Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

“Tear Open Those Doors” In Worcester

One of the most ridiculous tropes I hear from museum people all the time revolves around museum architecture, mainly old-style Beaux Arts buildings; any old building, actually. They say some variation of “young people find them intimidating.”

Please. Young people as group are bold and take all sorts of risks older people won’t take — why would they find beautiful buildings intimidating? Such lazy thinking has led to many a poor “solution,” such as building new entrances on old museums or closing the old entrances when a new building presents an opporunity to do so. But we won’t name names.

Rather, this post is about the attempts by a museum director, Matthias Waschek (at left). who recently took over as director of the Worcester Art Museum, to reopen the lovely building’s front doors, which open onto it “beautiful Renaissance Court, a trademark of our Museum.”

Those doors, known as the Salisbury Street entrance, weren’t closed because they were intimidating, it’s true. They were closed (except on weekends and for special events) to save money. But Waschek says that they provide the museum with a “WOW factor.” The home page of the museum’s website  features a plea, including a video, by him asking members to “join forces with me and open the doors!” Online he says:

The $60,000 needed to open the doors would be very difficult for one, two, or even ten of us to raise – but this can be easily done if each member gives just $25. This is less than the cost of a dinner out, or two movie tickets on a Friday night.

May I count on you? I would love to add you to the list of supporters for this special initiative.

Although the museum’s finances haven’t substantially improved, he says in the video, showing the Renaissance court inside, he thinks it’s doable for the community. Fantastic: I would do one more thing — have one of those thermometer devices showing contributions toward the goal, so that all can see. After getting “an overwhelming response” from members, according to the Worcester Scene, Waschek has taken the campaign to the broader public.  

Waschek has a background in modern and contemporary art; he has a PhD in French surrealism and he ran the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis before moving to Massachusetts. But when I spoke with him in January for an article about acquisitions endowments, he was an enthusiastic evangelist for his new museum, all of it. Attendance there is just 45,000 a year, despite a terrific collection, and he knows he must do something — opening the front doors is a symbolic and meaningful initiative, especially if he galvanizes support throught this campaign. Good for him.

Now back to that false intimidation excuse — framing something incorrectly leads to the wrong solution. Waschek is showing what a real problem is — that non-visitors think museums are boring. That’s why he mentions the WOW factor. That can start at the door, even of an old building, whose architecture usually has nothing to do with it.  

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum

Josiah McElheny, On Not Being The Easy Artist You Think – UPDATED

Josiah McElheny has been around in the art world for a while, but I confess that the first time he really registered with me was last year, when I saw Endlessly Repeating Twentieth Century Modernism at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (detail, below right), followed quickly by a look at Czech Modernism (below left) at the Institute For Contemporary Art nearby. That was for the article I wrote last fall for The New York Times about contemporary art in Boston.

I was intrigued, and that got me interested in writing about him, which led to my article about him in yesterday’s New York Times. I confess that I was one of the people Helen Molesworth, chief curator at ICA and a long-time backer of McElheny, was talking about in this passage, drawn from a catalogue essay:

If part of Josiah’s agenda is to try and think through the relations between the social contract and abstraction, then I’d like to talk about the kinds of experiences I find people have of Czech Modernism….The piece is comprised of mirrored vases housed in a mirrored vitrine that allows you to see an endlessly reflected image of the vases––a truly spectacular mise en abyme––and yet you do not see yourself. …for the most part, what people experience in response to this object are feelings of profound pleasure, amazement, and wonder. Yet when I talk about Czech Modernism publicly and discuss my sense of dread and horror, which is what the object engenders in me, when I describe a world of infinitely reproducible objects that are unfailingly the same, in which no human agent exists …

I find that I have to be gentle, I have to lead people to the idea slowly, because if I begin there, the crash, the affective letdown, is so hard.

…it’s not hard to get people to realize the dark implications of the piece. If this is a model of the social, then it is not a place where you want to live. That being said, I’ve watched a lot of people dispense with the darkness of the work almost immediately on assimilating it, and move back into the much more comforting place of wonder. So, for all of the sculpture’s explorations of the roads of modernism not taken, for all of its querying of utopianism, there’s a deep strain of foreboding in it. The work can be quite dark, as it intimates that the thing that you want is also the thing that is unsustainable….helplessness.

When I discussed these modernity pieces with McElheny, he said: “To me those pieces are a failure. I misread how they would be perceived.” He called them his “most successful failures,” and added “I was disappointed that most people didn’t think what I thought they would.”

But here’s the thing: McElheny knows that he is trying to embed sophisticated ideas into simple objects, and he volunteered to me that  “There could be a big gap between what I’m talking about and what I’m doing. I accept that absolutely.” In other words, the viewer may not be entirely at fault.

A little later in our discussions, he added this: “I am an artist, so I get to be irresponsible in the way I am responsible to my own desires. That’s the gift and the terror of it. I don’t think artists should run the world. We should represent quixotic, imaginative thinking.”

I like that.

UPDATE: Cleaning out some of my reporting notes, I found a few other comments from some who knows McElheny’s work well but didn’t want to be quoted by name. They are revealing, though, so I wanted to share them:

  • He wants the work to be seductive, beautiful and compelling purely as an object, but an object imbued with content has a much deeper life. It has a life of its own.  
  • He is interested in our obsession that histories are true, with singular meanings. There are layers, and his work makes us responsible for finding out the cracks in history.
  • You’re trapped by the physical seduction, but then you have to realize that there are all these layers and you say, “now I have to know that.”

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (top); ICA (bottom)

Josiah McElheny’s Own Big Bang

In today’s Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times, I have an article about Josiah McElheny, the glass artist who’s certainly having a moment right now — museum exhibits, gallery shows, commissions. He’s a very thoughtful and articulate artist, a conundrum of sorts, because he’s a cerebral artist working primarily in a medium known for its decorative nature.

A little excerpt:

… a few hours spent with him there recently — during which he expounded on influences like Czech modernism, the 19th-century German writer Paul Scheerbart and various obscure historical incidents — demonstrated why this room, where he researches and draws, is more important to his work than his small glass foundry, also in Brooklyn. In a medium known for work many regard as lightweight and decorative, Mr. McElheny’s creations strive to convey sophisticated, often dark ideas.

…Over the next year Mr. McElheny will have his own big bang, a constellation of exhibitions that will reveal his work —in glass and other mediums — in more depth than ever. It started last month in New York, with a show of new work addressing fashion, abstraction and identity at Andrea Rosen Gallery, up through the end of June. In Boston on Friday, the Institute for Contemporary Art will open “Josiah McElheny: Some Pictures of the Infinite,” a midcareer survey that will unveil a major piece about the cosmos, “The Center Is Everywhere.” In London seven large sculptures, all involving mirrors that reflect abstract films, are on view at the Whitechapel Gallery through July 20.

Other events will follow, including a gallery show in Chicago in September relating to the Swiss literary modernist Robert Walser, and the premiere in December, at the Vizcaya Museum in Miami, of a film reimagining Scheerbart’s story “The Light Club of Batavia.” And next year the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio will present a survey of his work, “Towards a Light Club,” focused on modernism.

Oddly, given all this interest, Mr. McElheny said he is “still trying to figure out how art works.”

Here was an artist eager to talk about his work, unlike some others who prefer to let it speak for themselves.

I spent many hours with Josiah, and I’ll be back with some further thoughts later.

 

A 1908 Sojourn Pays Off For The Clark

The Clark Art Institute’s biggest splashiest exhibitions always take place in the summer, when tourists visit the Berkshires looking for things to see and do. This year is a little special though, because the 1908 scientific expedition led by the museum’s founder, Robert Sterling Clark, is paying off all these years later.

In 2008, the 100th anniversary, the Clark forged a relationship with China’s Ministry of Culture – a cultural exchange program.  At the time,  the museum says on its website,

the Clark commemorated the 100th anniversary of the expedition by presenting in China an exhibition of historic images printed from the original photographs in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington. Researchers believe that all of these photographs were taken during the Clark expedition of 1908-9, although little is known about some of the images.

…the Clark also presented rare original copies of Through Shên-kan to Chinese municipalities along the expedition route, and has translated the book into Mandarin… The book has also served as inspiration for three students from Oxford University, who during the summer of 2008 retraced the original route of the Clark expedition, recording on their own website the changes that have occurred during the past 100 years. In 2011 and 2012 the Clark will share masterpieces from its collection of French Impressionist paintings with leading museums in Beijing and Shanghai, furthering the relationship between the institution’s artistic legacy and the country Sterling Clark studied so carefully early in his life.

In return, the Chinese have lent antiquities from three recently excavated tombs in the territories Clark explored — the exhibition is called  Unearthed: Recent Archaeological Discoveries From Northern China and it opens tomorrow.

That’s not all: The Clark has three other related exhibitions on tap this summer, a critical mass that interested the Wall Street Journal — I have a short article on the Clark’s China summer in tomorrow’s paper. They’ll be worth the trip.

Photo Credit: Tang Dynasty figures (top); Woman with Headdress in Zhenyuan Xian, Gansu (bottom), Smithsonian Institution Archives, both Courtesy of the Clark

 

 

Louis Grachos Quits The Albright-Knox

The news was announced today: Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, has quit that job to become Executive Director of AMOA-Arthouse, a new organization formed by the merger of two long-standing arts organizations in Austin, Texas — the Austin Museum of Art and the Jones Center (Art House) — last November.

He leaves effective January 2013.

In some ways, his departure does come “at the right time,” as Grachos told the Buffalo News. He took up the Albright-Knox post in 2002, and ten years is a goodly amount of time to make a difference. As the press release announcing his departure reported:

 During his tenure, he has implemented a strong, dynamic exhibitions program, which featured the landmark exhibition Extreme Abstraction in 2005, as well as theRemix and Artists in Depth series of exhibitions that mined and deeply explored the Gallery’s Collection in new ways, frequently inviting leading local, national, and international artists to engage with the Gallery and become involved in selecting and installing exhibitions in the museum’s spaces.  He also initiated a host of innovative and important projects, programs, and community collaborations, which include Art’scool, Gusto at the Gallery, and M&T FIRST FRIDAYS @ THE GALLERY.  Grachos …[added] many significant, key works to the Collection over the past ten years… The exhibition DECADE: Contemporary Collecting 2002–2012, which the Gallery will present this fall…will show, for the first time, many works that have entered the Collection during Grachos’s tenure.

All true, and Grachos does deserve some credit for trying to restore the Albright-Knox to it glory days, when it was a leader in showing contemporary art. Its recent show, The Long Curve: 150 Years of Of Visionary Collecting at the Albright-Knox Gallery, attempted to do that (and was in demand to travel, though I am not sure what happened with that), and its current show, Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s, takes visitors back, too (apparently not quite so successfully, some critics have said. I haven’t seen it).

But there is that unspeakable matter of deaccessioning antiquities from the permanent collection in 2007, despite the fact that the museum’s own Collections Management Policy said “No sale of masterpieces; nor, in terms of its own collection, of very important works.” Those non-masterpieces brought in $67 million. I am eager to see exactly what he’s been buying that money in the coming exhibition.

Before moving to Buffalo, Grachos was the director of SITE Santa Fe, and I always felt he was leading the A-K’s directors down a contemporary path they thought they wanted, but might not have thought through.

It’s too late to go back, though. The die was cast in 2002. The release said the board was, of course, “forming a committee to initiate a national search for our next director.”

Photo Credit: Courtesy of AMOA-Arthouse.