MAN Q&A: Olga Viso, part one

In recent years we've seen curators realize a number of artworks conceived -- but not made -- by artists before they died. The most prominent of these projects is Nancy Spector's realization of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres for the U.S. pavilion in the upcoming Venice Biennale. This week MAN will feature Q&As with Spector, Hirshhorn director Olga Viso, and Andrea Rosen Gallery FG-T guru Michelle Reyes on realizing the unrealized. Today: Olga Viso. This is part one of two.

A few years ago then-Hirshhorn curator (and now director) Olga Viso curated a retrospective of Ana Mendieta in which Viso wrestled with how to present a Mendieta that would have had to be semi-reproduced. And earlier this year Viso was on a Washington, DC panel that decided not to make an unrealized Gene Davis stripe painting on the National Mall. (The Davis was designed for a circular area outside the Kennedy Center; the (sometimes) grassy areas on the Mall are not round.)

MAN: When should and when shouldn't an artist work be created after his/her death?

Olga Viso: Since people are doing survey exhibits and looking at this work more deeply, all of these issues come to bear. A lot of artists resisted these things in how you present the work. When I did the Ana Mendieta retrospective, this was a big question. I still debate whether we did the right thing or not in terms of presenting one specific work. I talked to a lot of people who knew the artist, who worked with the artist, scholars who spent a lot of time looking at her writings and my own in-depth study of her words and trying to come to terms with what was appropriate in the spirit of her work.

Do you have one over-arching principle you use in determining whether creating an unrealized work is acceptable, or no?

Conservators deal with these issues all the time. I think it's case by case. I don't think you can apply one specific programmatic logic to these things I think you have to immerse yourself fin the artist's world and how open-ended their works were and with what they left behind.

I think you have to get as close to the artist's intent as you possibly can. In some cases it's very clear and in other cases it's not so clear.

I think you have to be clear about what it is you are presenting. In the case of Ana Mendieta we spent a year and a half dialoguing with conservators and with Chrissie Iles. There was this gunpowder piece she had executed in Miami. [Ed.: Maroya.] It was really the only gunpowder piece that was intended to be a permanent piece. She made a lot of pieces out in the landscape, they exploded and that was it. This one she created with the actual intent, as an incense burner that could be lit and relit over time. So this collector who had this...[was about to leave the house where the piece was made and] was in this moment of crisis of what to do. Do you just leave it, or do you excavate it and what is it once you excavate it?

He excavated it, and it broke into pieces. he brought it up to the cons lab and I got deep into my research about it and for me the piece was very much a trace or a residue of an action. I was very clear that if we were going to present it would be presented as that. I found very clearly in her words and actions and articles that she had tried to translate the Smithson idea of bringing the non-site inside, and she was not happy with that solution, bringing in glass and grass and creating faux-nature inside. For her it was not a successful solution, so I didn't think we should do that.

It was 16 inches deep so it would have to be built or put in a pedestal and it would fall apart... I was really clear that would be presented as a fragment. We talked about whether to dig it into the pedestal or some kind of display that would let you see the underneath of it. For me the big judgment call was this: It was the only piece, the residue of the piece, that would give you a sense of the scale, the texture and the materiality of her work because everything else was text or photos. So presenting it as a residue of an outdoor piece along with her original photos and films that showed how these things [existed] in the landscape is ultimately how we decided to present it. I don't think we got it right at the Whitney, but I think we got it right by the time the show traveled.