Anyone else see Holland Carter's piece from today's New York Times about David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective at Harlem's Triple Candie gallery? Excuse me as I muddle through my complex feelings on the subject.
For those who missed it (or are too busy to click through the links) the gallery has long been interested in doing a show with the artist David Hammons, who has, for one reason or another, long not been doing a show with the gallery (collectors of major pieces were also unwilling to lend their holdings, Cotter reports). So, to make a long story short, the gallery Xeroxed and printed from its computers nearly 100 images of Hammons' pieces and taped them to the wall, and voila, instant retrospective. Call it the Kitty Kelly school of curating, but it sounds brilliant. (an image of the installation from their website appears above). A passage from Triple Candies' website notes that
On one level, the exhibition is about David Hammons' art and career. On another, it is about the art world: particularly how the strategic process of ascribing value to an artist's - by galleries, collectors, and even artists - changes the art's relationship to the public. Finally, this collection of reproductions is meant to question the status-quo of exhibition-making itself.
As a teacher, I've asked artists to simulate exhibitions in which they locate their work in the context of other artists with whom they wish to be associated using architectural models and PowerPoint presentations. Asking artists to behave like curators has - for a long time to me - been like asking workers to behave like management for a day. These purely theoretical exhibit projects have expended and attracted only intellectual capital, not the cold hard cash that dealers and institutions use to accomplish their missions, and have demanded from their audience - mostly other students - only the outlay of a few minutes of thought.
But as a curator, I’ve always felt like it’s my job to bring the real deal to audiences. If I cannot obtain the piece I want for a show, I have to reconsider the show (it has always struck me as being like editing a book; if I cannot get a brilliant essay by someone on a certain topic, I can’t take another one they had lying around as a replacement).
Part of me feels like Triple Candie is doing something (through its simulation) that many of us have been engaged in all along. Part of me now realizes the ethical complexity of what we’ve been engaged in all along through simulation. In a world in which the art object is increasingly irrelevant in the first place (see Sunday’s LA Times article on the use of modern architecture as a means of increasing snob appeal for shampoo and car ads…) art images reign supreme. If we want to participate in our culutre in the way it wants or expects us to participate, artists should be making images limited to the palette of web browsers, scalable for printers, and sufficiently graphic for production at any size. We should be ready for whatever we make to be repurposed and incorporated into others' work and products. We should recognize that we are in the raw materials business.
1 comment:
Good stuff, the show of David Hammons is interesting - seems a bit tongue in cheek to me. Makes me think of the big event cattle call shows (Dali, etc.) that seem to be all about attending the show and marketing rather than seeing the work. Might as well be printouts on the walls.
I’d like to know more about the second show at Triple Candie - It’s of models of Richard Serra’s Tourqued Ellipse. From the description the models are made of museum board and were created by an exhibition designer. I think this show is hilarious. It’s just missing small-scale people around the model sculptures - like an anthropological exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. With a caption of "Late 20th Century art goers view Serra's work in its natural environment."
Should we also include all residual artifacts from gallery and museum exhibits, not just raw materials but as finished products too? I’ll add that to my not painting for the camera - unless it’s digital - painting for the scanner with my web palette swatch book, and PDFing everything I make.
I’m kidding, but is that what we have to be thinking about?
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