. There was no reason to believe anyone would be interested in buying a humongous painting by Jackson Pollock. He had achieved some renown in the art world, but he was not a big superstar. Besides, people were not commissioning great big paintings, and if they were, they commissioned the Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfredo Siqueiros, who all did major commissions in New York City and across the United States. Of course, those painters had been inspirations to Pollock and he had traveled to see their work.

Given that he was relatively unknown and poor in New York City, it would have been ridiculous chutzpah to think that anyone would want a big painting by him. I think what pushed him to do it again seven years later was, first, in the interim he had not only evolved but had achieved recognition. By 1949 he was very well known. He was known in the national media as a great young artist, but more importantly, he had developed his style and realized he could work make these paintings that were simultaneously very small scale and large scale. There was an implicit infinity to what he was doing.

Some people say his drip paintings are fractal. I don’t think so, but even if they aren’t they do have that fractal quality. They read powerfully at a distance and if you get close you see more. If you get closer, then that you see more. They keep paying off the closer you get, and they keep paying off the farther away you get.

In any case, part of what made Pollock a great genius was that the work scaled up. I think it was there for internal pressures, you know, ‘How big can I make this?’ From paintings that were 3-by-5 feet to 4-by-8 feet, and he kept pushing it bigger and bigger. Then in 1950 he went out and bought a roll of big canvas and did a series of big paintings by cutting off pieces from that roll. That reflects an internal process as well. [Image: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

MAN: Did World War II have an impact on the possibility of painters ramping up their scale during the early 1940s? Were some materials hard to get or in shorter supply because of the war effort or anything similar?

PK: That’s a really good question and the honest answer is I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything suggesting it was a problem. If you were a sculptor, maybe David Smith would have had trouble getting bronze or whatever. But this was canvas, so it was used for sailboat sails or whatever you used canvas for. They didn’t use fancy paints. It’s an odd fact how little effect the war seems to have had on abstract expressionism. Now and then you get sight of hidden images that seem to deal with the war or death and terror, but it’s not the major theme.

MAN: Do we know if the painting had an impact on other artists right after it was made? Was it widely seen or did that not come until later?

PK: I’m going to guess it was widely accessible because Peggy Guggenheim herself was very active as a promoter of contemporary art, surrealists and the younger American artists. It wasn’t in her gallery, but it was in her home. Just as Pollock was invited there, probably other artists were too. Whether it was as much a center as the Steins’ house in Paris, I don’t know.

Also, I’m sure it was accessible, but I don’t think it had the kind of impact the later paintings had. It was a bit of a one-off, after which he went back to making smaller paintings. It probably didn’t make that much sense to people. They may have been impressed by it, but by itself it didn’t announce a new style. Aesthetically, looking back, we go, ‘Aha, this is it. This is when he gets there, even prematurely, and then goes away from it.’ I’m guessing other people, including artists, who saw it didn’t understand its implications for some time. By the time they did, Peggy Guggenheim had left, gone to Europe and had given it away.

MAN: Peggy Guggenheim sent paintings  far and wide, to San Francisco, Iowa and so on. I know that you aren’t a ‘Peggy Guggenheim scholar,’ but I was wondering if in doing the Pollock show in 1998 you came across anything that unpacked that a bit.

PK: Yes, that’s true, she did. She sent another key Pollock, Galaxy (1947, above), out to Nebraska, to the Joslyn Art Museum.

I don’t know much about that. I think she really, truly believed in the United States, and in contrast to the kind of snobbery that art world people often have in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, who believe that everyone else is too provincial, she believed in America, that if you gave people real great, tough art to look at, it would speak to them. It might not speak to all of them – look at this state representative in Iowa – but it would work for some of them and set fire to people. That’s why it’s important for those things to be there.

Remember: Other countries, other than the United States, art was very centralized until recently. All the important art in France, for example, was in Paris. To some extent the rest of the country was a cultural wasteland, except for the chateaux and the stuff you couldn’t move. In the last 20-30 years, the French have been imitating us and have decided it’s good to be like us and to have art everywhere. I don’t want to go all Richard Florida, but it might be true that having rich collections in many places is a boon to American creativity.

Posted in Collections, Q&A | 3 Comments »

February 22, 2011, 8:59 am

Q&A on ‘Mural’ with Pollock scholar Pepe Karmel

“Mural is safe,” reported the Daily Iowan last night after Iowa state Rep. Scott Raecker (R) withdrew his bill that would have forced the sale of Jackson Pollock’s monumental painting out of the collection of the University of Iowa Museum of Art. For the second time in three years, a disastrous forced sale was averted — for now. In an email cited by the Daily Iowan, Raecker emphasized that he’s only putting the idea on the shelf for this legislative session: “I’m a firm believer in the legislative process, and further discussion of the sale of the Pollock painting will not be moved forward in the legislature this year.” (Read a Des Moines Register blog post on same here.)

Late last week I talked with New York University art historian Pepe Karmel about Pollock’s Mural. Along with Kirk Varnedoe, Karmel co-curated the Museum of Modern Art’s 1998 Pollock retrospective. This is the first of two parts. Part two is here.

MAN: I think the overwhelming majority of people who care about art have seen Mural only in JPEG form, at about 600 pixels wide. That’s always a tough way to look at pictures of art, but especially so in the case of Mural. Can you tell us why it’s an important painting for Pollock?

Pepe Karmel: First of all, we’re talking about this because it’s a landmark painting for Iowa and for the University of Iowa. It stands for their historic openness about art. It would be a disaster for it to leave.

It’s an important painting for Jackson Pollock because it’s the moment that announces his future as a painter of large, mural-scale paintings that become environments, and furthermore paintings that are in this distinct, all-over style that changes people’s idea of what a painting might be.

Before he did Mural, he had one a number of late surrealist-style paintings, part of the abstract surreal tendency in the early 1940s shared by Pollock and a lot of other painters in New York at the time. Then he gets this commission from Peggy Guggenheim and he runs with it.

There are famous mythic stories about him struggling for months and not knowing what to do and then how he did the whole painting in a day or two before Peggy Guggenheim’s New Year’s Eve party. That doesn’t seem to be true. It seems more likely that he worked on it for months and finished it at the last moment.

The commission was that he paint a very large, specifically a very long painting from side to side. It’s eight feet high and it’s really, really wide, almost 20 feet. That forced Pollock to relate to space in a different way. He couldn’t make a scene you look into that had illusionistic space. He hadn’t been doing that in the surrealist paintings he had been doing, but he knew about something like Miro or Picasso that was advanced. Having to do this huge space forced him to work in this repetitive frieze format where he paints many large abstract almost figures and then joins them so they become an enormous tapestry. You can hardly look from one to the next — and this looks forward to the 1950 paintings that are at the Metropolitan, in Dusseldorf (above: Number 32, 1950, collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen) and at MoMA. These are the pictures that give us this sense of scale.

MAN: You have to be there for it.

PK: It does not reproduce well because it’s so wide. It’s like Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis or Pollock’s own Number 1, 1950 (left, collection of the National Gallery of Art). You have to be there. You have to be standing in front of it and feel it filling up your field of vision and feel it wrapping around you and feel yourself falling into the field of the painting. If you don’t have that experience first-hand, you won’t get the feeling of the painting.

I get people seeing it in JPEGs saying, ‘Next!’ but that’s not the effect it has in real life. When Kirk Varnedoe and I went out to see it when we did the MoMA exhibition, we were blown away by how big it was. It was a big hassle getting it to New York City and when we installed it in the show it transformed the the first half of the show. This painting, when we got it on the wall, we were blown away by how great it was.

MAN: You talked about how important the painting was in terms of Pollock’s oeuvre. Can you detail why it’s so important to what came next in American and modern and contemporary art?

PK: The next step is off the wall and out into space. In contemporary art that deals with installation as an art form, which comes out of those paintings in 1950 and that comes out of this painting in 1943. It just doesn’t get more historic than this.

It’s truly a kind of unrecognized monument of American art. If it’s ever sold, it will be a loss to Iowa and the university, yes, but potentially to the art world as a whole because it may very well go into a private collection somewhere and who knows when and if it will be seen.

Part two is available here.

Posted in Collections, Q&A | 3 Comments »

December 16, 2010, 12:52 pm

Q&A with AA Bronson on ‘Hide/Seek,’ ‘Felix’

AA Bronson is the artistic director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He’s also the artist of Felix, June 5, 1994 [below], which is included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Yesterday Bronson asked the National Gallery of Canada, which owns the version of Felix in “Hide/Seek” to remove the artwork from the exhibition.

UPDATE, 130pm EST: NPG tells MAN that Felix will stay in the show.

MAN: Could you tell me the story behind your decision?

AA Bronson: I’m involved with the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice, I’m the artistic director there. We do programming in which we try to bring contemporary art into a dialogue with religion through social justice. So, for example, we had a lecture last week by Alfredo Jaar and the week before by Paul Chan. We’ve just taken down an exhibition of 10 artists who are dealing with social justice, with those kinds of issues.

In response to the whole thing with David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly being removed from “Hide/Seek,” we came up with a plan to host a panel discussion which was originally supposed to be tomorrow at the seminary. The idea was that we would try to bring together all the voices that are involved: [Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne] Clough, National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan, one or both of the politicians who are being outspoken, Bill Donohue from the Catholic League along with people who represent a different kind of view, including religious people and the curators from the exhibition. We wanted to really put together a group representing all the different views and try to create some dialogue with the hope of creating even some kind of reconciliation. Maybe that’s far too ambitious.

It was, of course, much too short notice. Very few of the people were available. We decided to put it off until the end of February. In the end, we may do this in Washington instead of in New York. In the process of doing that, it became clear that there’s not going to be any movmenet on the part of the Smithsonian.

Then when the Warhol Foundation announced their position, and when the [Smithsonian] responded to Warhol… My piece in the show, the Felix portrait, is built around the same subject matter as the Wojnarowicz. I realized that just from a position of solidarity with an artist who’s not here to defend himself I had no choice but to withdraw the piece from the show.

I was hoping for reconciliation and I was trying to hold back from doing anything too extreme. I haven’t seen the exhibition but I’ve heard how wonderful and groundbreaking it is. I value that, but on a personal level I can’t support what’s happened at the Smithsonian, which I feel as also a personal affront to edit out that aspect of queer history. I can’t stand for that. So I made the decision to withdraw the work based on that.

There’s s one other thing I want to mention in passing: When we do our panel, when it comes to that, we really want to focus on the bigger issues rather than focusing on the censorship of one video. In the response of the Catholic League, they talk about art as being the purview of rich white people and therefore funding should be cut off because it’s not for everyone. I’m sure the Smithsonian’s education department would be very quick to disagree with that.

It’s a kind of racism on their part to put it that way because it denies that people of color have culture and it denies there’s an audience for culture. It’s very racist on the part of the Catholic League. Those are the issues that come out of this but they don’t make headlines.

MAN: To date the Smithsonian leadership – the Wayne Clough, who made the call – has remained silent. He’s not spoken to the press, given a speech, nothing. Do artists in the show, in particular, need to hear from him?

Bronson: We received an email from his secretary saying that he wouldn’t be available for the panel discussion that was originally supposed to be tomorrow. We haven’t heard anything directly from him at all.

But yes, that’s why we invited him to be on the panel discussion. He does in a way hold the key to the whole thing. But I don’t expect…  frankly, I’ve kind of given up. I don’t expect to hear from him. As one of the artists in the show, yes, a reassuring statement would certainly be helpful. Probably his silence has made the whole situation worse.

MAN: At this point, would the Smithsonian’s restoration of the Wojnarowicz, no matter how unlikely, be enough to correct its error?

Bronson: I think they need to restore the video and issue an apology. I think that would be enough, frankly. It would be enough for me. I would leave my piece in the show.

I should just explain my piece in the show belongs to the National Gallery of Canada. It’s on loan from them to the National Portrait Gallery. So whether I have the legal right to remove my work I don’t know. I heard from the contemporary curator at the NGC, who sent me a very supportive email. She’s meeting with the director of the NGC today and hopefully they’ll then request that the piece be removed. I’m in a peculiar position: I’m a third party even though I’m the artist who made the piece.

MAN: One of the things I think the show is really successful at is presenting how gay art history is American art history is gay art history. It makes the argument for a single history. In your letter to Martin Sullivan, you complained about the Smithsonian’s “editing of queer history.” Could you talk about whether it’s useful for that history to be considered in a broader dialogue or whether there’s still a need for gays and lesbians to maintain a separate history?

Bronson: Well, I think that they’re both needed. The separate history has been kind of edited out of art history but in fact art history is very much interwoven with gay or queer history. In a way the two can’t be separated.

America doesn’t like anything uncomfortable. I find in my dealings with museums that if I ask a question and the answer is ‘no,’ they don’t answer. If the answer is ‘yes,’ I get these amazingly enthusiastic responses. I find it sort of strange sometimes, not being American myself.

In a way what they’re doing is editing out the uncomfortable. David Wojnarowicz’s work can make you uncomfortable — and they’ve edited out that possibility in the show.

I’ve just looked at the little YouTube video of Martin Sullivan speaking at the New York Public Library last night. He’s calling for more positive energy in relation to the show. What’s left of the show, anyway. But frankly, that’s the whole problem, editing out the negative energy. That part of the voice, that part of the very agonized voice, is being edited out.

MAN: It seems to me Sullivan has been put in an odd position. He didn’t remove the work, Clough did. Yet Sullivan has to go out in public and talk about Clough’s removal of it.

Bronson: Yes,  [Sullivan] is in a very weird position. There’s another aspect I’m trying to to mention too much which is that it was a clip. It was not a full video. You’d never show 10 percent of a painting, why a clip from a video? To some degree it had already been severely edited.

MAN: One response to what you’re doing is that part of the right-wing project is to make gays and lesbians invisible, to exclude them from American history and from American art history. I’m sure you thought about that. Could you address how this isn’t, well, playing into that?

Bronson: I did think about that. Frankly, since the Wojnarowicz was pulled from the show, many, many, many, thousands of people have seen the video who wouldn’t otherwise. Since I announced I was pulling the piece, many reproductions have turned up on various Facebook pages. The image is proliferating very rapidly out there. It’s quite startling. If anything in this digital era the effect is quite the opposite.

I’ve also been approached by someone who wants to show the piece in Washington. It’s incredible how quickly the response has come. We’ll actually get the image out into the world much faster than leaving it in would have.

MAN: So if, say, the National Gallery of Art — which is in no way affiliated with the Smithsonian — wanted to show it tomorrow, you’d be OK with that?

Bronson: Oh sure yes. Of course I would.

Posted in Breaking news, Exhibitions, Hide/Seek, Q&A, Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

December 8, 2010, 2:06 pm

Q&A with “Hide/Seek” curators Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward

Today I spoke with Jonathan Katz and David C. Ward, the two curators of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The show has been in the news ever since right-wing activists threatened the Smithsonian over the exhibition and especially since Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough removed David Wojnarowicz’s video A Fire in My Belly (1987) from the show.

In our conversation — the curators’ first joint interview since the fiasco exploded — Katz and Ward reveal that there is a chance that A Fire in My Belly could possibly return to the show. They also discuss how the Smithsonian and Secretary G. Wayne Clough can repair the damage done by Clough’s removal of the piece.

Katz is an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, where he chairs the visual studies doctoral program. Ward is a historian at the National Portrait Gallery. MAN’s complete posts on “Hide/Seek” are available here. [Image: Andy Warhol, Camouflage Self-Portrait, 1986. Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.]

MAN: Yesterday I published a Q&A with Dan Cameron, who curated the New Museum’s 1999 David Wojnarowicz retrospective. Let me start with a version of the last question I asked him: Is it good for the exhibition or bad for the exhibition that this brouhaha is going on?

Jonathan Katz: Can I re-frame your question a bit? Ultimately as concerned as I am about the show, I’m even more concerned about the atmosphere for finally doing the kind of LGBT-themed exhibitions that have been foreclosed in the American art world for the last 21 years. I’m worried, deeply worried, that this conflict is going to chill the prospects so substantially that we may have to wait decades before another museum does this again.

David C. Ward: I agree totally with that. My feeling of the last week has been sort of on a knife’s edge. We’re sort of in a kind of tautology here, where if everything works out as I hope, the controversy will have been helpful.

There’s an actual political debate going on that has material consequences. If that struggle is lost by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian, this will chill [scholarship and exhibitions] for another 20 years. I’m very happy we raised this issue. I think the fact that the controversy has developed shows the exhibition’s salience and explosiveness. It shows that our framing of the issue is correct — except that the issues that were issues in 1890 or 1920 or 1950 or 1980 are still alive and this is still a show that is perceived as a threat. That threat is not just academic, it is existential. [Image: Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, 1988.]

Katz: There is something positive about all of this. When all of this started to go down, I was a little bit worried about the prospects of the next exhibit I’m doing, which is Art/AIDS/America at the Tacoma Art Museum. A lot of other museums are considering participating in 2014 or 2015. The director of the Tacoma Art Museum sent me an email saying, ‘Clearly, lest there be any doubt, we’re in no way shaken in our commitment to your exhibition.’”

Ward: I think that regarding the whole A Fire in My Belly element… we don’t want to continually focus on David Wojnarowicz. I think that element of raising in an even kind of retrospective way the last 20 years of cultural struggles, I think that there will be a renewed sense of activism on the part of people who want to be activisitic. I fear the larger context, but this may be a new era with a new paradigm inaugurated by “Hide/Seek.” We broke the ice as we intended to do, and hopefully people follow on and we welcome their support.

MAN: What’s been the biggest positive to come out of the show?

Katz: For me there are two key benefits. The first is that by design, over 25 years of scholarship on American art has been withheld from public museums. Museums, public display, is where the rubber meets the road and where art meets an interested populace. By definition, museums have refused scholarship — and even edited it out of bibliographies. We’ve had an opportunity to bring that to the public.

What’s been remarkable is how the public has responded. With the exception of this minor incident, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The other key benefit is the opportunity it has posed for a generation younger than me to discover, or in some instances re-discover, activism. I am sorry that an exhibition that should in no way be controversial has proven to be, but I am happy that it has provided the occasion for young people who have never before organized a protest to rediscover the prospect of participatory democracy.

Ward: I just find the artwork — from Eakins’ Salutat (1898, at right, Addison Gallery of American Art)  through to the Glenn Ligon or the Warhol — I think it’s aesthetically thrilling. I think it’s the best of America, the best of American culture.

I also totally agree with what Jonathan said. One of the things I found thrilling was that the National Portrait Gallery agreed to do it and saw it through. Having this at the Smithsonian and at the place of what is nominally the normative site for American citizenship and its display: I think that’s crucially important.

MAN: Why isn’t A Fire in My Belly in the exhibition catalogue?

Ward: Yeah. To be blunt, it’s an inadvertent exclusion. We didn’t put any videos in the catalogue. We should have.

Katz: It should have been in the catalogue and I think it was a mistake that it wasn’t. Indeed, as David suggests, there was an issue raised about how one represents in a catalogue a video in which time and movement are significant. Can you, in the format of the catalogue with one page dedicated to one image… is it fair to represent something in a single capture?

Ward: The Warhol screen tests aren’t in there either. It’s an error on my part.

MAN: Could the Wojnarowicz video come back into the show?

Ward: There is ongoing discussion about that. I don’t want to say anything more about that because it is delicate. We are also looking for other ways to present it. [Image: A still from A Fire in My Belly.]

Katz: It is also, as you know, being show across the country. This is critical.

Ward: I also want to again point out the irony. We are being denied the right to show it, but the people who are criticizing it are showing it or linking to it. It gets back to agency: Who has the right to display art or your own body? As long as you condemn, you can display works of art in order to condemn them and, in an echo of the 1930s, ultimately to burn them. If you show them, even in a cool and even way as an artwork of its time, it’s illegitimate. I think it’s comical that Fox News can display this and we can’t. We know what the agenda is there.

Katz: I think another key issue here is that we have to resist the framing of this as a religious issue. It’s naked politics. It’s power politics. It’s not even really in some sense a homophobia issue. It’s about consolidation of conservative power in many instances. It’s attempting to dictate a new American polity.

Ward: It confirms a theme of the show, which is that social and economic crises are frequently gendered. The 1890s start with resurgent masculinity, which Eakins’ took and subverted with Salutat. I would also say in response to our critics: The one thing I’ve found infuriating about how this was framed was that this is a Christmas show. That’s a distortion of simple logistical slotting of shows into a fall/winter slot instead of a spring/summer slot. This is not tied to any season not Halloween, not the NFL and so on.

Also, we want to emphasize that there are two Wojnarowicz pieces still in the exhibition, and Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz is still in the exhibition. We’d be interested in acquiring especially the Hujar, especially those. That’s just off the top of my head. Those are the kind of works of his we would acquire.

MAN:When I saw the show there were a couple of pieces I thought might provoke flashpoints. The Wojnarowicz was not one of them. Were there pieces you thought would be contentious, about which you were prepared for culture-war-style controversy?

DW: [Laughing.] Yes, but we’re not going to tell you what it is.

Let me make a more general point. Jonathan and I have evolved this show over the course of two-and-a-half or three-and-a-half years and we have — again, contrary to our image now in the conservative press — we were very careful about what we showed and how we showed it. We were not going to make a provocation for the sake of making a provocation. We wanted to get this show done. We wanted the show to speak to modernism. Even in our editing of A Fire in My Belly, which we had the permission of the estate to do, we were very careful. We edited for length and content. We were caereful about what we selected for the show.

Katz: Well, we edited in terms of length, not to remove content. We felt the imperative to represent David Wojnarowicz’s work as he designed it. We included every scene that’s in the video, we just truncated the length.

I think it’s an interesting cultural moment when the homophobes — and that’s what they are are — are actually trying to redirect the dialogue toward religion because clearly that suggests in my reading that the old homophobic line isn’t working as well anymore. Paradoxically I read that as progress.

Ward: I agree with that to a point. I think the salience here of the Christianity-plus-perversion created the firestorm. I have been gobsmacked that the Annie Leibovitz pic of Ellen DeGeneres (above, 1997) is described as obscene and filth. What is clearly going on there is that you can’t display the lesbian body. She is wearing a basketball sized bra! It clearly is a joke! To label that as obscene and prurient is a mischaracterization. It’s based on heterosexual panic and it’s tied into a Christian issue. This is a recapitulation of the 1950s, with the notion of American exceptionalism, with our purity at stake.

MAN: What can the Castle do to fix the mess it created? Given that one of you works at the Smithsonian and one of you co-curated the show as an independent historian and curator, I wonder if you might have different answers.

Katz: I think there are two things. I think the first thing the Castle should do is reinstall the work. They should ideally do that in the exhibition, if not on the web page. [Image: Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge, 1924. Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum]

I also think that the Smithsonian, to pull itself out of the crosshairs of the culture war, should not and cannot be seen as engaging in political expediency, especially with people who foam rabidly at the mouth. What we need to do is to say this is a museum exhibition. It examines a history. You may or not like that history, but it’s a job of a museum to examine that history.

The Smithsonian has a terrible inferiority complex. It’s America’s beloved. Everyone loves it. If the right goes after it and guts it as it has threatened to do, I hope and believe that most Americans would say the Smithsonian is far too important to what it is to be an American to let it die.

I think it would be extremely useful at this point that one of the Smithsonian museums set up an exhibition on the lesbian and gay civil rights movement. I think one has to now aggressively battle any construction that this museum has cowered.

Ward: Let me agree with that and extend it briefly. The crisis of confidence in the humanities and liberal arts needs to be overcome. The Smithsonian can play an important role in moving that forward. I agree with Jonathan on the Smithsonian. Inside the Smithsonian, we’ll be watching the Secretary’s actions very closely.

MAN: Going back to the conception of the exhibition, can you give me an idea of what kind of institutional support you did or did not receive, both from the Castle and the National Portrait Gallery?

Ward: The support was 100 percent positive. The exhibition was initially approved under the previous director, Marc Pachter. When Martin Sullivan came on as director he reviewed it and approved it and carried on. We went through the whole process of vetting and approval through the Castle with the undersecretary and with other people involved. The whole thing was seen as a worthwhile thing to do and as an exciting show that broke new ground at the Portrait Gallery because of both the thematics and the depth and extent of its portraiture. [Image: Jasper Johns, Souvenir, 1964, collection of the artist on long-term loan to SFMOMA.]

Katz: One of the things I found quite remarkable about this is that the NPG finally agreed to take on an exhibition that many other institutions have long had the opportunity to do and for reasons that are all too clear elected not to do. What was striking in my conversations with David and with  other individuals at the NPG, was that this exhibition was understood as the further evolution of a long-standing interest in the extension of Amer democracy to disenfranchised populations as part of a heritage that included the examination of African-American civil rights, the women’s rights movement and so on, and that it was therefore not just something that they were willing to do, but that it was central to their portfolio.

MAN: My last question is specifically for Dr. Katz. After your experience with the Smithsonian, would you recommend that other historians and curators work or not work with the Smithsonian?

Katz: It’s hard to say two thing at once, but I’m going to. I’m going to say that I could not disagree more with the stupidity of the removal of the video. At the same time, I’m also absolutely convinced that the Smithsonian has been heroic in breaking this blacklist. In fact, what I’m finding very troubling about some of the reaction to what happened is that it tends to demonize the Smithsonian to the delectation of the very right-wing fringe that inaugurated this conflict in the first place. [Image: AA Bronson, Felix, June 5, 1994. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada.]

What I think we need to remember is that the Smithsonian is courageous and that other museums were not. I’m increasingly getting concerned that the activist response targeting the Smithsonian loses the bigger picture, which is that it’s been 21 years since Mapplethorpe and no one has done a damn thing in that time, that museums have been sitting on their hands and that this incident confirms the wisdom of so doing.

It’s probably a vain hope, but I still want to express the hope that 11 seconds of video do not overshadow an exhibition that is historic.

Posted in Exhibitions, Hide/Seek, Q&A | 10 Comments »

December 7, 2010, 1:39 pm

Q&A with Dan Cameron, curator of the New Museum’s 1999 David Wojnarowicz retro

Dan Cameron was the curator of the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s 1999 David Wojnarowicz retrospective, titled “Fever.” We spoke earlier today via telephone.

MAN: When you did “Fever” in 1999, why did you do it? Why that show and why then?

Dan Cameron: I think at that point the New Museum was in between directors, between Marcia Tucker and Lisa Phillips, so one of the things that was very important to us at the time was this feeling that the New Museum’s identity or mission was to a degree determined by what the other major museums were not doing. So we thought that if we sat down and made a list of all the shows that needed to be done in New York at that time but that were not getting done, that would sort of point our way toward what our future was.

It became clear to me that you had an artist like David Wojnarowicz whose reputation was growing nationally and internationally, but when you looked around at the Whitney, the Guggenheim and MoMA, you realized they’d never do that show. Well, maybe not never, maybe someday, but if somebody else didn’t do the exhibition soon there was this possibility that David Wojnarowicz would wind up being kind of swept under the rug. In the last years of his life, the art world had written him off as an activist an not an artist. There was this sense that there was no longer a convenient slot in art history to fit him into. Then he up and dies. There was just no activity from the time of his death to the time of our exhibition. None at all. No museum acquisitions, no shows. There was simply zero movement in New York museums. It was a little bit like the Martin Wong  show we did at that time. Time seemed to be running out and no one else was doing this and someone needed to do it.

MAN: It seems to me like since that show I’ve seen much more Wojnarowicz at New York museums. So far as I know, he’s still not in any Washington art museum collections. He’s still only barely in California collections. But certainly the Museum of Modern Art, for one, has had him up more in permanent collection installations.

Cameron: Both the Whitney and MoMA acquired major works from the New Museum show. I don’t know what other museums had, but both those museums decided to really beef up their Wojnarowicz holdings based on the New Museum exhibition. That kind of thing happened a lot at that time with other shows and artists, such as Paul McCarthy [whom the New Museum featured in 2001].

David Wojnarowicz doesn’t have that ‘blue-chip status’ and it’s possible he never will. If it happens it will probably be because eventually there won’t be much left in the estate and museums will feel like they have to get something.

I think this is one of the things that’s wrong with the U.S. art market overall: We don’t value things that are meaningful and important. We value things that are going up in price rapidly, so we can get in on them before another zero is added to the price. [Image: Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.]

MAN: When you launched your show, did you expect manufactured, motivated-by-biogtry flare-ups like this one?

Cameron: Yeah. Honestly, David is a couple years older than me. He was a little bit more of a rabble-rouser and more politically motivated, but I felt in a way that he was an older brother in that he paved the way in his work and in his actions and in his words for things I would then take on myself a couple years later. So when we finally got all the work out there and I finally had this opportunity to immerse myself in everything that David had done, yeah, it became really clear to me that he was taking a position a battle-position for a war, that we had seen the first skirmish or two with Andres Serrano. Even at the time of the retrospective, there was no active controversy brewing, but  it was really a short period of time between our opening and the Chris Ofili brouhaha that Rudy Giuliani and [the Catholic League's] William Donohue had a hand in.

By that time it was painfully evident that these forces of repression and censorship will always be around. They will never back off and they will never back down. They will simply hide in the shadows until they see an opportune moment to strike. They hope they will be able to take advantage of people’s limited memories and people’s not understanding that this is part of a pattern where every decade or so another opportunistic attack on contemporary art happens. It’s almost always – well, Serrano’s case and Ofili’s case had nothing to do with gay identity or the politics of AIDS,  but with David Wojnarowicz’s work there’s clearly a vendetta. There are right-wing extremists who’ve had a target on him for a very long time, ever since his dustups with then Archbishop O’Connor. So yes, I felt very worried, regularly worried in the last 12 years that it wasn’t a question of if, but of when they would shoot the next shot across our bow. And here it is. [Image: Wojnarowicz, Untitled (face in dirt), c. 1990. Courtesy PPOW Gallery.]

MAN: It’s funny that you use the word opportunistic. Last week on MAN I noted that the top two House Republicans, John Boehner and Eric Cantor, seized on this story just as the Pentagon released a report saying that the only justification for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was bigotry. The Wojnarowicz gave them an opportunity to throw some anti-gay red meat to the Republican Party’s gay-hating base.

Cameron: Exactly. And clearly an aide had already prepped them because the exhibition had been up for a while. It had generated exactly zero controversy up until last week. It seems very strategic in terms of its timing. I think you’re correct in noting that the repeal of ‘DADT,’ which seems unstoppable at this point, that they needed something else to go after. Ripping David’s work out of the National Portrait Gallery on World AIDS Day – I think they were unaware of that by the way – this really drives this point home. This is ‘Chapter Three’ of the culture wars.

MAN: What was Wojnarowicz’s reaction when these types of things happened to him?

Cameron: I think that David was pretty agonized a lot of the time, to be honest with you. He just didn’t understand why someone who wants to actualize their life, their consciousness, in the broadest and richest possible way, why they’d become targets for people who want to shut that down. There was an essential confusion with him, he’d ask it over and over again: What is the source of homophobia in our society, and why do we not look at homophobia as a disease the same way we understand racism and sexism are bad and negative, and that they harm and even kill people? We’ve never had that national conversation, and David insisted that it be in the forefront of discussion of his work.

When the forces of religious-driven bigotry rose up, when he became the victim, he really suffered. It was really horrible for him to live with this reality. He was surrounded by people at the time who said, ‘It’s a bitter cup, but you’re going to have to take it.’ In that sense, this idea that people are saying that David’s work is hate speech against Christians during the Christian season… it’s fascinating how passionately [the religious right has] used anti-bigotry and anti-hate language and that they have turned the same language and weapons to beat us up with.

I even heard Rep. Cantor go off on the class dimensions, saying it’s only elitist East Coast liberals who believe this stuff is art.! To think of David, who was a Polish-American from a working-class background, and to hear these accusations of elitism, it’s frightening. [Image: Wojnarowicz, Fire, 1987. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.]

MAN: Did Wojnarowicz expect that this silliness would continue after his death, or did he expect the persecution to pass?

Cameron: I don’t really know. I think he had a pretty pessimistic and borderline fatalistic viewpoint on the need for American society to need to invest in homophobia. He thought it performed a dynamic function in American society, and that unless we look at why fear and hatred of gay people is part of our culture we’ll never get to the bottom of it.

I think that he thought that in the early 1990s that there was no one willing to do the heavy lifting. That’s changed now: You have the Log Cabin Republicans and a broad non-partisan consensus about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But I don’t think that the roots of homophobia have been explored. I don’t think we’ve begun to look into the ‘why’ of all this, why people like Boehner and Cantor seem to continually believe that gay-baiting and using this broad, blunt instrument to attack contemporary art through its exposed gay flank, why they think they can get away with it, why they think they can get mileage out of the fear and loathing of gay people.

Of course, maybe they do. The Association of Art Museum Directors basically, in a very, very bland, kind of almost anti-confrontational statement in which the sexual identity of David was non-issue, didn’t really stand up. [Image: Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, 1982. Courtesy PPOW Gallery.]

MAN: I’ve been struggling with whether this kind of dust-up is ‘good’ for the artist’s legacy in that it brings attention to his work or ‘bad’ because it reduces him to cartoonish public flare-ups. Have you thought of that this past week and if so have you come to any conclusions?

Cameron: A friend of mine here in New Orleans reported to me a very heated elevator conversation he overheard wherein a couple of right-wingers were speaking with great approval of the censorship and how dare they call this art and so on. Of course, this person didn’t intervene.

I think when people talk about contemporary art I think it’s always good for contemporary art. I would even say that when bigoted people talk about this, it’s good for contemporary art because in exposing their bigotry or narrow-mindedness, it’s good for other people and that’s really important.

I think more important than these suit-and-ties who are having a knee-jerk reaction are young people, who have an intrinsic resistance to censorship. They want to know why it’s being done and they want to get to the bottom of it. I bet there are thousands or millions of young people hearing about this and looking at David Wojnarowicz’s work for the first time. The museums who are presenting David Wojnarowicz’s work in response to this controversy will only add to the appreciation and understanding of his work. It’s just unfortunate that it has to happen in this way.

Posted in Hide/Seek, Q&A | 5 Comments »

August 3, 2010, 12:35 pm

August Newsmaker Q&A: Zoe Strauss, part two

Continuing MAN’s August Newsmaker Q&A with photographer Zoe Strauss. The introduction to the Q&A and part one are here and a juxtaposition of recent work by Mark Bradford and Strauss is here. [Larger image of picture above is here.]

MAN: Let’s talk more about the pictures you took. You shot everything digitally?

Zoe Strauss: Yes.

MAN: How many?

ZS: I took a couple thousand. I had just one camera. I used a different lens for about one minute, but I mostly like one camera and one lens. That total seems kind of false because literally, without exaggeration, I’d take 100 photos of the same place I’m standing with different variations of people moving in and out of the shot. So it’s not that many photos, it’s variations on one structure a lot of the time. When you’re shooting with a digital camera you can keep going endlessly, and who doesn’t love that?

MAN: So what do you think really worked? I see there are about 1,100 Gulf pictures in your Flickr stream, about 800 from the first trip and about 300 from the second trip. I noticed you really liked the colors of the oil booms and other industrial cleanup materials and that you liked to place them against the coastal landscapes or Gulf-scapes.

ZS: You bet, those were the most distinct components of a lot of the photos: the artificial band of color that’s now in the landscape. I think that worked best for me, maybe even more so than the oil. It’s such a foreign component in these very traditional landscape photos, so I think that worked pretty well. To be honest I always kind of generally like structured architectural photos, but in these pictures on this trip, I thought the abstract, organic photos looked best. I don’t know if they’ll be the ones that tell the story the best, but they’re the ones I felt were the strongest. [Larger image here.]

MAN: You feel like they worked better than your pictures of people?

ZS: Yes. That’s just my aesthetic preference, but that’s the feeling I had of being down there, a feeling of being both overwhelmed and confused. It’s so unbelievably beautiful that it’s also a little frightening. Those images, while they might not necessarily be the strongest to other people, they’re the ones that I think will help me order and base the other ones [in the moment and place].

MAN: I think this is a question that kind of gets at your broader artistic practice, but I’ll make it specific to the recent event: What business does an artist have at an oil spill? Why should an artist be there?

ZS: I did think about that, particularly because I flew over the site twice. I don’t if I’ll be able to articulate this right, but an artist’s job is to help make people think. This is going to be long-lasting and this is going to be a catastrophe that’s going to be there for years to come. Part of an artist’s ‘job’ is to try to make something that will be part of the dialogue. I know it’s a hard… with photography in particular, it’s very difficult for there to be a line. It’s slippery between photojournalism and fine art in terms of how people perceive photography. [Larger image here.]

MAN: Is that why you’re attracted to working in series?

ZS: Actually I think it is, it definitely is. I think part of it is coming off of the big project I worked on for 10 years. [Ed.: Strauss' I-95 project.] “On the Beach” is very similar to the structure of what I’ve put out there before, which is allowing the editing process to be seen.

MAN: Can you think of or have you thought of art historical precedents for your Gulf work?

ZS: Absolutely. I think all the time about photography and particularly the meanings that photo is giving to culture and how photography has shifted ideas about image. I think this is more like Alan Sekula’s work. He’s done a lot of work specifically about the oceans and globalization. While of course it’s aesthetically not similar to his work, it’s more in line with his idea of including a fine art piece that talks about these issues without making it, I think, didactic. His work also includes the ability for the viewer to make what they will out of it, rather than a piece of journalism.

It’s also certainly engaging the idea of an American road trip, like Robert Frank, and certainly Ed Burtynsky’s ‘oil series.’ These are all things that have to be referenced when looking at my own work because they’re so important.

MAN: Do you know what you want to do with the work yet? I know one of the ideas you’ve discussed on your blog is the possibility of turning into a 30-picture, limited-edition book.

ZS: I don’t have any big plans for it yet. I wanted to make it first. I felt like it was important to go immediately and make it and then figure out venues afterward. I might show it at Bruce Silverstein, my New York gallery, and I’m probably going to do a project with another Philly guy who was also down there for a while. He’s a writer who’s interested in the same threads I am, and also in the long haul of this. [Larger image here.]

MAN: What do you want to do with the images, how do you want to present/show/publish/etc. them?

ZS: I’ve got to sort out the “art” from the “journalist” possibilities, I’m pretty sure three or four of these photos are important to show as a straightforward recording of what’s happening there. But to be honest, the scope of what’s happened is impossible to articulate, in words or photos.

MAN: One of the things that an artist has the privilege of trying to do is to make images or objects that exist in a particular time horizon or tradition. So if/when you make your book of these images or prints, they’ll almost certainly end up institutionalized, in archives, in libraries, in museum collections. Especially considering that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is launching a retrospective of your career in the not-too-distant future. Do you think about that?

ZS: I definitely think about that. We have a very interesting divide in which the idea of newsworthiness falls by the wayside rather quickly – that is people will move on from the spill to the next thing pretty quickly – but we fetishize art in a way that allows these things to remain relevant through display, inclusion in museum collections and so on. I do think about that. I don’t know that about my own work because it’s too presumptuous to think of myself in that construct, but I do think about the longevity of art collections and how they continue to move these moments to the forefront of public thought. [Larger image here.]

MAN: Will any of this work be in the PMA show or have you thought about that?

ZS: The show at the PMA! How f*cking awesome is that? Can you believe it? It is so awesome I don’t even know what I”m going to do.

I purposely tried to push that out of my mind as I made this work. I wanted to make sure there was no thought that this might be included. I felt I wanted to make this work with its own structure on the basis of how I felt compelled to talk about it. I mean, maybe it could, but it would have to be an ‘after-edit.’

MAN: Sounds like you’re having fun with the PMA show.

ZS: I will be perfectly frank with you: Right now I can’t even think about that because the amount of Xanax it would take to simmer me down is not manufactured in this world. I’m cognizant of it, but it creates so much anxiety in terms of the way I produce – which is kind of full-throttle – I don’t know if I can deal with it. That’s just the honest, real answer. I purposely don’t think about it.

Posted in Newsmakers on MAN, Q&A | 1 Comment »

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