The Cloisters, between Pilgrimage and Tourism

This was a miniature conference paper I gave this week. I was trying to locate the Cloisters, as both a museum and a medieval (contemporary) construction, relative to traditions of pilgrimage and tourism.

In the modern age of tourism, museums have achieved landmark status. For one who sees “everything as a sign of itself,” [1] museums are convenient concentrations of cultural artifacts employed to typify the conditions under which they were made. Fortunately for New York tourists and tour organizations, the majority of these museums are concentrated in upper-middle Manhattan. City Sites NY, a popular tour bus franchise, advertises that both their “All Around Town” and “Uptown Tour Bus” tours include visits to the Museum Mile [2], and is therefore a must. The visibility of these museums contributes to their high visitor traffic, and perpetuates their canonization in the New York tourist experience.

Excluded from these franchised museum loops is the Cloisters. This is in part due to its distance from central Manhattan: it is 5.6 miles north of its parent museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose inclusion on bus tours is almost guaranteed. The Cloisters’ absence from the museum canon may also have to do with its specialization in medieval art: its narrow focus appeals to a necessarily smaller audience. Thus, obscure enough in location and content to have eluded the double-decker’s radius of interest, the Cloisters occupies a different category of destinations working along and at odds with touristic practice. Continue reading…

(Re)Distributing Gawker Artists

I recently got news from Liz Dimmitt, a co-curator of Gawker Artists, that it is again expanding its already multi-faceted role in the art scene. GA recently has begun to collaborate with the art print organization society6 to make its artists’ work available to purchase in a variety of forms. Society6 is a group that shares GA’s principles and function, and this joint venture makes sense. Both are groups helping artist communities gain presence and support in the too-vast art world, by giving them a forum to display their work, and means of distributing it. Both are open for anyone to join.

GA’s most recent project is their Limited Editions, a curated selection of pieces limited to 100 printings each. It stands apart from the other shops on the site to which all artists can submit their work. GA has always been deft at operating in multiple levels of inclusion, of offering the prestige of being curatorially selected alongside a membership to an ungated network of artists. It is what gives GA’s actions a different valence than those of a now-competitor, 20×200.

Though skeptical of GA’s step towards market participation, I realize that art prints have a legacy of benefitting artists, dating back before the art market boom in the 15th century Netherlands. Prints then were a way of circulating visual ideas, of increasing the visibility of genius. It could be read in the same way now. Prints then also necessarily came in limited number, because the plates would break with repeated use. Thus the Limited Editions finds a relevance and precedence in tradition.

Take a look. If nothing else, the artists are fantastic and deserving of support.

For more information on Gawker Artists, please see my earlier piece.

Anticipating Studios (Yoshimoto Nara)

Months ago in August, the Asia Society had a five-day open studio in which visitors could go watch the famed Yoshimoto Nara construct his installation for their upcoming show. I managed to go during the middle of the construction process, at a time when the artist was not present and did not make himself present for the duration of my visit. The visit was uncanny and slightly uncomfortable for me. Really, it took me until now to locate the source of this affect in the misalignment of the expectations inscribed in a studio visit, and what might actually (not) occur there.

The studio visit(or) expects to be witness to an authentic creativity. In this one expectation are pack several individually problematic assumptions. It assumes that the moment of the visit(or) will intersect with something worth seeing. It assumes that the visit(or) is neutral. It assumes that productivity is visible. It assumes the artist is a demonstrable being. The visit(or) then is affected by pressurized anticipation, not entirely unlike the touristic mentality.*

What people don’t anticipate is the artist not presenting himself, or rather, the artist’s agency in non-compliance with the nature of the visit. The visit(or) may be founded on the acknowledgement of an abstract creative agency, but lacking in an understanding of a subjective agency closely tied to the individual body (to take bathroom breaks, to be in a bad mood, to be unproductive). The show title, “Nobody’s Fool,” is a worthwhile consideration here. I felt sheepish after I realized I was standing around and waiting.

*For more on what I mean by tourism, please see what I wrote on “the Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign by Jonathan Culler.

What “Work of Art” has Done

Abdi Farah

This week, the season finale of Bravo’s art-related reality TV show aired, knighting the 23-year-old Abdi Farah as what the tagline calls “the Next Great Artist,” which comes with the benefits of a solo show in the Brooklyn Museum, and a piece to be auctioned at Philips de Pury. Also, every inch of that sentence has been violently protested by a surprising hoard of passionate dissidents, many of whom preface their comments with “I don’t call myself an art person, but–.” That in itself has proved the show to be successful to me.

I mentioned after the show’s premier that I foresaw this as a valuable experience in showing a larger public more emerging art while demystifying the exclusivity of art insiders. I’d like to add now that the show has done something I didn’t fully expect, and that was only possible through the medium of a tv show: it given people a space and greater comfortability to discuss art.

To understand the magnitude of this, we have to start in the museum and gallery. These two institutions need to have a sheen of completion and some incontestability to survive; their very exhibitions defend that which they are displaying. This defensiveness on behalf of the institution becomes another barrier between the non-frequenters and their ability to feel confident about their individual aesthetic judgement. I do not mean to exaggerate the strength of this barrier or diminish the will of the individual, I simply mean to comment on the feeling of awe and intimidation, however slight, that is built into our museum and gallery spaces.

What this show has done, therefore, is to remove that barrier of intimidation by taking the viewing process out of its usual institutionality (albeit by putting it into another one). It takes works that are decently representative of some emerging art now, and brings them to the viewer in his own space, in which he is comfortable making and defending his judgment. And because thew viewer sees the artists talk, and watch these pieces come into being with no previous scholarship or criticism attached, he participates as an equal in an open forum. Jerry Saltz, famed art critic and regular judge on the show, wrote in his final of many blog posts throughout the season that the show has given birth to a different kind of art criticism. I’ve pulled an excerpt below:

“I wanted to see if art criticism was porous and supple enough to actually exist on a different stage….[and] It happened in the tens of thousands of words that all of you wrote in the comment sections at the bottom of the recaps. An accidental art criticism sprang up, practiced in a new place, in a new way, on a fairly high level. Together we were crumbs and butter of a mysterious madeleine. The delivery mechanism of art criticism seemed to turn itself inside out; instead of one voice speaking to many, there were many voices speaking to one another. Coherently. All these voices became ghosts in criticism’s machine. It was a criticism of unfolding process, not dictums and law – a criticism of intimacy that pulsed with a kind of phosphorescent grandeur.”

Mr. Saltz has my utmost respect for recognizing the potential of this new kind of viewing process, and honoring the reactions it can elicit. He and his fellow judges, all of whom blog regularly on the show, have called this an experiment, and rightly so. It was an experiment in diffusing artistic knowledge and authority through an atypical medium, and for that it was immensely satisfying to witness. I will be curious to see how an institution like the Brooklyn Museum further engages with this, when Farah’s show goes up.

Presenting “Work of Art”

I approached the idea of Bravo’s new reality TV show Work of Art with some disdain and apprehension. The idea of artistic competition, fenced by deadlines, assignments and criticism, is not new in the art world. I mostly had reservations having the ability to maintain artistic integrity within the framework of a reality TV show. After watching the season premier, I found myself pleasantly surprised. There is a value to seeing artwork in the context of a TV show like this one. It also helped that the art was really good.

The show becomes an unexpected way to bring art to a viewership that might not necessarily have access to emerging art. It lends itself to a gallery experience, showing both the art and how other people interact with it. In fact, the critical segment of the show, featuring some of the most famed art critics in New York, becomes a crash course in how to talk about and see art. It contracts the two-part process of reading an art critique in print—seeing and retaining the work, then understanding what the critique is referring to. It inadvertently trains the eye to discriminate not only based on presentation but also based on process.

There are, however, elements to the show that I still feel unsure about. Though each critique is preceded by a gallery show, in which the work has a chance to interact with a selected public, I want to see how other venues and contexts will affect the process and the work. (Art is never just the object itself, but what it is presented in, and how.)

Also, because of the set-up, the show overstates the role of critics in determining the success of a work. The reliance on this might just be a function of keeping the show efficient and moving forward. The deeper debates of art are relegated elsewhere. It is easy to see that the judging might become tricky because aesthetic preference has always been a touchy subject in our culture, which begat the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”  The show might have a hard time identifying and consistently justifying criteria that define a successful art piece throughout the season. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this avoided entirely for the sake of keeping it digestible.

On the whole, it has something for art lovers, and drama lovers. I am optimistic.

Work of Art airs Wednesday nights, 11/10c on Bravo.

Abramovic at MoMA: Museum Mediation

I didn’t get a chance to see The Artist is Present before this past week, the week before it closes. Fortunately enough, my visit towards the end of the show was a way for the visit to point out to me the brevity of presence, and what presence means in a museum context.

The title work of the show is the one in which Marina Abramovic sits in a large square and receives visitors who can sit facing her for as long as they want. Abramovic doesn’t speak, reciprocate movements, or move much at all, and the viewer is limited to a set of actions as well (not to touch, place anything in front of, etc., the artist).

While this work can be read on many levels, especially in light of her retrospective on display four flights up, I found it a perfect example of the museum altering behavior and perception, both implicitly and explicitly. Something as simple as a non-verbal human interaction when transplanted into the museum becomes infinitely more complex and regulated. For me, the show revealed more what a museum needed and imposed onto people, than what people did onto themselves.

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