Q&A on anti-art world art with Sasha Archibald

About 10 days ago some friends and I were discussing how much institutional critique-style art we'd seen lately. My blogging compadre Ed Winkleman shows Jennifer Dalton, I recently mentioned Filip Noterdaeme on the blog, and so on. I thought I might do a week's worth of posts on this kind of work. Then someone said: 'You don't have to. There's a show of it that's about to open.' True: Brooklyn's Momenta Art is featuring Air Kissing: An Exhibition of Contemporary Art About the Art World. I asked curator Sasha Archibald if she'd chat with me about it.

MAN: Who is the father of some of this work? Ed Ruscha? Michael Asher? John Baldessari?

Sasha Archibald: Those influences definitely. You can cast a wider net and include Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp. I attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and they definitely have a particular course of study that's unique to that program, which came about in the late seventies and has stayed pretty much the same since then. The big names talked about there are Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and that generation. So in terms of my interest in doing this show, those are the more immediate influences.

You keep mentioning institutional critique -- I don't know if I classify the show as institutional critique. I think of institutional critique as a body of critical theory that stemmed from various movements in the late '80s, early '90s, generally termed "cultural studies." I see it as limited in time. I don't think it's irrelevant, but I think the conventional strategies of institutional critique are shopworn. I'm not sure they're as successful now as they were in the past. I know Fred [Wilson's] work best... he has gone from working in museums where there's a great degree of resistance to what he would come in and do... to where his approach is solicited, welcomed, celebrated.

Earlier you mentioned Jennifer Dalton: I don't think of what Jennifer Dalton is doing as institutional critique exactly, but maybe that's just my training.

MAN: Oh I think they are. Dalton, William Powhida, Elmgreen & Dragset as exploding the idea of institutional critique beyond bricks-and-mortar institutions, and are expanding those ideas and taking them to the entire system, to the entire art world, be it the market or whatever.

Archibald: But William [Powhida's] doing really well. [That's a detail from Powhida's Possible Show Titles.] I looked at his works list from a show in San Francisco and the show had sold out. [Correx from TG: Actually it didn't. Sorry about that.] Then I went to the Schroeder Romero show here in New York and every work but one had sold. And while I was there the gallery attendant was clearly courting a collector and the collector had pulled up a chair to one of his paintings, was reading the painting and slapping her thigh, laughing out loud and totally enjoying herself. I told William, and he took great delight in this, in the irony of the collector being crapped on and enjoying it. But you have to wonder if there's an actual "critique" going on, when there's such viable commercial value. The art world is very savvy now -- savvy enough to know it's better off embracing criticism than resisting it.

MAN: Why does institutional critique have to be commercially unacceptable?

Archibald: I guess my notion of critique is that it has to be unpalatable. It needs to come from a voice that's outside enough and disrupts the ordinary course of things. Maybe that's a more avant garde notion of what change is, but people should resist critique. It shouldn't be welcome. If it's painful to address, the institution's impulse is to ignore or deny or say it's not art, not snap-it-up. If it's as radical as it should be, critique hurts. [At left: Carl Pope.]

MAN: There's work in the show that hurts? And there's work there that hurts, say, you? Where did wanting to do the show come from?

Archibald: Well, I'd like that! Right now I feel okay about my place in the art world because I enjoyed putting the show together. But before that I was really intent on leaving the art world entirely. I felt very disillusioned and decided that I would go back to school and be re-educated to do something else. Then Momenta asked me to do a show and I said the only show I was really interested in doing was an anti-art world show. They were great and encouraged it.

There's a lot of chatter happening in the art world -- and it may be the equivalent of water-cooler chatter, and some of it is sour grapes or gossip or whatever, but there's a lot of complaining. And it's not often translated into journalism. In fact, usually it doesn't go anywhere because the people doing the talking are bound by what they can say and where. As much as they gripe, they want to get ahead too. So when I had the idea to do a show about that talk, it was a welcome relief to hear that people were interested in the show happening and really excited to participate. These are artists who want to succeed in the contemporary art world -- they aren't interested in jumping ship or operating at the margins -- and have legitimate problems with it. People are talking about these things, but no one's talking very loud.

MAN: I'm guessing that the whole idea or existence of 'The Market' came up a lot in doing the show.

Archibald: Few artists have a very good grasp of economics and how the market works, especially over time, so it's become a code word of insult and denigration to say, 'The market is the problem.' It seems to me that the words are swung around too easily. People are quick to rip the market and I try to avoid doing that, mostly because although I know the market is a problem, I don't have it better articulated than anyone else. There are a lot of good artists making money they deserve to make and there are a lot of collectors who are collecting wisely, collecting artists who deserve to be supported. There are other serious problems in the art world that get a lot less lip service than the market. [At right: James Mills.]

MAN: Given Christoph Buchel's mock heroics in Massachusetts, did you consider including something, anything about that? That's was the anti-art, anti-institution pseudo-statement of the summer.

Archibald: It's an interesting idea, but no I didn't, the timing was just a little bit off. There's a piece in the show that's self-reflexive of Momenta, though we didn't post it online. It's a piece by William Bryan Purcell. He made his piece out of paper mache and latex, a sculpture that's meant to look like a bloodied scalp, hung to a wall by a rusty nail. He donated that work to the 2007 Momenta benefit auction and there was a collector who bought it - he wasn't there but because of the way the benefit worked a piece was 'assigned' to him and sent to him. The collector actually returned the piece to Momenta with a letter saying he knows they represent underrepresented, emerging artists, but still this work was pathetic, I'm paraphrasing, and he didn't want to be involved with the auction or any other Momenta events. So I included the sculpture and the letter in the show because they said a lot about taste, the nature of these big fundraisers, this particular collector's logic about what he deserved for his money, etc.