In Conversation with Karin Higa at the Japanese American National Museum

This week we had the opportunity to speak with Karin Higa, curator at the Japanese American National Museum. Karin has stepped down as director and into the position of curator, as she is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Art History at USC. Her art historical approach to curation (as opposed to curator-stars, independent curators, artist/curators, and curatorial majors) seemed quite different than the conversations we've had in weeks past.

She was quite proud of the fact that one of her professors uses an article she wrote to bring 20th Century Japanese-American artists in the the traditional art history cannon. She also mentioned some upcoming shows she is curating, including a show of contemporary Asian-American artists called "One Way or Another," (that will include the faux-appliance maker Kaz Oshiro) and show that pairs Ikebana with contemporary artists.

The conversation was far-ranging, from Jessica Bronson's comment about how we live in a lateral culture without a lot of depth. In this respect Karin's art-historical-based practice was much more penetrating and contextualized than some of the work of past curators we've talked to. Karen made the comment that art cannot be separated from context and vice versa, which seemed to be at odds with her upcoming show that will pair a German artist like Isa Genzken and Japanese flower arrangements.

And again (as with most curators) I wind up feeling troubled by the power relationships between these people and the artists that they curate. On one hand they speak about the good work they do when they insert unrecognized artists into the art cannon: the curator as a sort of historical repairman. On the other hand, the relationship is a lot more complicated. As an example, she spoke of the work of Hideo Date. When she first contacted him, he said he didn't talk to curators and hung up on her. Her attitude was fairly cavalier; there were plenty of other unrecognized artists she could contact. Later, she talked about how her curatorial practice helped artist get their work into the collections of LACMA and the Autry, and how she was able to get these artists to donate large amounts of their work to JANM. It seems that she has these artists over a barrel: if the want to be included in the art cannon, they need to play by the terms set by the JANM.

Lastly (or more tangentially) I wanted to get back to Jessica's comment about the flattening of culture. With things like blogs, YouTube, digg, etc. there becomes a sort of equivalence of information. Culturally based institutions like JANM work against that, attempting to tease out and preserve difference. I'm actually more interested in that process of how difference disappears. When does the Battle of Iwo Jima become like the Battle of Hastings?

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Listening to Sam Durant

I attended the lecture last night given by Sam Durant at the Hammer, as part of the UCLA Art Department's visiting artist lecture series. He talked about the show he curated at MOCA of Emory Douglas' work as well as his own practice.

At the end of the presentation, one of the UCLA students asked Sam if making political work has hurt his career. Sam said that he felt lucky to have gained some measure of success before his work became so pointedly political; he offered the warning that for younger artists starting out; making political work may hurt their chances at getting shown.

I feel lucky having Sam as my mentor at CalArts and never hearing such caveats and warnings from him. Perhaps it's because UCLA is much more of a careerist place, where success is judged in terms of shows rather than content.

Addendum:
Herein lies the blogger's dilemma: How much does one write? It seems the form lends itself to the short, pithy, and opinionated rather than the in-depth and complicated. That being the case, I thought I'd write a bit more about Sam's work, particularly the inversions that take place.

Though he didn't talk about it, I'm thinking of the photographs of the upside down chairs, as well as the inverted tree stumps, reversed drawings, and backwards-tracked music. In Hal Foster's review of Michael Kimmelman's book in The Nation, he makes an interesting point:

Great art teaches us "to live life more alertly"; it sharpens our senses and, in doing so, sharpens our sense of being. This is a precept of the Russian Formalists (among other Modernists): Great art renews perception, hardened by artistic convention and social habit, through a defamiliarization of representations that have become automatic. "The process of perception is an end in itself," Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917. "Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." In Russian Formalism (as opposed to the Anglo-American school of Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg) this artfulness does not separate art from life but rather restores both through renewed contact and close attention.

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Musical Interlude

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Meg Linton at Ben Maltz Galley

Today we visited with Meg Linton at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis. Her programming there is quite eclectic, showing local and international artists, shows curated by others, and shows that highlight design, like the Misfit Toy Show and the current exhibition on local green products. It was a bit difficult to get a handle on her programming, as most of the other curators we've visited tend to have some sort of focus or agenda.

Towards the end of our talk we did get into some of the more interesting issues that are being debated in the art world. Meg talked about no longer writing art reviews in part because gallerists are some of the same people she may ask to borrow art from. Even in a review that's more descriptive than critical, it's easy for an fragile artist or sensitive dealer to take umbrage. There was a prescient mention of this by Chris Bors in his ArtInfo piece, "The Unspoken Gorilla." Near the end of the article he relates a story by an SVA alum:

SVA faculty member and noted art critic Jerry Saltz took students on class trips to galleries, he warned them not to say anything openly negative in front of dealers. Instead, Saltz told them to use a series of secret hand signals to indicate whether they liked the work or not. It seems the risk of upsetting a potential connection was simply not worth it.

It makes me realize that all they hype that accompanies the current art-fair-related boom is tenuous and fragile indeed.

Meg also bemoaned the lack of any substantive alternative movement in art, as our vast and speedy consumer culture absorbs the radical and subversive and transforms it into commodities as quickly as it's produced. (My take on her ideas) Even the idea of artists creating alternative spaces is quickly becoming a historical tradition.

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A Visit with Malik Gaines

This week we paid a studio visit to My Barbarian Malik Gaines. Besides his performative work, teaching at CalArts, writing, and getting a Ph.D. at UCLA, Malik also has curated several shows at places like LA>. He also curated Fade (1990-Present): African American Artists in Los Angeles, a Survey Exhibition, and has an upcoming showof text-based art at the Armory in Pasadena. This was the first curator that we talked to that didn't see his curatorial work as his primary practice. What was also different was that many of his past projects were themed shows that somehow related to his own interests and existence as a African-American gay performance artist/writer. He seemed to get pulled into some of these projects rather than shows coming to fruition based on his own inertia. His life seems incredibly overwhelming with all the hats he wears, and it seems like his curatorial work will play a minor role until he graduates.

I liked what he had to say about the upcoming show at the Armory in the Spring, with his interest in the bifurcation in the art world (in the mid-90's) between political work and work interested in beauty and the sublime.

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CalArts 2007 Mid-Res MFA Show

Sorry for the blurry photo, taken last night after installation at 2:00am. This piece is in the Main Gallery at CalArts and is part of the MFA-2 Art and Photography Annual Mid-Residency Show . Works in seven gallery spaces on the third and fourth floors. Opening is this Thursday, October 11 at 9:00pm: Alcohol, Music, Art, and Hot Young MFAs!

Part of my on-going interest in image and text, my piece speaks to the recent history of artists including books in their shows. And my art fabricators at Amazon, the USPS, and the mailrooms of CalArts and LA BioMed have given the works a fine patina of dents and scratches found on Judd's work in many museum collections. In the detail below, you can see where my fabricator in the mailroom applied my signature.

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Curator Glenn Phillips at the Getty Center

This week we met with Getty Research Institute curator Glenn Phillips. He took us around his current GRI show, Evidence of Movement, and talked about the upcoming exhibition California Video. The current show includes broadcasts from the KPFK show Close Radio that aired in the 1970's. Have a listen to Cris Burden "Wiretap," where he gets his two dealers to badmouth each other, secretly recording the conversation and putting it on the air.

Some interesting tidbits that came out was that 60% of the visitors to the museum don't go inside to look at the art, and instead spend their time in the garden and checking out the architecture and the views. He also talked about designing exhibitions for viewers who aren't really there to see the art, allowing for "escape routes" through the show.

On the subject of censorship, he said that as far as showing videos, the only policy is "no penetration," which came up from his screening of Andrea Fraser's video. Most of these screenings and shows now come with caveats and warnings, since the Getty is such a litigation magnet. He mentions that folks take the tram up the hill on a regular basis for the sole purpose of slipping, tripping, falling, and sueing, so the lawyers at the center are well versed at protecting their endowment. He told one story of a video screening where it was announced beforehand that the tape contained nudity. Still one viewer sued because she didn't think that nudity would include MALE nudity. Go figure.

My one critique of the place would come from the way they spend their money in relation to local contemporary institutions. Since they have received many notable archives (most recently the video collection of the Long Beach Museum of Art) they are in a position to preserve materials that might otherwise be lost. This is a good thing. They also give money to local art organizations to help them catalog and preserve their archives. This is a good thing too. My only wish is that some of that money would go to help these art organizations be more fiscally stable, rather than swooping in once they falter and acquiring their collections.

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