February 2009 Archives

Once they were revealed to the human eye, certain images and objects have been so powerful that we've been fascinated with them ever since we first (really) saw them.

This morning I posted two images of the common housefly. One was from an early photomicrograph, an ~1865 print by Arthur E. Durham. The other was a trompe l'oeil construction by Tom Friedman, made 130 years later. Both Durham and Friedman were fascinated by the tiny made static, by the way the thing revealed itself when it was 'made' to hold still. I can relate: When a fly lands on my knee, I stare at it until it flies away. I do the same thing with Friedman's flies, and at SFMOMA I was similarly fascinated with Durham's print. How does that bizarre little organism work? How the heck does it see? How does it fly? How is it put together? And just when I figure it out, it flies away. (That is, a real fly does. Part of the fun of the Friedman and the Durham is that I can stare at them as long as I like.)

As SFMOMA's Brought to Light show revealed, once scientists figured out how to reveal the minute details of minutiae to us by marrying photographic processes to the microscope, we've never stopped looking. Artists know this all too well. Perhaps more than anyone but scientists, artists have been fascinated with the natural world.

Take Philip Taaffe, a painter who broke through by mining art history for images that he then re-created in his own language. By the late 1990s Taaffe's fascination with natural history was in full-force. His paintings from that period include serial images of ferns, conifers and simple sea organisms, all of which are among the oldest continuing species.

The painting above is Taaffe's 1999 Diadem, which features 'slices' of plant material and organisms that plainly reference the earliest microphotography. Taaffe even presents Diadem in a way that references photomicrography-filled collages popular at the end of the 19th-century.

At the top of this post is a detail from A. Thouroude's Collection of microphotographs, from 1890. At the center of the piece (which is made up of albumen and printing-out paper prints mounted on board) is a pleurosigma angulatum, apparently magnified 3000 times. That same organism is the compositional thread that holds together Taaffe's Diadem. (At least I think it is -- I'm no naturalist.) Underneath Taafe's pleurosigma angulatum are what seem to be dozens of microphotographic 'slides' of cross sections of plant matter, one of the most popular early photomicrographic subjects. Taaffe's background 'color' even mimics the vaguely yellowed paper of early albumen prints. [At right: A detail from Andreas Ritter von Ettinghausen's 1840 daguerrotype of the cross section of a clematis stem. In the jump you can see a detail from Taaffe's Diadem that shows 'his cross sections' more clearly. Or click here to see a large JPEG of the whole painting.]

Related: SFMOMA's Brought to Light. Stop-motion photography: Muybridge and Antin. Two flies. Brought to Light is now on view in Vienna at the Albertina, which has a better website for the show than SFMOMA did.

The Smithsonian Institution and the Hirshhorn board of trustees have selected Richard Koshalek to be the museum's next director.

The Hirshhorn has been without a director since Olga Viso left to run the Walker Art Center. Viso announced her departure 531 days ago, on Sept. 11, 2007. Kerry Brougher, the museum's chief curator, has been serving as acting director. Brougher was not a candidate for the directorship.

Koshalek was the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1999 and was the president of the Art Center College of Design until last September. He and the school parted ways after conflicting over institutional priorities. The end of Koshalek's tenure at Art Center was marked by student protests over tuition costs and related complaints over Koshalek's support of a $50 million, Frank Gehry-designed expansion.

Prior to his tenure at Art Center, Koshalek spent nearly 20 years at MOCA, where the collection expanded dramatically under his leadership. He started at MOCA as chief curator and deputy director in 1980 and became director in 1983. Among his curatorial staffers at MOCA was the Hirshhorn's Brougher. 

The hiring of Koshalek, 67, marks the continuation of a recent Smithsonian trend: The hiring of late-career executives. The Smithsonian's secretary, G. Wayne Clough, is also 67. Johnnetta Cole, the newly-hired director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, is 72.

Back to SFMOMA's Brought to Light tomorrow (unless there's more breaking news) Check out this BtL-recalling post from Amy Stein. Timely! (And creepy.)

• Two exhibition websites worth a browse: Kees van Dongen at the Montreal MFA. The catalogue (which is available here via the museum and not in the US via DAP/Amazon, etc.) is beautiful. More on it in a week or two.
  
• LACMA's Art of Two Germanys page links to a slideshow, a timeline and more.
• Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory has teamed up with BrightKite to allow museum visitors to interact with each other and with the museum in realtime via BrightKite and Twitter. It's neat-o-er than I'm making it sound, so just click here and here to read and to see pictures that will make it all clear.
• How and why is there an Abe Lincoln sculpture in NYC's Union Square?
• WPA posters are completely f'ing cool. So. F'ing. Cool.
• I'm an anti-social non-communitarian, but this looks like smart, tasty fun.
  
• Why small(er) museums matter out of proportion to their size/budgets. Amen.
  
• All the (deserved) attention Fred Sandback is getting lately has me thinking about Kate Shepherd. Here's an example of why.
  

I've got invites to ArtBabble, the Indianapolis Museum of Art's cool new art video site with cool stuff for both your PC and your iPod. Tweeple got them yesterday. If you'd like an invite, click here...

Earlier this week Congress published online the federal fiscal year 2009 omnibus appropriations bill. Only about half of the earmarks in the bill are immediately identifiable -- the earmarks that members of Congress were willing to 'take credit' for by attaching their names to them.

Both houses of Congress will vote on (and almost certainly pass) the omnibus before March 6. I went through the bill looking for artsy earmarks, and here's what I found:

• WPA mural conservation at Harlem Hospital: $150,000;
• Facility buildout at the Huntsville (Ala.) Museum of Art: $190,000;
• Improvements to infrastructure at the Wadsworth Atheneum: $902,500;
• Educational programming at the MFA Boston: $238,000;
• Cataloguing and preservation at the Columbus Museum of Art: $95,000; and
• Digital media collections, educational programs and online exhibitions at the George Eastman House: $381,000.

I emailed the Wadsworth, the MFAB and the Eastman House for details on their projects. All three failed to respond. (Skittish about earmarks are we?)

• Today in museum cutbacks: Detroit, the High, and Philadelphia [via], which tellingly chose not to reply to my email on this subject yesterday.
• A confluence for my geek streak: Is this the first painting of hockey?
• Christopher Knight, who has decried museum collection-rental deals for years, posts about art in Las Vegas and finds the questionable arrangement to be part of the "Sin City mind-set."
  

Continued from here...

When MCASD director Hugh Davies asked me why I object to the deal MCASD has done with the Bellagio, I told him that one reason is that I think non-profits should focus on their missions, and not on providing profit opportunities for business. One of the fundamental principles of non-profit institutions is that 501c3s are not holding companies that for-profit organizations or individuals can raid for profit-making activities. (This is part of why the Nature Conservancy was investigated by Congress in 2003, and it's part of why I think that Congress and the relevant state attorney generals should investigate the way non-profits are increasingly monetizing art in clear violation of the museum sector's own rules, such as at the National Academy and with the Bellagio Three.)  [Image: Sol LeWitt, Floor Piece #4, 1976.]

"Well, we have been paid a fee [by the Bellagio] just as when we send any show traveling," Davies replied. "Yes, the fee is larger than the normal fee you would expect if you send a traveling show of permanent collection works as we have to the Sheldon Museum, to the High, the Weatherspoon and so on. If we charge $50,000 for that plus prorated shipping and insurance, why is it any different if we charge twice as much because of the length of the time period to Las Vegas? The work is only moving once, we used the same fine art movers, and so on?

"I can see why the fact that the Bellagio casino is a for-profit corporation means that the context appears sullied. But I'm just looking at the fact that they run a perfectly high-standard gallery. Their security and their air-handling systems are as good or better than 90 percent of US museums."

I told Davies that I didn't necessarily agree, that when MFA Boston's first loan was at the Bellagio that the hotel-casino's power went out for four days and that the art baked. The MFA had to send out specialists to make sure the temperature was reduced gradually and despite repeated requests the MFA never released any information regarding whether or not works were damaged. Davies said that he was unaware of the Bellagio's earlier power issue.

Davies and I discussed several other aspects of the arrangement, but one in particular sticks in my head. The Brandeis University president views the Rose Art Museum's art collection as an asset to monetize. (Davies is a former adviser to the Rose and he wrote Brandeis  an angry letter about what it's trying to do.) Albeit through a different instrument, isn't that what MCASD is doing here: monetizing an asset?

"No more than when the Phillips is when it re-does their air-handling system [and sends its collection on the road]," Davies said. "I always find amusing when these institutions fix their air-handling systems and the collections travel for two or three years! It's a way of generating revenue, no question...

"I have been perversely trying to look at the other side of the coin. We museum directors can huff and puff about how once we bring these artworks into our collections that they no longer have value because they've been removed from the market, that they become this special trust that is the patrimony of our cities and that they're held in trust for future generations. It's B.S. We go on and sell them and the rule is the proceeds form the sale can only go to replenish the collection." [Image: Frank Stella, Sabra III, 1967.]

Finally, Davies said the Bellagio deal is a great way to raise the profile of MCASD, a much-admired museum that has a fine collection and strong programming, but which receives little national attention (except for on MAN).

"I cannot possibly spend to get billboards and airline magazine ads for our museum, and the Bellagio can and now every single one of them mentions MCASD," Davies said. "You are never a prophet in your own land. So when people from Phoenix and Los Angeles go to Las Vegas and see this, it increases the knowledge and the reputation of our museum."

Despite Association of Art Museum Director guidelines telling member museums that "the collections a museum holds in public trust do not represent financial assets that may be converted to cash for operating or capital needs, or pledged as collateral for loans," AAMD continues to look away as museum after museum partners with commercial entities to rent out art for cash.

The latest: The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is currently renting art from its collection to the "Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art," a space in Las Vegas' Bellagio hotel-and-casino. The presentation will be on view through Sept. 7.

The MCASD is the third museum to allow a commercial entity the opportunity to make money off of its collection by renting it to the casino-based gallery. The Phillips Collection pioneered the collection-goes-to-Vegas model in 2000 by splitting admissions revenue with the Bellagio -- and AAMD looked the other way. The MFA Boston took the concept a step further by accepting over $1 million from PaceWildenstein's PaperBall subsidiary in return for sending 21 Monets (and later other paintings) to the Bellagio. Each time Boston rented out art to a commercial entity, AAMD shrugged.

So can it really be a surprise that a third museum has flouted the AAMD's alleged guidelines and, according to multiple sources, at its most recent meeting left undiscussed this latest monetization of a museum collection?

The MCASD-Bellagio deal
According to MCASD director Hugh Davies, under the terms of San Diego's arrangement with the Bellagio (Paperball no longer runs the the Bellagio gallery), the MCASD receives a flat fee for renting contemporary works by Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol and others to the casino. In addition, MCASD staff assisted the Bellagio in setting up an exhibition store.

Davies refused to say how much money the museum was receiving from the Bellagio, which is charging $15 to visit the installation. (In time there should be some good hints in the MCASD's tax return.) Davies said that about 7,000 people have visited since the show opened on Jan. 23.

MCASD doesn't mention the questionable arrangement anywhere on its own website, but six MCASD works are visible on the Bellagio's site. MCASD's Flickr stream features images from the opening of the rental. [Image: Ellsworth Kelly, Red Blue Green, 1963.]

"The folks at Bellagio put a fair amount of time and energy into re-doing that gallery so it could host larger-scale contemporary works," Davies told me on Tuesday. "To their credit they even had to take a wall out of their bookstore in order to get the large Warhol in there. They did whatever they had to do to get it right. They've tried to make it a serious museum presentation rather than dumb it down or something like that."

MCASD's transaction would seem to violate several guidelines laid down by the Association of American Museums (of which MCASD is a member) and by AAMD (of which Davies is a member and former president).

Both AAM and AAMD cite the protection of art as a major charge of museums and as a major reason not to rent out art for financial gain. In addition to the passage from AAMD's handbook, "Professional Practices in Art Museums," noted above, AAMD also mandates that:

"In any decision about a proposed loan from the collection, the intellectual merit and educational benefits, as well as the protection of the work of art, must be the primary considerations, rather than possible financial gain."

"For me the best reason to do this is that Las Vegas, which is the fastest-growing city in the U.S., is far and away the largest city without a collecting art museum," Davies said. "I think it's an unhappy coincidence that they're closing the Las Vegas Art Museum as we're doing this.

"I see it as a very good thing for us to do, to lend to this city that doesn't have a collecting museum first-rate examples of classic contemporary art... that they wouldn't otherwise have access to see in their own hometown. I see it not in a patronizing, or in a missionary way, but as a very non-elitist thing to do."

Coming this afternoon: The debate over the practice.

It's the Lab at Belmar's Adam Lerner. And the Lab will merge into the MCA Denver.

In 1872 Leland Stanford hired photographer Eadweard Muybridge to see if all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground when a horse runs. After much trial-and-error, Muybridge found a way to set up cameras in a way that would create a series showing a horse in motion. Ever since, Muybridge's stop-motion grids became objects of intense fascination. They're still gee-whiz cool. (Not only do Muybridge's pictures capture the intricacies of animal motion, but they may be the first photographs to be presented in grid form.)

"Brought to Light, Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900," which was recently on view at SFMOMA, features many examples of stop-action photography, including other Muybridges such as a woman spanking a child and a gymnast doing a headspring, Etienne-Jules Marey's elegant albumen print of a heron in flight and his study of a swimming skate, Ottomar Anschutz's running dogs and even Thomas Eakins' Marey wheel photographs of a man walking. In-sequence photography didn't just actualize the imagination of the public, but it drove scientists and artists too.

As I noted yesterday, while most of the work in Brought to Light wasn't primarily motivated by aesthetics, work in the exhibition has had an extraordinary influence -- both directly and indirectly -- on artists who worked 100 years later. Once (usually) amateur scientist-aesthetes opened the door to visual possibilities, artists took the chemical process and ran/galloped/walked with it.

So fast forward exactly 100 years from Muybridge's experiments to 1972, when Eleanor Antin cleverly tweaked Muybridge's motion photography with her Carving: A Traditional Sculpture. Antin's project is one of the most famous conceptual pieces of the 20th-century: During a 37-day crash diet, Antin photographed herself four times a day and presented the results in grid form. [Image: A detail from the work, which is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.]

From the title on down, the work is a clever critique of art history and its treatment of women. The female nude is one of sculpture's most classic subjects. Sculptures were often carved; Antin was dieting and thus carving her own body. To generations of painters and sculptors women were disposable models, merely there to enable the artist. Antin used herself as the subject, literally disposing of some of herself.

Finally, Antin tweaked stop-motion photography and the way Muybridge and his successors presented it: In each frame Antin is holding still, but her body is in a sort of slow-motion. Instead of using photography to capture too-quick-for-the-eye motion, Antin uses it to capture too-slow-for-the-eye motion.

Related: Also a potential subject for stop-motion examination: Muybridge's forever-shifting spelling of his own name. (A little art-history joke, that. Ha ha.) Topic discussed by Rebecca Solnit here.

• Trouvelot Figures, like the one I posted yesterday when writing up SFMOMA's Brought to Light, are almost biologically irresistable.
• Yesterday I raced through the six sections of the show. Bean Gilsdorf details them more thoroughly.
• Greg Allen really, really does not approve of NYTer Ken Johnson right now.
• Thanks to Ed Winkleman and his commenters, we learn that this summer the Smithsonian American Art Museum will be presenting an exhibit on American art in 1934 and how Franklin Delano Roosevelt used arts funding as both economic stimulus and community-spirit lifting. SAAM already has a Flickr set of paintings from 1934.
• LACMA's tiny little Kroyer rocks.
• Douglas Britt has some fab pictures of Color into Light at MFAH.
• Once a month SFMOMA invites someone to put together a selection of collection images from its collection and then post them to its Open Space blog. This month Chris Appelgren (who runs an SF indy music festival called Noise Pop) pairs artworks with tunes.
  

Just wondering: Did the same Congressfolk that raised such a silly, poorly-informed, faux-righteous stink over the value of the arts to the U.S. economy in recent weeks vote in favor of the $14 million in U.S. funds that went toward the partial re-opening of the Iraq National Museum? (Thanks to Perry Garvin for the link.)

MAN is looking for the appropriations bill -- probably a supplemental -- that OK'd that $14M. Please help and let me know what you find -- both about the bill and how the anti-arts pontificators voted on it. If art, culture and national heritage is good enough for Iraq, surely it's good enough for us too, right?

More than any other modern art museum in America, SFMOMA has a logical start date: 1906, the year an earthquake and fire decimated San Francisco. Shortly after the disaster, collectors Michael and Sarah Stein steamed from Paris to their home in San Francisco, worried that the quake had wiped out most of their wealth. It was a visit that effectively marked the introduction of the European avant-garde into San Francisco.

In tacit recognition of the Steins and the quake, the starting point of SFMOMA's collection is a painting that the Steins bought just before the disaster hit: Matisse's 1905 Woman with a Hat. In hindsight, the painting and San Francisco fit perfectly: The Matisse laid waste to pre-fauve painting and representation, eviscerating painterly tradition and opening the door to something new. That's about what the quake and fire did to San Francisco.

Into this tidy, convenient narrative came SFMOMA curator Corey Keller's irresistable recent exhibition, "Brought to Light, Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900." In a way, Brought to Light is a photography curator's argument for a new 'beginning date' for SFMOMA, a museum which has one of the finest photography collections in America. Instead of starting with painting and the earthquake, hints Keller, start with when science and aesthetics merged to create a new medium: photography. In other words, tie the beginning of a narrative of the modern to when scientific rationalism met aesthetics. 

This is not entirely new ground and the joining of science and photography has been well-examined: In the mid-19th century, when science was emerging as a professional discipline, scientists used new-fangled gizmos and various chemical and physical processes in an effort to further human understanding of the world and universe around them. They then used the surprising visual evidence of everything from microscopic organisms to the moon to electricity to reveal truth and experience through photography.

Still, it's delightful to be reminded that this sounds a lot like how we define art now. [Image: Direct electric sparks obtained with a Ruhmkorff coil or Wimshurst machine, also known as "Trouvelot figures", Etienne Leopold Trouvelot.]

So what if much -- most -- OK, nearly all -- of the work in Brought to Light wasn't intended as 'art.' The only two adamantly self-identifying artists in the show are Carleton Watkins, represented by one weird-but-fabulous photograph of an eclipse (below) and Thomas Eakins, whose 'Marey wheel' photographs of a man walking helped him understand human movement. (Eakins, who worked in Pennsylvania with Edward Muybridge and who is also included in the show -- saw science and art as complementary disciplines. Once Eakins even went all Messonier and dissected a horse in order to better understand how it 'worked.')

The exhibition was built around Keller's presentation of six foci of early photography: microscopes, telescopes, motion studies, electricity and magnetism, x-rays and spirit photography. As Kenneth Baker noted in the San Francisco Chronicle, many of the subjects and methods in Brought to Light were familiar to 20th-century artists: He noted Vija Celmins' star fields or Chuck Close's use of daguerreotypes. No question. [Image:  Solar Eclipse from Mount Santa Lucia, 1889, Carleton Watkins.]

In a series of posts this week I'll explore the less-literal impact of the photographs in Brought to Light and how the work in the show has informed artists since. I'll also talk about why this was an especially timely exhibit: Today Brandeis University is trying to monetize its art museum's art collection because it thinks that building (and paying for) expensive science buildings is more important and more fundamental to what a university does than anything related to visual explorations of human thought. Other universities and elected officials have been dabbling with these same ideas. That makes the present an especially good time to focus on how closely related art, science and the investigation of knowledge have been -- and will continue to be.

• In the SF Chron, Jesse Hamlin describes Kerry James Marshall's new murals in SFMOMA's atrium. The LAT's culture blog has pix.
  
• The Baltimore Sun's Edward Gunts finds the BMA's new circus show to be surprisingly dark.
• Paul Villinski's Emergency Response Studio makes an appearance in Houston and Douglas Britt has several engaging posts on the Houston Chronicle's website. Among them: Britt has a problem with one Houston-area reviewer's response to the work, video of the piece, and a chat with the artist.
• LATer Suzanne Muchnic on the Huntington's big new Sam Francis. Yes, the Huntington.
  
• Uh, these roundups are getting shorter, aren't they? (All those commercial journalism cutbacks made obvious...)

Back Monday.

• If you enjoyed Jonathan Harr's The Lost Painting (about a hidden Caravaggio), then you'll love Detroit Free Presser Mark Stryker's story about a lost...
• MAN neighbor Greg Sandow took to the WSJ to argue that the arts don't deserve stimulus dollars? Jorg Colberg says that the federal government has been an admirable, progressive arts patron.
  
• I'm looking forward to the Philly Museum's Cezanne and Beyond show, especially because the PMA's website is so good. Look at all those cool artist quotes about Cezanne! [via]
  

Last week Congress included $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts as part of the federal stimulus package. Artsfolk, from advocacy groups that flooded my inbox on Friday to museums -- very few of whom will see a penny -- declared victory.

"It was not politics as usual in Washington, as the Congressional conferees' final version of the bill seized the opportunity to provide much-needed stimulus support for the nation's creative workforce," Americans for the Arts director Robert Lynch trumpeted in a press release.

Hogwash. As the recent Mapplethorpe symposium hosted by the ICA Philadelphia reminded me, the NEA is now mostly representative of how successfully culture has been purged from the federal sphere.

How silly is $50 million? In San Diego alone, the two headline arts institutions, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, have between them cut about 30 jobs. That represents the loss of around $2 million in annual salary (and benefits) at just two art museums in just one medium-sized city. If I were to total up the cutbacks at San Diego's other cultural institutions, such as The Old Globe Theater, the La Jolla Playhouse, Lamb's Player Theater, the San Diego Museum of Man, the Museum of Photographic Arts, the San Diego Symphony, the Mingei International Museum, the San Diego Opera, the Timken Museum of Art, and on and on, I could probably spend most of that $50 million in just San Diego, America's 17th largest metropolitan area. Christopher Knight has reported that 100,000 non-profit arts groups around America sustain six million jobs.

How small is the NEA's $145 million annual appropriation? The National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center receive more federal dollars through the normal federal budgeting process than the NEA does. The NEA is supposed the be the primary arts protagonist for the American people, yet a single arts philanthropy, the J. Paul Getty Trust, spent 50 percent more than the NEA did in the Getty's most recently reported year. (Imagine if one charitable foundation spent more than the federal government does on environmental research. It would rightly be a national embarrassment.)

The self-perpetuating NEA debate is a continuing admission of defeat by both progressives and cultural organizations. The right won: The NEA is timid and ancillary. Progressives have been cowed into failing to substantially supporting one of their most reliable constituent groups: Culture lovers and workers.

So culture lovers should give up on the NEA once and for all. The problem is, what replaces it and how should the federal government be engaged in and supportive of American culture? There is no ready answer. Solving the federal-involvement-in-culture problem will take time.

So here's a first suggestion: The arts community should take a lesson from how policy is made in Washington, from the policy-driven infrastructure of the city. The first step: The arts should join Washington's think-tank culture. Arts philanthropists should fund arts policy fellows at major think tanks, places such as the Center for American Progress and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Smart arts thinkers would have the opportunity to be involved in policy debates, to develop new ideas about how government should be involved in the arts (and not just in one little agency, but across the federal apparatus).

Joining the Washington policy-making set wouldn't result in immediate, FY 2010 policy changes, but over time it would lead to new ideas and new ways that the federal government could engage with and support the nation's cultural vitality. Just as importantly: It would burrow cultural thinkers and backers into the culture of Washington influence, building a baseline of support for the arts amongst policy-makers who work in a range of fields. Perhaps, finally, a great nation would have the federal involvement in the arts that it deserves.

Related: In favor of a White House arts adviser.

• The LAT has featured (by far) the best coverage of the potential that the stimulus bill might or might not provide funding for cultural organizations or culturally-related infrastructure. Of note: Christopher Knight on the unemployment rate in the arts, the state of California's beyond-pathetic arts spending; Mike Boehm on the NEA's $50 million and more on California's beyond-pathetic arts spending.
  
• At Friday's Mapplethorpe symposium in Philly, I tweeted about Robert Storr's use of the term 'misconceptual art.' Greg Allen plays etymologist. 
• Heart as Arena finds a nice accompaniment to Fred Sandback.
• Sometime last year I was on a Los Angeles NPR station doing a spot on the then-new BCAM @ LACMA. Eli Broad was on before me and he explained to the host that is LACMA loan was better than a gift to LACMA because museums couldn't afford to add to their collections. The host asked me what I thought of that and I said that one of the too-little-told stories of American art museums is just how good they are at acquiring art. Today's example thereof: The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic chronicles a banner year for Los Angeles' art museums. 
• Speaking of acquisitions: Warhol and soup can(s) at LACMA.
• Hans Haacke shows how the news makes us feel.
  

Today I'm at the Philly ICA's Imperfect Moments symposium on Robert Mapplethorpe and 1989. Follow my live updates here starting at ~10:15am EST.

Continued from parts one and two...

MAN: With a couple exceptions, most of the paintings you chose don't push the eye to any particular place. They're almost color-fieldy in that way. Why does that attract you?

Steve Roden: It's interesting to think about busy things that are color-fieldy, but i do indeed see the paintings i make as a field of bits and/or actions, and i do think there is this element of things holding together and falling apart at the same time, as well as a visual focus on the bigger picture than say a "subject."

Again, in relation to things I think about that I can never approach as a maker, the first thing that comes to mind is Kusama's early 'net paintings' which do exactly what you are talking about. They are calm in spite of their busy-ness. Terry Winters' work of the last few years takes that whole idea of a field of fragments or bits to another level. I love how that work feels architectural and stable as well as about to collapse, with things existing on different planes -- they move back and forth between being pictorial and graphic. I'm certainly interested in a kind of compression -- of moments and images, and perhaps the love of "fieldy" work is that these people have been able to maintain the integrity of both the bits and the whole, leaving a viewer the ability to wander through the bits as stepping stones, towards the entire landscape.

I really love looking at maps for this reason. They flutter between bits of information and their larger, beautiful graphic presence. Alfred Jensen's work [Image above: Jensen, That is It, 1966] is kind of like this -- there are so many components that at some point you become overwhelmed by the amount of parts, so you find yourself in some kind of calming whole. That's what i love about his work, how it seems loud, with an almost hyper-intensity in first moments, and then it kind of washes over you like a wave, and you have to start over with a quiet mind and a whole lot of patience. You can follow so many paths through the work, and it takes so long to even begin to approach grasping the whole. [Image: Arnold Schoenberg, Street Scene at Night.]

For me, it's very much related to the idea of life as a collection of moments and say a landscape as a collection of visions. I am really interested in this tension between a painting being a field of bits and a whole, between being a picture and an action, between holding together and falling apart. This is one of the biggest connections to my sound work. I have no background in music, but composing with sound is so much about fragments forming a field, which I tend to solve by attempting to deny any kind of narrative quality. Like a painting, the idea is that once someone is inside the sound, there is no beginning or end or dynamic that shakes them out of the space of the "soundscape".

With paintings my hope is that it is kind of the same. I don't want there to be any kind of referential situation that might draw someone out of the "painting-scape," which would deny them the ability to wander. If the work wasn't able to dissolve into a field, one would have to take a narrative approach, which in the case of my own work, would be a dead end. The systems I use to generate the work are all related to translation, but if one seeks a kind of literal logic in the work, it falls apart because it can't be translated back -- these aren't codes, so logic isn't necessary to navigate them. [Image: Peder Balke, Stetind in Fog, 1864.]

It probably sounds a bit esoteric but the idea is to create a situation that one can only truly participate in if one has the ability to "unknow" certain things, to allow the fieldy-ness of the work to become a world that one must enter on its own terms... It becomes a place where a bright pink might have the potential to suggest 'somber,' and a gray the possibility of 'sunlight,' and the only way someone can piece this landscape of bits together is to begin to let it overwhelm them, to find their own way rather than worrying about my intentions. It is important for me to make work that attempts to have this kind of generosity, where my intentions can fall away freely, and no one really notices the difference... All of this is simply towards the creation of a visual experience that might have some value for those who are willing to take the time to look at it...

(Also: Roden specified that he would also like his O&S gallery to include one wall with works on paper hung salon-style. It would feature a late collage by Joseph Cornell, a paper cut-out by Hans Christian Andersen, an ink drawing by Victor Hugo (preferably The Octopus), and a calligraphic ink drawing by Henri Michaux, a similar one by Brion Gysin, a Tom Marioni drum brush drawing, and a William Anastasi subway drawing.)

Continued from part one...

MAN: A number of the works have palettes I would almost call eccentric. The colors in Eugene von Bruenchenhein's 'Filament of Ages' [right] do not typically go together. Lee Mullican's colors [in the jump] often seem turned down somehow. Your colors are bold -- you throw more color at one painting than Agnes Martin used in her whole life. Do you take your use of color from, well, from where?

Steve Roden: It's funny because when i give talks someone always asks me about the color, and I always say that my goal is to someday make a white painting (and I'm totally serious).

I don't feel the color is so much an intentional decision as much as is it intuitive. I think when you ask me where i take my color from, I can't really answer other than it is simply a part of me. In all aspects of my work, there is never a kind of over-controlled moment where I tell the painting what i want it to be -- i don't have any sense of what I want from a painting until it is finished. I don't view color as symbolic, nor do I want to use it in a way that suggests any kind of specific emotion or meaning from color.

Painting is a very, very quiet and deeply intuitive activity for me, and so I rarely question decisions such as, 'Why are you using blue here, red would work better.' I try never to force things I want, but to negotiate with the painting and generally to let it have its way with me. [Steve Roden, turning music into mountains, 2007. An 'overheadish' view of the same work is in the jump.]

Of course, there are things from childhood that come into play, as if placing colors together in a painting is an act of triggering memory. A few years ago I put this strange green and orange together, and I instantly remembered this baseball cap from Japan I had as a kid. The combination on a cap was so exotic and strange for a ball team, and the cap fascinated me even though i rarely wore it because it was so ugly! So now every time I place those colors together they bring that all back. I have a lot of moments like this, where I realize that the color choices are not always coming from the environment of the painting itself, but from specific "color moments" or memories from my life.

It's unconscious certainly, and feels accidental, and I rarely end up remembering the sources; but these moments allow me to at least feel like I'm pulling things from inside me rather than from anyone else. One of the bonuses of going through art school at the time that i did (1982-1989) is that I had very few technical classes, especially related to painting, and in many ways I'm self-taught in terms of technique. [Image: Oskar Fischinger, The Small Wave, 1940.]

I'm not the kind of artist who because I'm totally overwhelmed with love for the color in a Rothko or in a Guston, feels that I must notate these things and try to exploit them in my own work. Other artists have their path, I have mine, and I mean that with absolute humility. Rothko spent his entire life devoted to the things he discovered by following his own path (and of course being obsessed with some history that fueled his interests). How could I possibly feel comfortable using his work as "cheat notes," or even inspiration in terms of wanting to use how his work works, to make my own work... I need to find my own way.

In the end it tends to be about negotiation with the moment and with the painting at whatever stage it is at. I don't have kids, but i would imagine that my own color decisions are similar to the way you negotiate with a child when leaving the house: You select for them a green shirt, and they instantly go for purple shoes and you try to coerce them to put on the green shoes, and so they put the green shoes on but change the shirt to a pink one and throw on a yellow hat. Where do kids get this kind of determined color sense? It's not learned. It's in them. [Image: Steve Roden, fall after moons fall after..., 2008.]

I try to negotiate with the painting in the same way -- to kind of ask it what it wants next to an orange form, and intuitively I reach down to the paint tubes and grab a color that I generally feel has come from conversation with the painting, but of course, on a deeper level, coming from that place that as a child you know you want the yellow hat with the green shoes...

Yesterday I kicked off a two-day meandering around the Hammer's Oranges and Sardines show here and by talking with Mark Grotjahn, whose gallery I particularly enjoyed. Today artist Steve Roden goes all O&S here on MAN. Just as the artists in O&S picked their own galleries, I asked Roden to pick some works of art for me to 'hang' here. My first question refers to those works, and I'll show all of them on MAN in this or in upcoming posts. This is the first of three parts. [Image: Steve Roden, the same sun spinning and fading..., 2008.]

MAN: I noticed that a number of the works you picked have circles in them: The Cage, the Lee Mullican, the Redon, the Martin (in the jump). The Schoenberg might, depending on whether one counts the street lights as circles. Why are you attracted to the circles?

Steve Roden: Wow, that's a really interesting question. I never realized such an attraction, nor did I initially view any of the works you mentioned in terms of their circular presence. (I immediately thought of Kupka, whose cosmic use of circles floors me.)

I'm thinking first in relation to my own work and how I've rarely managed to use circle forms in a painting, so perhaps it's a kind of longing and attraction to something I've struggled with but never found my way. I rarely use tape, never pre-draw, and all of the forms on the surface of the works are birthed through the process of making. So if I plan to use a circle in a piece there's a good chance it won't happen, as it has to evolve naturally. Generally when an actual circle-form enters the work it feels forced and ultimately gets painted out as a kind of dishonest solution to a visual problem. [Image: John Cage, 11 Stones, 1989.]

I have used marks as a kind of aura or circular presence -- a field of bits that surrounds a circle of negative space, which relates to Lee Mullican, as well as the circles in the Redon, as a kind of cosmic presence or activity -- be it electric, spirit, or dust. My whole relationship to Agnes Martin as a painter is that she does the kinds of things in her paintings that I don't feel I can ever approach in my own work, which is perhaps why I gravitated towards an early work of hers, which is the closest bridge.

With John Cage the circles are tracings, and thus the form is really about the hand and the action -- making circular motion with hands -- I also gravitated towards this because of the score-based nature of my own work, which is really a combination of making a picture and performing an action. Like Martin, Cage manages to capture everything in a fairly simple and straightforward action. The purity of his work and Martin's is something I really do try to approach in my own work, although of course on the surface one might never find those connections. (I should mention that with both of them their writings have been profoundly important to me as well.) [Image: Odilon Redon, La Budha, 1906-07.]

With Schoenberg you have something I think that is closer to my own attempts with circles, which is a built-in awkwardness and handling... that is, you can tell he's trying, he's climbing, and he's struggling. There's so much honesty in his circles, and more than circles, that is what I'm after in my own work. In a way, it was his inability to "master" technique (or perhaps even more wonderfully, his desire not to master technique), that allow these presences to flutter between circles and street-lights. They are ambivalent, and feel somehow true. 

Tomorrow and Friday the Philly ICA is holding a two-day symposium that examines the L'Affaire Mapplethorpe 20 years on. I'll be in attendance on Friday, live-Tweeting the proceedings. Prepare now by signing up for Twitter and/or following me here.

My favorite single gallery at the Hammer's Oranges and Sardines show was Mark Grotjahn's. Of the six artists in the show, Grotjahn was the painter most willing to lay bare his foundations. His Q&A with curator Gary Garrels in the show's catalogue is the best artist Q&A I've read in a while. So I thought I'd try to pick up where Garrels left off... [Image: Mark Grotjahn, Untitled, 2008.]

MAN: One of the things that I heard over and over again in your catalogue Q&A with Gary Garrels was how important being in front of actual art objects is for you, that being in the museum and around art is a real motivator for you.

Mark Grotjahn: Yeah. It's like the difference between seeing people having sex and having it yourself. You can get an idea but it's not the thing itself. With the image, No. 1: it's the scale that you don't have. Then you don't get the detail or see how the paint was put down or see what the color actually looks like. So at a museum you actually get to see the thing, that is you get to experience it the way it was meant to be experienced. I mean, it's great to see TV shows about nature, but it's better to see a tiger in the wild.

MAN: With a lot of the artists you told Garrels that you love spending time with, I noticed that they're painters where those details are important: How paint was put down, and so on. Take David Park: You don't get the loaded brush from JPEGs.

MG: At least you can get the image with him. With Ad Reinhardt it's pretty bad.

You know, installation shots are sometimes the best because you get the vibe of what the artist is doing with the installation. You can see the installations that Clyfford Still did in that book of the retrospective he had at the Met: They had a lot of shots of the installations. You get a better sense of the paintings as a whole rather than just the individual things.

MAN: Speaking of Clyfford Still, he's why I wanted to talk with you. I grew up near San Francisco and I had the same experience with Still you discussed: I started out a non-fan, later found myself warming to a lot of his work, then I took on the zeal of the converted. It sounds like that's how Still emerged for you.

MG: I used to go to SFMOMA and I'd always be excited to walk into the room of Stills and then when I got there I thought they were terrible. I couldn't believe that he was the painter we got stuck with in the Bay Area. It made me feel second-rate. And as it turns out, as I saw more and more, he's the best. It's different work, but it's great.

I don't know when it was that I made the switch to thinking he was one of the best. Or even why that was. I feel like I saw so many in person as a young person... I think just spending more and more time with art and thinking about them maybe having a different or possibly more sophisticated understanding, you know, allowed certain kinds of opening-up to understanding the work. [Image: Clyfford Still, Unititled, 1954, from the collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. This was the Still that Grotjahn wanted to install at the Hammer, but it was unavailable for loan.]

MAN: I've seen your work for years and it was so interesting to me  -- and even surprising -- to learn that Still was a biggie for you. You're so much a loaded-brush painter a la David Park, Elmer Bischoff and such... and Still didn't even use a brush!

MG: [Laughs.] He didn't use a brush, but he did use a decent amount of paint. I think I get what you're saying. He was the opposite of those Bay Area guys in a lot of ways. He was clearly different. For me, it was more how he was it different from those guys that works for me. Is it that it was more difficult? Or is it that he was purely abstract and they weren't?

MAN: Your paint is certainly more... viscous than Still's. Not as viscous as Park's, but even within your 'rules' your basking in paint's properties.

MG: Yeah. And there's a certain way you see that the painter loves the paint and they make it very obvious. Maybe that's why I still think of Clyfford Still as more of an East Coast guy.

It's also that they're heavy, masculine works. They're aggressive and thoughtful at the same time and I like that in the work. He doesn't give you everything or make it super-obvious. He treats you as an equal.

MAN: Would you have fun installing your work with his, or 'curating' a small Still show in Denver someday or out of SFMOMA's collection?

MG:  I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to show at SFMOMA and I wouldn't pass up an opportunity to hang some Stills. That'd be great, I'd love to do that! That sounds like some fun.

Last week Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein reminded me how museums were once reticent to put images of works in their collection online. If the paintings were JPEGs, so went the thinking, who would come to the museum?

Fast forward: Last week Crain's and Gothamist had the first mentions of MoMA's new Atlantic Avenue-subway-based marketing campaign. It features posters of works in MoMA's collection plastered throughout a station. Before you could say 'doors closing,' a Flickr thread was doing booming broadband.

Yesterday the NYT's Randy Kennedy picked up on the story, complete with the new thinking, NYT-style: "[The] Museum of Modern Art... will briefly transform the cavernous stations into a kunsthalle."

How times change: According to the NYT, a marketing campaign of posters of such images in a subway station = a kunsthalle. [Image: From Jeff Baxter's Flickr stream, taken by Bradly Brown.]

A couple weeks ago I reported about an improper wall-text that SFMOMA added to Emily Jacir's Where We Came From. At the time I wondered: What will LACMA do when it installs Ed Kienholz's The Illegal Operation for the first time? LACMA acquired the sculpture last August, but shortly thereafter it went on view in Sweden.

The answer: The right thing. There is no politically-motivated/distancing wall-text on LACMA's Kienholz as there was on SFMOMA's Jacir. LACMA says that the wall-text is of the straightforward, art-historical variety. Nothing more.

News-willing, over the next two days I'll be featuring a series of posts about the Hammer Museum's Oranges & Sardines show. (If the news is not willing, it'll take more than two days.)

On one hand, Oranges & Sardines, just closed at the Hammer, is a really simple show for a museum and a curator to put on: Pick six artists. Give them each a gallery. Tell them to pick a couple of their paintings and some paintings of artists they dig. All done.

Except for Gary Garrels and the team at the Hammer it couldn't have been quite that simple. As the Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt pointed out, the six artists in O&S borrowed art from 43 different collections. And then there were galleries to build, assign and paint, artists Q&As to do for the catalogue, and Christopher Wool to deal with (because he didn't want to do a Q&A and just submitted a list of exhibitions he'd enjoyed).

The show worked -- and as Britt notes, it's easily copyable by museums and bloggers alike. Speaking of which: I particularly enjoyed reading about Mark Grotjahn's love of Bay Area art museums, so he and I continued that thread in a Q&A I'll publish here later today. Then I liked Garrels' concept so much that I invited Steve Roden -- a painter who loves to plumb forgotten art histories -- to do an O&S-style 'gallery' here on MAN. That'll run tomorrow.

Related: David Pagel in the LAT. Ed Schad. Garrels in conversation with the artists.

• There will be a town meeting at the Rose Art Museum at 6:30 pm. It will be webcast live here. [via]
  
• If you will be live-Tweeting the meeting, please tip me off.
• Lots of good content on the Rose's own site, including an open letter from Kimerly Rorschach, Gary Tinterow and Adam Weinberg, a strangely thin list of news coverage, more open letters to the school, and more at the bottom of the Rose's 'front page.' 
• Speak Clearly Rose, a new blog (with this awesome photo).
• Christopher Knight adds some historical context to my two-part Q&A with Rose board chair Jonathan Lee.
  

Continued from this morning with Rose Art Museum board chair Jonathan Lee...

MAN: To the best of my knowledge, Brandeis has not actually tried to sell any art yet, nor has it moved to seize the Rose's endowment funds: $16 million in endowment and about $4 million in facilities funds.

Jonathan Lee: That's right. They haven't yet.

They know the eyes of the world are looking at them. I've said, 'Guys, you don't want to plow the road here for other universities. Why do you want to be the guy who does it. If this is a road to be plowed, let someone else do it.' Why do you want to be the guy who says, ''I've set the precedent?' After all, if a university can sell its stuff, then a city could and a town could -- and is the United States in such dire straits that we want all of our places selling their stuff? [Image: Jenny Holzer, Stave, Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: Other than a public relations campaign, does the Rose have any procedural options -- that is legal options -- until they do seize funds or until they do try to sell art?

JL: I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. The whole 'who's got standing and on what basis...' But we do have a good lawyer on our board, we're looking into all of this stuff. And it's not like I haven't talked to a bunch of angry donors who are talking to their lawyers.

I suspect this evolves into a lot of litigation, but that would be sad. There's no positive upside to this course of action in my point-of-view. If I get an audience [with the Brandeis University board] I'd like to say, 'I'm a friend not an enemy, and this is why...'

I'm having a tough time spelling out my view of reality because they're pretty set in their view. Their view is pretty much dictated by one guy, a university president, plus a chair and a former board chair. These people drive everything.

MAN: Have you and the board conducted an examination of what your legal options might be if and when seizure happens? I mean, do you have a legal plan set up, ready to operate should Brandeis try to seize and move a painting tomorrow? Or are you still in evaluation mode?

JL: Well, as far as the [$20 million is concerned], we don't have control of our funds. We don't have our own funds.

But yes, there's a lot of talking to attorneys going on. [Brandeis has] told me they are not going to seize art tomorrow. I believe that. I think all of this takes a fair amount of time. They don't want to sell art tomorrow, they'd like the art market to recover. I think what they have in their minds -- I imagine this from what they have said to me -- is 18 months. They want to clear the decks legally, get rid of the museum so we don't have that 'messy ethics stuff,' get all the documents to the Massachusetts attorney general's office and then they hope the AG can give [them] a clear channel. They've hired a guy who used to run the non-profit division of the AG's office  and they think, 'Isn't that cool?' and they think he'll tell them how it'll be OK to do what they want. [Image: Milton Avery, Party at Sylvia's, Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: I know you've talked with the AG's office. Have those conversations focused on donor intent issues? Or on other areas too?

JL: When I talked with the man from the AG's office, he said that they will operate a slow, deliberate, transparent process and that they are not likely to give a go-ahead until we go through all of it. Of course, I'm worried about 'Swiss cheese,' that is, that Brandeis gets one or two pieces clear. The AG's office said to me no, and that they've thought of that.

Look, I don't want to sit here and say to you that I'm threatening lawsuits. I'd love to enlighten folks and get them re-tracked, That is far and away our preference.

But yes, I hope there are other legal issues in play. I know first and primary is donor intent. But let's be honest: If you're looking at a lawsuit here down the road, any judge is going to understand it's probably hard to keep it narrow. You're talking about a broad-scale precedent that other universities would then be looking at very closely. If you give the go-ahead to Brandeis, you're giving the green light for lots of universities to bail on their stuff. And if you're a smart judge you're saying, 'Why doesn't that lead to cities and towns...' And before you know it everyone's selling stuff.

MAN: This is probably a silly question and it probably indicates my lack of knowledge about the way in which Brandeis and the Rose are legally related. And I understand that there are substantial issues that this question ignores, including the place of an art museum and an art collection at an institution of higher learning. But... at some point could the Rose just declare independence? Just declare itself free of Brandeis, and operate itself independently of the university affiliation?

JL: I don't know That might be cool: At the end of the day we'd become our own 501(c)3. By the way, the building was given to make a museum. You could make a case that the buildings aren't owned by the university, but the land is owned by the university, and the building is owned by the art museum. I don't know. It seems like a long-shot.

But I'll admit, I've asked that question of myself. We're so far away from that... but I can't say yes, and I don't know. But yeah, I've asked the question myself, and every time I've asked that, people say we're pretty far away from that. That's several steps removed.

Yesterday evening I spoke with Jonathan Lee, the chairman of the Rose Art Museum's board of overseers. (Lee also sits on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Aspen Art Museum.) Lee has been notably outspoken regarding Brandeis University's attempts to sell off the Rose Art Museum's art collection. That outspokenness continues in this Q&A, which I'll run in two parts. Look for the second half around noon. [Image: Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curves, 1954, Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: Last week you said that you wanted to meet with the Brandeis board. Has that happened, will that happen?

Jonathan Lee: I sent the president of the university a letter [Monday] asking to meet with him, with his attorney, and any members of the Brandeis University board that he'd like to have at the meeting. I'd come with a small group of the Rose overseers. I doubt that will happen. My initial outreaches to the board itself have not borne any fruit. My expectation is that won't happen, but I'm making every good-faith effort to have such a meeting.

MAN: Do you have an endgame in mind for that meeting, a desired result? Or do you mostly want to chat and cajole?

JL: The issue that I have -- or that I perceive -- is that we share completely different reality sets. I'm sitting in a chair at the time this thing explodes as the chairman of the Rose of the board of overseers, so I have a duty and a responsibility to the collection and to the people who have given money to the museum. We have endowments and cash-on-hand for facility enhancements, and there is a museum that has been going since 1961. So I am representing those interests as loudly and as clearly as I can.

I come in as an art person and not first and foremost as a Brandeis person. I didn't go there. My mother was highly involved in the Rose and was, I think, the first chair of the board and had given a lot of pictures to this place as well as a gallery. I grew up going there and learning about art by her taking me there, so there's a long family connection and history.

So, with all that in mind, the endgame is to convince the trustees and the administration of the university that closing the art museum and selling the art is not in the interest of the university even though I appreciate that the university is in a dire financial time. I feel for the university. I am not anti-university, and I appreciate that the university's situation is difficult. I think that the solution does not lie with selling the art off. So I would love to get [Brandeis] motivated to develop a 'Plan B.'

Of course when they turn to me and say, 'What else should we do?' I'd say, 'I'm not on your university board of trustees and I'm not on your financial committee, and the things that I'd say off the top of my head that aren't well-founded you won't like. Such as: Stop building the buildings you're building. Stop rolling out things in your life sciences initiative for two or three years. But I'm on the outside. Obviously I'm not the most effective person to solve that problem.

But I do think that selling the art and closing the museum is extremely bad for the long-term health of the university. They say, 'Without selling the art we have no university.' And I say, 'If you sell art we have no university.' So I don't know who's correct, but my take on the art is this: The Rose is a cultural and an artistic legacy of post-World War II Jewry who got over the shock of Hitler and World War II and pulled themselves up and made money and became philanthropic and culturally-inclined, so they collected art, supported the university and gave it art. It's a beautiful legacy. It has an intellectual legacy beyond the art -- and the art here is the largest modern and contemporary collection in New England. This art has been loaned from the museum to all over the world. To me this is a world-class asset. Maybe I'm not subjective, but I categorize it as a world-class asset and I say protect your world-class asset, the kernel of the wheat, not the chaff.

This place is fundamental to a liberal art education. Louis Brandeis was very eloquent when he talks about this to his daughter, who was involved with the University of Louisville: One thing is you have to get books and start a library; and two you have to get art and start an art collection. He's very eloquent about what that means. [Image: Alexander Archipenko, Torso Nude Female Figure, Collection of the Rose Art Museum, dammit.]

MAN: You're looking at legacies from multiple positions: the past, the present and the future.

JL: Yes. The whole thing about art museum codes of conduct and codes of ethics -- Brandeis, they don't really care about museum codes of ethics. So that's why the first thing they said was that we won't be a museum anymore, we'll get around the codes of ethics by not being a museum.

My position is that you make a whole lot of current donors, past donors and much more importantly future donors really unhappy. It's a reputational hit that's hard to get over. It gets Jewish donors who are philanthropically-oriented... you give them a perfect excuse not to give Brandeis any money. What they're doing to the Rose is an easy out.

So yeah, I feel it's my job to try to protect this thing. Why do I want to see an artistic and cultural legacy busted up like some poor widow who is sending her jewelry [out] through a pawn shop to where it's ending up in Dubai and Russia?

It's not too late to strip the Coburn Amendment from the stimulus package that emerges from the House-Senate conference committee: You can still call/email your members of Congress to ask them to make sure the amendment is stripped from the final bill. Christopher Knight has been all over this story, including his call for a cultural jobs bill, an examination of why conservatives target us the arts, and his list of five reasons that Congress hates the arts. Richard Lacayo has also taken aim at the Coburn Amendment.

An Association of Art Museum Directors investigation into the Denver Art Museum and its director Lewis Sharp has found that Denver successfully found a loophole in AAMD's guidelines and that it should be proud of itself for doing so. As first detailed here on MAN, Denver engaged in a questionable transaction to sell half of a painting in its collection to a private collector who is a major supporter of the museum, which prompted AAMD to open an investigation last summer. Last week AAMD announced that it did not sanction or reprimand Sharp. AAMD apparently did not force DAM to make alterations to the unusual deaccessioning. Instead the organization swept the matter under the, er, building. [Image: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Big Sweep, 2006. Collection of the Denver Art Museum, at least for now...]

AAMD's statement, which is available here, says: "[A]fter a detailed review of the general issues involved in fractional deaccessions of works of art from a museum to a private party, the Board of AAMD strongly encourages member museums not to employ fractional deaccessions as a method of collections development."

In other words, if you are an art museum director and you are the first to figure out how to game the system, AAMD will give you a free pass. (Just don't be the second one to do it. Unless, of course, you choose to effectively rent your collection for display in a Las Vegas casino. We're looking at you, MFA Boston and possibly MCASD.)

A DAM spokesperson told me last week that DAM "endorse[s] the Association's decision to provide further clarity regarding these types of complex issues in the future. No formal revisions have been made to the original transaction." In a follow-up email the spokesperson said that no "informal revisions" had been made either. I have no confirmation that any changes were made to the DAM-Philip Anschutz transaction that created Denver's non-problem.

In recent years Congress and many state attorneys general have shown a willingness to investigate nonprofit institutions that misuse their tax-exempt status, particularly when that misuse benefits individuals who have a relationship with the non-profit. Denver's dealings with Philip Anschutz deserve that kind of scrutiny.

Also of note: At a time when AAMD is screaming from its papier mache mountaintop about how it's just horrible that Brandeis University wants to monetize the Rose Art Museum's art collection, it has allowed one of its (retiring) club members to do precisely that with his museum's collection. How can AAMD claim the moral and ethical high ground on the Brandeis-Rose Art Museum situation while it allows one of its members to creatively and improperly turn part of his collection into cash?

The Washington Post, arguably America's second-most influential newspaper, has neither a visual art nor an arts reporter on staff. Given the density of major national arts institutions here as well as the role of the federal government in the arts, that's fairly striking. It's a plain-as-day indicator of the continuing death of commercial arts journalism.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the National Gallery of Art could make a mind-blowing acquisition on Friday and that the Post never mentioned it. In case you missed it: On Friday night the NGA announced that it had acquired Bagpipe Player in Profile (1824, right) by Hendrick ter Brugghen. Only the NYT mentioned the acquisition. (And kudos to the NYT for getting a late Friday-night announcement into the Saturday paper.)

Bagpipe Player was recently sold at Sotheby's for $10.2 million (inclusive of Sotheby's premium). It is unclear if the NGA was the buyer at auction, or if it acquired the painting through a dealer shortly after the auction.

This is a biggie for the NGA, which has a remarkable collection of Dutch Golden Age art, but which has long lacked a major work by an Utrecht Caravaggisti. Also: The NGA's Dutch curator, Arthur Wheelock, is a dervish. This is the second major acquisition Wheelock has made in the last year. (The other was the NGA's first Salomon van Ruysdael.)

• Christopher Knight makes a terrific argument for including substantial funding for culture in the federal stimulus package. It says something about how ineffectively the arts worlds engage government that this hasn't come up before now...
• Sebastian Smee reviews Shephard Fairey at the Boston ICA.
  
• The KC Star's Alice Thorson says the Nerman Museum's recent acquisitions show should remind the boneheads at Brandeis why art is instructional.
• Jen Graves examines the Munich Secessionists at the Frye.
  
• There is a ton of super stuff on Regina Hackett's Seattle P-I blog. The Seattle P-I is in danger of ceasing to exist any day now. So go enjoy Hackett while you still can.
• The Dallas Morning News' Scott Cantrell journeys to Houston to take in a major Ernst show at the Menil. (Unrelated story: Given that the Met's Ernst retro severely downplayed Ernst's Dada work, how about an Ernst Dada show someone...)
• Speaking of the DMN: Love it when newspapers cover museum exhibitions. Kriston Capps on recent acqs at the Dallas Museum of Art.
• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt on the death of Max Neuhaus.
• See: Other art folk love hockey and Alex Ovechkin too! [via]
  

At 9:30pm EST on Friday, the National Gallery of Art announced this acquisition, which is related to this news. More on Monday.

While I was traveling yesterday: Just after an Iowa state senator says that Iowa could raise $200 million by selling the University of Iowa Museum of Art's 1943 Jackson Pollock Mural -- pause for laughter, much laughter -- some Iowa legislative leaders and University of Iowa president Sally Mason said they have no interest in selling Mural.

Of special note: Matt McCoy is the state senator who told the Des Moines Register that he wants to sell the Pollock. One of McCoy's constituents in Iowa Senate District 31 is Des Moines Art Center director Jeff Fleming, who has come under fire here on MAN for his lack of leadership on the Pollock issue. (DMAC found itself entangled in the Pollock issue when the husband of one of its trustees started this whole mess.) Fleming defended his low-key position on the Pollock here.

Readers may email McCoy here.

UPDATE: Iowa Gov. Chet Culver reiterates his opposition to selling the Pollock.

I was on travel yesterday, so expect some newsy, rat-a-tat posts this morning...

The Brandeis faculty tells Brandeis' wanna-be Gagosian Jehuda Reinharz that his lunkheadedness regarding the art collection of the Rose Art Museum has led to a "crisis of confidence" in his administration, reports the Boston Globe. Reinharz issued a bizarre letter yesterday. A funeral march protests the potential closing of the Rose. Reinharz bizarrely wraps himself in Obama? Richard Lacayo traps Jehuda Reinharz in Brandeis' own words.

If you would like to express yourself to Brandeis' Gogo-in-waiting, you may email him via this e-mail address.

Yesterday the Frick launched a web feature detailing the Getty's cleaning of the Norton Simon's great Zurbaran still-life. The Zurbaran is arguably the greatest European still-life in the United States, and after seeing what Getty conservator Mark Leonard did to it I can't wait to see the painting again. Or, in a way, to see it for the first time.

Here's a dramatic preview of the Frick feature: On the left, a detail from the painting pre-cleaning. On the right, the same detail, post-cleaning.

Today even the museums that are the best at putting their collections online have a very limited amount of information online, for a limited number of objects. The National Gallery of Art has more online about more many works in its collection than just about any American museum, but even its fullest records -- such as for this Ribera -- stop short of the level of detail and breadth about which the Getty is talking. Other museums have emphasized public access: MoMA has added some social media sharing tools to its collection and will be adding more -- but it provides relatively little information about individual works online. And then there's the Metropolitan Museum of Art's online collection listings, which are, well, impossible to use for anything.

"Museums used to worry about a JPEG being the surrogate and not the original," Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein, who is managing the project I started detailing yesterday, said. "Years ago the fear was, 'If we put it online then no one will come see original.' It sounds funny now, but in the early days that was the issue. No more. Museums see how people use their websites, and how they might better use their websites."

So aside from the obvious, how would an online, accessible-to-everyone-for-free online art museum collection catalogue be different from what museums do either online or in print?  Weinstein told me that the Getty started from the top.

"How do you not take what would just be a PDF page online, but totally re-think it for an online environment?" Weinstein said. "How do you track scholarship if it changes all the time? How do you reference something to a certain date if it's constantly updated?"

If everything goes well, the result will be 21st-century collection catalogues on steroids. Anyone with a web connection will be able to overlay x-rays of a painting over the 'actual' painting. Or see how curators through the years have changed their opinions on key points about a painting or an artist. Or see how conservators have helped paintings along. Or click from bibliography listings right to articles, or to related paintings in other museums' collections.

Weinstein said that there are some hurdles to creating Collection Catalogues 2.0: Curators were initially a bit hesitant to publish online because, well, you know, books are real and pixels aren't. Museums want to be sure that they respect the intellectual property and rights of living artists. Some museums are wary of putting super-high-quality large images of paintings online for fear that people will turn paintings into consumer objects. Curators are also worried that essays published in HTML aren't 'archival' in the same way books are, so the project will likely also enable unchangeable PDFs of scholarly essays. Finally, museums have done catalogues a certain way for decades. The Getty's nine initial institutions (the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the Walker, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA) are considering new ways of doing catalogues and who is -- and isn't -- involved in the process.

Right now the Getty is in the process of tracking how its initial group does everything, and it will document methods, compare costs and will share that information with the field. The Getty has asked the museums above (plus the Getty Museum) to apply for funding and in the next few months it will announce its first 'CC 2.0' grants. A next-gen catalogue could be online as soon as 2011.

Could the Iowa legislature force the sale of the University of Iowa Art Museum's Jackson Pollock?

There is a section of one of my bookcases where I keep collection catalogues from museums such as the Walker, MCASD, and so on. It's a great reference for when I want to find images to use on MAN or when I just want to look something up.

The problem is that it's a ridiculously incomplete shelf. I can't afford MoMA's umpteen different collection catalogues, nor the Met's 243 tomes. (I made that number up; it may be low.) Even if I could afford to buy the collection catalogues from, say, America's 20 most important museums, where would I keep them all? That's a lot of bound paper. Because of cost and volume, collections and the scholarship done about them are primarily accessible to two groups of people: People who live in City X who can visit the extremely limited percentage of collection on view at City X Museum on a given day, and scholars who have access to libraries with excellent art-related books collections. If I feel like looking at the Nelson-Atkins' Caravaggio -- let alone learning more about it -- the available images and information are limited.

Enter the Getty Foundation, which is working on a program that could transform how museums catalogue their collections and how they share their art and scholarship with the public. The Getty's project is ambitious: It aims to replace the expensive dead-tree scholarly catalogue with an open-source, web-accessible-to-all, digital catalogue format. For now the Getty is working with nine museums on the initial stage of the project: the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian's Sackler/Freer, SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Walker, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, the Seattle Art Museum and LACMA.

"In transforming the catalogues to an online environment, they won't be just scholarly," Getty Foundation associate director Joan Weinstein told me. Weinstein is managing the Getty project. "The premise is that you can include all kinds of information online that you can't in a print volume, information for everyone from the general public to students to scholars. You don't have to wait until everything's complete to put it online. You can have multiple voices in single entries: For more recent work, you can have both artists and curators speaking. Same thing for older collections. You can have conservators speaking and you can put the conservation documentation online. You could even super-impose an x-ray onto the image of a work of art itself."

Read more: The Getty's first publication detailing its online cataloguing initiative, how it might work and how museums would have to change in order to provide better access to their art collections.

Tomorrow: What all this would involve for museums -- and what it would enable for the rest of us.

On the left, Luisa Lambri's Untitled (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, #12), 2008 and on view now at Luhring Augustine in New York. On the right, Hiroshi Sugimoto's C1015, from his Colors of Shadow series.

Last Friday I told you that MOCA would announce job cuts and trustee changes. Late that day  the museum announced the job cuts. Today the LAT has the story of substantial trustee departures.

Continued from here...

Paradoxically, when I encountered the best Morandis at the Met's recent retrospective, my first impulse was to step back from them. Morandi still-lifes may be small paintings -- the Met's show amusingly demonstrated how many owners of Morandi's paintings try to bulk them up with big frames -- but I prefer viewing them from a distance, all the better to allow Morandi's compositions move my eyes around the canvas. In the Met's hanging there was a hanging of two 1949 still-lifes that indicated that Morandi liked to do the same thing with his objects: He painted nearly the exact assemblage up close, so that they filled almost the entire canvas, and then 'from a distance,' so that they filled less of the canvas. [The image above is a detail from this 1956 still-life.]

But when I zoomed in close on individual paintings, I found myself more fascinated than I'd ever been with Morandi's brushstrokes. Only about a dozen of the paintings at the Met were from Morandi's pre-mature period; the rest came from about his 40th birthday on. Thus the show provided an excellent, extended way to examine how Morandi made his paintings.

Photographers, writers and scholars have all made much of how Morandi used a stable of objects over and over for 35 years, how he rearranged them and painted them over and over. He did, and the result is a fascinating monotone of consistency. But Morandi also used the same brushstrokes for 35 years. He built his objects on canvas almost exactly the same way for his entire adult life. (I'm apparently not the only one who became fascinated by Morandi's brushstrokes -- the show's excellent catalogue is full of super-tight details of Morandi's work.)

Morandi's brushstrokes are tactile, modest, careful -- and always certain. On still-life after still-life his process is abundantly clear: He picked a color on his palette, he loaded up his brush, and then he laid paint on canvas in the prescribed place. Morandi's still-lifes are not the product of meticulous working and re-working: Most of the time he picked a vessel, picked a color, put it on canvas, and moved on to the next vessel. He didn't mix his colors on canvas. Even in his later years, when his brushstrokes become a little wavier, a little less firm, he stayed within the rules he apparently laid down for himself. [The image at right is a detail from this 1956 still-life.]

This is a marked difference from how Morandi painted his landscapes, which Morandi built differently: He painted trees as if they were in breeze-induced motion, as masses of color rather than as distinct objects. When it came to painting foliage, Morandi laid light green over dark green and vice versa, blending them on the surface of his paintings in a way that created depth. And while the landscape 'sample' in the Met's show is markedly smaller than the still-life sample, I noticed that Morandi happily mixed colors on the canvas on most of them, sticking to his apparent 'rules' as strictly as he did with his still-lifes. It leaves me really hoping for a U.S. Morandi landscape show. [I've included a 1942 landscape and a detail in the jump, but it's pretty hard to see what I'm talking about with the landscape JPEG I have available.]

• I love it when stuff like this happens: Last year I did a post about the near-death of artist self-portraits just as the rest of us embrace them on Facebook and Twitter and so on. So along comes painter Matt Held... who will paint your JPEG'd self-portrait for your Facebook page. Held explains the project here.
• Remember these federal raids on LA museums last year? KPCC's Adolfo Guzman-Lopez explains how the antiquities-to-museums biz has changed since.
• The Houston Chronicle's Douglas Britt talks about the Menil's expansion plan and whether the Menil should be adding gallery space. Short answer: Yes. Smarter answer: Britt's.
  
• Venetian Red finds pleasure in the Leo Villareal at the NGA.
• There's some Diebenkorn up in SF, says Bay Area Art Quake.
• Jon Lutz chats with Harry Shearer about his show at the Aldrich.
  
• Finally: Pick a Kiss! (Me: Klimt.)

• Ed Winkleman posted the most thoughtful response to the SFMOMA-Jacir news that I've read so far. His take is spot-on. SFMOMA is both trying to stand behind the piece and in front of it, and in the process the museum is insulting the artist and her work.
• Just as I did, Hrag Vartanian wonders: Where does the museum draw the line?
• Timothy Buckwalter isn't satisfied with SFMOMA's response either.
• Translinguistic Other nails it in the last sentence of this post.
  
• Clancco notes that the institution's text "violently intercedes in the creation of [the Jacir's] meaning."
• I'm surprised that no major California paper has picked up on the story. (Or got there before I did.)
  

First up: A journalist asked me in email why I don't talk about "deaccessioning" re: what is happening to the Rose Art Museum. Fair question. Answer: Because it's not a deaccessioning. Brandeis is attempting to seize the Rose Art Museum's art collection and its endowment for the purpose of (at least partially and depending on the day of the week) liquidating the former, and commandeering the latter. 'Deaccessioning' is a term of art (sorry about that) that is specific to art museums and the disbursement of works in their collection. That's not what's happening here. [Image: Alexander Calder's tapestry Corn Meal, from the collection of the Rose Art Museum]

• Today Roberta Smith has a strong piece condemning Brandeis' attempted seizure. I wish it had run last week (umpteen other outlets have been intelligently opining on this for almost a week now), but I still dig it today;
• Jeff Weinstein, a Brandeis alum and ex- of the Village Voice, the Philly Inky and Bloomberg, tells a fantastic, personal story about Brandeis and the Rose;
• The NYT editorial page lashes Brandeis and its president;
• In case you missed it: Harvard's Tom Lentz has spoken out;
• So has Rose Art Museum director Michael Rush -- and on the Rose's own website. Well played!;
  
• The Chronicle of Higher Education's Laurie Fendrich is posting regularly. Instead of linking to each post I'll simply suggest that you go read everything she's writing; and
  
• A nice reminder that the Rose is a functioning, admired art museum: Greg Cook reviews the Rose's current Hans Hofmann show.

From time to time I complain about the lack of leadership some museum directors show on important local or national issues. Sometimes I'll even be very specific about what directors should be speaking out on what issues. For example: Last week I wondered out-loud whether Harvard's Tom Lentz or MFA Boston's Malcolm Rogers would call out Brandeis University for its attempts to sell off the Rose Art Museum's art collection and commandeer the Rose's endowment.

I was pretty sure that Lentz would give Brandeis a public flogging: Lentz is a demonstrated industry leader on issues such as this and the Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers is smart and knows which arts leaders might/should speak out on a key story. On Friday afternoon Edgers and Lentz chatted. Here's the must-read result, complete with Lentz saying he'll be "surprised" if the Brandeis sale goes through. Kudos to Lentz.

• Michael Z. Wise's NYT Q&A with Emily Jacir was disjointed and dull and full of insinuation. If he was looking to tag Jacir as an artist whose work has become a flashpoint for controversy, he didn't have to look back very far (but didn't).
  
• Roberta Smith reviews Bonnard at the Met.
• Konrad Marshall takes to the Indianapolis Star to explain iMOCA's role in the Indy firmament.
• Jeremy Strick's ex-board chair says that the Nasher Sculpture Center made a "fantastic hire" in hiring Strick. Which does not explain why said ex-board chair was so unwilling to help properly fund Strick's museum when he had him.
• David Bonetti (Brandeis, '69) writes passionately about "the rape of the Rose."
• Luis Croquer is the new director of Detroit's MOCA (aka MOCAD), says the Freep's Mark Stryker.
  
• Rarity: Museum acquires work, newspaper covers it. In this case the MIA acquires a Yinka Shonibare photograph and Mary Abbe of the Strib writes it up.
• It is inconceivable to me that the LA Times (in the person of Scarlet Cheng) would bother to write about the 'The Third Mind' at the Gugg and fail to mention John McLaughlin. (Holland Cotter did the same thing in the NYT, but I'm rarely stunned by Cotter's omissions, though sometimes I do note them.)