Long Historic
Path
From the late 1960s to the early ¹70s, art critics and museum directors
(the category of independent curator did not yet exist) moved up and
down in the newly born national and international art systems, wrecking
them.
The most significant events, apart from the establishment of museums (which
were almost never interested in contemporary art, although the rare
times they were, the exhibitions have become milestones in our memory),
were: the Biennale of Venice, the Biennale of San Paolo, the Biennale of
Paris, Sosenbeeck, Documenta. And what else?
Sweeney, Greenberg, Rosenberg, Alloway
At this time the art critic was a strong, powerful, and sometimes
uncooperative figure. Critics such as James Johnson Sweeney, Clement
Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Udo Kultermann, Michel Tapiè, Arnold Bode (founder
of Documenta), and Lawrence Alloway dominated the cultural arena and
influenced the market. The market was in trouble because the academic
and theoretical critic (the result of an encyclopedic and bigoted
culture that demonized the market, money, and any marketing of works),
preferred reading theory in libraries to seeing art in galleries: so the
academic critic buried the work of art under the theory and dust of
books.
Argan’s blunders
We all know of the great blunders of Italian historian Giulio Carlo
Argan as a demonstration that a strong theoretical culture often moves
you further away from the work of art.
This kind of culture has never paid whoever wants to get closer to the
work of art with pompousness. Instead in the USA, where criticism was
less academic and more pragmatic, Sweeney and Greenberg did not disdain
contacts with the galleries of the time, in particular with Martha
Jackson and with Sidney Janis, who became the godfather of Action
Painting and abstract American art.
Museums and Contemporary Art.
The first great event when a museum attempted to scrupulously analyze
and summarize an important contemporary movement, in this case,
cinematic art, was The Responsive Eye² by William Seitz, at MoMA in NY
in 1964. In 1970 MoMA then present ³Information,² created by Kineston
Mac Shine. The Guggenheim responded to this exhibition with a great show
by its director Thomas Messer about the latest fashions, which were
discussed by some of the attending artists, among them Daniel Buren.
These events that were rare and isolated and so far from our habits that
they appeared charismatic and timeless.
Low Budget but High Energy
Budgets were obviously low compared to today, and often the artists had
to carry and mount their artworks themselves. But in any case these were
events with a strong energy, which met the approval of the artists,
representing valid alternatives to the extremely rare and sometimes
obsolete institutional events.
A forerunner of all the hip and a little desecrating exhibitions was
When Attitudes Become Forms² by Harald Szeemann at the Museum of Lucerne,
and also “Arte Povera, Minimal Art” by Germano Celant in Turin ‹ the
very first exhibition of propositive international art or, as it was
called in those days, “Avant-garde” in an Italian museum. I think it was
1971*.
As we reach the late ‘70s, the battle between critics and the market
that would like to get rid of them commenced.
Transavantgarde is
Opposed by Critics
Also the Transavantgarde movement was resented by the most idealistic
and conceptual curators and critics, with the exception of a few museum
directors. There was actually a time when (especially in France, with
the intellectuals of Rue Jacob and Tel Quel) they tried to compare the
Italian Transavantgarde to the ideological instances of Fascism, and
German Neo-Expressionism (Baselitz, etc.) to Nazism. Luckily for the
movement’s protagonists (and their commercial prospects), the equation
had risen and fallen in Paris.
The great season of idealistic critics and curators with strong
moralistic attitudes had begun. The pioneer was Rudi Fuchs who, I
remember, confessed that he hadn¹t invited Julian Schnabel to Documenta
in 1982 because he had too much commercial success.
The great offensive against the market that began in the ¹70s continued
on and off, even though it seemed that the great painting season had
defeated the art idealists. Great painting, especially the figurative
sort, doesn’t need translators or mediators; it is direct to the public,
the end users.
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The Absconding Critic
From here rose the barely concealed hatred of some critics and curators
who were losing their jobs and authority due to image painting hatred
that in some cases still continues. A clear example was the entrance of
poets and writers in the artistic fields (René Ricard, Allen Ginsberg)
substituting for the militant critic who refused to write about Julian
Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, etc.
For some intellectuals, painting more so if it was figurative signified
reaction, the return to the past and to order. In a word: fascism.
I remember the difficulties encountered when I asked militant critics to
write for Flash Art on Schnabel, the Transavantgarde, and
Neo-Expressionism.
They refused, disgusted.
The only person who did not adhere to this position (and as a result he
received money as he had never) was the American philosopher-critic
Donald Kuspitt. In fact during those years he achieved a kind of
notoriety.
Meanwhile museums pushed from the foundations, that is the public, began
to succumb to the pressure of requests to present the new. Jean
Cristophe Ammann (Basel), Zdenek Felix (Munich, and even the elderly De
Wilde (Stedeljik, Amsterdam) opened up with great success to the new
wave; the general consensus was as much remarkable as it was brief.
Meanwhile, the cultured and idealistic critic was strong again and was
attacking even more frenetically the market, hence painting; art at the
time of Conceptual and Minimal art was becoming even more inexpressive,
leaving less cultural space to painting, and opening more doors to
photography, video, and installations.
Catherine David, with the great joy of the ayatollah of pure theory, in
her Documenta X (1997), exacerbated the concept of the theoretical
exhibition mutilating the show with the presence of significant works of
art, with a strong and highly enjoyable impact, but excluding many of
the most significant and celebrated artists of the moment. Gerhard
Richter himself, true monument of German art and international painting,
presented a series of Polaroid photographs, the report of his
sentimental journey in northern Europe.
The Elimination of the Object
With Rudi Fuchs and Catherine David (it is not by chance that we are on
the front of the typical extremism of a certain culture dedicated to
eliminating the object in art), they commenced managing the great
budgets for their own personal journeys and those of their many
collaborators, press conferences in different continents, publications,
and television presentations. The great exhibitions begin, the era of
jet-set curators, with budgets that could make you feel dizzy (at first
10, then 20 and now 30 million dollars), budgets like mid-sized
companies, almost always assigned to absent-minded theorists at times
owing to expensive intellectual whims.
From Catherine David (if I am not wrong she was Jean-Francois Lyotard’s
assistant at the Centre Pompidou for the exhibition “Les Immateriaux” in
1985) to Okwui Enwezor, the continuity of the politically correct is
obvious.
Even Enwezor, having an Anglo-Saxon formation but of Nigerian origin, is
therefore oriented towards the suburbs and keen in documenting political
and cultural repressions of colonialism. He does not feel like opening
Documenta to the market, not even to the great artists with a strong
cultural connotation, preferring people with a low profile but strong
substance, once again to privilege theory and ideology. He re-discusses
the concept of art (you cannot buy, you cannot sell art), the concept of
western supremacy, but especially economic, political, and cultural
oppression.
Back to the Roots?
In conclusion, we should say that the problem is very simple: what is
the role of the curator today? Should it be to show us the most
interesting forms of art, the most outrageous and clever artists placing
certain art forms, not even too interesting, in the empty spaces of
theory? Because this is the problem: shall we give Okwui Enwezor 30
million dollars so that he can illustrate and shape his ghosts or
desires or frustrations, or should we ask the curator to try to put
together the best of today’s artistic production? When the system of art
resolves this conflict we will be closer to a great exhibition knowing
what we are going to see.
Giancarlo Politi (Flash Art Italia, Summer 2002)
* This text was
written on a journey without the possibility to consult catalogues or
books. Some names or dates may be imprecise. I apologize to the readers
and to the people mentioned.zine.com
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