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.

Anticipating the Museum (Chris Burden)

Recently, in the context of a class discussion on expectations in museum contexts, I returned to an earlier paper I wrote on alternative spaces for a performance art theory class. The topic of our conversation was what a Museum Goer anticipates of the viewing space, and what alternative iterations of art spaces can do to illuminate the substructure of our expectation.

Performance art is a revealing lens in museology because it constructs a pocket of liminal space around itself, especially when presented in an art institution. It is through physical contact with the work, thus approaching the threshold of liminal/institutional, that we become aware of the responsibilities we take on as Museum Goer and the ones that we defer.

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Kunsthaus Graz: A Meditation on Wall Labels

The gallery space of Kunsthaus Graz is infamous for a variety of reasons–its color, its unusual architecture, its capacity to accommodate contemporary art in its versatile spaces. What struck me was a small choice in presentation which ended up making the world of a difference in viewing the art. The information typically found on the wall-label is enlarged and applied directly to the floor a few meters away from the work.

While this seems insubstantial, there is actually something very thoughtful in this. It begins with the question of what a wall label does and is supposed to do in a museum space. Simply put, it identifies the work so that the viewer knows what he is looking at. Said in a slightly more complicated way, it locates work within its historical and autobiographical (relative to the artist) moment. It gives the viewer the vocabulary to refer to the work in a succinct way, rather than through description (for example, “The Sunflowers by Van Gogh” as opposed to “the yellowish painting with sunflowers and the really big vase in the center”). In fact, the label and the work become equal presentations of the same thing, which Joseph Kosuth observed as early as 1965 in the famous piece, “One and Three Chairs.” William Anastasi thematized in a series of works, like “Label” below.

In the Kunsthaus, the label retains its informative authority, but designates itself to a separate plane than that of the work on the wall–a separation of that which places the object, from the space of the object. This permits the viewer to distinguish the experience of observing the work from that of obtaining its factual context, which become inextricable when the label and work are seen together. It also allows a viewer to crop the insitutionality out of his own line of vision of he so chooses. After all, the significance of the label was born with art history, not in the artist’s studio.

Finally, I found myself more aware of an object’s space because of the floor labels. It reminds us that paintings occupy space in the third dimension. I also find it nice to be able to look down and see my own body extend towards the art’s text on the floor. It makes me think of the act of looking as a physical activity, and more aware of a work’s physical threshold.

Kunsthaus Graz
Lendkai 1
8020 Graz, Austria

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A (belated re-)Visit to Art Basel

In the week that has passed since I’ve visited Basel, I’ve mulled over the question of what would make this fair the opposite of what Thornton would call a “well-thought-out museum show.” After all this time, I can think of distinctions, though nothing to warrant the need to seek the refuge of a museum. It is easy to point out that at Art Basel each room represents a different institution and thus has an overall incoherence, unlike the museum. I could also say that the atmosphere is charged with commercialism, unlike the museum. One look inside would also note the substantial lack of explanation in the form of labels or educational tools (like books, audioguides, public tours), unlike the museum. Yet each of these surface differences obscures a deeper similarity between the two forms of display.

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Sarah Thornton’s Art Basel

In preparation for my visit to Art Basel, I want to look at Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World, and its mention. Her treatment of Art Basel is consistent with her treatment of all of her subjects, emphasizing the singularity and totality of each component in the art world. There is a neat and self-assuming wholeness to her exploration, beginning at the title (she makes her art world in seven days, God makes his world in seven days), down to the chapters (THE Auction, THE Magazine, THE Biennale). Someone else (I think Paddy Johnson) has said this already—what she describes is not THE art world, but AN art world. The book is an attempt to itemize and make routine these days, suggesting that they stand in for each of many, and necessarily leaves out other (harder to define) nooks in the art world. What, for example, about a gallerist’s day in the gallery? An art historian’s day? Or (equally relevant at this point) an art blogger’s day? Her focus also over-emphasizes the art market and the well-established, which then become analogous to the art world. (Takashi Murakami’s studio operations cannot stand for the experiences of an artist living in a collective, sharing a 20 square-foot room with three others.)

She devotes one of her seven day-long explorations to Art Basel, which she calls “The Fair,” connoting simultaneously the uniqueness and quintessentiality that its reputation carries. The word “fair” conjures two meanings: of display, and of sale. The second disproportionately obscures the first in Thorton’s chapter—most of the buying happens on the single day before the fair opens to the public for the week. Art Basel is described, in fact, as almost everything but a display of art. Its focus is on the politics, the commercial consequences, the competition, the etiquette, and the central players.

Knowing that most of this will be inaccessible to my visit, I found her reaction to the fair something I could see for myself. What interested me the most was her closing statement, that afterwards one “crave[s] nothing more than a well-thought-out museum show.” I am surprised she ended on a controversial and loaded statement. What does it mean to identify a well-thought-out museum show as its opposite? My goal tomorrow is to find an answer to that question.

Art Basel from a previous year

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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