Titus O.

My friend artist Peter Fagundo described to me this morning a studio visit he had recently with an artist he works with, at the restaurant where he waits tables to pay bills. He said that his initial reaction to the work was to dislike it, though with some time and conversation with the artist he got a place of appreciating where she was coming from, if still not exactly liking the work.

That’s how it goes. And that works well when teaching; it’s the crucial skill, actually. When I used to write criticism, I refused to meet with the artists because I knew that I would lose, not objectivity, but the integrity of that somewhat “pure” immediate gestalt, and subsequent very personal analysis. I didn’t, and don’t, want to appreciate everything that comes round the pike. As an artist, I want to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and actually feel great satisfaction when I see something I clearly don’t care about. As I remember Krishanmurti once saying when asked about some silent yogi or levitating lama, “good for them. That’s just something I don’t have to worry about doing myself.” I love that idea. Rather than giving way to envy or agitation, just to think, oh good, I don’t have to make or do that thing.

Pete said that he feels like his aesthetic knife is getting really “honed”; not to kill, but to pare away the unnecessary. I know what he means. I, too, feel like I’m getting ever clearer about what I want to see, and what I don’t. I can appreciate the latter, but feel an increasing devotion to serving the former. Agnes Martin often spoke about human beings having a certain feeling or idea of perfection in their minds, and how artists often attempt to express this idea through their work, of their own sense of perfection in the mind. I take the meaning of this extremely broadly, as I think she was able to do, though her own work had a clear, very personal expression of it.

For whatever reason, I think I’m one of those people who find it especially difficult to know clearly what it is I need to make with much distraction around. Graduate school was really difficult in that respect. It really didn’t help me at all; in fact, it was quite damaging I think. I guess this is why I’m drawn to Agnes Martin, and Zen hermits, Taoist recluses, and desert monks. They shunned the hubbub in order to be able to truly listen within themselves.

Martin called it listening to inspiration. She said that inspiration is sort of always close, but that rational, discursive thought gets in the way; that artists often have that inspiration but that they don’t humble themselves before it (“humility is the most beautiful word,” she said), that they think it has to service their egos, and between the inspiration and the execution, a thousand thoughts enter and debase it. This is exactly how I feel when look at so much work today. I’m using the term “thinking” here not to mean a certain thoughtfulness; but rather, that I think art is by nature a much more intuitive, pre-rational, immediate, visceral kind of experience – even when as quietly reflective as the Ryman’s and Martin’s and early Marden’s I’m enjoying lately.

I’m reflecting on this “inspiration” standard in my own work a lot lately. In the galleries, I see too much thinking often times, and too much superficial influence from unquestioned trends and conventions. My old Korean Zen teacher used to say over and over “too much-e tinking tinking tinking! Only go straight, don’t-know!”

Which reminds me now of the thing I meant to say at the beginning, which is to relate this series of questions. They were how Pete boiled down his critique of that artist he visited. He rattled it off: “I asked her: Why are you doing this? This way? For whom? What do you mean by it? How do you want people to react to it?” I said she probably felt really tired in the day following. Like, those are the questions, aren’t they? And how many artists are really committed to asking them from their toes to their head tops? I’d say, only a percentage, and not a large one.

Titus painting? Yes, strange but true. I can’t make anymore sculpture right now as I’m sick of finding storage for them.

Was actually building a maquette for a new sculpture when I got fed up with the fussiness and started making some quick collages. I liked them surprisingly well, and saw them as bigger paintings. Made the first one as a test, think it interesting enough, and will hopefully complete the next bigger one (5 x 6 feet +) before the new semester starts at SAIC/Columbia.

Its untitled for now; acrylic, charcoal, and graphite on linen. Here are some crappy, flash-hot snaps of it, followed by one of the next collage slated for translation to paint:

To be published soon. Here’s a link to Women & their Work, the gallery. And to the show website.

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In the beginning, void. Total absence. Out of this nothing came One. No why or how. Bang. There it is. Logos. One thought. A word.

Out of One came Two. From Two came Three, and from the Three, Infinite Cosmos. More galaxies in our universe than stars in our galaxy, more universes beyond this one than galaxies in it.

What was the phrase that shaped itself from this nothing (no creator needed, separate from the creation)? The one Word that begat the symphonic infinite holographic encyclopedia of being, all of it reducible to that first utterance; which is still just now, and always?

Why, “Love,” of course.

Well, apologies to you hard-nosed art worlders, but we can’t talk about the artwork of Lizzy Wetzel and not confront the obvious. You can’t not use the word “psychedelic.” You can’t not get a little cosmic for minute. You have to use the “L-word.” After all, she does.

In the ritual that initiated her exhibition at WOTW, individuals were selected from the crowd by a male “gatekeeper” dressed in nothing more than a hawk-wing codpiece, ornately embellished plastic Halloween wolf mask, and white body paint. They were ushered by two more masked, dark-costumed functionaries into a black-light illumined bamboo dome. There Wetzel, in hooded white druid’s dress, her stated intention to “massage” each person with amplified drum beats and chanting, whispered a healing mantra: “I love you.” Each participant was given an initiatory mark as they exited, an orange stripe painted down their forehead and nose.

Love chants, glitter hot glue, fluorescent shiny puff paint, black lights, animal parts: this work is nothing less than a challenge to every last vestige of high-art respectability, and really, the new academy.

By the 1990’s, after the thorough decades-long “deconstruction” of any authoritative aesthetic or material criteria, art-world clout had finally come to more or less be measured by a perceived level of analytical critique; a predominance of a sort of masculine, reductivist, passive-aggressive, hyper-intellectual gameswo/manship and tactical maneuvering, symptomized by a lack of any sort of emotional/physical expansiveness, in favor of endless small tight turns in the brain. Feeling was allowed, as long as it was moderated by a wink/nudge irony, political agitation, or was observably negative (ennui, angst, self-loathing, disgust preferred, thank you.) Sincerity was really only to be believed if what was expressed was unpleasant.

The last few years have seen an overwhelming push-back against this sort of discrimination, toward glee, joy, casualness, collaboration, hilarity, friendship, care, entheogens, make-up, and generally having a good time in the art experience.

Wetzel is a member of a creative generation emerging naturally in this moment, reacting spontaneously with their cultural products and intrusions – I would argue she happens to do it better that most. The world clearly needs a new approach. Things are a mess. We are out of balance. We need some healing. A Medicine Show, even.

Art as medicine; of course. What else should it be?

What needs healing? God, what doesn’t?

At root, we greatly suffer the loss of functional myth and meaning structures. Disconnection from Earth (physical and metaphysical,) each other. War, within the self, and by extension, everything else.

We are sick, unto the possible death of our species. To the death of many others, that is already certain.

We don’t have the luxury to be purely negative anymore, to wallow in the impulse to critique and intellectually unravel the mechanisms of our immanent demise. We need healing. We need vision.

Art can act as medicine. Illness, of all sorts, is about separation; even just from the notion of health itself. We lose felt connection to the trunk of the sources of being, and find ourselves driven out into strangled branches and twigs. Lost in the weeds.

Indigenous people everywhere lived and developed slow, sustainable cultures over dozens of millennia, building myth-ritual-social structures in harmony with human and natural patterns, staying connected to the roots, not losing site of the obvious. They ate, grateful, sustained by the gifts of the flowering world, and in turn they were eaten, by the earth, by its gods.

Very few of us still live consciously connected in this way today, and we exist embedded in conditions that make it seemingly almost impossible to do, like soul-caught bugs in media amber.

Indigenous societies had certain technicians whose function it was to specialize in this sort of harmonizing: of the human with human, and of the human with the seen and unseen realms beyond the boundaries of flesh and conscious psyche. We now generally use the Turko-Mongolian term “shaman” to label these doctors of the sacred.

If religions, as most now generally understand them, arose with the development of settled agricultural civilizations 5000 years ago, these free-agent visionary technicians, men and women, have been acting in much the same manner for closer to perhaps 100,000 years. This is not a heritage that we simply shrug off, or technologically “evolve” beyond. We are actually much less “advanced” than we think, functioning with essentially the same physio/psychological equipment as our great-to-the-1000th grandmother.

Many “civilized” human societies are deeply alienated from their original holistic human cultural systems. The “why” of it is (perhaps) a long discussion. But clear is that in the development of what has come to be considered contemporary art praxis, numbers of its significant recent practitioners have embraced the shamanic function quite consciously, engaged in what some consider an archaic revival, a revolution on par with the European Renaissance. Joseph Beuys would of course be foremost among these artists.

He is one of Wetzel’s art lineage ancestors. But like a reactionary shamanic art granddaughter, she’s painted his tools fluorescent pink and covered them with glitter and butterfly wings. Instead of aesthetically reclaiming the dark rusted iron and fat/felt of a resurrected Luftwaffe martyr, she re-posits her summer day-camp kids’ Hobby Lobby materials, and her DJ friend’s post-rave-culture club gear.

Wetzel is from the Southwestern US. She feels it too. She likes the desert; cacti and bones. Her material language emerges out of the dusty red soil and Hill Country caliche, and while she’s temporarily taken her alchemical laboratory to NYC, she doesn’t leave the region for long at a time. Certainly never in spirit.

The curtained, black-lit, sacred shrouded dome zone in the exhibition is balanced by a desert evocation outside it, symbolized by bright lights and a triangular installation of San Pedro cacti. The San Pedro is a source of many traditional medicines used for thousands of years in Americas north and south, famously including psychoactive mescaline alkaloids. Shamans know that plants have communicating spirits, and power beyond their mere chemical components — no different than you or I. She’s adorned these cacti with gold glitter and artificial painted blooms, and planted in hand-built clay chalices.

Circles symbolically relate to water, and triangles to fire. Balancing oppositions, male and female. On the walls are enshrined the ritual masks and garb worn at the opening. I pointed out to the artist that she’d intuitively arranged them as cross-adorned (4) pentagrams (5) inside triangles of light (3). There is sacred geometry at work. Each whole number by nature has associated energies and archetypal references. I’ll leave interpretation at that. Find in them what you will. I hope viewers will be drawn to spend time with the installation, and feel their way toward the messages Wetzel embeds and embodies in it, having happily struggled to midwife it into the world, in laughter, in tears. It was hard work, physical and spiritual.

The final element is a trinity of horse-hides stretched on the walls, with mirrored rainbow star-bursts tied across their surfaces. As I spent time gazing at them they began to resemble gateways opening into deep space, like images shot from the Hubble space telescope of black holes and nebulae. I like that rather than try to pretend to depict something cosmic using high-tech or illusionary means, a horse hide, a few strands of plastic craft cord, some octagonal feng shui mirrors , some goopy paints, and the context do the trick, perhaps more evocatively.

The whole thing is actually surprisingly discreet. Too often lately this kind of approach can feel like a big adolescent neon dump pile; trying too hard with the more-is-more, lamely forcing the glam tacky anti-art factor. Wetzel takes some lessons from the desert, from the indigenous, and maybe Don Judd and Dan Flavin. There’s a surprising kind of sophistication, tastefulness believe it or not, that you can’t really pretend. I call it ‘visual intelligence.’

The important thing is to know that it’s possible to generate these kinds of crazy/sane visions, intrusions, happenings, detournement, these kind of ancient/futuristic lineages and communities today. Wetzel’s effort is a challenge to you to create a medicine show in your own world.

And by the way: she loves you.

June 10, 2009

Titus O’Brien is an artist and writer currently based in Chicago.

I saw Richard Tuttle talk the other night, along with his wife, poet Mei Mei Berssenbrugge. Wow.

He really has become one of a handful of constant touchstones in my thinking about art today, from a couple of shows I saw in NYC 15 years ago to his retrospective in Dallas in 2006. This night, he read a series of short poetic “essays” that he wrote for a series of catalogs on color. I didn’t get exactly what, where, or for whom these were done. There was an un-synchronized slide show going on behind him with work spanning 1970 to a current show of new work in New York.

He spoke about letting the colors themselves write the essays, and they ranged from the profound to the impenetrable to the humorous (as when he’s conversing with the blue who is writing the essay on blue, “in his head” as it were – a phrase I always find to make very little real sense.)

After, he was asked about beauty and morality, and I loved that he took the question so seriously that he spluttered for a few seconds before getting started. He then emphatically said that he felt that art was really about the opposite of beauty, in that it is a way to digest and become aware of the phenomenal world without being destroyed by beauty. “I mean,” he said, “if I could see the actual beauty of this podium right here I would be annihilated by it.”

Jeder Engel is Schrecklich, said Rilke. Indeed.

That one statement really deftly flipped an entire aesthetic convention on its head, and reminded me of similar verbal maneuvers by Dogen, or any other number of Zen-type folks.

I had to go up and shake his hand after, pay homage. I was happy to find his handshake strong, dry, and warm, and his demeanor so friendly, attentive and convivial. I so liked him, and Mei Mei, with whom I briefly discussed Leslie Silko (her friend, and a favorite writer of mine) and her home in Abiquiu, a mile or two from where we stayed over Christmas.

My friend, artist Peter Fagundo, and I walked to the train pleasantly high and seemingly extra attuned and sensitive to self and surroundings, making drunken thugs and winos on the train platform extra-disconcerting, but accepted as grist for our attention’s mill.

We then went over to my place for a studio visit. I’ve been making some really difficult sculptures the last year. It began with a 3-D Design class in Arlington last spring. I worked along side the students, as I very much like to do, and made something with wire and melted plastic that quite intrigued me. I wonder if I have spent the year since going down a blind alley, while polluting the atmosphere with the noxious gases given off by heat gunned shopping bags and painting tarps. I’ve made a body of what I’d consider some tough, freaky doo-dads that are the most fun I’ve ever had in production, but with results that perpetually leave me aching with intimations of a missing element, or perhaps a wholly misguided approach. I’m at one of those agonizing if perceptibly fruitful impasses.

The crux of my dilemma has been this re-emphasis for me on trying to make a functioning, cohesive aesthetic object, but using a completely unconventional approach and material. I began with wire armatures, but wanted to have less control over the forms. This led me to airplane cable, that I began to zip-tie into looping, Marden-esque aerial forms hanging in space. Some stayed just like this, while others accrued plastic skins, as pictured here. These are just a couple hanging around in the living room until I can get them documented, and then hopefully out of sight/out of mind for a bit.

I know quite clearly what I do not want to see: production or process as cheeky gimmick, cheesy crap re-contextualized as wink-nudge formal maneuver, hipster anything. I’ve really wanted to avoid directly referencing ANYTHING in the world, and am both intrigued and frustrated by the wealth of associations the biomorphic forms I’ve been using conjure, for me anyway.

I have wanted to be in discussion with certain things – moderns, mainly, like DeKooning, Pollock, Leger, Andre Masson, Picasso, analytical and synthetic cubism, etc. Also, there’s an obvious relationship to John Chamberlain, and I think often about Tomas Kiesewetter, the contemporary German sculptor who I think simply kicks total ass.

And cartoon explosions.

So, I’m a bit caught at the moment, wondering whether to proceed, or step away from this approach for awhile. Pete and I have this open-ended project starting in a house in Evanston. That’s soon to become a real platform for a wide-ranging inquiry into art practice, and I’m sure some solutions will present themselves,  in the midst of new dilemmas.

(I was just looking for this old interview and realized it never made it from Glasstire to my site. So for sake of archiving…)

I recently sat down with Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, to discuss (among other things) Declaring Space, his revelatory exhibition of four artists who attempted to modernize our very conception of space itself. Featuring Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, this exhibition marks the first time these artists have been brought together in this way, and they’ve perhaps never looked better.

Titus O’Brien: Congratulations on a wonderful show. The Modern continues to be one of my favorite museums in the country. I have noticed since I’ve been in the area the last three years that the Modern seems to have a certain focus on sort of grand, almost heroic late modern masters; like Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Sean Scully, and now the four artists in Declaring Space.

Michael Auping: Maybe that’s a reflection of my age, knowing at this point that I can’t do everything. When I was a young curator I thought I could do everything. I would do two shows a year. Now I do a show every three years. I tend to look at art harder now. I’m not as easily seduced by the next new thing. I take my time to engage more classic statements.

This and following images are installation views
of Declaring Space.

I also think that this show has a little something to do with the current context right now. The artists in this show were incredibly ambitious and boldly romantic. It’s harder to find that kind of art now. Maybe that’s for the better, maybe it’s for the worse, I don’t know. Some say it’s because of 9/11: people retrench, artists retreat a little bit—become more conservative. But this show has been on my mind since I was at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where they have one of the great collections of international abstraction from the 1950s. I’ve always wanted to do this show. To my mind, it represents a very intense moment in the metaphysics of abstraction. It could be thought of as the high renaissance of abstraction. Maybe we need to be reminded of a moment like that now.

TO: It does seem very timely. In the past couple decades, the “head-y,” postmodern climate found these guys really sort of unfashionable. Their pronouncements and stated goals were so profoundly metaphysical, transpersonal, mystical even – seriously no-no territory for a long time.

But as you say, 9-11 has acted as some sort of watershed. We’ve seen a kind of burgeoning romanticism and longing for authenticity. It seems, though, almost like a pastiche, with all the mushrooms, fairies, deer, skulls, needlepoint, etc. It doesn’t feel very confident. Can you say more about what you think makes this show timely in this environment?

MA: It’s timely only in the sense that artists right now seem so caught up in their own minutiae, and in their own little products which can be sold at the growing number of art fairs to new collectors who seem to create an overwhelming demand in the market. That’s fine to a point, but artists also need time to think and reflect. Their role in society is not to produce product but to act as visual philosophers who ask big questions. Rothko, Newman, Fontana, and Klein are of a generation of artists that thought larger. I think they are good models for younger artists to look at today.

TO: I have to say that as I get older these works do start to look different. Their gravity (thinking especially of Rothko and Newman) is attractive. With that softly lit, chapel-like gallery, I’ve never seen so many Rothkos displayed so well. The bodies of the other artists’ work look great too, and create a fascinating dialog with each other. I wanted to ask you how intimately involved you are in the installation process.

MA: Probably more intimately involved than our installers would like (laughs). I work very hard on the installation of art. It tells more about the meaning behind the artist’s intentions than any essay or wall label. It’s a very practical thing. You simply have to make the effort to get to know the artist and their work – what it calls for, what it needs to exist on its own terms. I read a lot of letters by Rothko, for example, and I think he understood by the end that shining a lot of light on his paintings was the worst way to experience them.

TO: Yeah, I’d actually almost forgotten that a Rothko could work, they’re normally lit and hung so badly.

MA: Our initial thought is that to see more color we need to shine more light on something, and that’s not true. If an artist uses color properly, the color will to a certain extent burn under its own fuel. You don’t need to add a lot more gasoline to the fire. This is especially so with Rothko. I took all the lights down and looked at the art. With our minimal skylights, it wasn’t dark, but more like twilight. I aimed one light in the center of each picture. That’s not much considering how large some of these paintings are. Rothko was trying to create a situation where the color was vibrating in the room. So, by not lighting all the walls up it allows the edges of the paintings to blend with the space, and if you allow that to happen, the paintings and the space become one thing. Also, he was one of the first to allow paint to spill over on the edge of his canvas so if you look at the side you’ll see paint on the side. To my mind, that was an indication of his engagement with the wall.

TO: In terms of the lighting, I’m reminded of that Caravaggio in Kansas City which, if you’re sneaky, you can flip the lights off and see it much more as it was meant to be.

MA: Yes. Frescoes in many Italian churches were not lit by anything other than ambient light, sometimes a candle or two. The artists knew that was the way they would be seen, and they painted the light into the painting accordingly. With abstraction it’s also important how these paintings are lit and installed.

TO: Looking at work of this period (the 1950s), you notice there is this shift from the depicted romanticism of say, Caspar David Friedrich or the American landscape tradition to the works of these artists, where the viewer now becomes the figure in the landscape.

MA: Yes. Somehow that romantic impulse was inherited by abstraction, and the mystery of what Rothko called “an unknown space.” And that unknown space remains a mystery after all this time. I was saying to someone the other night, its incredible that abstraction is almost 100 years old. When something is 100 years old it’s an antique. In some ways these paintings exist as modernist relics of an ancient religion. I really think that the middle fifties constitutes the high point of abstraction. Yet we still haven’t solved the mystery of that space.

TO: You compare this to our moment, where there is a toying with romanticism, but its almost embarrassed, or ironic. It’s a return to that earlier depiction or representation of it. There is a lot of overt referencing to it, to Friederich for instance; it’s all over the place.

MA: Well, it may not be the moment to be romantic. This may be a good time to remember a time when you could be. Anyway, great moments in art often occur around wartime situations; who knows what will occur.

Also, it’s not as if there is nothing left of this romantic transcendentalism. Rothko, Newman, Fontana, and Klein did leave a legacy that we can see today. Newman’s zips were magnificently transformed into Walter de Maria’s stainless steel poles which electrify his monumental Lightning Field. Can you imagine a Jim Turrell being created without the knowledge of Rothko or Yves Klein?

TO: The large Klein IKB monochrome on the wall starts to float just like a Turrell when you stand in front of it. I was noting recently that Olafur Eliasson seems like a natural heir to Donald Judd and that group.

MA: Yes. He is also in debt to the generation before Judd, whether he knows it or not. I assume he does.

TO: I like how the show ends with Klein, the youngest artist of the four, obviously pointing the way to the revolutions in art in the sixties and seventies. Op art, conceptual art, happenings, Fluxus, etc.

MA: You might say, pun intended, Klein makes the biggest leap of all four. In this show, he is the most radical.

TO: Do you find that there is any particular distinction between these artists culturally, with two Americans and two Europeans?

MA: Certainly this exhibition begs a question like that. Bringing this group of artists together is somewhat controversial because we think of European and American art as being very separate structures. It’s also viewed as a competitive situation. Of course, the typical historical take is that the US triumphed after the war and the European contribution was just a footnote. There is no question that abstract expressionism or the New York School, as it is also known, had an incredible international impact. But in terms of this idea of opening and expanding the space of abstraction, the Europeans were very much engaged as well. They made important contributions, Fontana and Klein in particular.

TO: The palettes of Newman and Rothko are more sober, saturnine – morose even. Klein and Fontana seem more whimsical in a way.

MA: Maybe not whimsical. Lighter maybe, with those starburst sorts of colors…and in terms of color, Klein’s love affair with blue is very French. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek, there’s evidence of a sense of humor for a Frenchman to invent his own blue.

TO: Humor seems to be a part of Klein, in particular, and even in Fontana to some extent, where its nowhere near in Rothko or Newman.

MA: The Americans were “painters,” and in many ways more conservative. They engaged the tradition and tools of painting, probably because they didn’t have a long tradition of their own. They were single-handedly, and soberly, creating a new American painting in the context of this grand spatial democracy. The Europeans were more skeptical and advanced conceptually, and in terms of their awareness of art history. Fontana, for example, was very conscious of the fact that Italians invented perspective in painting. That absolutely changed the nature of space in painting. By slicing through the surfaces of his canvases, he also created another dimension for painting.

Fontana was also intensely aware of space exploration in the 1950s. He felt that painting should be an intrinsic part of expanding our consciousness about space—how it is defined and perceived. Klein was also very futuristic in his approach. He believed that space was the ultimate medium and that in a perfect world gravity would not exist. People would float around the planet, completely unburdened by their past. His famous leap off a second-story ledge in Paris was a leap into a future, mystical concept of space.

TO: There is a curious dichotomy between the Ron Mueck show that just closed, after setting all kinds of attendance records for the Modern, and this one.

MA: The attendance has actually been quite good for Declaring Space, considering the fact that it is a fairly philosophical exhibition. This show won’t travel to any other museums—it’s too expensive to insure—so people are coming here from out of town. The coupling of two shows like these really highlights the fact that today’s contemporary museum is addressing many different communities. The Ron Mueck show had a “wow” factor that very few shows can match. People—many of whom have never been to a museum before—came to witness Ron’s technical skills. I can’t tell you how many times I was asked, “How did he make those figures look so real?” Dazzling us with technical skill—and Ron is one of the best—is a form of entertainment, and many younger artists today understand that entertainment is a valid aspect of the art experience. Declaring Space is more esoteric and a little more difficult to deal with. It doesn’t provide a specific skill or image to hold on to. It creates a space that forces you back on yourself. That has always been an important aspect of art. One is like going to the movies. The other is like going to church.

TO: Do you think the general public really understands the issues brought up by Declaring Space? How much does that matter to you?

MA: I don’t really think about the public when I’m planning a show. What is “the public”? There are communities with varying degrees of interest and education…I think mostly about artists when I’m putting a show together—what they will think. They are smarter than the public about art. They know how to understand subtle narratives. I’d like to think our job is to be smart rather than appeal to the lowest common denominator.

TO: Do you think about the kind of institution you’re wanting to create—like what kind of niche or brand the Modern has as opposed to other institutions around the country or world?

MA: I’m conscious of what they do, but I think it’s important for museums to be unique, and not try to be MoMA, or the Walker, even if it means doing things that are not “hip” or of the moment. You have to do things you think are unique. I think our exhibition program is unique, for better and worse. You can’t be unique and make everybody happy.

TO: You can’t talk about art today without money coming up. What are your observations about money and art today?

MA: We’re in a gluttonous time in the world. I think people should be nervous. I know I am. I was just in China, and I did dozens of studio visits. It’s like America in the twenties, in terms of trying to develop the concept of an avant-garde. In the twenties and thirties, Americans knew about the radical developments taking place in Europe, but we didn’t yet know how to find our own radical nature. We copied Picasso and Matisse. In China, all the artists are looking to the West, and doing quite good impressions of Nauman or Kiefer or Warhol; but it’s just a sort of mannerism. As was true in America, it is a country with a lot of money and a lot of contemporary art; unfortunately, not much of it is very good.

In the world in general there is simply more money, and certainly more artists than there have ever been. But it’s like a garden. If you give it lots and lots of water many things will grow, and among them, quite a few weeds. What we have here is a garden out of control. There needs to be more emphasis on quality, not quantity. The museum, like the critic, must be discriminating.

TO: What are you working on next?

MA: I’m not sure yet. I’m just enjoying this one for now. I’m a little nervous, anticipating the next idea. But I don’t need to know for another few months. The next show won’t be for another two years.