Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Curatorial Matters

Curators Name Award-Worthy Exhibitions and Catalogues

Now for some awards, these just announced by the Association of Art Museum Curators. Recognition by one’s peers is the highest form of praise, really, as they should know the true values of a profession and pay little heed to popularity. 

Outstanding Catalogue Based on an Exhibition (tie):

Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011, by Linda Komaroff, Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom et. al.

and:

Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980, Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011, by Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk et. al.

Outstanding Catalogue Based on a Permanent Collection

Fragonard’s Progress of Love at The Frick Collection, New York: The Frick Collection in association with D Giles Limited, 2011, by Colin B. Bailey.

Outstanding Catalogue Essay:

Randall R. Griffey, Curator of American Art, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, “Reconsidering ‘The Soil'”: The Stieglitz Circle, The Regionalists and Cultural Eugenics in the Twenties,” in Teresa A. Carbone, et al., Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, exh. cat. (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 2011), 245-77.

Outstanding Monographic or Retrospective Exhibition

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” curated by Andrew Bolton, The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (pictured above)

Outstanding Thematic Exhibition

“The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” co-curated by Janet Bishop of SFMOMA, Cécile Debray for the Reunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, Rebecca Rabinow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Art, and Gary Tinterow, formerly of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum

“It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973,” curated by Rebecca McGrew, Pomona College Museum of Art and Glenn Phillips, Getty Research Institute, at Pomona College Museum of Art

 Outstanding Permanent Collection New Installation (or Re-installation)

“Artist’s Eye, Artist’s Hand: American Indian Art,” curated by Nancy Blomberg, Chief Curator and Curator of Native Arts, Denver Art Museum 

Outstanding Small Exhibition (based on square footage: no more than 2,000 square feet)

“Antico: The Golden Age of Renaissance Bronzes,” curated by Eleonora Luciano, associate curator of sculpture, National Gallery of Art, in collaboration with Denise Allen, curator of Italian sculpture, The Frick Collection, New York, and Claudia Kryza-Gersch, Curator of the Kunstkammer, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (above, right).

The complete press release, with all authors named and some runners-up, is here.

I’m especially pleased by the award to the Denver Art Museum, whose installation, which added attribution to Native American artists wherever possible, I wrote about in The New York Times and here, here and here.

I don’t have any other real comments — I liked all of those honored that I saw — except to note again that these choices seem to favor the east and west coasts.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Met (top) and the Frick (bottom)

Duane Hanson Conserved, And That’s A Challenge And A Tale

If recent exhibitions give a clue, museums seem to think that visitors want to know more about conservation — and I think they’re right. Conservation obviously provides a window on process, on how the artist did it, on creativity.  

Recently the Milwaukee Art Museum conserved a sculpture by Duane Hanson, which it had agreed to lend to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for an exhibition called LifeLike — “artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal.” This job, rather than an exhibition for the conservation work, had a good story behind it, and merited extensive blog post recounting of the process, which I’d like to share. 

Hanson’s hyperrealistic sculptures — beloved by people but often belittled by critics — aren’t easy to tend. They are, in fact, the subject of vandalism at times, with people lifting small items from them. In Milwaukee, for example, the museum conservators had to seek out ballpoint pens from the late 60s and early 70s, because people had taken them from their Janitor (1973). They also had to clean his uniform, which proved highly difficult when they realized they couldn’t remove the clothes without taking apart the sculpture.

Did they or didn’t they? Read the answer here.  

And how do conservators restore the Janitor’s human hair? Says MAM’s Senior Conservator, Jim DeYoung:

We found a letter written in 1974 from Duane Hanson and it demonstrates that he was very involved with the owners of his artwork in their care and maintenance of these artworks. We read that Hanson was not only involved himself, but that he was eager to get other people involved, too. In this case, he had no problem packing human hair into the letter and instructing how to attach the hair with the gluing method and so forth. So this gave us a bit of a road map in what we thought was ethical to do to, how much latitude we had in caring for the artwork, and how much artistic license we had to move ahead with plans to bring the janitor to its original condition.

What to do about that ’60s watch? And his fraying pocket? It’s all on that post, by assistant curator Mel Buchanan. I enjoyed it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Art Museum

Take The High (Line) Road: Art CAN Be Fun

If one of her first projects is an indication, I like the way Cecilia Alemani, the new art curator at the High Line, thinks. Alemani joined the High Line last October, and in a Q&A she did for the park’s spring newsletter, she was answered a question about her plans this way:

As soon as I joined the High Line, people started asking me what my first  big bronze sculpture would be. I think it’s funny how people put art in silos, assuming that “public art” means monumental sculptures in corporate plazas and government buildings. To react to this, I decided to do a show of very tiny objects to debut in HIGH LINE COMMISSIONS. The show will be called Lilliput. It will be the High Line’s first group exhibition, with a series of miniature sculptures installed in peculiar places along the High Line.

She’s right; people do have certain expections — and sometimes the best way to create interest is to defy them. Alemandi is doing it in a way that doesn’t employ shock value, which is often the fallback position. I like that.

The High Line website has more about the show, which opened on Apr. 19 and continues for a year. It involves six artists — names and projects are here — who made and sited their pieces among the vegetation and along the pathways. For visitors, it’s an art treasure hunt.  “Throughout the different seasons, nature will embrace the sculptures, transforming their surroundings and acting as a backdrop in continuous flux,” Alemani says, looking forward to the way the art works will blend with, or not, the landscape over the course of the year.

The artists Alemani chose are all, but one, foreign-born, as is the curator. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.

They’re lucky: the  High Line is an incredible venue for exposure. Since it opened in June 2009, more than 7 million people have visited.

Photo Credit: Herakles by Oliver Laric, one of the artists in the exhibition, Courtesy of the High Line

 

Qatar’s Murakami Exibition: Fair Billing Or Not?

While we’re on the subject of curatorial matters — yesterday I mentioned how much I’d learned by the focused curating of van Gogh’s paintings to show his take/perspective on nature — I decided to take up a very different example that has been on my mind. In honesty, I don’t know how I feel about this.

Since Feb. 9, Murakami – Ego has been on view at the Al Riwaq exhibition space, located next to the Museum of Islamic Art on Doha’s Corniche, a project of the Qatar Museums Authority. It’s billed as “ his first exhibition in the Middle East and one of his largest to date” and promises that “Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will immerse visitors in a fantasy world that captures his distinct perspective on contemporary culture.”

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the press release says the show will have more than 70 works, from 1997 through the present, in a 24,756 sq. ft space:

The exhibition, which functions as a giant self-portrait and offers a look inside the artist’s mind, features new monumental works of art, a variety of multi-media objects and environments, new modes of display, and important series presented in their entirety for the first time.

The full press release, which describes the exhibition in detail, is here.

Now Murakami also makes some risque, some might say profane, works, such as his nudes and his “My Lonesome Cowboy.” I asked whether any were in this show. The response from the press representative was “no, the exhibition does not contain his nudes. Takashi Murakami and curator Massimiliano Gioni obviously have shown respect for the local culture and tradition of Qatar.”

I also asked who the show was aimed at, and got this response:

There are actually a number of educational initiatives planned. To celebrate the opening, there was a talk between Takashi Murakami and curator Massimiliano Gioni on Feb 9, at the Museum of Islamic Art auditorium.  The audience was a mix of university students, artists, people involved in the Qatar/regional art scene, and special guests from the international art world.

The Japanese Club from Qatar University, which is made up of young Qatari and Arab students, helped with the event.  In addition, the group is working with QMA as volunteers, serving as gallery guides for visitors and school groups touring the exhibition.

Other activities planned for local audiences include a series of family workshops from April-June called “Once Upon a Time,” which will explore Murakami’s work as inspiration for art projects. 

Hmmm. I guess that means locals and visitors alike. Here is what I think I think: It’s fine for the curators to choose works that will respect the local culture, and I respect them for that.

What I think may be wrong is billing the show as his “distinct perspective on contemporary culture.” That, to me, would include his most popular, or most valuable, works. If “My Lonesome Cowboy,” a large sculpture of an anime manga-boy masturbating that fetched some $15 million at auction, isn’t “a look inside his mind,” a lot of other people have been fooled about that. His nudes are clearly sexual. These works are, largely, what he is famous for. How can they be left out, without an explanation? Viewers are not getting the true picture — they are being misled.

 

The Getty Gambit — Not With Tim Potts, But With Observation

I’d already been planning to write something about the Getty Museum sometime soon — before the J. Paul Getty Trust announced its choice for the director of the museum today — Timothy Potts, formerly with the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge and before that director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (here’s the link to the press release). So now I’ll put away what I was going to write and switch to the Getty.

But not about Potts. I know him a little, and by reputation as well. And I know him to be a very ambitous man. How he will fit in at the Getty remains to be seen. The Trust is a messy, hydra-headed entity, and whether it works or not has always depended on the personalities involved. It remains to be seen whether the five people now in place, James Cuno at the trust, and the heads of four divisions will work together nicely.

Let me move to my original post, which is again about getting people to appreciate the art in museums.

On Feb. 7, a new, long-term exhibition opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum called The Life of Art: Context, Collecting, and Display.  It displays four objects from the permanent collection and encourages visitors to sit down and spend time with them, offering the opportunity to examine them closely to understand how they were made and functioned, why they were collected, and how they have been displayed.  The Getty has also installed touch screen interactive displays that highlight and explain visual clues about the life of each object.

The four objects are a silver fountain (France, 1661-1663), a lidded porcelain bowl (China or Japan and England late-1600s) (pictured at left), a gilt-wood side chair (France, about 17351740), and a gilt-bronze wall light (France, 1756) . They’re shown in “an inviting, comfortable setting” and the works are displayed “at table height so that each can be seen easily at close range and in the round.”

The Getty has written labels to prompt visitors to examine the artworks carefully, looking for “makers marks or inscriptions, details of construction or assembly, and visual evidence of alteration or repair.” The interactives do the same. If you go to the exhibition website, you can, as the picture above suggests, “launch the interactive.”

The press release that triggered my interest is dated Dec. 20, 2011, and quoted Potts’s recently departed predecessor:

“Many of the objects in the Getty Museums permanent collection have fascinating stories,” said David Bomford, acting director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “By focusing on close engagement with a few selected works, The Life of Art encourages critical seeing and reveals the full lives of these objects and why they continue to be collected and cherished today.”

Later, it says:

Each of the works of art in the exhibition has a mate, or a similar piece, on view in the adjacent permanent collection galleries, allowing visitors the opportunity to compare the different viewing experiences. Labels will be installed in the spots where each piece is normally displayed—marking their absence, illustrating how each object is normally displayed and directing visitors to the exhibition.

As I always say when I haven’t a show in person, I reserve judgment until, and if, I do. The online interactives seem a little too simple, and perhaps the Getty should have made advanced versions, too.

Nonetheless, this seems to be another excellent example of trying to get people to observe more and learn more at museums, without shoving education down their throats, which they seem to resist.

Good for the Getty. I invite feedback from anyone who has been to the show.