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>> So good evening everyone.
My name is Michael Taylor, the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College,
and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you
to the 8th Annual Dr. Allen W. Root Contemporary Art Distinguished Lecture
at the Hood Museum of Art.
I would like to thank Allen and Janet Root, who are in the audience with us today,
and to also recognize their granddaughter, Gillian,
who is a member of the class of 2014 at Dartmouth.
Dr. Root graduated from Dartmouth in 1955 as did his son Jonathon in 1982
and his daughter Jennifer in 1995.
This family bleeds green, and we love that.
Because of their father's passionate interest in contemporary art, Jonathon, Jennifer,
and their other son, Michael Root, established this lectureship in honor of their father,
a renowned pediatric endocrinologist and also a collector of modern and contemporary art.
It is a great privilege for me to introduce this evening's speaker, who is Dr. Richard Meyer.
Richard Meyer is one of the foremost art historians in the field
of 20th Century American Art and Visual Culture.
He is the professor of art history at Stanford University and has also taught at the University
of Southern California; the Courtauld Institute in London, my alma mater;
the University of Pennsylvania; and Columbia University.
At USC, he was also from 2008 to 2011 the director of visual graduate studies
and was an affiliated faculty member in American studies and ethnicity.
He received his BA from Yale University and his PhD in art history from the University
of California Berkley, and his doctoral dissertation led to the landmark publication,
"Outlaw Representations, Censorship in Homosexuality in 20th Century American Art,"
which was published to great critical acclaim by Oxford University Press in 2002.
He is also the author of "Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles" in 2011
and has 2 publication projects forthcoming in 2013.
The first, for which he is co-author with Catherine Lord, is titled "Art in Queer Culture"
and will be published by Phaidon Press.
The second, which relates to the topic of this evening's lecture, is titled,
"What was Contemporary Art" and will be published MIT Press.
So both in 2013.
Richard was also the co-editor of Weegee in Naked City in 2008, and in 2003,
he edited the volume, "Representing the Passions, Histories, Bodies,
and Visions" for the Getty Research Institute.
In 2006, Richard was co-editor of a 2-part issue of the journal, GLQ,
a journal of lesbian and gay studies.
He has served as curator of exhibitions as well including "Naked Hollywood:
Weegee in Los Angeles" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2011
and "Warhol's Jews, Ten Portraits Reconsidered," at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2008.
I saw both of those exhibitions, and they were absolutely outstanding.
He's the author of numerous journal articles and edited volumes
with such thought-provoking titles as "Big Middle Class Modernism,"
"Artists Sometimes Have Feelings," "Gay Power Circa 1970," "Visual Strategies
for Sexual Revolution," "Mind the Gap," "Americanist, Modernist, and the Boundaries
of 20th Century Art," "The Jesse Helms Theory of Art," "Have you Heard the One About the Lesbian
Who Goes to the Supreme Court," "This is to Enrage You: Grand Fury and the Graphics
of AIDS Activism," "Robert Mapplethorpe and the Discipline of Photography,"
and "Los Angeles Meant Boys: David Hockney, Bob Mizer,
and the Lure of Physique Photography" to name but a few.
Those are just my favorite titles [laughter].
Richard has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Charles C. Eldredge Prize
for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art,
which was awarded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Mellon Award for Excellence
in Undergraduate Mentoring; and the Albert S. Raubenheimer Award for Outstanding Teaching,
Research, and Service to University of Southern California.
His talk this evening is entitled, "What was Contemporary Art: An Introduction."
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Richard Meyer.
[ Applause ]
>> Thanks.
I first met Michael Taylor 6 years ago in Philadelphia when he was a curator
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I was a visiting professor of contemporary art history
at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was immediately struck by his generosity of spirit
and of intellect, and I'm delighted to have this opportunity to reunite with him and to meet all
of you here at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth.
This is my first time visiting not only Dartmouth
but New Hampshire so I'm very happy to be here.
The book project I was working on at the time I met Michael, the one I finally finished
and I'm to preview for you here today, that book project addresses the tension
between contemporary art and art history.
How it asks can contemporary works be part of the history of art
when those works have not been time tested or vetted, when the necessary critical
and historical distance has not yet been achieved.
How in deed can there even be something called contemporary art history?
And I'll remind you that I was a visiting professor of contemporary art history at Penn
but even as I accepted the position I was sort of wondering, well what is this strange beast,
and that's where the book comes in.
So I'm showing you.
This is the cover of the book.
It features a young woman, one Miss Polly Cotter, facing off against a Plexiglas sculpture
by Alexander Calder at the Plastics Exhibition held
at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston in 1940.
The sculpture had recently won first prize in an art contest sponsored
by the chemical manufacturing company Rohm and Haas, the inventors
and commercial distributors of Plexiglas.
Created by the company as a shatter-proof alternative to glass in 1933,
Plexiglas was introduced to American markets within the context of military production,
so it was first used for cockpit covers, wind screens, and weapon mounts.
The sculptural competition in 1939 underscored the possibility of an aesthetic rather
than strictly utilitarian or militarist application of the material.
As the winning entry in the competition, and here's the sculpture from a different angle,
it's the same sculpture you're seeing here.
As the winning entry, Calder's sculpture was given pride of place in the Rohm
and Haas Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
That's what I'm showing you on the screen on the right.
Displayed on a circular table to allow viewers to approach from all sides,
the sculpture was set against a series of 7 backlit dioramas,
each of which demonstrated a different property, flexibility, lightness, luminosity of Plexiglas,
or it's sister plastic crystallite.
And there you see the pavilion, which features Plexiglas.
The showcase is Plexiglas, crystallite, and Calder's sculpture.
In their very datedness, the picture of Polly Cotter from 1940 and the Rohn and Hass pavilion
from the world fair in 1939 in their very datedness, these pictures recall
that the category of contemporary art is not a new one.
All works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them.
Part of the task of the art historian then is to retrieve a vivid sense of the world
into which an art work was introduced and so to measure the distance
between its contemporary moment and the scholar's own between say 1939
when Plexiglas had only recently been introduced and was still kind
of a marvel of a material and today.
Our return to the past must acknowledge the impossibility of forging a comprehensive account
of the artwork as it really was while nevertheless attending
to the specificity and heft of history.
By asking what was contemporary art, I do not mean to suggest that contemporary art is now
over or that we have arrived at a post-contemporary moment
of cultural production, which some have suggested.
Rather, I mean to retrieve selected episodes in the history of once current art so as
to reclaim the contemporary as a condition of being alive, to,
and alongside other moments, artists, and objects.
So something like what we now call contemporaneous, that is existing along with
or alongside, alive at the same moment as.
Today, I want to share with you and excerpt from the book's introduction and a brief sketch
of its principal chapters, and I'm giving fair warning that we'll be jumping around quite a bit
between different art historicals, examples and contexts.
One of those contexts, which I've just briefly introduced to you, is the plastics exhibition
at the Institute of Modern Art in 1940, the Institute of Modern Art,
which to great controversy would rename itself the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948.
And there's a chapter of the book that looks at that controversy and through
that controversy looks back at the history of the institute of contemporary/modern art.
In the book's introduction, which I'm going to turn to now, I seek to explain how
and when contemporary art emerged as part of the discipline of art history, and in doing so,
I revisit the doctoral thesis of a now eminent art historian.
The introduction is called, "The Art Historical Postmortem."
This is an excerpt from the introduction.
In 1969, a young woman named Rosalind Krauss filed a dissertation in the department
of fine arts at Harvard University.
Fifteen years later, after she had emerged as one of the leading critical
and art historical thinkers of her generation, Krauss would explain the unorthodox means
by which she had chosen her dissertation topic, and here is a quote,
a long quote from Rosalind Krauss, "I was in fact thinking of a topic
in 19th century European Art that would have been much palatable to my professors at Harvard,
but it was going to be difficult for me to go to France
for a year in the middle of this marriage."
She had recently wed Richard Krauss.
"I didn't know what to do until one morning I woke up to an announcement on my clock radio
that a sculptor had been killed in Vermont.
I thought it was Tony Caro, because they said Bennington, Vermont, where he was teaching.
I thought, oh, how terrible, because I knew Tony.
Then after a couple of sentences, they repeated the name, and I realized it was David Smith,
I thought, um, I now have a thesis topic.
I knew they would never allow me to do a dissertation on someone
who was alive, but he had just died.
I went rushing to Harvard to announce this as my topic."
Within the logic of this anecdote, the shift from the imagined death of Anthony Caro
to the actual one of David Smith constitutes a passage from personal loss
to professional opportunity, from the register of friendship to that of scholarship,
from the terrible thought that a sculptor Krauss knew firsthand had perished to the recognition
of the use value of an entirely different sculptor's demise.
Death here delivers the artist into history or at least into the history of art.
Sealed off from the possibility of new work, stylistic shifts, imaginative breakthroughs,
or creative disappointments, Smith's artistic output could at least be scrutinized,
interpreted, and catalogued by the art historian.
Krauss in other words could now write a thesis on David Smith but only
and almost literally over his dead body.
Even here however there was a catch.
To make Smith more palatable as a topic, Krauss' advisors approved her dissertation
on the condition that she prepare a Catalogue Raisonne
of Smith's sculptures as part of this thesis.
Krauss Dutifully researched and photographed some 700 sculptures.
So a Catalogue Raisonne as many of you will know is a catalogue that includes all the works,
in this case all the sculptures by a single artist.
Krauss dutifully researched and photographed some 700 sculptures dating from 1932,
the year that Smith turned from painting to 3-dimensional construction,
or what he called drawing in space, to 1965,
the year in which he was killed in an automobile accident.
He missed a turn in the road and was crushed inside his pickup truck.
A range of sculptural production I've represented here by showing you construction
from 1932 on the left, which is number 4 in Krauss' Catalogue Raisonne,
and Cubi XXVIII from 1965, which is number 676 in Krauss' catalogue, and it is the last work
that David Smith completed before his death in 1965.
The glossary color image of Cubi XXVIII shown here is not from Krauss' dissertation.
There's the image from Krauss' dissertation.
It's the same work but a very different, oops, different view as you can see
in which the images as you might expect are black and white photographs circa 1969.
But the image on the left is from the catalogue of Sotheby's sale of contemporary art held
in New York City on the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2005.
Cubi XXVIII, also known that evening as lot 23, sold for $23.8 million to the dealer,
Larry Gagosian, who was himself bidding on behalf of the collector, Eli Broad.
The sale of Cubi XXVIII set a new record for the price of a single work of contemporary art
at auction, a record that had in fact been broken just the night before
when Christie's sold Mark Rothko's Homage to Matisse for $22.4 million.
So Homage to Matisse only held the record for less than a day
because the very next day Smith's Cubi XXVIII broke the record, and of course that's a record
that has now been broken many times since.
Though Rothko had been dead for 35 years and Smith for 40,
by the time these records were set, the prices paid for each man's work in 2005 raised the bar
for the secondary market in post-war painting and sculpture.
Here then, we have the conception of contemporary art attuned to the logic
and temporalities of the auction market rather than to those of the artist's life and death.
So one question we might ask is what makes David Smith's work
or Mark Rothko's work contemporary still in 2005, and I'm suggesting that one of the ways
in which it's contemporary is that it's breaking a record for post-war art,
and it doesn't matter any longer that the artist is deceased because the work is living
on in the marketplace and in the culture, and so the market renews the contemporaneity,
the relevance of the work by having it be a record breaker at a particular auction.
The rationale behind the intense bidding over the Smith sculpture according
to the New York Times was "plain to lovers of contemporary art.
The elegantly composed melding of boxes and columns may be the last example of the series
to come on the market for some time.
Most of the others are in museums or collections where they will stay for generations.
So this last chance opportunity was irresistible,
which is why the sculpture's final price was nearly double its high estimate of $12 million.
" The last sculpture completed by Smith before his accidental death
in 1965 thus becomes 40 years later the last
of a highly prized series available for private purchase.
Returning to Krauss' dissertation complicates the narrative
of Cubi XXVIII's irresistible lastness in significant ways, for as it turns out,
Smith's physical death did not mark the endpoint of his artistic production.
Krauss' catalogue includes 8 sculptures that were begun by Smith but completed posthumously
by Leon Pratt, the artist's close associate and welder during the 7 years before Smith's death.
When the catalogue reaches these works, Krauss steps outside her own sequential system
by designating them not with consecutive numbers but with letters, posthumous A through H.
So I'm showing you from 1966 when they were completed the year after Smith's death.
I'm showing you posthumous E, F, G, and H from Krauss' dissertation.
I just have to get my water, sorry [background noise].
Speaking of the needs of the living [background noise].
Given the exhaustive scope of Krauss' Catalogue Raisonne,
which traces Smith's, can you hear me okay?
Which traces Smith's sculptural production throughout and even beyond his lifetime,
the logic that guides that rest of her dissertation is brilliantly paradoxical.
In the long essay, so the dissertation was 3 chapters that formed an essay,
and then the Catalogue Raisonne, which included almost 700 items, but in the long essay
that precedes the catalogue, Krauss argues that art historical chronology
and biographical sequence are precisely the wrong tools
for understanding Smith's pre-eminence as a modernist sculpture, as though in response
or in revenge to the very advisors who required her to locate, photograph,
and date some 700 sculptures as well as dig up every public statement, lecture,
and radio interview by this famously loquacious artist, Krauss positioned her interpretation
of Smith's modernism "against the testimony which a brute chronological succession
of works provides" and against "any simple idea of symbiosis between David Smith
and his historical context," and the first chapter of the dissertation is called
"David Smith's career beyond a historical context.
In thinking about Krauss' dismissal of context and of history,
it helps to know that she was working as an art critic
at the time she was preparing her dissertation.
She was writing especially for Artforum Magazine and also
for Art International and other periodicals.
She was reviewing exhibitions in New York and Boston,
and she was developing a more public writerly voice.
Her mentor in this field, the pre-eminent modernist critic, Clement Greenberg,
inculcated in Krauss the lesson that "the first obligation
of an art critic is to deliver value judgments."
So Krauss in the essay is delivering value judgments about which of the works
of the 700 really matter and which do not, and her confidence in doing so,
her ability to say this one matters and these don't, comes I'm arguing from her work
as a contemporary art critic rather than as a historian.
In describing the parameters of her study, Krauss notes "while the catalogue
of Smith's sculpture, which follows this essay contains nearly 700 works,
I have dealt explicitly with only about 40.
This is because I believe that the quality of Smith's work derives
from a particular attitude he had toward sculpture, an attitude which is fully embodied
in the masterpieces of his career."
Note the self-assurance of Krauss' critical voice in this passage,
the certainty with which she adjudicates and separates the 40 masterpieces
of Smith's sculptural output from the remainder of his career.
And, by the way, Cubi XXVIII would be one of those masterpieces for Krauss,
construction is not and none of the posthumous works are among the 40.
For Krauss Smith's best sculptures exemplify how "certain objects
or occurrences detach themselves from their historical background and strike the scholar
with their overwhelming importance."
So it's literally as though the object in its importance as an object, as a perceptual
and visual experience of the viewer, in this case the scholar,
the object detaches itself from history.
It breaks off from its historical surround and becomes this instantaneous
and almost overwhelming visual and phenomenological experience
that the scholar has to try to explain.
With such statements, we see art history moving away
from comprehensive cataloguing towards critical accounts of selected artworks,
away from the 700 toward ever closer readings of the 40.
In Krauss' writing, as in that of other leading figures in the field,
the present tense encounter between object and scholar increasingly came to take precedence
over the brute chronological succession of art works and the monographic logic of biography,
and one of the ways in which this was most manifest was
that later Krauss' essay was published itself as a book called
"Terminal Ironworks, the Sculpture of David Smith."
That was one book that she published, her first book,
and then the Catalogue Raisonne was published separately as a book called "The Sculpture
of David Smith, a Catalogue Raisonne."
So we could see art criticism and art history sort of breaking apart
and the Catalogue Raisonne of older version of what the task of art history would be published
as its own entity and "Terminal Ironworks" an art critical version of art history, again,
standing on its own as a book from MIT Press.
With Krauss' dissertation essay on David Smith, we see art history becoming criticism,
and we see art history becoming contemporary.
As the dissertations I now advise attest, artists no longer need to be dead
or even very old to be the subject of intensive scholarly analysis.
Today, dissertations are routinely written on artists who are in mid to late career,
on recent museum exhibitions and biennials,
and on current critical debates within the art world.
Tenured and tenure track jobs are posted for historians of contemporary art,
and endowed chairs have been established in the field.
In the United States at least, contemporary art has emerged not only as a viable field
of art historical study, but as by far the most popular.
An article by New York Times critic Holland Cotter,
reported in 2011 that "an overwhelming number of applicants
to art history graduate programs now declare contemporary art their field of choice.
This is Holland Cotter speaking, "Eighty percent was the figure I heard repeatedly
by unofficially in conversation during the annual College Art Association conference
this winter.
The College Art Association, which is the professional conference for artists
and art historians, where people go to give papers and interview for jobs.
One source for that figure, 80 percent, may well have been Patricia Mainardi,
a scholar of 19th century European art who convened a panel called The Crisis
in Art History at the 2011 CAA conference.
In her opening remarks, Mainardi lamented the preponderance of art history doctoral students,
8 out of every 10, specializing in contemporary art.
Maybe we should drop the word history from art history, she proposed a bit caustically
to a ballroom full of art historians.
Consider the following anecdote as further evidence of the rise of what I call now-ism, N,
O, W, hyphen I, S, M, the rise of now-ism within art history.
In 2009, I offered a gradual seminar at the University of Southern California that sought
to historicize the idea of contemporary art.
At the first meeting of the course, I was taken aback when a PhD student expressed the hope
that we would not have to endure that long slog through the 90s before arriving
at the current decade of art and criticism.
Prior to that semester, I had rarely taught a seminar that reached the 1990s,
much less slogged through them to arrive triumphantly
at the millennium on the other side.
The students in this class understood the designation contemporary differently
than I had expected.
Rather than referring to art since 1945, art since 1960, or even art since 1970,
contemporary meant to them the work of artists exhibiting today and in the immediate past.
Banksy, Matthew Barney, Sophie Calle, Patty Chang, Sam Durant, Nikki S. Lee, Glenn Ligon,
and Cathy Opie were some of the arts on whom students in the seminar had already written
or declared their intention of doing so in upcoming projects.
In one or 2 cases, the students were nearly the same age as the artist they wished to study.
The history they proposed to chart neatly coincided with the time of their own lives,
and anyone, well, I will just speak from experience having taught undergraduates at USC
for 15 years and I'm about to start teaching Stanford undergraduates,
I can attest to the challenge of getting young people sometimes to think back before the time
of their own lives, to think about history as a vivid and compelling and urgent matter.
Again, this is a generalization, but just one based on years in the classroom.
And also thinking about my own inability as a college student sometimes to think before
and beyond the experiences of my own life.
I think that's partially what college does, is forces you out of imaging that your own life
or your own historical moment is definitive, for everyone and everything.
But as more and more historians, art historians are writing about living artists,
the importance of history and of the historical past and of moments before we were alive
or the artists whom we are writing were alive,
the importance of history, I think, becomes questioned.
In response to this emphasis on the present, I pose to the students in the class a series
of questions at once straight forward and admittedly aggressive.
Why, I ask them, are you studying art history if what you really want
to do is write about the contemporary moment.
Where are the archives for your research on contemporary art?
In the files of a commercial gallery, in a draw in the artist's studio,
in a theoretical paradigm, in a series of interviews that you intend to conduct
with the artist, or in the testimony of the works of art themselves?
What if anything distinguishes your practice as a historian of contemporary art from that
of an art critic, and this goes back to Krauss and her bringing of criticism into art history.
And finally, how does the history of art matter to the work you plan to write about
and to the scholarly contribution you hope to make?
One student, and this was not the 90s slogger, but another student in the class,
effectively redirected these questions to me.
During her admissions interview, the previous year she recalled,
faculty had emphasized the close association of the doctoral program in art history
with contemporary art museums, curators, and artists as well as its location
in an international center of early 21st century art, namely Los Angeles.
Since the contemporary had been used as a device to attract graduate students to the program,
she reasoned, perhaps it was the professor rather than those very students,
who should define and defend the relation between contemporary art and art history.
So she was basically asking why are you putting these questions to us when we've been promised
that this program will enjoy such close ties to the contemporary art world
and to what's going on right now.
So in effect, you're promising us that we're going
to be contemporary by studying art history.
And in retrospect I realize that she was right.
If graduate students and emerging scholars now take contemporary art for granted as an area
of specialization, it is because the discipline of art history invites them to do so.
When I started graduate school in 1988, no such invitation was forthcoming.
It was understood that modernists, like everyone else in the program, medievalists, classicists,
early modernists, Americanists, Asianists,
worked on historical artists' issues and objects.
It might have been conceivable for a modernist to study the early work of a living artist
who had reached a certain golden age.
In that case, however, the work at issue would have been old enough
for sufficient historical distance, say about 40 years, to have been achieved.
None of these ground rules were spoken aloud nor did they need to be.
At the time there were no professional societies for historians
of contemporary art nor were there tenure track jobs in the field to which one might aspire.
Had someone proposed the practice of something called contemporary art history,
I could only have understood it as an oxymoron.
Somewhere along the line sometime perhaps in the long 1990s, things changed.
The discipline of art history embraced the work of living artists.
"What was contemporary art," this book, is an attempt to reckon with that shift,
but it is also an effort to grapple with the broader dialogue
between contemporary art and the historical past.
In doing so, it draws on the semantic fact that contemporary has not always signified a quality
of being up to date, current, or extremely recent, the way we tend to think
of contemporary now as the most recent and current of art forms and that which comes
after the period coming after the modern.
Often contemporary art nowadays is periodized as beginning say in 1989 with the rise
of the Internet, the end of communism,
certain kinds of interactive technologies and the rise of globalization.
But I'm interested in a different idea of the contemporary.
An older idea, the very first definition of the word,
in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, is as follows.
Contemporary is defined as belonging to the same time, age, or period; living,
existing or occurring together in time.
So, it is a word that conveys co-existence rather than newness.
According to the entry in the OED, the variant co-temporary was in usage during the 17th
and 18th centuries and became so popular as to almost expel contemporary from use.
Although the preference for co-temporary faded relatively quickly,
this antiquated synonym is a useful reminder that contemporary is
at its core a relational condition.
It takes two in other words to be contemporary.
Consider in this context the title of a book published in 1907,
Randall Davies' "English Society of the 18th Century in Contemporary Art," which focuses
on art that portrays British society in the 1700s, not on art contemporary
to Davies' own moment of writing, which was 1907,
or on works that conveyed any particularly modern quality or spirit of innovation.
Society for Davies meant the elites of Society, of British aristocracy,
as represented for example by a watercolor drawing of Queen Charlotte
and the Princess Royale, a mesotante [phonetic] after a painted portrait of Mary Somerset,
Duchess of Ormond, or a cut paper silhouette of a patrician family in their drawing room.
And I'm showing you some of the works that Davies studies in English society
of the 18th century and contemporary art.
So obviously contemporary art is contemporary to the 18th century not to Davies' own moment.
For Davies and his contemporaries in 1907, modern was a property of work that was original,
progressive, and forward looking, of art that was not so much of its time as ahead of it.
Contemporary by contrast described a neutral condition
of temporal co-existence between 2 or more entities.
While a portrait of the Duchess or Ormond attended
by an African child servant was contemporary to 18th century British society,
few in 1907 would have called it modern in the sense of being progressive or forward looking.
Even here, however, the matter
of what constitutes contemporary art does not necessarily remain straight forward.
The 18th century silhouette by Thenard [phonetic] published by Davies
in 1907 cannot help but look contemporary to viewers in 2012, who share a prior knowledge
of the work of the living American artist, Kara Walker.
I'm showing you a work by Kara Walker from 2000 on the right.
In pieces such as "Insurrection!
(Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On)," Walker draws upon a history
of cut paper silhouettes extending back to the late 17th century,
even as she introduces bodies, gestures, and terrors never before visible in that history.
For all the fierceness of Walker's reckoning with the historical past, her art can do nothing
to change the social conditions and inequities that shaped 18th century society,
whether British or American, whether we spell society with a lowercase or capital S.
But Walker can change our retrospective view of those conditions such that
for example the drawing room formality of the 18th century scene on the left comes
to seem rigid and compulsory, a world of enforced protocols and exacting regulations
to which each figure, even the family dog, must submit.
Here's the dog.
Seen through Walker's Insurrection, that is looking at the 18th century silhouette
through the lens of our contemporary work, the Kara Walker, Thenard's rendering
of aristocratic privilege begins to unravel.
It is as though Walker's insurgent figures may breach the boundaries
of Thenard's sedate society as thought the black and blue history of servants and slaves might
at any moment overtake the black and white patrician family in its drawing room.
Walker's art operates according to a dialectical model of history
in which the past is no more settled or secure than the present, and it's this model,
which is very difficult to grab hold of precise because it is dialectical and seized history
as itself something in motion and something that is still to be reckoned with and contested,
but it's this model of history of the present moment of still working out the past
and the past as being reviewed through the present that I try to take
on board in "What Was Contemporary Art."
The temporal existence of an art work is not bound by its moment of production
or by the life or death of its creator.
As it persists over time, the art work, say in this case the Thenard, may become newly relevant
to later works and social historical contexts.
For the art historian, Thomas Crow, art is distinguished by its status
as an expressive object "from the past that arrives
in our midst like a traveler through time."
Building on this line of argument, I propose that the category
of contemporary art might include not only newly produced works by living artists
but also those time travelers that arrive in our midst
from earlier moments and historical context.
And now very briefly I'm going to tell you how I do this
by just sketching the chapters of the book.
To make this argument, each chapter in the book opens with a specific episode
in the production display criticism or historical study of then current art,
so the first chapter is about the year 1927.
In each case, I try to reconstruct the logic and retrieve the vividness of these episodes,
when they were contemporary, when they were now.
By retrieving an acronistic [phonetic] moment and apparently obsolete conceptions
of contemporary art, I hope to repurposed them as counterweights to early 21st century now-ism.
These episodes are first a course taught by Alfred Barr at Wellesley College in 1927
that is thought to have been the first college class to include then current art, architecture,
theatre, film, and graphic design on the syllabus.
From avant-garde painting in Europe to industrial architecture and automobiles
in the United States, from Russian experimental cinema such as Vertov's "Man
with the Movie Camera" that you're seeing referenced in a cover
of a magazine called Sovetskoe Kino or Soviet cinema, the cover designed by Varvara Stepanova,
who was the managing editor of the magazine, that is some of the kind of work
that Barr was showing his students at Wellesley in 1927 to current issues of magazines
such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
The course took the art in culture of its own moment as both subject matter and inspiration.
And in a way Barr's 1927 course of Wellesley College became the inspiration
for what was contemporary art because of the ways
in which he was making vivid the culture of the student's own moment.
He actually designated all the students in the class as faculty
because he said they were all going to teach each other as well as himself
about what was going on at that very moment.
So this first chapter examines the iconoclastic pedagogy and experimental sense modernity
that sharped Barr's unprecedented class.
The second chapter charts a highly selective path through the curatorial program,
I'm sorry chapter 3, through the curatorial program of MoMA under Barr's directorship,
and it looks in particular detail at the ways in which several exhibitions
of premodern art including Persian Frescos [phonetic], prehistoric rock pictures of Europe
and Africa, which I'm showing you in installation shot from here,
and Italian masters were positioned in relation to early 20th century art at the time.
So what you're looking at, this is a show that was at the Museum of Modern Art,
and what you're seeing are full-scale painted, oops, what you were seeing,
here's our contemporary technology intervening,
but in a moment it will return, or shall I do it?
There we go.
These are works in a sense of contemporary art.
They were made by living artists who went on expedition with archeologists throughout Africa
and Europe, and on site they made drawings that were the basis for these water color renderings
that are to the scale of the actual prehistoric cave paintings.
So when you went into MoMA, you were meant to think that you were seeing,
you were meant to experience the prehistoric art as it existed in prehistory but also
as a modern rediscovery of the prehistoric past, and what you were looking at was works
by artists who were contemporary even though they were unnamed as individual artists,
but the copiest, who made these facsimiles contemporary to Matisse and Maison [phonetic]
and the other artists who were on display at MoMA.
And then finally the last chapter considers the surprisingly bitter controversy sparked
by the decision of the Institute of Modern Art, you'll remember in Boston,
who housed among many other exhibits the Plastics Exhibition,
the decision of the Institute of Modern Art to change its name
to the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948.
The change was necessary according to the institute because the idea
of modern art had collapsed into a narrow version of European modernism,
a culture of bewilderment, as its manifesto said.
These are just some of the clippings of the articles from the time this caused something
of a public and national controversy over the renunciation
of modern in favor of the contemporary.
And so the last chapter looks at that controversy and tries
to reconstruct the symbolic and political stakes of the modern contemporary divide at midcentury.
Having sketched the book's chapters, I want to conclude now by reading something
from its Afterward, which is called , "Not Now."
[ Background Noise ]
And this is the conclusion.
It takes about a year for a University Press book
to appear once the final manuscript has been submitted by the author.
Given this, when writing what was contemporary art, I knew that it would be at least 12 months
out of date by the time it was published.
Rather than regretting this delay, I have come to view it as a metaphor for the necessity
of falling behind the times, for the importance of losing step with the ever advancing march
and marketing of contemporary art.
By one recent accounting, there are now more than 100 biannual exhibitions
of contemporary art across the globe, from Sao Paulo to Seoul to Sharjah
with one almost every 10 days on average.
The art market has never been more genuinely global
or more massively capitalized than it is today.
In researching this book, I attended versions of the Venice Biennial, the Whitney Biennial,
the Athens Biennial, Documenta, and Art Basel Miami as well as various satellite events
and expositions including the 2007 Art Now Fair in Miami Beach,
which I'm showing you banners from.
And by the way, those biennials that I just mentioned, the ones that I went to,
that's hardly a patch on the itinerary say of contemporary art curators, museum directors,
collectors, who go to many, many more of these hundred biennials a year then I did.
It soon became clear to me that trying to keep up with the pace
of the contemporary art world was a practical impossibility,
not least because I lacked the financial resources to do so.
Archival research, critical thinking, the crafting of book length projects,
these tasks do not lend themselves to the tempo or logic of art now.
In writing contemporary art history, it may therefore be necessary paradoxically
to lag behind the time of the contemporary art world,
behind the latest biennial opening, artist project, or blog posting.
In 2012, that is right now, the culture of contemporary art seems
to be burning more intensely than ever, but the glare of now-ism,
of the current international art fair, efflux posting hot young artists,
and auction host record, can be fairly blinding.
The spectacular immediacy of the contemporary art world threatens to overwhelm our ability
to think critically about the relation of the current moment to the past.
"All art has been contemporary," reads Maurizio Nannucci's 2010 neon sculpture
at the Boston Museum of Fine Arthritis.
To make that glowing text into more than a truism, we need to recognize
that all historical art was once current
and that all contemporary art will soon be historical.
We also need to grapple with how the art of the past informs
and reconfigures the current moment.
We need, that is to say, to grapple not only with the fast moving art world of our own time
but also with the living history of once contemporary artists and art works,
with a past that should not be permitted to pass away.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
Yes, I'm very happy, we have time, I believe, for questions.
I always say the Q and A is my favorite part of any lecture because it's where I learn.
I know what I said, but I don't know what you heard, so now I learn something
about what you actually, what you heard, which can be, as any professor can tell you,
2 very different things if you talk to your students.
Yes?
>> [inaudible] .
>> Sure.
>> [inaudible] I was thinking when you were talking about [inaudible].
[ Inaudible question ]
And all of that, and it really changed the direction of [inaudible],
and I was just thinking [inaudible] contemporary [inaudible] history
in [inaudible] more traditionally [inaudible] contemporary
or [inaudible] probably also looking at contemporary art.
>> Yes. And that's an excellent point, and it goes straight to the heart of the ambition
of this project, which is actually to say not only that all art was once contemporary
but that all art history is also being written in a contemporary moment
and that what's the conditions of the contemporary culture
in which history is being written shape how that history unfolds
as does the historical past that's actually being studied.
So I don't want to say that it's completely, that contemporary moment determines history
but that we have to understand the writing of history including of art history as a kind
of dialectic between the object of study, the historical moment under scrutiny,
and the moment of the scholar's own practice.
And I think that, and contemporary art is really useful to do this because many,
or what was contemporary art at the moment the historian is writing,
because although some art historians have been very antipathetic to their own moment
in contemporary art, many others, as you mentioned,
have also actually written art criticism as a side light to their art history or collected
or were friends with contemporary artists or certainly were open to the energy,
to the visual culture of the contemporary art of their times.
And I think that it's very exciting when we think about art history
through this double lens, through the lens of the moment that the art history is looking at
but also the moment of the art historian's own light.
[ Background Noise ]
Yes?
>> I was wondering if you could say a bit about the relationship between the art market
for contemporary art and the subject that you're talking about.
>> Yeah.
>> It's natural to think that there is a parallel, which we the students
in your graduate seminar, you know, wanting to get through the 90s as soon as possible,
and the sort of explosion of the contemporary art market in recent years.
>> Yeah, and I think that that's absolutely true and one of the things that's happened, I mean,
and part of the reason I mentioned the art, the record, auction, house records,
is that I think that the art world is bigger, I mean the global art world.
There are more museums for example of contemporary art
than there have ever been before and even the whole invention of something called the Museum
of Contemporary Art coming after, or the Institute of Contemporary Art,
and one of the things I didn't mention was the reason why they called themselves an institute
of contemporary art was because they were going to be a place for research and study
and exhibition rather than an acquisition, so the idea was that if you were going
to remain truly contemporary, you would never acquire works of art because as soon
as you acquired works of art those works would date you at some point
and you couldn't really be fleet footedly up to date if you were being as it were anchored
or dragged down by these works from the past.
But I think the impact of there are more art magazines, there are more art fairs,
and there's simply a culture of contemporary art
that I think is much more, engages many more people.
And the market is larger, so there's more opportunity
to work in the contemporary art field.
You know, sort of manning those boots at the art fairs or working in those galleries or going
into consulting jobs or curatorial jobs or academic jobs.
And I do feel that the market has rendered contemporary art more palpable and kind
of more maybe somewhat more immediate than it was for example for Barrs' Wellesley students.
I talk about how the art shows that he and the students put up on campus were widely reviled
by the Wellesley student body as what they called queer and incomprehensible art,
so I don't think in 1927 that an educated young woman
or man for that matter would have necessarily been expected to have a knowledge or interest
in contemporary art, in the contemporary art of their own moment whereas it seems to me today
that part of the idea of being an educated young person is having some knowledge
of contemporary culture and including one's own contemporary moment.
I would also say that I think that it's not only in art history
that things have become more contemporary but also in the rise of a field
like cultural studies, which is so much about contemporary popular culture,
the interest in noneconomical or countereconomical works, I think,
so some that were popular works so something like the way in which in literary,
in English departments you might study the romance novel nowadays.
I think that we've seen like a turn toward the contemporary, kind of a cross, the humanities,
and I think that the art market, the growth of the art market sort
of amplifies what was already happening you know kind of within art history,
that is things becoming more current and then becoming even more publicized
and maybe also more attractive once people see how vibrant the market
and how global the market is.
But I don't think this is something only this turn toward the contemporary
or this tendency toward now-ism I do think is related
to other developments besides the market, intellectual developments [inaudible].
Yes in the back?
>> When you were talking earlier about the avant-garde being ahead of the curve
in relationship [inaudible] and these days when there's a commodification of the now,
is there a possibility for it to be an avant-garde.
Do avant-garde's easily get commodified [inaudible]?
>> Well I think there's an open question
as to whether the contemporary art world is operating according to a model of avant-garde
or what model of the avant-garde it's operating with, so this notion that the artist is going
to be out front or is going to be a sort of advance garde, and explorer,
or you know is going to sort of bravely risk or go where art has not gone before.
That's one model of the avant-garde.
I'm not sure that that obtains in the same way, and certainly in terms
of the historical avant-gardes, which had political and social ambitions,
like the constructivists for example and their idea of moving art into life and their sort
of social commitments, I'm not sure
that most contemporary artists today are fashioning themselves as a political avant-garde
or an avant-garde that's going to bring about social and political transformation.
I guess let me put it another way, I'm not sure that commodification is seen
as the enemy by many artists today.
I think that I was trained in a kind of Frankfort school modernist etiology that said
that what art wants to do is out distance commodification,
and it wants to trouble the status quo and it wants to be something other
than mass culture and entertainment.
I'm not sure that those models about art as critical of the culture or art as separable
from entertainment or fashion or the so-called culture industry,
I'm not sure that those are the most operable models for artists that are emerging today.
So I think yes it's true that the avant-garde has always been commodified,
but I don't know that young artists who might fashion themselves avant-garde see
that as a problem today, so I don't know if that answers your question.
>> Yeah that makes sense.
>> Your question, Michael?
>> I was wondering how writing this book, obviously it's been a long time coming,
and during that gestation period you worked on Weegee.
>> Um hum.
>> [inaudible] how has thinking about contemporary art and its relation
to art history affected your own [inaudible] practice and such relation
to those exhibitions you did, do you think
of Warhol differently now or Weegee differently now?
>> Well in both cases, Warhol, the 10 Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century,
which was the series that Warhol's Jews focused on, which is a series from 1980,
that was a series that was critically reviled at the time that it premiered.
Although it was very popular, it sold very well, but it was critically largely dismissed,
and Weegee's work, especially his LA work, was never intended to be understood as art
with a capital A, and even those who admire Weegee's sort of film noir
and New York work often have trouble with his LA, his later work and the distortion,
which was the work that was shown in Naked Hollywood, so one thing I guess is to say is
that I have always been drawn to what doesn't count as contemporary art, so what else exists
in the culture that's kind of adjacent to or the underside of what's considered important art.
So Warhol nowadays nobody has a problem with the portraits,
or I don't know that they haven't been, they're not reviled,
the show wasn't when the works were shown in 2005, but in 1980 Warhol was seen as kind
of somewhat marginal to what was going on,
which is hard to imagine now given his posthumous influence.
Part of the impulse behind this book was to say if we think about,
I'm thinking now let's say the show upstairs, the Aboriginal Art Show,
well that is contemporary art, but so often contemporary art is identified
as only what a certain international art market or art world is writing about or looking at
or acquiring, and we don't see let's say other kinds of art that are being produced right now
or craft or art being produced outside of major cities or not in dialogue with what's happening
in Artforum Magazine, we don't really grant those the quality of being fully contemporary.
It's as though somehow Matthew Barney or whomever you might choose is more contemporary
than artists who don't get written about or purchased or seen at art fairs or biennials
to the same extent, and part of what I wanted to do in the book was to say look,
there's always been all of these multiple art worlds, these multiple contemporaries,
and if we think about contemporary art as always being,
as a category where art is alive alongside other works of art and artists and viewers are alive
in a certain moment that they share with others that that could help us to see things as part
of the history of art that haven't been granted that value in the past.
And I'll just say one last thing about that.
You know, one of the real reservations that I had was well what does it mean to put Weegee,
these are photographs basically by a tabloid photographer by a crime photographer,
who really made his name as a photo journalist and then came out to LA to kind of try
to become a celebrity and that didn't work out so well for him,
but one of the issues I had was thinking about what does it mean to put these works,
these photographs, which weren't intended to be art in the museum of contemporary art.
So now to place what wasn't art in its own historical moment in conversation
and one of the thing, one of the ways in which I explained that to myself was that it turned
out that Cindy Sherman and Ed Ruscha and Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham were all collectors
of late Weegee, who leant works to the show,
and in Cindy Sherman's case, she leant a Marilyn distortion.
And Weegee becomes [inaudible] or the dialogue between Sherman's work on femininity
and celebrity and Weegee's work I thought was a really interesting one, and so Weegee,
we could argue that he had an impact on contemporary art
or that nowadays contemporary art is so involved with the culture of celebrity and photography
and journalism that Weegee has something to say to today's contemporary moment in art
that he didn't have to say in the late 40s or early 50s, and that's also part
of what I'm trying to do in this book is to say,
art is not only intended for its own contemporary moment.
It can be revived in a later moment and become as it were newly relevant, newly contemporary,
which is sort of what that brought the Kara Walker and the Thenardins [phonetic] to sort
of say we don't know what the future is going to hold in terms of artistic production,
and the future is going to change how we will see the past,
and actually the future will help us rediscover things, let's say like Weegee
or like late Warhol, that we thought were not part of the history of art.
Does that make sense?
>> It's a great way to end.
>> Okay.
[ Applause ]