Archives for June 2010

As I mentioned the other day, last Wednesday I attended a reception at the Museum of Modern Art* for Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art. The event was heartening — many women in the art/museum world, and plenty of men, too, showed up to celebrate.

Still, I can’t help but think this is “too little, too late.” I wrote an article about the effort for the June issue of The Art Newspaper, which is out now. The story is not online — you have to go buy the paper, which is a fat 120 pages. It’s got to have something for everyone.

But here I’ll share a few things about Modern Women, some in the story and some in the outtakes.

• The effort began in 2005, not from within MoMA, but when a donor-artist named Sarah Peters approached the museum with a desire to do “something” for the women of MoMA. Her offer provoked internal discussions, with the end being that curators could research deeply the women artists in the museum’s collection.
• The book program, led first by Deborah Wye and most recently by Cornelia Butler, did not take the coffee-table approach, illustrating the “canonical” artists at MoMA. Instead, it focuses on “lesser-known” artists, too, Butler says.
• Butler promises some “discoveries” among the artists who made the cut. “Even on the timeline, there will be names and careers that some light is shed up,” she said.
• The book doesn’t apply the “gender lens” throughout, but rather the editors allowed each author to decide her own approach — “her” is deliberate. The vast majority of the 50 authors is female, an acknowledged problem.
• The ratio of male-to-female artists at MoMA is about 4.5 to 1, with a few caveats as outlined in The Art Newspaper.
• Along with the book, MoMA is showing many women in the months ahead, including a solo exhibit of Lee Bontecou. And I have to say that Helen Frankenthaler’s Chairman of the Board looked pretty spectacular in the lobby the other night. The image below — too small and not deep enough in color — doesn’t do it justice.

The best news is that Butler says the efforts to raise the profile of women artists, which we’ve discussed here before, will continue at MoMA, after the current run of exhibitions ends next year. 

Back to my “too little” complaint: I didn’t find too many others who agreed; most of the women I spoke with are happy for any moves in this direction.

This subject is far from new, of course, even for me on this 15-month-old blog: Here are links to my previous posts on it (here, here, here, and here).

Photo Credits: Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

*A consulting client of mine supports MoMA.

Polly Apfelbaum has been around for decades, with exhibitions in venues from coast to coast and overseas. Her art is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Henry Art Gallery, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, etc. etc. etc. When you mount an Apfelbaum exhibition, you would seemingly know what you are getting.

Which makes a current case, where a curator was reportedly fired over an exhibition of Apfelbaum’s work, very curious. As her New York Gallery, D’Amelio Terras, says:

Polly Apfelbaum is currently featured in a solo show at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Montana. The artist has created a new installation specifically for the museum, titled “Mini Hollywood,” which will be on display through September 19, 2010 [above].  

The Billings, MT museum’s website lists the show, which opened on Apr. 1:

Created specifically for Billings, this floor installation – “fallen paintings” – plays with the theme of glitz and glamor. Visitors move through and within her works, interacting with them and perceiving shifting iridescent colors.

Last week, a brief item by the Associated Press in the Great Falls, MT Tribune said that the show’s curator had been fired. It continued:

Robert Manchester held the position since 2006. He said he was fired in April because of a dispute over an exhibit….Manchester said he was asked by the museum’s executive director, Robyn Peterson, to have Apfelbaum change her installation. He said he was fired after he refused.

Peterson said she cannot comment because it is a personnel issue.

Now that is odd.

The Billings Gazette published a longer story Friday, noting that the Apfelbaum show “raised questions about what art is.” In it, Manchester says:

You don’t tell an international artist to make something else. I just said I wouldn’t do it. Because I defied Robyn, I had to go. I hadn’t abdicated my curatorial responsibilities.

There’s something funny about all this. Apfelbaum’s work, to my knowledge, has never been problematic — or controversial. Either the whole story isn’t out, or Manchester, who says he may sue, has a grievance. Peterson, which is to say the Yellowstone museum, is not a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors. But maybe the Association of Art Museum Curators — or more noisy reporters — should investigate.

Meantime, Peterson told the Gazette that she “expects to hire another curator after the new fiscal year begins in July.” Who’s going to take that job?

Photo Credits: Courtesy of D’Amelio Terras Gallery (top); By Casey Riffe/Courtesy of the Billings Gazette (bottom)

 

Last year, I did two posts of summer reading lists (here and here), following the pattern of many publications (e.g., The New York Times Book Review’s is out this weekend), but suggesting all artsy books. I’ve been on the lookout again this year, but haven’t seen very many that look enticing. So — probably no lists this year, but rather an occasional notice of one or two books.

Here’s one, brought to my attention earlier this week when The Wall Street Journal reviewed Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson, by Stanley Mazaroff. It tells the story of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, whose collection was put together, for a while, with the help of Berenson.

Mazaroff is a lawyer, now retired, as well as a trustee of the Walters, so it’s a good bet that Berenson fares poorly. Here’s one paragraph of the review:

The 33 paintings that Walters purchased through Berenson are, for Mr. Mazaroff, the key evidence of Berenson’s slipperiness. A third of them had their attributions changed over the century that followed. Yet the rate of reattribution matches that of the Old Masters that Walters bought through other dealers–and is much lower than for the art that Walters bought on his own.

Berenson figures so much in the story of art-collecting in the U.S. that the book is worth a look. Here’s the link to the WSJ review.

Many art publications would like to interview Charles Saatchi, but the so-called reclusive collector demurs. Usually. So it was interesting that The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s website, got him to answer email questions from “leading journalists and critics as well as members of the public.” The DB called him “brutally frank.”

But as one commenter later put it,

These answers may be “brutally frank” but they’re not brutally spontaneous. No wonder he refuses to be interviewed. He likes to research the answers to questions so he can come up with clever retorts like these.

And another:

I always enjoy Charles Saatchi’s answers, but I do wish he would expand on the more serious ones sometimes. Charles, could you try? Some of us are really interested to hear your genuine thoughts…

So what did he say? Not that much about art, though he did answer this question: “Do you think artists are more intelligent than other people?”

I have always been hesitant about visiting artists’ studios, and discovering that work I have admired has been made by someone nitwitted. This can be disconcerting if you believe an artist paints with his brains, not with his hands

Saatchi sidestepped the question of whether he has an obsession with collecting, but hinted at a yes answer. For the answer to “Is there art on other planets?” you can go here. It involves Lewitt, Andre and Judd.

Was this “get” worth it for the DB? Since there’s no space limit on the web, I suppose yes, but if this were a print publication, I wouldn’t have let him get away with the answers he gave. Where’s the spike?

For a better idea of Saatchi’s thinking, check out his website.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Daily Beast

Whatever else Marina Abramovic was at the Museum of Modern Art*, she was a phenomenon. Whether or not The Artist Is Present belongs in a museum like MoMA remains a matter of debate — even MoMA says it was an experiment — but the piece was unquestionably a spectacle.

Last night, I attended an event in MoMA’s lobby to celebrate the publication of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, but Marina ruled downstairs, where some 400 people were attending an event about her and the piece. 

Another bit of evidence was this, posted on the Artifacts blog of The New York Times’s T Magazine by Linda Yablonsky:

It was no surprise that the audience present on Monday for the end of Marina Abramovic’s epic, 716-hour sit at the Museum of Modern Art gave her a tremendous ovation. The remarkable thing was the extent, and especially the sound, of it. The cheers lasted a good 15 minutes, filling the museum’s towering atrium with the sort of unbridled excitement that often greets (male) sports stars after a big win….

The last person to face Abramovic in the closing minutes of the performance was the curator who brought her blockbuster career retrospective to the museum, the MoMA P.S. 1 director Klaus Biesenbach.

I learned another interesting factoid last night about the piece: On May 1, Abramovic had the table that separated her and her visitors removed. The idea occurred to her because some wheelchair-bound visitors had difficulty with the table, but in the end she and MoMA felt that removing the table removed a barrier and led to a more direct encounter.

So, clearly, for MoMA this was an experiment that worked — as a crowd-pleaser.

Photo Credit: Marco Anelli, Courtesy of The New York Times

* A consulting client of mine supports MoMA.