Books
O’Doherty, Brian, and Thomas McEvilley. Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space. New York: University of California, 2000.
Woolf, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/85/. [October 5, 2009].
John., Berger,. Ways of Seeing Based on the BBC Television Series. New York: Penguin (Non-Classics), 1990.
Ackerman, Diane. Natural history of the senses. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Ulrich Obrist, Hans, ed. A Brief History of Curating. JRP|Ringier, 2008.
Holmes, Hannah. The Secret Life of Dust From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things. New York: Wiley, 2003. Print.
Articles
The Word “Curate” no Longer belongs to the Museum crowd–NYTimes.com
Films
Palindromes
Quotes from Readings:
Inside the white cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
by Brian O’ Doherty
i. Notes on the Gallery Space
p1
“The outside world must not come in, so windows are actually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light…The art is free, as the saying used to go, ‘to take on its own life.”
p9
“The construction of a supposedly unchanging space, then, or a space where the effects of change are deliberately disguised and hidden, is sympathetic magic to promote unchangingness in the real or non-ritual world; it is an attempt to cast an appearance of eternality over the status quo in terms of social values and also, in our modern instance, artistic values.
p11
“As a ritual place of meeting for members of that caste or group, it censors out the world of social variation, promoting a sense of the sole reality of its own point of view and, consequently, its endurance or eternal rightness. Seen thus, the endurance of a certain power structure is the end for which the sympathetic magic of the white cube is devised.
p14
The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art.” The work is isolated form everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other spaces where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values.
As modernism gets older, contest becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery “frames” the gallery and its laws.
p15
*Salons–
Indeed, the Salon itself implicitly defines what a gallery is, a definition appropriate for the esthetics of the period.
authority of the frame.
p18
Larger paintings rise to the top
“best” pictures stay in the middle zone;
small pictures drop to the bottom.
Limits are established and framed;
miniaturization become say powerful convention that assists rather than contradicts illusion
p24
Courbert’s one man Salon des Rufuses–How were the pictures hung?
How did Courbet construe their spaces between? I suspect he did nothing startling; yet it as the first time a modern artist had to construct the context of his work and therefore editorialize about his values.
Though pictures may have been radical, their early framing and hanging usually was not. The interpretation of what a picture implies about its context is always, we may assume, delayed.
II. The Eye and the Spectator
p39
As We move around that space, looking at the walls, avoiding things on the floor, we become aware that that gallery also contains a wandering phantom frequently mentioned in avant-garde dispatches–the spectator. Who is this Spectator, also called the Viewer, sometimes called the Observer, occasionally the Perceiver? It has no face, is mostly a back. It stoops and peers, is slightly clumsy. Its attitude is inquiring, its puzzlement discreet. He–I’m sure it is more male than female–arrived with modernism with the disappearance of perspective.
p45
The transformation of objects is contextual, a matter of relocation. Proximity to the picture plane assists this transformation. WHen isolated, the context of objects is the gallery. Eventually, the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force. At this point, as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalized and detransformed; the gallery will make it art anyway.
p52
It often feels as if we can no longer experience anything if we don’t first alienate it. In fact, alienation may now be a necessary preface to experience. Anything too close to us bears the label “Objectify and re-ingest.” this mode of handling experience–especially art experience–is inescapably modern. But while its pathos is obvious, it is not all negative. But while its pathos is obvious, it is not all negative. As a mode of experience it can be called degenerate, but it is no more so than our “space” is degenerate.
p55
Presence before a work of art, then, means that we absent ourselves in favor of the Eye and Spectator, who report to us what we might have seen had we been there. The absent work of art is frequently more present to us.
p64
Hard-Core Conceptualism eliminates the Eye in favor of the mind. The audience reads. Language is reasonably well equipped to examine the sets of conditions that formulate art’s end-product: “meaning.” This inquiry tends to be come self-referential or contextual–that is, more like art more like the conditions that sustain it.
III. Context as Content
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
p9
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved–for a few moments or a few centuries.
p10
The photographer’s way of seeing is reflected in his choice of subject.
p11
Yet when an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning: Beauty Truth Genius Civilization Form Status Taste, etc
p16
The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of the beholder.
Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world.
p18
Perspective organized the visual field as though that were indeed the ideal.
For Cubists the visible was no longer what confronted the single eye, but the totality of possible views taken from points all round the object(or person) being depicted.
p24
The majority of the population do not visit art museums.
p27, 28
Paintings are often reproduced with words around them.
Van Gogh painting–”This is a landscape of a cornfield with birds flying out of it.
“This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.
It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have.
p29
The meaning of an image is changed according to what one sees immediately beside it or what comes immediately after it.
p33
Seeing comes before worlds.
the entire art of the pat has now become a political issue.
p56
true lover–the specator-owner
p130
Publicity
Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up to date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.
For example, the fact that thee images belong to the moment but speak of the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar that we scarecely notice it. Usually it is we who pass the image–walking travelling, turning a page; on the tv screen it is somewhat different but even then we are theoretically the active agent–we can look away, turn down teh sound, make some coffee.
We are static; they are dynamic–until the newspaper is thrown away, the television programme continues or the poster is posted over.
p132
This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing ot the buyer who is not yet enjoying it.
p149
Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world.
p151
The contrast between publicity’s interpreation of the world and the worl’d sactual condition is a very stark one, and this sometimes becomes evident in the colour magazines which deal with news stories.
p153
IT is not, however, the moral shock of the contrast which needs emphasizing.
Publicity is essentially eventless. It extends just as far as nothing else is happening. For publicity all real events are exceptional and happen only to strangers.
Fred wilson:
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/wilson/clip1.html#
Fred Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York in 1954, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from SUNY/Purchase. Commenting on his unorthodox artistic practice, Wilson has said that, although he studied art, he no longer has a strong desire to make things with his hands. “I get everything that satisfies my soul,” he says, “from bringing together objects that are in the world, manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and having things presented in the way I want to see them.” Thus, Wilson creates new exhibition contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections, along with wall labels, sound, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects.
I am seeing museum space as a constructed kind of design space, as an installation environment. Very much like an artist you’re manipulating objects, light, color, spatial relationships. So I thought perhaps I could manipulate the space, make it kind of a trompe l’oeil of a museum space. Critiquing, as well, the notion of museum.
A lot of times people just think I’m a curator, but in fact the things I’m creating are much more about a meta-narrative than about museums and displays. The subject of the exhibition—which is what most curators are concerned about—takes a back seat to that. I’m just using the museum as my palette, basically.
When you go into one of my projects a lot of times you’re scratching your head. You’re scratching your head because the information—like any art work—makes you question your own thoughts and have to work a little bit. It’s not telling you everything. Your emotions and your feelings about what you’re seeing and your experience are as important as any specific information that I’m giving you. So it’s a very different experience when you’re in one of my projects. And it’s even a greater experience if you didn’t know that I did it, because then you’re just having this experience without knowing that it’s an artist who created it for you.
I really start these kinds of museum projects without knowing what I’m going to do. I try to just go in tabula rasa and be a sponge. I always have a little notebook about each project and write down everything—every experience, every thought, anything that was important along the way. In the beginning it’s fun and then as you keep going you get a little nervous because you have to figure out what this is, and you only have a certain amount of time to get this piece done. So it gets a little nerve-wracking. But it always comes together. If I trust the process and have enough time, all the strands come together.
There was nobody to talk to about these things and no way to understand—on any level—how people felt about these things or how they related in the context of the culture.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST
A brief HIstory of Curating
p7
During the course of the 20th century, “exhibitions have become the medium through which most art becomes known”
Walter Hopps
p10
Shows such as Thirty-Six Hours, in which he hung the work of any and all comers over a two-and-a-half-day period, are case studies in curating art outside museum settings.
p16
Walter Mengelberg was a conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who imported the grand Germanic tradition of running an orchestra and conducting. So I mention Mengelberg not so much for his style, but for his unrelenting rigor.
Of the curators, I admired Katherine Dreier enormously , with her exhibitions and activities, because she, more than any the collector or impresario I knew, felt she should facilitate what they actually wanted to do, to do the greatest extent possible.
So you could say she was the artist’s accomplice.
p19
D’Harnonocourt had a kind of stature as a diplomat who could keep all the departments, all the egos, more or less in balance.
I think the other one on this list is Jermayne MacAgy. She was the mistress, or the master, of beautiful theme shows.
p20
You also mentioned her shows in terms of an almost-empty design.(MacAgy)
Yes. She managed to ignore design systems–or tired to work outside systems of taste for these shows.
(It was just a general reminder that you don’t start trying to ask questions–just relax and enjoy the beauty, a general reminder that viewers should not be upset if there is no image, no subject.
So you actually had just a small alternative space, the Museum of Temporary Art, at your disposal.
p20
project 36 hours
(Basement and two floors–he had a space where anyone, not just artists could show their work)
So not just artists–everybody.
Anybody–we made no distinction. My role in this was to be there all 36 hours, meeting and greeting every single person who brought in a work.
p21
Somehow, early on I got used to the idea that these people who were exploring any given subject were constantly pushing out beyond the boundaries, in order to understand what the boundaries were in the first place.
p22
But i’ve also tried to think of exhibits featuring only tow or three works, or even one work, and some unusual comparisons.
p24
Double-leg Theory: an exhibition that is highly regarded by specialists but also makes the cover of Time–in other words, having one leg in a popular field and one in a specialized field.
ex)
p25
The automobile and Culture ant MOCA
(subject and issue?)
p26
So at first the idea was to create a platform?
So at the beginning it was almost like an aritsts’ collective?
p27
Right. The solidarity between the artists was very strong. That’s the positive side. THe negative side, by the way, is that the artists felt that they had a ruthless say over who else would be part of the enterprise.
Ausstellungsmacher–the one who puts on an exhibition–as an administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat. This list can be expanded by adding the functions of the guard, the transporter, the communicator, and the researcher.
p30
(Artists and instructions)
In 1919, Duchamp was one of the first artsits to use instructions. He sent his sister in Paris a telegram for his Ready-made malheureux, to realize the piece on the balcony. Moholy-nagy was the first artist to do a piece by transmitting instructions over the phone.
Artist space as a laboratory.
We don’t have the salon now; we don’t have the big competitive shows in smaller cities, you know?
They don’t mean much anymore. Most serious artists don’t submit to those. In a sad way, the old salon is dead.
artist-entreprenuers—what the east village was about.
p31
I really believe–and, obviously, hope for–radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have. If you look at the Menil, with its range if interests–everything is quite manicured and segregated out. But there are some larger areas of juxtaposition as well. We have our African section, right up against a very small section of Egyptian art. But egypt interposes–you can’t get into the Central and Western Europea section, or to Greco-Roman culture, from Africa without going through Egypt. It makes a kind of sense, SO just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some. But I mean beyond that–where special presentations can jump around in time and space, in ways we just don’t do now. I really believe in these kinds of shows.
Pontus Hulten
p32
He has the soul of an artist, not of a museum director. Has always maintained a special dialogue with artists.
Hulten defined the museum as an elastic and open space, hosting a plethora of activities within its walls: lectures, film series, concerts, and debates.
p33
1951. Things were infinitely easier then. Paintings didn’t have the value they do today. YOu could bring a Mondrian to the gallery in a taxicab.
-One of the shows were held in a bookstore.
p34
Gallery bookshops were a way of exhibiting the work of young artists without making a financial commitment.
p36
create shows that combine theater, dance, film and painting.
p37
We had many friends who were working in music, dance and theater, for whom the museum represented the only available space, since opera houses and theaters were out of the question–their work was viewed as too “experimental.” So interdisciplinary came about all by itself. The museum became a meeting ground for an entire generation.
p43
Many exhibitions you organized in the 1960s didn’t privilege the artwork as such. Documentation and participation in various forms became equally important. How come?
Documentation was something we found very exciting!
p45
cross between laboratory, a studio, a workshop, a theater, and a museum.
The participation of the public was to be more direct, more intense, and more hands-on than ever before, that is we wanted to develop workshops where the public could participate directly, could discuss for example, how something new was dealt with by the press–these would be places for the criticism of everyday life.
p46
I think a collection is very fundamental.
p47
It allows it to survive a difficult moment–like when the director is fired.
A collection isn’t a shelter into which to retreat, it’s a source of energy for the curator as much as the visitor.