October 2009 Archives

One of the familiar familiars on Anne Truitt is that she's been an invisible figure, ignored by the critical discourse for years and years.

It's certainly true that Truitt hasn't been written about as widely as, say, Donald Judd. But there has been a slow drip of Truitt consideration over the years, including this fabulous, short piece by Newsweek's Peter Plagens. This paragraph is probably the best description of Truitt's work I've read:

Truitt's work is deceptively simple. Take "Autumn Dryad" (1975), for instance. It's a boxy wooden column, a little taller than most people, painted entirely orange except for a grayish mauve brand around the bottom. At first glance, it seems like a design fillip for a Scandinavian airport lobby. But as you continue to look at it (and you cannot help but look at it), you notice that the acrylic paint has been lovingly applied in untold coats. Simultaneously, the sculpture looks like it's solid color, like butter is yellow all the way through. The piece makes your mouth water (which is, by the way, the test of all good abstract art). "Autumn Dryad" is visceral -- as opposed to conceptual-minimalism. As Truitt puts it, "Everything is written on the body. Your experience stains your body like color dyes a canvas. [That's why] the paint sinks into the wood. It marries the wood." In almost all the works on view, the bride and groom indeed live happily ever after.

But I also quote it for this: I've concluded that it's impossible to write about Truitt's work without quoting her from time to time. What artist has ever written so clearly about what they see, how they live and have lived and about how they translate that into what they make?

In yesterday's examination of the Hirshhorn's Anne Truitt retrospective I discussed how Truitt didn't fit neatly into the categories that critics and scholars have built up around post-war art. Sure, Truitt's a minimalist, but only kind of. Sure, Truitt made sculptures, but she didn't do much sculpting. And so on.

As such, the Hirshhorn's Truitt show provides an opportunity for a re-consideration of how we think about post-abstract-expressionist art. Typically we talk about the post-abex generation as being pop artists or minimalists or whatever. Sure, Truitt is some of those things. But mostly she makes work that is slow, that is slow to look at, that she made slowly and that draws the viewer into a slow visual absorption of the work. (Truitt painted and sanded and re-painted her surfaces dozens of times before they had the depth of color she wanted.)

Perhaps the right way to consider Truitt is as part of an unaffiliated group of artists who slowed art from the frenetic pace of the expressionists, both figurative-exers such as David Park and Willem de Kooning, and ab-exers such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

From the first gallery of the Truitt show forward I was conscious of the way in which individual sculptures trapped my eyes and slowed my looking. Truitt's Watauga (1962) is a low-slung sculpture, longer than it is tall, a big rectangle sitting on a smaller rectangle. The smaller rectangle thrusts forward, toward the viewer. The left side of the sculpture is painted near-black, the right side is a ruddy brown. (All of Truitt's colors seem to require two-word descriptions.) Just like a good Barnett Newman grabs the viewer's eye and moves it around the canvas, Watauga held my eye, which involuntarily bounced between the big rectangle and the smaller, thrust-forward 'base.' I'd look away, return to Watauga, and would find myself trapped again.

Over and over, too. Insurrection (1962) held my eye between its two reds. Valley Forge (1963) bounced me between its red rectangles, turning my gaze into a participant in art Pong. A Wall for Apricots (1968, above) shuttled my eye up and down, from a pale blue to a pine-tree green to a dead yellow, and back up again. Landfall (1970) features a faded-denim blue with some small, overlapping blocks of darker blues at its base. My eye would wander up the plinth, and then would be snapped back down to the darker blues at the base, only to be drawn upward again by the expanse of light blue. And repeat. Truitts are easy to get lost in, to spend time on. If you walk by them you miss them. If you linger you are rewarded.

Truitt was hardly the only artist looking for ways to reclaim surface, technique, color, light, process and pretty much everything else form the abex-ers. Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler and James Turrell all reduced art down to light and each found ways to gave it enough physical space so that we could lose ourselves in it. As with Truitts, if you look at an Irwin or a Turrell quickly, you may not see anything. It takes time.

And more: Robert Smithson made art that emphasized the long, slow passage of time. Ed Ruscha made paintings that only fully revealed themselves once you solved his word or picture games. Richard Long took walks, long walks. Ultimately, maybe we should think less about our beloved -isms and more about pacing.

Related: Anne Truitt and what I learned about her work by visiting Maryland's Eastern Shore. Greg Allen flirted with some similar ideas.

• Nayland Blake sez, 'Make a Halloween costume for your art!"
• Richard Lacayo tries to figure out why Miami Art Museum director Terry Riley resigned (?) so abruptly.
• When neurobiologissts meet art historians.
• When artist Steve Roden writes about seeing, you should read it.
  

Only rarely does an historical exhibition unveil a familiar artist as an unexpectedly major figure, as someone who was somehow overlooked. "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection," on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is one of those shows.

The exhibition, curated by Kristen Hileman, reveals the full scope of Truitt's multi-disciplinary career and the remarkable, frankly surprising 40-year consistency of her oeuvre. It is a presentation that will leave even the most knowledgable critics, curators and historians wondering how they missed her. [Image: Installation of Return (2004), Elixir (1997) and Evensong (2004) at the Hirshhorn.]

Maybe Truitt has been skipped over because she is an artist who didn't (and still doesn't) fit into a post-ab-ex nomenclature that has confined artists to certain critical, curatorial or commercial boxes. Instead: Like Donald Judd, Truitt was a minimalist. Like David Smith, a sculptor. Like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, a painter. Like Dan Flavin, a colorist. Like Lee Bontecou or Agnes Martin, a woman who dabbled in New York but who mostly stayed away (and who paid for it). Like David Hammons, an artist whose lack of market savvy and engagement has prevented her from being broadly embraced. Like Robert Irwin or Doug Wheeler, an artist who valued physical experience and perception.

But maybe the best explanation of how we've all missed the breadth of Truitt's achievement is that she was uninterested in the commercial side of the art world. Truitt was never proactive in presenting herself to dealers and collectors She was more interested in her artistic practice than she was in participating in the market-guided establishment. As a result, Truitts are in few museum collections and as a result are not oft on public view. This has had the effect of encumbering new consideration of her work and has sealed her reputation in Greenbergian amber. The Hirshhorn's exhibition should be a shot across the bow of the Chelsea-dominated establishment: When institutions and collectors rely on the trading floor to guide them to accomplishment, that they are effectively confining their worldview to sales brochures.

As a result of all this, the standard view of Truitt was that she was not on the cutting-edge of anything. No more. The Hirshhorn exhibition of 49 sculptures, 26 works on paper and 12 paintings presents Truitt as an artist in the vanguard of multi-media practice. Truitt sculptures are paintings and vice versa. This is not latter-day curatorial or critical myth-making; Truitt herself identified her approach as a progressive conceptual strategy and was was hesitant to refer to her painted plinths as mere sculptures: "It is difficult to convey the idea that these structures are intrinsically paintings, as delicate of surface," she wrote in her famed artist's journal Daybook, the 'work' for which she is probably best-known. 

Before Truitt, artists certainly made both painting and sculpture. Witness Barnett Newman, who made paintings that were one of Truitt's two principle motivating influences. Newman's sculpture practice was distinctly different from his painting practice. The two never overlapped. A Newman painting was a painting and a Newman sculpture was a heroic thing in bronze.

Enter Truitt, who from the very beginning of her practice knew she was doing something different. "[E]arly in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights," she wrote in Daybook. "I was actually trying to... take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake." Fast-forward to now, when Franz Ackermann-style three-dimensional painting and practice-blending is so common that an artist would no more think to separate her painting and sculptural practices than she would confine herself to just one.

Truitt was ahead of her time. The Hirshhorn exhibition reveals that Truitt's practice-blending was not a one-off idea that worked for a while, it was a fundamental principle that drove her for over 40 years, from her first major work, 1961's First [above, left], through the honestly, fatalistically-titled Evensong of 2004, the year in which she died.

Each sculptural plinth is really eight three-dimensional paintings in one. To see Truitt's sculptures fully, a viewer has to look at all four sides, each of which may feature different colors and compositions. Then, to finish seeing each work, a viewer has to stand at each of the four corners, from which the viewer can see two sides of the plinth at the same time. Over a period of time and as you walk slowly around each object, it presents itself as a series of paintings. [Image: Elixir (detail), 1997.]

The exhibition is as perfect as a Truitt show is likely to be. I have only minor quibbles: The sculptures are slightly elevated on risers, which takes away from how they relate to the viewer's body. It's maddeningly impossible to walk 360 degrees around many of them. Even though the exhibition fills nearly an entire floor of the Hirshhorn, it turns out that the color that emanates from each sculpture demands so much space that the show feels crowded. Curators of future Truitt shows will struggle with these same issues; the Hirshhorn handled them as well as they could have been handled.

The only preventable error is the show's catalogue, the first major monograph on Truitt. It includes only two essays, one by Hileman and the other by the minimalism and Truitt scholar James Meyer. Hileman's essay reads like it was assembled by conflict-avoiding team of lawyers rather than by a scholar who was allowed to present and contextualize the artist. The catalogue makes little effort to extend the consideration of Truitt's work among scholars or to bring new context to her achievements. It is a missed opportunity.

Truitt probably wouldn't have minded. She knew that her work had to be experienced, not just seen. The Hirshhorn show closes Jan. 3, 2010. It will not travel.

MAN will feature several more posts examining "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection." Upcoming posts will examine Truitt as a colorist and as a 'slow artist.'

One of the major books of my college years was David Halberstam's The Fifties. The conventional wisdom was that the book rescued the 1950s from its reputation for being Leave it to Beaver-style boring and that it presented the 1950s as the decade that wasn't just before but that gave rise to the 1960s.

Well, that's probably true. The Fifties did that. But it also did it while substantially ignoring the cultural life of the nation. The book doesn't so much as mention Robert Rauschenberg or Jasper Johns, two of the Americans who helped cement America's place as the post-Parisian land of progressive art. (And nevermind Halberstam's referencing Rauschenberg & Co. as being on the vanguard of what would become the gay liberation movement. Didn't happen.)

So just in time for American museums' justifiable obsession with exhibitions of Robert Frank's 1959(ish) classic series 'The Americans,' journalist Fred Kaplan has written a book examining 1959. The book presents the year as a turning point in 20th-century America. Appropriately enough it includes cultural events, including Frank's series, the Beats, erotic literature, the birth of the Guggenheim, the ascent of Rauschenberg, Johns and more. It's a much more complete look at how the decade -- especially 1959 -- was important than Halberstam's book.

Bonus: C-Monster just published a not-your-usual Q&A with Kaplan. Don't miss either!

Related: Robert Frank speaks at the National Gallery.

• If you are an art critic and if you use the phrase "bovine poo," then I will likely link to it. (Artist: Peter Shelton. Critic: Christopher Knight.)
  
• Knight dismantles a wingnut LAT op-ed about Shepard Fairey. Kind of leaves one wondering how such a flimsily researched piece made it into the paper.
• Speaking of the right-wing noise machine, Greg Cook has a nice roundup of its reaction to a Harvard exhibition about ACT UP's history.
  
• For the NYT, Ted Loos notices that MoMA chief curator of painting and sculpture Ann Temkin has been changing things up. Good catch. I've enjoyed that the permanent collection galleries are looking more risk-willing, less same-old, same-old. (Not entirely, mind you, but some steps...)
• Maybe the Charles Russell retrospective at the Denver Art Museum is the greatest thing ever, but the liberal use of OMG! adjectives by the Denver Post's Kyle MacMillan ("gripping," "best," "sweeping," "great," "highly accomplished," "overdue," "considerable" (twice), etc.) results in exhortation rather than a defense of (or discussion of) a considered position.
  
• In the Baltimore Sun, Tim Smith discusses the (promising!) scope of a major retrospective of Matisse prints at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
  
• The San Diego Union-Tribune's Robert Pincus asks if Tara Donovan (on view at MCASD) is an alchemist.

Throughout 2009, as I've written a series of posts that have examined the ways in which artists have addressed torture and related horrors, I've found myself thinking about Nancy Spero more and more. As I worked on those posts, I thought a lot about the humanity (or intentional lack thereof) of some of the work about which I was writing. I found myself mentally wandering toward Spero's work, which is as human, urgent and direct as any art since George Grosz.

Most of all I thought about Spero's art about war and violence. In many of her Vietnam War drawings, Spero used a helicopter as a symbol for both American militarism and for our nation's distance from the conflict. In G.L.O.R.Y. (1967, detail at right), Spero runs her helicopter up a flagpole, making explicit the way in which the stars-and-stripes helicopter stands in for the United States and declaring American culpability for the results of indiscriminate bombing. Politicians are shy about pointing fingers. Artists, especially Spero, need not be as circumspect. G.L.O.R.Y. is about responsibility and accountability in a way that realizes art's socio-political potential.

While many artists wallow in the space between art history and their art, in participating in a multi-generational discourse with previous artists, Spero was always more interested in the space between her art and contemporary events. It's not that she wasn't explicitly informed by art history, she just chose not to self-consciously bask in sizing herself up with the past. For Spero art history was not an oval around which she made left turns, but a straight road to now.

On Tuesday I called Connie Butler, the chief curator of MoMA's drawings department. In 2007 Butler curated WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, an audacious survey show of feminist art. We talked about Spero.

MAN: Thanks for chatting with me. I wanted to talk with you in particular because you just came through doing WACK! and I thought that maybe that experience might have given you the opportunity to re-examine a group of artists within the context of not just each other, but within a broader context. I wanted to know how you came out of that process thinking about Nancy Spero.

Connie Butler:  I ended up having a much deeper appreciation for the work after going through that process. I didn't know the work so well before doing WACK! Even though I had seen the work over the years there hadn't been many exhibitions in this country. I expected, as I got to know her, that I would find an incredibly formidable person there -- and she was.  [Image: Search and Destroy (detail), 1967.]

I last saw her about six months ago. She had this incredible force of her politics and her belief in the importance of dealing with, really, the big issues of life and death, birth, sexuality. She was a hugely strong personality and that was a thrill to get to know. She had all those things -- and in such a frail body in the last years.

She was one of my early visits for WACK! I was working on that show in 2002 when there was a show at Guild Hall on Long Island and at White Columns. Both were explicitly feminist exhibitions. There had just been a  great write-up in the NYT. So after seeing those two shows I visited Nancy to ask her to be in my show and to make a selection of her work.

She said to me, 'What more could you possibly say about this feminist work that hasn't been in those two exhibits there?' There was also something about what she had set up for me to see in her studio - it was something relatively small, some work that she had pulled out of a drawer or such. I just had this feeling of how she was emblematic to me of the diminished expectations that a lot of women of her generation had, that she couldn't see that no one had done a major exhibition on this topic and she couldn't see that someone would - or should.

So in a way, at first, that puzzled me... but then, as it turned out, this was something I kept experiencing. I visited Nancy relatively early on in the process of working on WACK!, and as it turned out, I experienced this same thing over and over again. It was most marked with her because she's one of the women in the show who had the biggest careers. And yet when I visited her, still she pulled out maybe four small fragments for me to see and I thought, 'Come on! You're a major, major figure! You should be telling me you want major real estate! An entire wall!' It's not like she wasn't strong or that she was shy, you know. [Image: Cri du Coeur (detail), 2005.)

MAN: Your show had a major impact. I don't know how to put this, but she's been 'trending up,' it seems.

CB: She was certainly front-and-center in Rob Storr's Venice Biennale. As she became more and more frail she wasn't able to travel and see some of these shows that really celebrated her work. But yes, I think in recent years she began to get her due, particularly with the American audience. As there has been more interest recently in figuration and in the socio-political context of art there's been a move to broaden the consideration of her work.

MAN: Is there any part of her work that you've been thinking about lately or that you think deserves some extra thought now?

CB: I think 'Torture of Women' is certainly one of her most important bodies of work, but lately and maybe since the [Galerie Lelong] show in the spring I've been thinking about the early war drawings. I think they're so gut wrenching and so incredibly simple and minimal in terms of their gesture and composition but so, so powerful. I think they're kind of extraordinary.

MAN: Did Nancy Spero become so identified as a feminist or as a 'political' artist that she became hard to consider as just an artist?

CB:This is going to maybe sound weird or perhaps it's an experience that's too personal to my own history. I didn't come to her first as a feminist artist. My feeling is that she really emerges into the consciousness of the art world is really in the 1980s, and not really within the context of feminism, where she'd been active since the late 1960s. You might be right, but maybe that's because in more recent years that the work has been associated with feminism.  [Ed.: After Butler and I did this Q&A, I noticed that the NYT headlined its obituary: "Nancy Spero, Artist of Feminism, is Dead at 83."] In addition to those in Europe such as Catherine de Zegher or Manuel Borja-Villel and Rosario Peiró, she's been championed by a number of wonderful American curators who weren't necessarily associated with feminism, curators such as Robert Storr, Elizabeth Smith and Susan Harris.

That's an interesting turn of events if you think about the arc of her career. Turning her back into a feminist is interesting. If you go back to the Vietnam War drawings, her feminism emerges out of her political feelings about a range of other issues: the Vietnam war and civil rights and such. She and Leon Golub were actively protesting on a lot of fronts before she began making explicitly feminist work into the 1970s.

MAN: Maybe it's just that the curators and people I talk to tend to be around my age, and that's a generation of folks that grew up after the 1988 Elizabeth Smith show at MOCA and so on. [Ed.: MOCA's exhibition archive is down. When it's up, I'll insert a link to the show.] I mean, when I've seen Spero it's hit me in the gut. But perhaps in recent years the Vietnam stuff and other work has been on view in museums less than the feminist work? Most of the Spero I've seen in the last couple years has been at MoMA, in fact. And it's been really meaningful to me.

CB: What you're getting at is right though. It's maybe partly because you're younger than I am and I did see the shows in the late '80s when, for my generation of curators and scholars, the 1970s and feminist art were the distant past and still unmined territory. But I think probably what you're getting at is right--because the work is figurative and because it's figurative in a very particular way. In fact, not only that, it's also the kind of mythologies she's dealing with, such as the female goddess mythology which was, in a way, verboten in the 1980s.

It's possible that more to the point is her work being political at all - maybe if it's had a more gradual build and reception it's partly because of that. Not unlike Leon's work, which was explicitly political and sexual and often very raw. I think political art has always had trouble reaching broad critical reception, possibly until right now.

In response to the ongoing debate over whether it is appropriate for art museums to stage single-private-collection exhibitions, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators, Sally Block, released this statement today:

The AAMC's broad-based membership represents the curators of a diverse number of fields of art and types of art museums in North America. As such, the AAMC is always cognizant of the complexities involved in loans for exhibitions whether from institutions or individuals. In exhibitions, art museum curators seek to present new information on works of arts based on scholarly research that can extend through the modern history of the works. An art museum curator's involvement in a private collector show is to interpret and determine how to present the collection in question. If a collection merits exposure, and fits the program and mission of the host museum, its presentation can be a great benefit to museum visitors by providing access to otherwise inaccessible works of art. Like its sister organizations, the AAMC reviews its opinions and standards on an ongoing basis.

My take: AAMC is not exactly planting the flag of scholarly independence or curatorial discretion. (I remain uncomfortable with the idea that there's meaningful merit/fulfillment of mission in merely "providing access" to a rich person's accumulations.) Also notable: AAMC is also leaving itself (and its membership) room to consider the issue anew...

On Sunday, the New York Times featured a special crossword puzzle celebrating the 50th anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark Guggenheim building. The puzzle's author was Elizabeth C. Gorski, a crossword constructor known for her entertaining, creative, holy cow! grids. (As followers of my Twitter feed know, I'm a big crossword fan.) I thought it would be fun to celebrate the Guggenheim's anniversary by talking with Gorski about her tribute puzzle. (Bonus: All of the images in this post are clued in the puzzle. There are a few spoilers herein, but it's Wednesday so you're caught up, right?)

MAN: How did you come up with the idea of doing a crossword on the Guggiversary, and then to incorporate a spiral into the grid?

Elizabeth Gorski: Well, the Guggenheim [theme] was pretty much just a fluke. I was visiting the museum about a year ago and read about their anniversary in a newsletter. I came home, where I have a little idea-board, and I immediately put up there as a nice thing to do.

The spiral evolved over time. I was thinking about the Guggenheim and I thought I could do a straight tribute puzzle, with the usual set-up, symmetry, no problem with that. But it just seemed that the building is so dynamic and the story behind it was so interesting I thought that'd be awfully boring.

I let it sit on the idea-board for a long time. Then I saw Ken Burns' documentary film on Frank Lloyd Wright and that was the defining moment. Remember at the end, when he plays that beautiful slow movement form the Beethoven's Emperor's Concerto? He takes you into the Guggenheim and he pans up and shows you the spiral and then and then, at camera level, slowly descends through the spiral. Burns used the Beethoven soundtrack in a way that was very powerful. (In fact, Burns had explained early in the documentary that Frank Lloyd Wright was a huge fan of Beethoven.) I thought that the grid has to be a spiral! [Image: 97 Across.]

Another evolution in my thought was: Should I make a round puzzle? Then I thought, maybe I should do what Wright was supposed to do, which was make something within a grid. Wright had to fit his building within a square city block, so I thought I'd use the standard block formation. My puzzle pretty much followed the architectural details set out by the New York Times, but the symmetry was all gone. That made it easier to construct because I didn't have to observe any kind of symmetry. I could make the design and put the words in. It was a weird evolution.

MAN: I'm a crossword geek so I know you're known for creative grids such as this one. I gather that when you pitch a grid such as this to NYT puzzle editor Will Shortz that he knows something like this might be coming and is receptive to them?

EG: Well, I really don't know. I have worked with Will for 14 years and my philosophy with editors is to have a necessary distance so they can examine the work and reject or accept it totally objectively. So I just sent him the grid without saying anything and told him that I made the grid in honor of the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary. I try to give them as much of a surprise as I can when they open the puzzle, to try to sell it and to say as little as possible about the puzzle. If you have to talk too much about the puzzle it really won't work. The solver doesn't have much to go with except the clues and that's the way it should be. I don't think [Shortz] expects anything from me and I always think everything's going to be my last puzzle. I had a 'Plan B' to give it to the museum for something. [Image: 101 Down.]

MAN: I was amazed at all these clever little stacks within the puzzle; MANET is right over OCEAN, and of course MANET painted lots of OCEAN scenes. PATRONAGE is over THE SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM, which is fitting because he was the museum's patron. Then, inside the spiral, you had BEGUILE-CHAGALL-DAPHNE as a three-fer stack. Near the end of his life CHAGALL made a BEGUILE(ing) portfolio of works titled 'DAPHNE and Chloe,' a print series that came out of work he did for the Paris Opera. So in addition to nine theme answers and such...!

EG: Now, should I just lie and say I planned that and appear much more interesting? I wish I could have planned that! In doing American-style puzzles every letter has to have an across and down component, so I don't think I could have planned that. That's amazing.

But those are some of the mysteries that emerge in puzzles. That's part of what makes them fun.

MAN: As Rex Parker noted, the theme density was astonishing. I gather there was certain theme content you knew you wanted in? Or? Walk us through that.

EG: Exactly. I went over to the Guggenheim's website and made a list of their artists and tried to include as many as I could possibly include while still maintaining a decent structure. Sometimes you can have overload and have too many themed answers and then a lot of stuff holding them together. So here I wanted all the artists I could get in -- it ended up being nine -- and I also wanted to distribute them around the grid instead of bunch them into one place. It's a lot easier when you don't have to worry about symmetry. Asymmetrical puzzles look harder but actually I find them much easier to construct. [Image: 34 Down.]

MAN: Anything you wanted to put in the puzzle but couldn't fit?

EG: I think I wanted a few more artists. There's always things you want to fit in and you're just constrained by the architectural details you have to follow. I think the major thing was to create the spiral.

MAN: Did you hear from anyone at the Guggenheim?

EG: I haven't heard from anyone at the Gugg, but I'm going there [today], the exact day of the anniversary. It's free. I'm looking forward to seeing it and I'll get Guggenheim 'spiral' cookies and I'll wear my spiral earrings. It was a lot of fun to celeb a great institution with the puzzle. I love buildings and I love the architecture. I'm a fan.

Related: Gorski's puzzle broken down (further spoiler alert) at Rex Parker's crossword blog. The puzzle and some entertaining notes about the Gugg's building at Jim Horne's Wordplay, the NYT's crossword blog.

• Holland Cotter wrote the NYT's Nancy Spero obituary.
• The Met has put together an exhibition-specific blog for its American Stories show. It's a thick read, but definitely a good one. 
• An art history mystery, Brueghel + telescopes (?) edition. 
• Yesterday I linked to a big-think Martha Schwendener essay about photography. On the occasion of these shows at SFMOMA, curator Lisa Sutcliffe asks photographers about their medium.
  

Ed Winkleman reports that Nancy Spero died over the weekend. She was 83. [Image: Nancy Spero, Thou Shalt Not Kill, plate VI from the portfolio The Ten Commandments, 1987. In numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Harvard Art Museum.]

About a year ago a couple of curator friends came to me with a question that was part-parlor game and part-not: Who might they nominate to represent the United States at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and it has to be a woman.

At the time I had just seen a superb Spero installation at MoMA, so I suggested Spero. Our little group decided that was a reasonably good idea, but that it would never fly with The Powers That Be. Today's contemporary art world, with its market-first focus, doesn't quite know what to do with Spero -- or with other artists who are more interested in engagement with the world than in engagement with their dealers.

Case in point: Last year the Reina Sofia presented a Spero retrospective. Even though the NYT had a cultural critic stationed in Europe, and even though that critic had a prior relationship with Spero and her work, the NYT didn't deem the first Spero survey in 20 years worth covering or reviewing. I'm guilty too: This is only the second mention of Spero on MAN. I've been interested in her work for some time, but I've not seen enough of it. Remarkably and ridiculously, until a recently the only Spero in Washington was a single print at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (The Hirshhorn just acquired two pieces. One, Torture of Women III, 1981, is in the jump. Click on it to expand it.)

Correction, 10/19/09: The Corcoran has a multi-panel Spero.

Tomorrow MAN will feature a Q&A on Spero with MoMA's Connie Butler, curator of the recent "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" exhibition.

Some links: In 1996 Michael Kimmelman visited the Met with Leon Golub and Spero. Kimmelman's story of their visit is wonderfully human, even beautiful. If you read one thing today, this should be it. Art21 ran a Spero segment in 2007. A Spero retrospective was at MOCA in 1988 and it should be in MOCA's excellent online exhibition archive, but as of this posting the site seems to be down. (Worth a click, though. If it works, run a search or go to 1988.) In 1993 Spero interviewed Sue Williams for BOMB magazine. Williams is the interview subject, but Spero was the star.

• The LAT's Suzanne Muchnic examines Annie Philbin's run as director of the Hammer.
• The Miami Herald's Fabiola Santiago profiles Guillermo Kuitca on the occasion of a Kuitca survey just up at the Miami Art Museum. Just curious: A Kuitca retrospective?! Why?
• Jen Graves digs a show of art about family at Western Bridge. 
• Jerry Saltz spotlights seven women who are artists (in slideshow form). 
• Martha Schwendener pens the kind of big-idea, expansive critical examination that's (unfortunately) out of fashion: Photography today.
• Greg Allen rounds up the news on the destruction of as much as 90 percent of Helio Oiticica's work.
  

Last May I noted that most obituaries of Robert Rauschenberg 'forgot' that he was gay, and I explained why that was an important omission: Rauschenberg was on the vanguard of what was then called gay liberation, he was on the vanguard of gay migration from rural areas to cities and his work frequently addressed homosexuality and equality in a direct way that artists before had not. I wrote that the coverage of Rauschenberg's death "hetero-normalized" him.

In a Sunday feature already posted online, the New York Times and free-lancer Carol Kino have unfortunately hetero-normalized David Hockney. According to Kino: "In 2005 Mr. Hockney -- temporarily, he says -- left Hollywood, where he had lived full time since 1978, to transform the manicured green and golden slopes, woods and farmland of the East Yorkshire landscape into spare, quickly worked compositions charged with pink, orange and violet."

That's not true. Hockney did not leave California because the East Yorkshire landscape romantically called him home to England. Hockney left because the United States government would not allow his partner, John Fitzherbert, back into the country. In order to be with Fitzherbert, Hockney returned to the UK. [The image above is a 1990 Hockney portrait of Fitzherbert.]

Even if Kino's error is one of what she and/or the NYT thinks is one of benign omission, it's not. America's discriminatory policies have driven away of the post-war era's most prominent artists -- someone who chose to live here because he loved being in America and who enriched the cultural life of our nation. America's treatment of Hockney, his partner and other men and women who have had to confront a similar circumstance, is a point of national shame, not a meaningless detail to be quietly dismissed.

UPDATE: A couple readers have emailed to suggest that I'm overstating the NYT's offense by using the word "error" given that Hockney's situation hasn't been written about in the U.S. media. Maybe I am. But that's also my point: Hockney hasn't made a secret of the situation. I don't think the NYT piece reported the complete truth... and the part the NYT didn't include is the part that has been traditionally left out because it's an uncomfortable truth.

The National Gallery of Art has acquired Byron Kim's Synecdoche, 1991-present. The installation, made up of over 400 monochromatic canvases hung in a grid, was shown at the 1993 'Multicultural' Whitney Biennial as a 265-panel installation [at right]. It has been shown in numerous iterations in the intervening years.

The work is the manfiestation of a conceptual strategy Kim used to examine America's diversity. Each panel represents the skin color of one person, a 'skin tone portrait,' of sorts. Sitters, some of whom were people Kim knew, some of whom were strangers, presented Kim with their arm for 20 minutes, and Kim painted the color of the arm with which he was presented in oil and wax.

The work, installed in a modernist grid, looks like a pre-modern mosaic. Fittingly, it is informed by a range of precedents, most notably minimalism. Not only is the Kim made up of monochromatic, gesturally-limited canvases of the sort that have been familiar since the heyday of minimalism, but they're are minimal in that they reduce Kim's sitters to their skin color, a wry presentation of the depth of America's commitment to multiculturalism and the myth of the melting pot.

Synecdoche, 1991-present also brings to mind a specific memory from my childhood: Around 1980 or so, my parents visited a color consultant in an effort to learn what color clothing/etc. was most appropriate to their skin tone, eye and hair color and so on. For years my father carried around the little booklet of his pre-approved' colors in the glove compartments of his car. Synecdoche, 1991-present is something of a national color chart, both an inventory and a chronicling of range.

The work will be installed at the NGA by October 24.

Related: Jen Graves and Robert Pincus on Synecdoche, 1991-present and a recent Kim survey. Kim discusses the piece for a MoMA audio guide.

At the beginning of his 13-hour television docu-essay Civilisation, a "personal" telling of the history of Western civilization, Kenneth Clark quotes John Ruskin: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

The quote tells us where Clark is going, why he's going there, and in whose tradition he hopes to follow. Civilisation, which turns 40 this year, is the best kind of epic relic: It's 13-part, appointment-viewing, single-teller, great-man history, told broadly, with a ridiculously huge sweeping arc -- and in colour, a near-first. It's personal, it's opinionated and it dared to make mistakes. This weekend the National Gallery of Art will celebrate Civilisation with two days of programming. Earlier this year the BBC celebrated its own programme with Civilisation: A Television Landmark at 40 (which the NGA will screen on Saturday).

The program (and the accompanying book) are notably imperfect. Women are almost totally absent. Clark is strikingly western European Christian-centric, at the expense of Judaism,  the Orthodox church and Islam. He misses artists and important developments in art: Mannerism, from El Greco to the Florentine portraiture of Bronzino and Pontormo, is absent. Venetian painting, in the persons of only Bellini and Titian, gets no more than a few dozen words. Goya, Velazquez and Cranach surface for only the briefest mentions -- part of the program's bias for Italian, French and British figures at the expense of Spaniards and Germans. Apparently civilization ends with impressionism, a nearly incomprehensible, indefensible endpoint. In failing to include Dada, Clark failed to chronicle the greatest impact art had on civilization in the 20thC: It enabled the first anti-war movement.

Even with all that -- and I could have kept going -- there's still something fantastically ambitious about the series. It is grounded in a certain middlebrow belief in self-improvement through broader understanding. It resolutely insists on the centrality of non-political developments in the development of man, of societies and of nations. It reminds us that great art lasts in a way that almost nothing else does. And, best of all, it's a lot of fun.

Related: The BBC looks at the influence the programme had on television. David Attenborough on the impact the programme had on him and on the BBC. The DVD of the entire series is $57.

Last week the NYT's photojournalism blog, Lens, featured this Thomas Lin post about a recent microphotography contest. The post is almost entirely about the intersection of photography and science, and how photographers continue to find new and exciting ways of showing us things we can't see (without help).

Lens put together a fun slideshow of images, the kind of thing that will amaze your co-workers. Some of the pictures remind me of abstract art, particularly painting. Haven't I seen these colors (and maybe shapes) in a Thomas Nozkowski? Didn't Lee Mullican make this? Something about this composition reminds me of Laura Owens. Maybe this is a detail from an early Lari Pittman? And so on. (Check out the slideshow and tweet me your associations.)

This intersection of photography and science is nothing new. Late last year SFMOMA curator Corey Keller put together a fantastic show and catalogue about how photography helped popularize science -- and about how science helped photography along, too. Here's MAN on Brought to Light. Stop-motion photography. Flies, yes, flies. Microscopy and Taaffe.

• More on the White House's art installation from Terry Teachout, who reminds us that the installation during the George W. Bush years didn't exactly reveal a whole lot about W's humanity. (See: Katrina.) 
• Allan Kaprow + tires + hipsters and cocktail dresses = awesome pics.
• The headline in the last picture here, about mining LACMA's library for treasure, can't be right, can it? 
• When architects were like baseball players, complete with chewing gum. 
• Christopher Knight on right-wing rantings about White House art; Greg Allen on Alma Thomas.
  

Last week, just before the Human Rights Campaign's annual Washington fundraising dinner, President Obama nominated a gay man to be ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. The appointment was transparent: For the better part of the last year Americans who care about gay equality have been disappointed with the Obama administration's failure to act on campaign promises and to eliminate a host of discriminatory laws and federal policies. Well aware of this, just before Obama was to speak at the annual dinner of the nation's biggest gay-equality organization, the president tossed gay equality supporters a bit of tokenism.

Last week the Obama administration made another symbolic gesture: It hung modern and contemporary art in the White House. Just as the HRC go-alongs decided that an ambassadorial appointment bought Obama some time, art lovers celebrated the Obamas' embrace of art. [Image: Glenn Ligon, Black Like Me #2, 1992. Collection: Hirshhorn.]

Several critics examined what Obama's selections may mean. Jerry Saltz was particularly thoughtful. Holland Cotter discussed Alma Thomas. The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik said something about prostitutes and fascists and had a dialogue with himself over whether the White House picks were safe or bold. (Meta-fun: Saltz noted that even as Gopnik was pointing out that the White House art selection was sometimes contradictory, that Gopnik was sometimes contradictory.)

I'm glad the White House is hanging modern and contemporary art. But consider the White House art hang within the context of the New Zealand-Samoa ambassadorial nomination: It's nice and it means something, but it's a gesture rather than a commitment.

Consider: Despite the unprecedented involvement of art communities and an artist in the 2008 election, the White House has done little to support or create art-focused/included policy. Art organizations received a measly $50 million in the $787 billion stimulus package, a percentage so infinitessimal that Google's calculator barely knows what to do with it. (Just as the HRC leadership welcomed a president who has done little for gay equality, Washington's art lobby was ecstatic at receiving weak tea.) The Obama administration has introduced no significant initiatives around cultural diplomacy, cultural exchange or arts education.

And that's the easy, obvious stuff. Instead of congratulating ourselves that the Obamas are art people, we should be demanding that the White House innovate, that it create new, progressive federal arts policies and initiatives. Maybe the White House should make it possible for every museum in America to offer free admission to its permanent collection? Maybe there's room for the humanities in a new Peace Corps or Americorps program? In Buffalo and Detroit, two of America's greatest museums, two places that hold some of the world's most important cultural treasures, are struggling to remain vibrant -- even open -- in the face of massive regional economic struggles. There is room for a new federal initiative to safeguard struggling-but-internationally-important cultural storehouses in a new way, in a way that emphasizes how the arts are a fundamental part of America's urban fabric... but no, nothing. The much-lauded General Services Administration program that sought to ensure that the government architecture was progressive and bold has languished for several years. And shouldn't there be art in every elementary, middle and high school in America?

The White House Art Hang is nice. We should be glad the Obamas like paintings. Now we should demand substance.

Related: Just after Obama took office, I argued in favor of a White House arts adviser.

Earlier this week I asked the Association of Art Museum Directors if organization president and Clark Art Institute director Michael Conforti would be willing to discuss whether AAMD would undergo a policy re-examination as a result of the recent rash of private collection shows at U.S. museums, particularly in New York. (In addition to the recently-announced show and planned series at the New Museum: this show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this show at the Brooklyn Museum, this show at New York University's Grey Art Gallery, and the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum will both be featuring private collection shows in mid-2010.)

I thought the topic might be of special interest to AAMD not just because it impacts questions about whether museums are places where independent scholarship has traditionally been valued -- even required -- but because the Internal Revenue Code mandates that non-profits may not "operate for the benefit of private interests." Private collector shows promote collectors and their collections, and make it easier -- and possibly more remunerative -- for collectors to sell those works. AAMD has a history of speaking up when its members bump into federal law or federal agency rules/guidelines.

Through a spokesperson, Conforti declined to discuss the issue, including whether AAMD would investigate the appropriateness of such shows or whether AAMD was concerned that 'fluff' shows left art museums exposed to potential investigation and sanction from non-profit overseers such as state attorneys general or the Internal Revenue Service. The spokesperson instead offered up a statement from AAMD executive director Janet Landay:

"We assume that our members bring the same curatorial purpose to these exhibitions as they do to any other, ultimately to answer the question: 'Does this presentation support our mission and benefit our audiences?' Moreover, these exhibitions often have works of art not frequently seen by the public. So, the museum is providing an opportunity for audiences to experience and enjoy new objects that they otherwise wouldn't have the chance to see. Also note that AAMD addressed a number of the related questions in a position paper on this issue, available on our website." [Ed: the link goes to a PDF and seems to be balky in Firefox]

Landay's comments miss the point. It is virtually impossible for shows from single private collections to have the same art historical or scholarly purpose as curator-generated exhibitions because they rely on a single, narrow source. Fluff shows are the opposite of curatorial purpose because by narrowly restricting a curator's view they limit curatorial freedom, investigation and inquiry. They are the primary means through which art museums devalue their curatorial departments.

Next up?: Will the Association of Art Museum Curators, whose members are professionally marginalized by these exhibitions, examine the subject? Stay tuned.

Related: Christopher Knight examined this issue from the point of curatorial independence when LACMA exhibited Cheech Marin's collection.

StructureHub has a nice post in which the renovation of Frank Gehry's landmark Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota is discussed. [via] The write-up includes great pics, boots-on-the-ground analysis of how the building is experienced, and one random tidbit that made me chuckle: The Weisman is rebranding itself 'WAM.' Cool. That reminds me that the Harvard University Art Museums recently rebranded itself/themselves (see?) as 'HAM.' Score one for the Minnies.

Continuing our contemporary art parlor game: No art museum in America has a more obvious art work to hang at the beginning of its contemporary art galleries than the Hirshhorn.

Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-68) may be the perfect artwork for any art museum to open its contemporary collection installation. The painting is a direct challenge to institutions and to the present, a theme of not just art of the 1960s, but of American life in the 1960s. Over the ensuing 40 years an engagement with today's world and issues faced by nations and humankind has been a hallmark of contemporary artistic practice.

Los Angeles County Museum on Fire has not been on view at the Hirshhorn in several years. Unfortunately, the image of the painting on the museum's website is badly distorted and cropped. The work is available here, on the Ed Ruscha catalogue raisonne website.

(It has also inspired the title for one of the smartest, most resolutely anonymous art blogs: Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.)

Previously: MOCA, SFMOMA.

The Amon Carter Museum has acquired Charles Sheeler's 1940 Conversation -- Sky and Earth.

The painting is one of a series of works Sheeler made for Fortune magazine about America's industrial might. Each of Sheeler's paintings examined electricity, power. Another painting from the series, Suspended Power, is across the metroplex in the Dallas Museum of Art's collection.

(Some subjects stay current: On view now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art is an exhibition of Edward Burtynsky photographs titled, 'Oil.' More on that show on MAN soon.)

The Sheeler is already on view at the Carter.

• Does the New Museum matter so little to New York journalists and bloggers that they are willing to accept the way in which the NuMu is being turned from a feminist-created, experiment-driven kunsthalle into a baublehaus in which wealthy collectors can stash their collections, thus puffing up their reputations and, potentially, prepare their artworks for market? So far as I've seen, only James Wagner has spoken out forcefully against the NuMu's plans. (MAN raised the issue in a two-part Q&A with NuMu director Lisa Phillips here and here.) Alas, New Yorkers seem to be OK with Chelsea invading the non-profit sphere. All the silly critical hand-wringing about the art market has missed the obvious story: The market madness is now corrupting the ethics and curatorial/scholarly authority and independence of some of New York's museums. (Here's the latest example.) Here's hoping some of New York's remaining arts journalists are working on this story.
  
• Speaking of which, the LAT's Mike Boehm has the shameful story of two Big Name movie moguls, their art, and the disgraceful behavior of the most-troubled Smithsonian art museum.
  
• The designs for the new "Barnes Collection" space on Philly's Benjamin Franklin Parkway are, uh, notably underwhelming.
• Speaking of which, Christopher Knight got his hands on a letter in which Robert Venturi expresses his opposition to the hijacking of the Barnes.
  

The easiest way to play our newest parlor game with SFMOMA would be to pick Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) and be done with it. It's an obvious, obviously self-conscious synthetic-rubber-drawn, line-in-the-sand paper line of demarcation between the abstract expressionists and the whippersnappers who would re-make contemporary and American art.

Erased de Kooning Drawing is an important piece, a gee-whiz, he did what?! moment, but it's a better story than it is something to look at. As a contemporary collection-starting piece it's a little flat. (And who wants to introduce contemporary art with that much wall text?)

So as a nod to SFMOMA's exceptional photography collection, I'd open the museum's contemporary collection with two sets of photographs, rotated in and out as photographs must be.

First, last year SFMOMA acquired a suite of photographs of atomic tests conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission in the Nevada desert in 1957. They are alternately dramatic and hum-drum, an apt metaphor for the flare-up and cool-down cycles of the Cold War. [Image above.]

Next, SFMOMA owns a photographic series called Death of a Valley. Produced by Californians Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones, the pictures chronicle the state-mandated destruction of an agricultural valley and its communities so that California Gov. Earl Warren could build a dam, thus helping to satisfy booming post-war California's endless lust for water and power. You might say that the creation of the resulting reservoir, Lake Berryessa, enabled California's two most prominent industries: agriculture and entertainment. (Yes, really.) [Image: House Being Moved, 1956, Pirkle Jones.]

The two groups of work say a lot about how the United States has (ab)used the West, the land and even the people. (The fallout from those 1957 tests was significant. And this Jones picture is particularly haunting.) Today the photographs look a little bit nostalgic, but so what? At the time of the AEC tests, our nation was focused on the ability to destroy an enemy, and so, in the name of self-preservation, we destroyed. Artists ever since -- from Richard Misrach to Robert Smithson to Matthew Barney  -- have mined our post-war mindset.

Runners-up: Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting, 1951. Another way of erasing the past to start anew. Robert Gober, Newspaper(s), 1992. Gober used the power of art to spotlight social inequality and institutionalized discrimination. Hans Haacke Blue Sail, 1964-65. So much is possible!... and then you see that the sail is weighted in place. Mel Ramos' Miss Grapefruit Festival, 1964. It is post-war California.

Previously: MOCA.

As the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles prepares a major exhibition of its collection, I've been thinking about how museums with significant commitments to contemporary art determine what are the best works from the recent past, what should always be on view at their museums and how/where. For example: No one questions that Caravaggio is a biggie. If Museum X has a Caravaggio it will be on view and it will get its own stop on the collection audio tour and so on. But what about an Ed Ruscha? Or a David Hammons?

This idea stems from a conversation I had with MoMA curator Ann Temkin a couple years ago. I complained to Temkin that museums do a poor job of saying what early contemporary works are 'masterpieces,' that is, which are the works that are important to them, that they want their visitors to take home with them as being particularly relevant and even current. Temkin agreed. 

Of course, that could run into the dozens of works. So herewith a parlor game inspired by what many a museum staffer has told me is a frequently-asked visitor question: Where does 'modern art' end and where does 'contemporary art' begin? And why?

The game: With what work should major museums start their contemporary collections. The paintings/sculptures/etc. need not be the oldest 'contemporary' work or the most famous, just what seems like a good starting point for both art of the last 50 or so years and for their collection. Given that I'm using MOCA's upcoming, much-anticipated collection installation as the peg for this, we'll start there.

Last year, as MOCA was teetering on the brink, Christopher Knight argued that MOCA should make a particular commitment to Andy Warhol's Telephone (1961, above; related 1960 work-on-paper). That's how I'd 'start' MOCA's contemporary collection. I can't improve on what Knight said last December.

My runners-up: In the mid-1950s Robert Rauschenberg executed numerous works that specifically sought to puncture abstract expressionism and other late-modern painting. MOCA's Factum I (1957) is among the best of those works. It's currently on view at MoMA, hanging next to Factum II (1957). Much the same applies to MOCA's Small Rebus (1956). (Unrelated: How in the name of Alfred Barr does MoMA not have images of Rebus and Factum II on its website?!?!?!) Antoni Tapies' Grey and Black Cross, No. XXVI (1955, left). The cross seems to be falling, descending out of view. The work seems to portend a period during which belief and blind faith gives way to cynicism and unrest.

In the little-known Mother and Child (1951), Roy Lichtenstein takes a 600-year-old religious-art standard and updates it for the post-war era by taking the child out of Mary's/his mother's arms and putting him/her in a stroller. Rotating selections from Robert Frank's The Americans. Something about this 1956 Clyfford Still work on paper suggests a moment of transition between the past and the future. I can't imagine Still himself thought that -- he was more likely to consider himself both -- but...

James Rosenquist's eroto-mechanical Push Button (1961). Richard Artschwager's Chair (1965) asks viewers to re-visit assumptions about what they see and what they're told. It encourages us to embrace ambiguity. Ed Ruscha's Chocolate Room (1970).

Comments: I'm also going to try something with this series of posts: The comments will be on. Feel free to agree, disagree, propose alternate 'starting points' and so on. (Link help: MOCA's collection. MOCA's fascinating exhibition archive also includes installation shots from previous collection shows/installations.) AJ's software also allows you to link to particular comments, so you may also Tweet your selections!

• Christopher Knight attended the National Arts Journalism Program contest finals in Los Angeles on Friday and was underwhelmed. Knight's issues with the process are nearly identical to the problems I flagged here and here. 
• The Buffalo News' Colin Dabkowski reveals how an Albright-Knox residency-and-exhibition can make artists and a museum a key community focal point.
• In the Houston Chronicle, Douglas Britt finds public art that is all wet.
• The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott examines the issues architect David Adjaye faces as he tries to build a new museum on the National Mall -- and as he tries to build two libraries in Washington, DC neighborhoods.
  
• I don't know how to pithily intro this Jen Graves review of work by Leo Saul Berk except by saying that the work is simultaneously phallic, excretory, news-media-critical and shiny.
  

Continued from this morning with New Museum director Lisa Phillips. [Image.]

MAN: One of the things non-profit institutions and their curators are supposed to do is determine what work has value to a society, value that is beyond the mere monetary. That's what scholarship and curatorial consideration is for. How do these kinds of shows do anything but exhibit and sort of validate the spending habits of certain influential collectors or trustees?

LP: Because I think it goes back to the work itself, the work that's in the collection. I don't think that it's just about validating spending habits or only about artists who have proven value because there are lots of artists in the collection that no one has heard of. There's a lot of obscure work. There's a lot of Greek artists. There's a lot of work that's not been seen.

I would say in Dakis' case that challenge and experimentation have been part of his approach, which is similar to ours. He's always pushing himself beyond. He started 25 years ago with artists who weren't known and he's continued in that vein. He continues to challenge himself. The adventure, his deep engagement with artists and their issues... [This] is a highly unusual situation. There are a lot of people who collect, there are a handful of people [who collect] in this way.

I think it's a model collection. I think he's a model person. He's incredibly generous. He's had an unbelievable impact on his city. He's had a consistent commitment to bringing in curators and critics, and he's made Athens a destination for contemporary art, like Eugenio Lopez in Mexico City. These are people who have been influential in turning the culture of their cities around, and in being advocates. He's sometimes way ahead of the rest of us in exploring where he's going. Curators learn from collectors too.

MAN: Why should a non-profit's resources be used to promote an individual, his collecting acumen and his collection? If a collector wants his collection seen, there are obviously other, better ways for him or her to do that, such as the so-called 'Miami model.'

LP: Because were an educational institution and we're here to share new art and new ideas. That's our mission. We're here to share that with the public and to be open and to be fearless in our approach. So we feel it's very relevant.

In this case, both the framing the terms of the debate and having the conversation around public-private partnerships is worth meeting head-on and having the conversation. It's worth partnering with a collector who has an extremely distinctive and high-quality collection that we do not have ourselves because we're not a collecting institution and working with that collection and making something of it.

And why is Miami model better? I think Museums would disagree that the private museum model is better than collectors collaborating with local institutions. But it doesn't have to be either /or, but both /and.

MAN: Do you worry that your decision could reinforce the notion that art is a luxury owned by the privileged few rather than a means through which artists engage communities and nations and societies in a broader discourse?

LP: I don't see it that way. I just see it as a way to enrich the public's experience and as an opportunity to present really great material that wouldn't otherwise be seen by the public. Visitors will first and foremost be engaged by the artists' works.

I guess I just have to repeat myself and say a redefinition of public-private partnerships has to be explored. Museums often can't compete in the marketplace very effectively and there are tremendous expenses involved with storage and maintenance of a collection that for a mid-sized institution like us presents a really big dilemma that could tip the balance of things. Add to that the dilemma that collectors face of not being able to share works with the public, or having them disappear into the black hole of storage -- even after they have been gifted to a museum -- and you have an interesting challenge to try to address.

I'm not sure that it's even consistent with our mission of being about new art and new ideas to collect in a traditional way. At the same time there are a lot of advantages to having a collection. You can draw from it and create exhibitions regularly and they provide the foundation for the institution. Well, is it possible to work with a group of private collections and [to] be able to draw on that resource, as a foundation? That's something that I think is worth exploring. I don't know that we'll do it, but that's were thinking about. We're really, really mindful of ethical conflicts. I wrote the ethics policy for the Whitney, I wrote it for the New Museum.

Our mandate is to push things forward in full awareness of complexities and the issues involved, but nevertheless propose new models and new ways of approaching things.

In Friday's New York Times the New Museum announced that it was beginning a new series of exhibitions of private collections called "The Imaginary Museum." I've written extensively about the problems with non-profit art museums devoting exhibitions to private collections, including this post regarding LACMA exhibiting Cheech Marin's collection. As the NYT write-up substantially disregarded the New Museum's plans to use its resources to show the collection of a private individual, I invited NuMu director Lisa Phillips to discuss the museums plans. Our Q&A will run in two parts. [Image.]

MAN: First, let's fill in the background a bit. Please describe the NuMu's "The Imaginary Museum" series.

Lisa Phillips: We have been having conversations and roundtables, closed sessions and open sessions for a number of years about collecting. Everything from whether the New Museum should do it, if so then how, pros and cons, etc. It's a really big issue for the museum, as you can imagine.

Now we have something called a semi-permanent collection. There was an idea of creating a semi-permanent collection wherein the works would be sold every 10 years and works would be constantly refreshed, but you can't implement that real well. It's a lovely concept but it doesn't work in practice: You can imagine how fraught with problems that is, and it doesn't really help the artists in the end.

We started thinking about what are the issues today in the 21stC. What are the problems and the dilemmas of putting together a collection if you're a contemporary institution? A collection is going to age [require expensive storage and conservation] and so on.

It has been clear that there are so many collections out there that never get seen by the public, that the public just doesn't have the opportunity to experience or see, and there should be some investigation of new kinds of public-private partnerships. You've seen some instances of it and they're increasing all the time. BCAM, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, is one. What the Fishers are doing [in San Francisco] is another. There are many ideas that are happening and sometimes these public-private conversations lead to the establishment of an institution.

We all realize that, and for the last five years we've been talking about how it's time to explore the possibility further and for redefining what these public-private partnerships should be within our strong sense of ethics and integrity and within the level of quality that we stand for. So I think it's really possible. That's what the New Museum is: We're an entrepreneurial institution. We don't feel we have to accept or receive things in a formulaic way.

That's part of what we're trying to do. We will have these discussions, like this, in public as part of it. Where have lines been crossed, where not in certain instances, what can people do by working together. I believe that collaboration is really where things will go in this century.

MAN: You cited BCAM. I'm not sure anyone, including LACMA and The Broad Art Foundation, would claim that's working well, that that model is a success.

LP: I don't know that that's working. I'm not saying that. Eli Broad is searching for a collaboration, some kind of partnership that is going to work. I'm not sure they've found what it is yet. But he's going to try something out at MOCA and he's reserving the right to try other things out elsewhere. I don't know how that's going to end, but that might have a really good ending.

MAN: Some of what The Broad Art Foundation does is interesting, such as how they make foundation works available to museums to help plug gaps in collection galleries and so on. But I don't think you're going to see a whole lot of curators at those institutions doing a lot of research and scholarship on works they don't own, which is a gap in the model.

LP: I've talked to a number of collectors and that's the primary appeal of working with a museum, that there would be research and scholarship that would be done on their collections.

MAN: Well, that's a good segue to something that Christopher Knight wrote when LACMA hosted its Cheech Marin collection show. He said, "We rely on art museums for free and thorough scholarship, which follows wherever the curatorial nose leads. But single-collector shows privatize that public museum role -- publicly funding it to boot." Why is that acceptable?

LP: Well, the collector may not have the expertise to do [that kind of scholarship], they may not have the time, maybe it's not a priority. I don't know.

MAN: Yes, but why should tax-exempt funds and resources go into researching and studying a wealthy person's private collection? It's a private collection, they could pay for that themselves, privately.

LP: In the case of Dakis Joannou [a private collector and decade-long New Museum trustee whose collection will be show at the NuMu in the first 'Imaginary Museum' show], he has involved curators in an active and continual way. But ultimately collectors are individuals. They're not an institution with a mission.

I don't see that as a conflict. This came out of curatorial discussions, and in this particular case if you just look at this collection it was something [our] curators all wanted to bring here ever since we first saw the collection in 2000. It's not just an impressive collection, it's an astonishing collection. Not that many people have seen it. It's the result of decades of looking, the result of passionate involvement. It's a really, really singular thing. I've seen a lot of collections. It's astonishing. The curators wanted it here. There are thousands of works in the collection so it's almost like a museum collection. It's as vast as a museum collection. I would say that this collection provides an opportunity to see contemporary artists' work in depth than any museum could provide.

This is parallel to our interests. If there were objects outside that, I can imagine. But in this case it's a totally synchronous interest. The material is there and the best examples [of artists' work] are there. We have an opportunity to shape it curatorially and share it with a public. It's a pleasure.

Part two to come later this morning.