Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Do We Need To Reshuffle Native American Art Collections?

This decade may end up being the years of a great re-shuffling of art, with some museums — mostly in the U.S. — returning looted antiquities to the country in which they were found and, presumably, stolen, and others continuing to return Nazi-looted art that turned up in their collections. On the later score, The Guardian recently wrote about a promise by France to return seven paintings to the descendants of their owners, and today The Telegraph published an article about a new effort in France:

President Francois Hollande’s administration is setting up a group of experts and curators to pro-actively track down families, rather than simply waiting for them to come forward. The group, which will start work next month, will carry out its detective work with the help of a new computerised database compiled of digital scans of thousands of pages of relevant documentation currently gathering dust in archives.

hall-of-northwest-coast-indians_dynamic_lead_hero_imageIn a completely different area, I came up an article the other day with a new question: why is Native American art in the collections of natural history museums?

Written by Katherine Abu Hadal, a designer and researcher who is interested in Indian culture, the article was first published on her blog and then on Indian Country Today Media Network, it begins:

Natural history museums—they are all over the US and abroad too. They house amazing dinosaur fossils, exotic hissing cockroaches, and wondrous planetariums—right next to priceless human-designed art and artifacts created by Native peoples of the Americas.

Like me, you might wonder why these designed objects are juxtaposed with objects of nature such as redwood trees and precious metal exhibits. Yes, of course art is part of the natural world that we live in—but then, why are there no Picasso paintings or Degas sculptures on display in the American Museum of Natural History?

…When Native American, Pacific, and African art and artifact is lumped in with natural history exhibits, it sends a message that these groups are a part of the “natural” world. That the art they produce is somehow less cultured and developed than the western art canon. It also sends the message that they are historical, an element of the romantic past, when in reality these peoples are alive and well, with many traditions intact and new traditions happening all the time.

She raises some good points. It’s true, of course, that art museums collect Native American art — as they should. Natural history collections are a throwback in many ways, and they’ve had to adapt their displays as science has advanced. Shouldn’t they have to adjust to the now-prevailing view of Indian artifacts, that is – art?

No one likes to admit errors. And we can’t have museums reordering their collections with changing fashions all the time. But in this case, natural history museums could either sell or lend their Indian art collections to art museums.

That, at least, is what I think I think is the best answer to this problem.

Photo Credit: Hall of the Northwest Coast Indians, Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

Triple Threat To Chelsea Galleries — And Artists

Chelsea, meet Cork Street. Just as that London gallery district is under threat from developers, Chelsea, too, is having its difficulties this winter. And not a double whammy, but a triple whammy.

First, Sandy hit last fall. Many galleries have cleaned up and are back in business, but many also took hits to their inventory. Where works could be salvaged, there were conservation costs.

All along, partly because of the success of the High Line, developers have had their eyes on properties down there, and many of those who haven’t built already are planning to do so. They’re building commercial and residental buildings. 

Now, as Bloomberg recently reported, rents are soaring, forcing many dealers who don’t own their building to consider moving out. Magdalena Sawon, of Postmasters Gallery, says she is headed back downtown 15 years after leaving Soho — because her rent is about to double. “The mid-range galleries are going to just vanish from Chelsea,” she told Bloomberg, adding “that ‘anything radical or experimental’ will become rarer as dealers seek to cover expenses by staging more-predictable shows that do well commercially.”

This post is about more than real estate – as we’ve been seeing, the mega-dealers are getting bigger and the smaller and mid-sized dealers who help emerging and mid-list artists are getting squeezed out.

Those that do not close will go to the Lower East Side and maybe to Brooklyn (if that’s still cheaper). I happen to think that have one big gallery district is better than a lot of smaller ones, but that doesn’t look like it’s happening.

 

 

The Walters Hires A New Director; Whither San Diego?

Just in from Baltimore: The Board of the Walters Art Museum has appointed Julia Marciari-Alexander as its new executive director, replacing Gary Vikan, who announced in March, 2012, that he would be stepping down after 18 years as the museum’s executive director.

Julia Marciari-Alexander -2_CPMarciari-Alexander is currently the Deputy Director of the San Diego Museum of Art, and her move requires several lines of comment, not least the conditions she is leaving behind in southern California.

First, for Marciari-Alexander, this is a great opportunity, but not without worries. Vikan is highly regarded, a man who accomplished many things at the Walters. Among them: the elimination of the Walters’ general admission fee which led to an increase in attendance of more than 45%, several fundraising milestones, plus noteworthy exhibitions and the creation of  a Center for the Arts of the Ancient Americas, with a $7.25 million endowment. They are outlined here in the press release that accompanied his announcement last year.

Marciari-Alexander, in her mid-40s, has been in San Diego, heading curatorial affairs, since 2008, and before that was Associate Director for Exhibitions and Publications, among other roles, at the Yale Center for British Art. In San Diego, she oversaw the reinstallation of most of the museum’s galleries and was “also instrumental in launching an initiative to publish the SDMA’s collection online, similar to the Walters’ ongoing digital projects,” according to the press release.

In that release, Marciari-Alexander is quoted saying, “As the new Executive Director, it will be my goal to leverage the collection and the professional expertise of staff to strengthen the Walters’ reputation as an international leader in the field of collections development, museum scholarship and community engagement.”

Marciari-Alexander is,  however, married to John Marciari, the Curator of European Art at the San Diego Museum, and he’ll be going with her to Baltimore — minus a full-time job. Instead, he told me, “I am going to continue working for San Diego, completing my catalogue of Italian, Spanish, and French paintings before 1850, and also continuing to work on an exhibition on the art of Seville (Velazquez, Zurbaran, Murillo & co.) that is scheduled for 2015. So I’m not breaking all ties.”

Marciari, then associate curator of early European art at the Yale Art Gallery, discovered that Velasquez in its closet in 2010.

He will need replacing, given that collection.

And last year, the San Diego Museum also lost Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, its curator of Asian art, to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Three top people out the door at a museum where the entire full-time staff numbers 55 can be a problem. It can also be indicative.

The San Diego Museum’s executive director, Roxana Velasquez, praises Marciari-Alexander in the Walters’ release, but I’ve heard rumblings of tension between the two for months — almost since Velasquez arrived in San Diego in fall, 2010, from her post as director of the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.

In fact, the tension seems to be more widespread that just the two of them. It’s not unusual for me to hear complaints from the ranks at museums, but I would say that whenever I mention San Diego someone sends me a beef, and sometimes more than one person.

So, something appears to be wrong there, though I can’t tell exactly what it is from afar. Different outlooks, views of art, management styles, poor spending decisions, curatorial independence? All of the above? I hope Velasquez uses this shakeup in her staff to fix it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Walters

Admit That You Were Wrong

The February issue of ARTnews has a thought-provoking article that was posted online earlier today: Split Decisions: When Critics Change Their Minds by Ann Landi. (Hat tip here to Ed Goldman, whose email about it I received last week. Yesterday, when I could not find the article, I asked Robin Cembalest, the magazine’s executive editor, about it, and she got it up online today.)

turrell-at-PomonaThe story’s deck: “What makes art critics revise their opinions? Some mind-changing critics explain”

As you will read in the article, it all started last year when Peter Schjeldahl recanted his earlier characterization of Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer as “transcendant” and instead deemed it “a largish, flattish bauble” and “a mess.”

Smartly, ARTnews reviews the long history of what it calls “flip-flops” (including Clement Greenberg’s) and then got a few contemporary critics to admit their “errors.” Among them, Peter Plagens was the most forthcoming, confessing “changes of heart” on “Helen Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon, James Turrell, and Robert Irwin, among others.” Christopher Knight is cited as reversing course on a piece by Nancy Rubins, and Kim Levin refined her view of John Currin.

There’s more in the article.

I’m not a full-time critic, but rather more a reporter.  Yet here’s one blooper I fully confess: my first view of James Turrell, based mainly on the large tunnel at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and a few other of his works, was not favorable — and also not fair, since I’d seen so little (I was living abroad when he had a big show in New York, at the Whitney, in 1980). Now, I think the opposite — I love much of his work, especially the skyspaces, like the one here at Pomona College – and I’m looking forward to the three-venue exhibition of his works this summer.

How about you?

 

The Tate’s Tanks: Three Steps Forward, Two Back

I was all set to compliment the Tate for creating a new space on YouTube called The Performance Room. It is meant to show performances designed specifically for online viewing, all commissioned, and “the first artistic programme created purely for live web broadcast.” (I’m not sure about that, but that is what the Tate claims.)

Joan Joanas (below) will be starting things off on Feb. 28:

Referencing previous works such as Vertical Roll 1972, in which she performed directly to the camera in her studio, and drawing on mythology, Jonas will create a live tableau using sculptural props, costumes, masks, music, her voice and her students.

joan_jonas_mirror_performanceThat Tate channel has nearly 13,000 subscribers and has had more than 3.2 million viewers for its other videos, which include the Tate’s performances in The Tanks. On Feb. 3, that meant a live, unscripted performance conceived by artist Suzanne Lacy, Silver Action. 

UK-based women who took part in significant activist movements and protests from the 1950s to 80s will share their personal stories in a series of workshops, culminating in a day-long public performance on 3 February. Visitors to The Tanks will hear diverse groups of women engaged in discussion about their experiences and the impact and results of their actions as they walk among them. Live documentation – film, social media and text – will also be projected in real time onto the walls of The Tanks.

You can read more about that here. I saw a video of a previous work by her in the Tanks last fall, and I quite liked it.

But while I was on the subject of the Tanks, I learned that the Tate did it again with regard to an overbearing corporate sponsorship — not just with BP, as I mentioned here. A recent missive from the Tate talks about the BMW Tate Live program, a four-year partnership between BMW and Tate now in its second year that “focuses on live performance and interdisciplinary art both in the gallery and online.” No amount for the gift was specified, and a quick Google search didn’t turn up anything either. Here’s the BMW version of the partnership.

Of course, BMW also forged a deal with the Guggenheim Museum in 2010, putting its name first and foremost on the BMW Guggenheim Lab. That’s a mobile structure, intended as a place to exchange talk (aka ideas), though — and somehow seems less offensive than the Tate deal.

Still, it makes one wonder — are we next going to have the BMW (Fill in an artist’s name)? A piece of conceptual art, sure, and also a very bad idea.

Why is the Tate allowing this, the thin end of the wedge, to use a British phrase? Don’t they have better negotiators in their development department? It’s hard to roll any of these abuses back. They should remember another Britishism, from their own history with the Vikings: Once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Tate