Morley Safer Defends His Take On Contemporary Art

 

[On 2 April, I posted the transcript of Morley Safer’s 60 Minutes segment on contemporary art from 1993.  That broadcast ignited a lot of opprobrium from various parts of the art world, as I noted in my comments accompanying the transcript.  I decided to continue the coverage of this event by posting some of the responses to Safer’s remarks, 

[I’m starting with the rather lengthy transcript of a panel discussion with Safer on PBS’s Charlie Rose.  I will follow this up with some written comments, including reviews of Safer’s broadcast.  Those will come out on 8 April. 

[One note on this post: it’s longer than my self-imposed maximum.  The discussion was long and all the participants had a great deal to say.  I didn’t want to split the transcript and post it in two installments because I feel that would cause it to lose some of its strength.  Please indulge me—but feel free to read it in installments if you prefer.]

“‘YES, BUT IS IT ART?’”

[The transcript (which I’ve edited and corrected as necessary) is the record of a talk show that aired on 25 October 1993.  The segment, moderated by Rose, presented journalist Morley Safer (Canadian-American broadcast journalist and reporter; 1931-2016), artist Jenny Holzer (American neo-conceptual artist; b. 1950), curator David Ross (b. 1948; at the time of this broadcast, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art), and art critic Arthur Danto (art critic and philosopher; 1924-2013) discussing Safer’s controversial 60 Minutes broadcast on contemporary art, broadcast on 19 September 1993. 

[Charlie Rose was a television interview and talk show with Charlie Rose (b. 1942) as executive producer, executive editor, and host.  The show was syndicated on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) from 1991 until 2017.  Rose interviewed thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, businesspersons, leaders, scientists, newsmakers, and fellow journalists.]

Charlie Rose: Welcome to our broadcast. Tonight, is contemporary art really art, or is it just media-hyped junk? Morley Safer takes on several art-world critics who are outraged at his 60 Minutes piece condemning some of the work in contemporary art . . . .

It is a rare occasion when the art world actually agrees on something, but when a feature entitled “Yes, But Is It Art?” aired on the popular 60 Minutes program, a cry was heard, “Unfair.” The reaction reminded us that new art can equal controversy. Battles and skirmishes arise when new aesthetics and ideas are introduced.

Joining me now to talk about some of the critical questions in contemporary art, Morley Safer, the co-editor of 60 Minutes, and reporter for the feature in question. Artist Jenny Holzer, whose work is shown around the world. She was the first woman chosen to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1990. Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, author of the acclaimed Beyond the Brillo Box [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992] and art critic for The Nation magazine. Also joining us, David Ross. He is director of the Whitney Museum of American Art [1991-98], and has been embroiled in some controversy at that place as well.

Welcome, one and all. I have said to you, what I want to have here is an engaging conversation. Morley’s piece has given us the opportunity to look at contemporary art. I start with that piece. Tell me why you did it. What was the point of view? What brought it to your attention that this was an appropriate subject now for 60 Minutes?

Morley Safer: First of all, it’s something I’ve been wanting to do for long time. Those people who know me well know some of my thoughts about some of that contemporary art. Along with John Tiffin, who is a producer I work with a lot in London, we’re both very interested in art, and in art history, purely as amateurs. I would not claim anyone’s expertise here in terms of art history.

Charlie Rose: And you dabble in painting a little bit yourself.

Morley Safer: And I paint myself. That was the genesis of the piece. The thing that surprised me, most of all about the piece, I knew there’d be some ruffled feathers. I had no idea it would cause the exposure it caused, which to me in a sense confirms the fragility of belief in much of the material we talked about, plus others. I think that it’s a very fragile belief, by the critics, by the dealers who may have no belief at all because they’re in the marketing business, even by the institutions, and perhaps by some of the artists as well.

Charlie Rose: You’re surprised by the controversy. What is it you think you said, or intended to say, that caused this uproar?

Morley Safer: I think—

Charlie Rose: What do you believe?

Morley Safer: I believe, the response to the uproar was to accuse me of being in league with Jessie Helms [Republican U.S Senator from North Carolina: 1973 to 2003, a leader in the conservative movement; 1921-2008], for repression, and for philistinism, among the other things. It’s the old [Joseph] McCarthy [1908-57; Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin: 1947-57] technique of don’t attack what the guy said. Create something that you think he stands for and attack that. [McCarthy is the namesake of ‘McCarthyism,’ the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.]

Charlie Rose: That’s why I’m asking the question. What did you say?

Morley Safer: To that?

Charlie Rose: No, no, to the – What was it you said that reflected your belief?

Morley Safer: You’ll have to ask them. I don’t know. I think everything I said touched a nerve here or there.

Arthur Danto: What was the belief, the fragility of which was exposed? You mean that people in the art world have serious doubts that this was art? Or Jeff Koons said, “I’ve been wrong all these years?”

Morley Safer: No. Certainly—

Arthur Danto: That wasn’t the kind of fragility.

Morley Safer: No, I think perhaps fragility of belief by Michael Kimmelman [b. 1958], for example, who’s the chief art critic for the New York Times [1990-2011; he’s now the architecture critic], who confessed a crisis of faith in—

David Ross: But I think the issue that your piece raised was that there’s a reality out there that artists are confronting, and artists use art to ask some very serious and interesting questions. You returned to a series of questions that seemed to be based on the assumption that what art is is what artists can get away with, that what art is is a kind of a sham, promoted by people marketing product, and promoted by magazines interested in supporting their advertiser base of dealers, and that’s what art is.

But in fact, art asks far more interesting questions about the society we’re living in, about our fragile lives as people living in the late 20th century. It’s those kinds of questions that your piece seemed to just gloss over by assuming that the basic question is, is it art? Is [Cy] Twombly [1928-2011] an artist because he makes scribbles? Is [Gerhard] Richter [b. 1932] an artist because he makes gray monochrome canvases? Is [Jean-Michel] Basquiat [1960-88] an artist because some kid says, “I could do that.” Well, in fact, what that kid was saying was wonderful to me. Because that meant that kid really understood the language that Basquiat, as an African American, was trying to bring out. [These artists are all mentioned in Safer’s 19 September broadcast; see referenced post.]

Charlie Rose: Let me interrupt you—

David Ross: So you asked the wrong questions, rather than any other problem. That’s what I thought. It was a terrific piece.

Charlie Rose: Wait, wait, wait, Morley. I want you to have a chance to respond to that. I’m going to come right back.

Morley Safer: I think that it would be wonderful if artists were asking these questions you speak about, asking truly interesting questions, and presenting their art in an interesting way, and getting to the core of some interesting things about this good country, or this society, or this world. I think what we are getting is this verbal blah, of juvenile questions being, verbal art so to speak. Don’t look at my art. Read my art. The questions are clichés. It makes bumper stickers art. It makes advertising copy art. It all becomes art, because I suspect that most advertising copy is written and believed in in the most heartfelt way possible.

Arthur Danto: You know, it’s really difficult to ask deep questions in the context of an auction room. That was your favorite venue. You showed these artworks up there, like so many slaves being auctioned off.

Morley Safer: That’s where they are.

Arthur Danto: Your question was, how much are they paying for this stuff? How can they be such fools as to pay that kind of money? Without for a moment leaving the possibility that intelligent people are interested in it. Intelligent people discourse intelligently about it, because the art itself is intelligent work made by intelligent people. You made it seem like a commercial sideshow.

Charlie Rose: Jenny.

Morley Safer: Well, much of it is.

Arthur Danto: It is not.

Jenny Holzer: Before we have to start defending art, let’s go back to your original question, which is what you said to start all this. I know what you said that I objected to, which was, and I’ll probably only misquote you a bit, that most contemporary art would be worthless junk without the hype. That’s more or less equivalent to my saying most reporting is hopelessly biased, or most old white men are cruel and destructive. I think you would disagree with those things. I disagree with what you said, because it’s not true. But I had fun saying those things. Did you do the piece so you could have fun saying it?

Morley Safer: Oh, I do everything – I do what I do because it’s fun to do, of course.

Jenny Holzer: But is it true.

David Ross: But journalism might—

Morley Safer: Mostly it’s true.

David Ross: Journalism might—

Morley Safer: Most of all, it is true.

Jenny Holzer: Most contemporary art is—

Morley Safer: Most of what I do, mostly, I do it because it happens to be true.

David Ross: It would be equally unfair to try to analyze journalism, broadcast journalism, by following around an ad salesman for 60 Minutes, watching him pitch why they should buy time on your show, watching that commercial side of what supports your show and your livelihood, or watching the people out there raising money for Channel 13 [WNET, the PBS outlet in New York City, producer of Charlie Rose] and trying to pitch why they should support Charlie Rose, and why they support shows like this.

The commercial side of anything has its seamier aspects to it. Because selling is not something we appreciate, and we actually try to demonize it. But if you look at that work, you took Gerhardt Richter’s gray painting out of context and said it’s silly because they didn’t know which side is up. But Richter is an enormously protean artist, whose work is so complex and so valuable and so intelligent, but out of context to take one gray monochrome canvas and ridicule it, it’s too easy. That’s cheap shot stuff.

Charlie Rose: Before we go any further, let me roll tape. Here is one excerpt from the piece on 60 Minutes, reported by Morley Safer.

Morley Safer: [clip from “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”] For his pièce de résistance last year, he hired platoons of German workmen to erect a 40-foot puppy made of flowers, and the art world cheered.

Unidentified Male [I identified him as art critic Jeffrey Deitch. ~Rick]: It’s very much about something extremely banal, made into something terrifically heroic and important. It kind of bespeaks of our own sense of ego in certain moments in our life.

Morley Safer: Of course, most of this art of the ’90s would be worthless junk, without the hype of the dealers, and even more important, the approval of the critics. They write in language, that to this viewer anyway, sounds important, but might as well be in Sanskrit. Of the American artist Julian Schnabel [b. 1951], a critic wrote:

Unidentified Male: “His is an eschatological art appropriating the master meanings of life and the master languages of art to reassert the sense of hurt and loss that evades both.”

Morley Safer: A book on Christopher Wool [b. 1955], the 'Rat, Rat, Rat' [a reference to a Wool painting at auction] man, said of his work:

Unidentified Female: “They communicate not by facile appropriations, but as a honed perfectionist idea of that discourse, reduced to the irreducible, then starting all over again.”

Morley Safer: Arts Magazine said of Robert Gober [b. 1954], who specializes in arms, legs, sinks, and urinals:

Unidentified Male: “Installations function as utopian and dystopian spaces. The tableau arrests, and its own stillness suspends social time.”

Morley Safer: If you’re still stumped, let Jeffrey Deitch [b. 1952], critic, dealer, and fan, explain.

Jeffrey Deitch: This work in particular shows something of the uncertainty in which artists find themselves today in the human sphere. They don’t quite know exactly where they stand.

Morley Safer: So simple when you think about it.

Charlie Rose: That’s the 60 Minutes piece. I’ve got a couple of questions I want to come back to. Number 1 is that, with respect to the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, a lot of people have raised questions, is this art? Is this an appropriate thing for this exhibition to be doing? Correct?

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You’ve talked about it on this broadcast.

David Ross: Sure.

Charlie Rose: And other people have written about the Venice Biennale. My question is, why isn’t it appropriate for 60 Minutes, or this program, to do a program about the notion, is this art? To raise questions about whether a piece of work is art, and what’s the definition of art, and if in fact you do that, you’re going to raise this piece, and this piece, and this piece, and say—

David Ross: That’s an enormously important question to ask. It’s what artists ask every day that they work. If artists all understood what art is, they would stop making it. If any of us absolutely was sure what art is, this subject would become a dead issue. Art continues to grow and change and evolve. So to ask that question is fine, but you have to do it in a balanced way. The 60 Minutes piece had Hilton Kramer [1928-2012] speaking from the same—

Charlie Rose: Who believes that perspective and British – much of contemporary art is not art.

David Ross: Yeah. So there was no balance in that piece. It was filled with the kind of an approach that it’s all a game. You could have equally found people who – you could have brought Arthur Danto onto that show and had a different kind of balance. It was a piece filled with, unfortunately, cheap shots. I think that’s why people got upset by it, not because it was being questioned.

Charlie Rose: Not because those issues were raised.                                  

David Ross: No.

Charlie Rose: But because the other side didn’t get a point.

David Ross: I think it’s enormously important and raises issues.

Jenny Holzer: It was an editorial. It wasn’t a thought piece.

Charlie Rose: All right. Morley?

Jenny Holzer: The questions weren’t asked. They were asked and answered.

Charlie Rose: Is that a point, that you did not hear from the other side of people who really—

Morley Safer: I think that—

Charlie Rose: —may quarrel with a lot that is being done.

David Ross: I think Jeff Deitch plays the role of the fool on purpose. That’s part of his work. He’s like a Shakespearean fool. That is literally what he is trying to do. To just take that out of context and say, “Oh look at this guy he’s a jerk,” but he’s doing that as—

Morley Safer: Would you say – Would you go further and say conman?

David Ross: No he’s playing the fool. He’s not a conman. I mean—

Arthur Danto: Well, whether he’s a conman or not, the issue that you raised was not raised in the form of a question but in the form of a condemnation. “Is it art” was not a question except in the most rhetorical sense. Your mind was made up. What you wanted to do was implant in the viewer the answer, no it’s certainly not.

Morley Safer: Shall we talk about the creative works of Jeff Koons [b. 1955]?

Jenny Holzer: And worse than that, to jeer.

Morley Safer: Sure.

David Ross: And if we want to we have a chance to talk about other things, too, but I’m happy to.

Morley Safer: Well, it would take somebody extraordinarily creative to have made that puppy out of flowers. I mean that—

Arthur Danto: He didn’t make it.

Jenny Holzer: You kicked the puppy. You kicked the puppy. That’s low.

Charlie Rose: Let me read in which Michael Kimmelman. He says, and this thing – this is from the New York Times – “A Few Artless Minutes on 60 Minutes” [17 October 1993] in which Michael talked about this piece. He said:

I admit to my own crises of faith in the midst of the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale. But I had no doubt about which side to stand on when the lines were drawn by Mr. Safer. No one who genuinely cares about art and aesthetics can feel anything but alarm while watching lampoons like the one broadcast into 17 million households the other night.

The show’s seeming blanket condemnation of the contemporary art world is important, then, in part as a reminder that to knock events like the Biennial requires reaffirming the familiar principles: that the new, the experimental and the daring are no less crucial to art than to science, and that raising informed and constructive doubts about some aspects of the contemporary scene doesn’t mean casting doubt on the whole of it.

Now I would assume you would agree with that?

Morley Safer: You assume correctly, however, what I don’t see much of out there, whether it’s a Robert Ryman [1930-2019] or a Robert Gober [b. 1954], forgive me, is anything new, daring or experimental. It’s filled with clichés. It’s all mainly been done before. Tired language, tired phrases. As I say, it makes bumper stickers into art. Anything you want to say, write it down and if that is art—

Charlie Rose: Well, now that’s an interesting question to have about contemporary art. Is it new and interesting and daring and who decides?

Morley Safer: If this verbal toboggan that the art world is sliding down on is art, I’ll go home and eat my library which is full of words.

Arthur Danto: Go home and eat your library, that’s a really good idea—

Jenny Holzer: Read it first.

Arthur Danto: Because the saying ‘it’s been done before’ is the least interesting observation anybody could make. No, each time somebody does something, even if it looks the same, some new statement is being made.

I want to get to a certain other point. I just came back from Canada where they’re also in an uproar over art. They’re in an uproar over [Mark] Rothko [Latvian-born American abstract painter; 1903-70] and [Barnett] Newman [American artist; 1905-70]. The National Gallery paid 1.8 million dollars for the Rothko, 1.5 million dollars for Newman.

Needless to say the Toronto Sun says a child could do it. Get out your crayons kids. The first three best Rothkos will get free passes to dinosaur park. A kid says I can do the Newman.

Here, so there’s a malaise in the country at this point. Last year one thought it might have to do with sex and censorship. In Canada one thought good money by the government which should be spent on other issues is going into that. Here we’ve got a free market. These were the most innocent looking works that you can think of and yeah, there’s this anxiety. How are people getting away with it and so forth.

David Ross: That’s what I was saying before. The problem of art’s value is undercut when the question that’s being asked isn’t did Jean-Michel Basquiat make art that talked about his own identity as a young African-American man.

By the way, wasn’t the greatest thing that could have happened to him that he died. It’s such a great tragedy that he died. For anyone to die of a drug overdose, it’s a horrible thing to lampoon in the way that you did in your piece. [See the post of Safer’s original broadcast.]

The fact that so many young kids came to see that show and understood that there was a vocabulary being involved that was being used by an artist being shown in a real museum that they could understand and would lead them to respect their own creative urges, I found terrific. I wish I knew who that kid was who said he could do it and maybe he can and maybe he will because he saw that Basquiat show. Maybe he won’t question the premises of art’s value to our society

Charlie Rose: This here raises an interesting question about some of contemporary art. Our people say exactly what these young men in this piece by 60 Minutes said. They look at something that is said to be contemporary art and they say, “I could do that.” They see some of Jeff Koons’s stuff and they say, “I could do that.” Now what’s going on here when you see a lot of stuff – They don’t say that about Picasso. They don’t say that about a lot of stuff.

David Ross: That’s not true.

Jenny Holzer: They do say that about Picasso.

David Ross: What is it about contemporary art that makes people say, “I could do that”? Of course they do. They say that because the craft tradition is changing. Because the notion of the kind of academic training that in the 19th century was absolutely necessary to be accepted into the Academy has shifted and now the notion of what’s an appropriate material, what’s an appropriate subject, what’s an appropriate approach to art-making is up for grabs. Take Jenny’s work.

Morley Safer: I hate the word appropriate. Appropriate sounds very conservative. It’s not a question of what’s the appropriate material or what’s the appropriate medium. I think the only appropriate thing is that this object, this painting, this anything somehow touches you.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: It’s ice cold.

David Ross: Did you see the Koons puppy in Germany?

Morley Safer: In person? No.

David Ross: You would have been moved by it. It was an enormously moving and wonderful experience.

Charlie Rose: This is the thing we saw. The Jeff Koons piece did the flower piece. Yes?

David Ross: An amazing thing. It’s easy to take it out of context and say it’s stupid but—

Morley Safer: Most of this art is ice cold. It attempts weakly to touch your mind. It does not even attempt to touch your heart.

Arthur Danto: Everybody’s in love with it Morley.

David Ross: Even people who hate Koons loved that piece.

Arthur Danto: People who hated Koons and who hated Documenta adored that piece. [Documenta 9 was an art fair near the site of Koons’s topiary Puppy. See the post of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?”]

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, I thought it was a wonderful joke.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice—

Morley Safer: It was full of wit.

David Ross: If you walked into Jenny’s installation in Venice, which was just words, it was so overpowering that I saw people there sitting crying in that piece. [I write about Jenny Holzer’s art in “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words,” 16 September 2014.] Filled with colored light coming at you at a million miles an hour, it was almost frightening to be there and yet they were so emotionally moved by the experience of that, I saw people sitting there, reading, thinking, experiencing this color and light and yes, text and crying because they were so moved by it. It was a beautiful, wonderful – Look, that’s why she won the first prize in the Venice Biennale.

The world isn’t made of fools. The world is made of people who are thinking and who are serious. Hilton Kramer aside, who hasn’t liked anything in contemporary art since 1960, there are many serious, thoughtful people—

Arthur Danto: ’47.

David Ross: ’47. I’m sorry, I gave him too much credit. There are serious, thoughtful people who find value and reason in the kind of work that you too easily lampoon.

Charlie Rose: All right let me hear from Jenny because you’re the artist among us.

Jenny Holzer: Can you understand that it’s enormously insulting for your piece to say that artists would, for instance, be awake at night thinking about how to pull a scam, how to pull the wool—

Morley Safer: I don’t suggest that the artists—

Jenny Holzer: No. Wait wait wait. Unless you are saying that the conspiracy is all about the critics and the dealers and that the artists are just too dumb to know what they’re doing. Artists are awake at night trying to figure out how to find the most profound things and then once found how to express them so that other people not only see them but feel them.

Morley Safer: I could not agree more with what you’re saying.

Jenny Holzer: That is what most artists are trying to do. Some succeed better than others but there is no scam. There’s nothing about—

Morley Safer: Let me give you an example. I do not doubt your sincerity and indeed the only one whose sincerity I might doubt might be Koons. I think he is a jokester and a prankster and that’s fine.

David Ross: But he’s sincere about it.

Arthur Danto: But then sincerity’s not that big an issue.

Morley Safer: Well, I think it is because people jumped on me for being critical of Robert Ryman, and I’ll tell you why I think Ryman does serve a purpose in a moment, because Robert Ryman is a man in his 60’s and has spent most of his adult life working at this. How can you dismiss him as a conman or a charlatan? I don’t, but sincerity of purpose is hardly any measure. If sincerity of purpose was applied to novelists, they’d all be Tolstoy and we’d be praising them.

When I say Ryman serves a wonderful purpose – I went to the Museum of Modern Art  the other day to look at the Ryman show [26 September 1993-4 January 1994]. I went through three times, feeling as ice cold when I came out as when I went in. Then I went down 20 feet to the permanent collection. I’ve done the same thing at your museum [i.e., the Whitney], which, as you know, I love.

David Ross: Thank you.

Arthur Danto: There, suddenly, is this wonderful demonstration of the best of experimental art. From Francis Bacon [Irish-born British figurative painter; 1909-92] to [Arshile] Gorky [Armenian-American painter; 1904-48] to [Willem] de Kooning [Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist; 1904-97] and you’re just bathed in this warmth and you feel uplifted by it.

David Ross: But don’t you realize that what you’re revealing right now about yourself is your own comfort zone? The area where you see art that maybe relates to your experience growing up, looking at the art of the Seven in Canada or art that deals with landscape or art that deals the expressionist tradition, but they’re other generations.

[The Group of Seven were Canadian landscape painters from 1920 to 1933 with “a like vision.” It originally consisted of Franklin Carmichael (1890-1945), Lawren Harris (1885-1970), A. Y. Jackson (1882-1974), Frank Johnston (1888-1949), Arthur Lismer (1885-1969), J. E. H. MacDonald (1873-1932), and Frederick Varley (1881-1969). A. J. Casson (1898-1992) was invited to join in 1926, Edwin Holgate (1892-1977) became a member in 1930, and Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald (1890-1956) joined in 1932.]

Jenny Holzer: You’re speaking of your personal relation—

Morley Safer: I don’t know that de Kooning would fall under that category and certainly Francis Bacon wouldn’t.

David Ross: But there are other generations and other languages that are evolved by new generations.

Jenny Holzer: I think we’ve come to something. The piece was about your personal response, which was fine, but you abused your platform to say that because you don’t get it, this is a terrible thing and it must be a fraud. Your piece should have had this subtitle, “This is your lack of response to art.”

David Ross: Or you could have taken the—

Jenny Holzer: You were being – Exactly.

Morley Safer: Or I could say that that piece on 60 Minutes was our occasional attempt to put on a piece of art.

David Ross: Well, I would love it if you did a performance art piece on 60 Minutes and put it out as that, but you have such credibility as a journalist that when you put out a piece that pretends to be balanced and fair in the same way that you’ve looked at serious, hard-hitting issues throughout the years of that program, then it skews the issue.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my question. Is the anger, whatever the reaction you feel about what Morley did on 60 Minutes, in contrast to the reaction you feel about other critics of contemporary art who raise the question, “Is this art, is this art, is this art?” Is it only the impact and the power that 60 Minutes has that concerns you or is it something else?

David Ross: Well, it’s the fact that you know he’s—

Charlie Rose: Because now other people have had the same thing he said.

David Ross: Asking the question is not a problem. In fact, when we first met, I said I was really pleased with that show because it did ask a question. The difference is—

Charlie Rose: Then what’s the difference?

Jenny Holzer: To use a legal term, it was asked and answered.

David Ross: Exactly, and he answered it – you know, before asking.

Charlie Rose: Letting the wrong people answer him.

David Ross: And he didn’t balance the way the question was presented to an enormous public.

Morley Safer: I don’t think that it’s possible to do a balanced piece on contemporary art. Or maybe on art period. I don’t think it’s possible.

Jenny Holzer: That’s a ridiculous statement, that it’s not possible to do a balanced piece about contemporary art.

Morley Safer: I don’t think it’s possible.

David Ross: Why not?

Morley Safer: Because one’s own eye—

Jenny Holzer: Defend that.

Morley Safer: Taste, heart, and mind get in the way.

Jenny Holzer: One’s? One’s? Yours.

Morley Safer: But should that be the test as to whether your eye sees this as art?

Arthur Danto: But this is supposed to be investigative journalism.

Morley Safer: Should David Ross have the right to decide what’s going into a public institution? Of course he should.

David Ross: And I get criticized.

Charlie Rose: Here’s my other question, if we move along. I’m going to look at some art in a moment. Who decides, I mean what enfranchises, to use the word, something as art? You know, an exhibit?

David Ross: Well, it’s part of the process.

Charlie Rose: Does anything that someone who has a reputation as a good artist like Jenny, that she does, whatever she does becomes art because she’s an artist. What enfranchises it?

David Ross: That kind of defining process today is almost unproductive in a conversation.

Charlie Rose: To try to answer it?

David Ross: Yeah, because from my perspective, I believe anything an artist does is art. The rest of us then have to decide what has value and quality that is worth our attention.

Charlie Rose: Then what’s an artist? Who is an artist?

Arthur Danto: That’s when it pushes back. I think it’s an important question but it’s not the whole of contemporary art. To make that issue that’s been discussed throughout the 20th century the defining character of contemporary art and then choose a number of examples that are going to raise the hairs of people who are suspicious in the first place and not to try to give a balanced account of the extraordinary diversity of art in the first place. Secondly the complex institutional structures of the art world, in which that question has to be answered. That is to say how does somebody get into exhibition space?

Charlie Rose: The reason I raised the question in part is because Morley said he thought Jeff Koons was a prankster and essentially not an artist is what he’s saying.

Arthur Danto: But you know if you’d seen his show at the Sonnabend Gallery [Made In Heaven, 23 November-21 December 1991] those gigantic kitsch objects. Those were so frightening you couldn’t—

Morley Safer: That was also at the Sonnabend.

Arthur Danto: —walk into that room and not feel put on edge. He had taken an aesthetic out of everyday life, amplified it in a way that suddenly made it almost unendurable to be in the same space with it. That was not just a charlatanry.

Morley Safer: No, it’s a glorious prank and I’m all for it.

David Ross: It’s not just a prank in the sense that it’s a joke.

Morley Safer: I’m all for language if it has wit.

Charlie Rose: Enough about Jeff Koons. Enough about Jeff Koons. Let me move on. Let me just look [at] some things so that we have a sense of where contemporary art is. Is contemporary art in crisis today?

David Ross: Is society in crisis today?

Charlie Rose: I’m asking about art first, David.

David Ross: I’m not being rhetorical. Contemporary art is a mirror of modern life.

Charlie Rose: Because it reflects a period—

David Ross: How can it not?

Charlie Rose: —of a society that’s in crisis.

David Ross: It’s made by human beings living in this society. Some of it is gonna retreat into safe havens, and present a world of calm and peace. Some of it’s gonna reflect the world and all of its horror and brutality.

Charlie Rose: So maybe I’m falling into traditional criticism when you raise this question. Is there no predominant school of thought or something, and therefore we’re at loose [ends] about what’s going on?

Arthur Danto: We’re living in a very pluralistic art world, at the moment. There’s no single monolithic thing in which you can say that’s in crisis. There’s just too much of it and it’s too diversified.

Morley Safer: I think it’s very fragile.

Charlie Rose: Fragile is the word you’d use.

Morley Safer: I do believe it’s very fragile, and I think the rejection, of figurative painting for example and of drawing almost reached the point where people are questioning that rejection, and there will be—

Jenny Holzer: It hasn’t been rejected. You’ve missed it.

David Ross: Look at Chartreuse.

Arthur Danto: One of the best shows around at the Pace Gallery. I mean, since when is rejecting – it’s true that’s doing faces but he can do them figuratively.

David Ross: Look at Alison Saar [Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist; b. 1956; her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity], look at people doing figurative work—

Charlie Rose: On this very show, if you remember. Let me look at some stills here guys. We put some together, and so let’s just talk about this. This is a de Kooning composition, 1955, everybody. What’s the point here?

David Ross: I’m not sure – who made the selection.

Charlie Rose: Beth Pollack made it, a producer who knows a lot about art.

David Ross: Obviously de Kooning is a great artist. Recognized as great now. When he made these, all the critics from Hildebrand on down said it was absolute garbage. Now he’s one of our most revered painters, whose career now we can see in retrospect.

I think the point is, Charlie, that we’re so close to what we’re doing right now, and those who are part of it are dealing with it in real time that we don’t have a real distance from it, and you know what? That’s okay. We’ll let historians in thirty years sort it out. Right now we’re engaged in watching it, looking at it. The Whitney and other museums are engaged in supporting those artists and helping put it out there and get the discourse moving.

Charlie Rose: You take me off course, but let me do this just one time. You had at the Whitney Biennial – I said Venice Biennial rather than Biennale. If you had at the Whitney the Rodney King video tape, correct?

[Rodney King (1965-2012) was an African-American man who was severely beaten on 3 March 1991 by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department during his arrest after a high speed pursuit for driving while intoxicated. An uninvolved resident, George Holliday, saw and filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage, which showed the unarmed King on the ground being beaten after initially evading arrest, to a local TV news station. The incident was covered by news media around the world and caused a public uproar.]

David Ross: Mm-hmm.

Charlie Rose: You said that was art in video. Video art because, what?

David Ross: Well, we believe that it was critical in the last two years of looking at independent film and video, to look at an image made in video by an amateur that transformed American consciousness during that moment.

Charlie Rose: So that becomes art rather than – because of the impact it had on American consciousness.

David Ross: I think you very properly focused on a very marginal work. Not that it was marginal in its impact, but in its definition. I think it was bold of the curator to select that work, because there was no way of looking at a media-influenced culture, whether it’s media art or traditional art, looked at over the last two years that wasn’t enormously affected by those images and what that said about a certain spirit in this country. And that’s what a show like the biennial was reflecting in a number of ways.

Arthur Danto: Well of course I really did object to that.

David Ross: I remember.

Charlie Rose: Where have you been?

Arthur Danto: I thought that was a deep mistake to include that in the biennial. That was supposed to be an art show, not a transformation-of-consciousness show. If art transforms consciousness that’s fine, but everything that transforms consciousness doesn’t belong in the museum. Lots of things, however—

Morley Safer: It may belong in the museum of natural history as an artifact.

Arthur Danto: We’re supposed to be beating up on Morley Safer, but—

Charlie Rose: We’re not supposed to be beating up on one another. What we’re supposed to be doing, and I think we’re doing, is allowing the fact that Morley produced a piece for 60 Minutes and reported a piece for 60 Minutes that’s got the whole art world talking, and we continued that conversation, and that’s important I think.

Jenny Holzer: We just demonstrated is that the art world is too diverse and too feisty to agree on a conspiracy that you seem to think you’ve identified.

Morley Safer: I’ve not talked about a conspiracy. That’s part of the McCarthy tent.

Charlie Rose: That’s just something – I don’t think she meant that. There’s no conspiracy. He may say that the process seems to be run amok.

Jenny Holzer: There’s a conspiracy. I’m taking it from the transcript among the critics and the dealers to perpetuate a fraud. That the art that’s really—

Charlie Rose: I don’t remember the language conspiracy.

Jenny Holzer: Not the word.

Charlie Rose: Let me move on here.

Jenny Holzer: Isn’t that a conspiracy? I think?

Charlie Rose: Fellow art lovers let’s move on, okay, slide two.

Arthur Danto: What happened to de Kooning?

Jenny Holzer: He’s gone. Next.

Charlie Rose: Next. All right—

Arthur Danto: We’re host co-pilots so I’ve actually written about this, now what are we supposed to do?

Charlie Rose: Just tell me why this is art?

Arthur Danto: Why it’s art?

Charlie Rose: Don’t criticize the question. Just answer it.

David Ross: Where we would overlap in like. You were right, we found two artists that we both like tonight. What I would urge you to do is just to open up your heart a little bit and recognize that what artists are trying to do is worth your time of looking and thinking rather than just so quickly and blanketly rejecting the impetus and the value of what you see. It may not have an immediate emotional response. What you did with that piece was give other people license to just walk away without doing the work it takes to really look hard and think hard about art. That’s what pissed so many of us off.

Morley Safer: I’ll tell you, what I would like is for all those people who, I’ll take your word for it, minds open, to really examine their conscience, not read the impenetrable language of Artspeak, but to think for themselves. Forget what the Larry Gagosians [American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries; b. 1945] and dealer says, what the Arne Glimchers [American art dealer and gallerist, and founder of The Pace Gallery; b. 1938] say, forget what they all say, and go and look and think. Don’t know about this producer just paid $3 million for one of these and to say it is not a commercial sideshow, it’s not beyond this planet and this city at this time.

Arthur Danto: I want to make a comment on that. These objects come embedded in a very wide culture. You can’t just look at them all by themselves and hope you’d get something out of it. You’ve got to have looked at other things and you’ve got to read some things. Some of it’s in not very nice language but notwithstanding you really have to work at art. You can’t just walk in and say, “Wow, I’m knocked out by that.” Sometimes it happens but you can’t count on it happening all the time. That’s why I write so that people will have a piece of thought to work with when they do go look at art.

Morley Safer: What you just described is what brings most people who really love art to art. It’s not really the tedious critics and art philosophers, it’s what it does to their eyes and their minds and their hearts.

David Ross: It’s both things. Either does not have to take the case.

Charlie Rose: All right, last word, to Jenny.

Jenny Holzer: The people will need to forget what you said to be able to enjoy the work.

Charlie Rose: I thank all of you for coming to talk about art and contemporary art. It certainly did what I hoped it would do which was to have an engaging discussion about contemporary art, and Morley’s piece certainly offered us the opportunity to do that. Thank you very much.

[I hope ROTters found this record of the TV program as interesting as I did.  Unlike “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” I didn’t see this Charlie Rose episode, so the transcript was my first time seeing what the art professionals had to say to Safer.

[In an article called “Yes . . . But Is It Art?: Morley Safer and Murphy Brown Take on the Experts” that was posted on Aristos (https://www.aristos.org/backissu/yesbutis.htm), a website that styles itself an online review of the arts and the philosophy of art, Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi concluded that 

the heated media debate that followed the airing of “Yes . . . But Is It Art?” on 60 Minutes fizzled out in a series of ill-considered letters by Morley Safer to the New York Times and other periodicals, and in his ineffectual sparring with Artspeak experts on the Charlie Rose show.  Safer lost the debate, not because the purported experts’ arguments made any sense but because he, despite the best of intentions, had no consistent argument at all.

[On 17 January 1994, an episode of Murphy Brown entitled “The Deal of the Art” aired.  It was a parody of the Charlie Rose panel in which, according to Wikipedia, recounts: “After Murphy [the eponymous investigative reporter for FYI, a parody of 60 Minutes] makes snide comments about modern art, she has to debate a group of artists and critics on PBS [a reference to Charlie Rose].  Is a pile of sweeteners art just because important people say so?  Murphy tests the critics with one of [her 18-month-old son] Avery's finger paintings.”

[Don’t forget to come back to ROT for some more examples of the responses to Morley Safer’s opinions about contemporary art.  It’s still a topic of interest today: 60 Minutes aired a segment with Jeff Koons just this last 10 March—and the only difference in his approach to his medium is that he’s now older and more established!

[The follow-up to this post and my earlier one on 2 April will be on ROT on Monday, 8 April.]

MoMA PS1

Diana called me on Saturday, 6 June, and asked if I was interested in going out to MoMA’s PS1 in Long Island City, Queens.  I’d never been there, so I said yes.  She picked me up at about quarter to one on Sunday and we drove over to Queens by way of the FDR Drive and the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (also known as the 59th Street Bridge—especially if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan), arriving at PS1 on Jackson Avenue between 46th Avenue and 46th Road at just after 1 p.m.  (Diana even found a parking place right in front of the museum.  Is this New York City or what?)

LIC, as the area’s known, was originally an independent city, founded in 1870, until it became part of Greater New York City in 1898 when Queens County merged with Bronx County, Kings County (Brooklyn), Richmond County (Staten Island), and New York County (Manhattan).  It’s been undergoing a transformation for the past decade or so as it’s changed over to a residential and commercial neighborhood from a largely warehouse and factory district.  In 2001, LIC was rezoned from an industrial neighborhood to residential and underwent gentrification.  

While there are many starkly modern luxury highrises, mostly combined residential and office spaces with retail businesses in the ground-floor premises, there are still the remnants of the area’s previous appearance as a utilitarian, unaesthetic area of storehouses, manufacturing plants, loading docks, truck bays, and parking lots.  

Several arts organizations have opened in the area; aside from PS1, there’s the SculptureCenter, New York City’s only non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary and innovative sculpture, founded in 1928 and expanded in 2014; the Socrates Sculpture Park, an outdoor museum and public sculpture park created in 1986 and given official status in 1998; See.me, a web-based arts organization founded in 2007; and the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a private foundation offering exhibitions of contemporary art established in 1991, closed to the public in November 2017.   Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, 1904-88, established his museum in LIC in 1985 in a former plant building; his studio had been across Vernon Boulevard in an old warehouse.

The organization that became MoMA PS1 began in 1971 as the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, whose mission was turning abandoned and underused buildings in New York City into artist studios and exhibition spaces.  In 1976, founder Alanna Heiss (b. 1943) opened the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in a deserted Romanesque Revival public school building in LIC.  The building, built in 1892, was the first school in Long Island City and functioned until 1963, when it was closed because of low attendance (probably because the neighborhood had slowly shifted from residential to industrial) and the building was turned into a warehouse.

In 1999, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center and Manhattan’s prestigious Museum of Modern Art merged, a process which was scheduled to take 10 years; MoMA PS1, the museum’s new name, and the Museum of Modern Art formalized their affiliation in 2000.  Today, MoMA PS1 is the oldest and second-largest (after the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MASS MoCA) non-profit arts center in the United States solely devoted to contemporary art.

An exhibition space rather than a collecting institution, MoMA PS1 has no permanent holdings like its parent museum on Manhattan’s West 53rd Street—though PS1 does display long-term installations.  PS1, with 125,000 square feet of space, has four floors of exhibit space, plus a courtyard that is currently the site of a gigantic installation, Pedro & Juana’s Hórama Rama (2019).  The first and second floors have the most exhibit spaces while the third floor also houses the museum’s administrative offices and the basement includes the cloakroom and the building’s infrastructure plant. 

Within PS1, are performance spaces, rooms for art-education programs, artist-in-residence studios, and site-specific installations.  There are large galleries for expansive exhibitions and small rooms that are ideal as project spaces or for video screenings.

Visitors enter PS1 through the newly created entrance on a spur of road (unnamed, as far as I can tell) that connects 46th Avenue to Jackson Avenue.  In 1994, PS1 underwent a major renovation to repairs decades of wear and frequent ad hoc remodeling that had left the original 102-year-old building severely deteriorated.  The renovation included the creation of an entranceway and the Courtyard just beyond.  

(Unlike MoMA in Manhattan, PS1’s admission is “suggested”: $10 for adults, seniors and students $5, children free; Fridays evenings are free and since 2015, admission is always free for New York City residents.  The museum is open Thursday through Monday from noon till 6 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Days.) 

Leaving the entrance kiosk, museumgoers cross the Courtyard to enter the old school building, which houses the exhibit spaces.  Like the entranceway, the Courtyard is constructed principally of unpainted concrete with a gray gravel floor; parts of the yard look like they’re still under construction while other areas look to be storage for equipment for Warm Up, PS1’s summer music program that runs every Saturday from July through early September.

As I said, the Courtyard is occupied through 2 September by Hórama Rama by Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo (Mexican, no date of birth) and Mecky Reuss (German, no DOB), founders of Pedro & Juana, a research, design, and architecture studio in Mexico City.  Unveiled in June as the 2019 winner of the Young Architects Program, an annual competition of MoMA PS1, the installation occupies the whole courtyard and towers dozens of feet above it.  Young architects are invited to submit design proposals to YAP for PS1’s courtyard.  The winning entry is then converted from concept to reality and becomes the architectural setting for Warm Up. 

Hórama Rama (I couldn’t find a translation for the title; it may not have one) is a large-scale cyclorama featuring a panoramic image on scaffolding that projects above the Courtyard and transports visitors into a wild jungle.  Nearly 40-foot-tall and 90-foot-wide, the structure looms over the Courtyard, setting visitors in an urban rainforest.  The exterior of the structure features protruding wood “bristles” that create a sense of movement.  

The presence of this large circular structure reconfigures the Courtyard into an immersive environment that visitors can move in and out of, contrasting with the cityscape just outside PS1 and visible over the Courtyard wall.  Amplifying the experience are bright pink hammocks handwoven in the south of Mexico and small wooden stools placed around the gravel terrain, along with a two-story, artificial waterfall. 

It almost seems churlish to say that the installation didn’t make me or Diana imagine being in a jungle.  The Courtyard, with its bare concrete walls and bland gravel ground, wasn’t inviting, especially on this hot, humid summer afternoon, and I certainly wasn’t inclined to hang out there, as it were, in a hammock.  As for the waterfall, it’s off to the right (as we entered the yard) in an area that was partially closed off and disused except as storage the day we visited, less attractive even than the “jungle.”

We didn’t linger in the Courtyard but made our way to the main museum building across the gravel yard and up some concrete steps.  There’s a terrace of sorts in front of the old school building with some picnic tables and chairs—intended, I assume, for use by patrons of the café, Mina’s, on the right side of the terrace (as you go up the stairs) that didn’t appear to be open this Sunday afternoon.

After orienting ourselves in the building—there’s a sort of reception lobby just inside the entrance from the Courtyard—Diana, who said she’d been expecting air conditioning and had brought a sweater, decided to leave it at the checkroom in the basement, so we went down there first.  It’s not truly an exhibit floor, but there are some spaces visitors can look at.  The most prominent is the lower part of a two-story installation that can also be viewed from the first floor, Maypole (2007) by Nancy Spero (American, 1926-2009). 

The space is called the Duplex gallery and contains Spero’s last work completed before her death, a 20-foot vertical steel pole from which images of decapitated aluminum heads (some with protruding tongues) are suspended by ribbons and metal chains.  Maypole (through 2 September) was created during the second Iraq War (“Operation Iraqi Freedom,” 2003-11) but was derived from Spero’s drawings from the 1960s inspired by the Vietnam war.   

Spero sees her work as simultaneously reflecting the celebratory and the grotesque.  The maypole is the universal symbol in the West of the coming of spring, recognizing the recurring cycle of nature, while the images of violence represent the recurring cycle of war.  Having watched the U.S. enter into a disastrous and destructive war in Southeast Asia based on the lies and manipulations of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and  Richard Nixon, Spero was horrified to see George W. Bush lead us down the same road in Iraq.  

In some previous incarnations of Maypole, viewers could walk around the installation, the aluminum heads hanging just above the visitors’ own heads, but at PS1, we saw the work through a sort of unglazed window into what looked like two flights of a former stairwell from which the steps had been disassembled—or maybe an elevator shaft with the car removed.

Also in the basement is a screening room running a short documentary, Autoportrait (1971-2012), on the life and work of Simone Fattal (Syrian-born Lebanese-American, b. 1942), associated with the exhibit of her work in Works and Days in a series of galleries on the first floor.  As the black-and-white film, which the artist herself edited from footage taken when she invited a crew into her Beirut kitchen in 1971 to help her make a video self-portrait, was over 40 years old, Diana and I decided to skip it.  

We also passed up the installation known as Central Governor residing in the Boiler Room of the old school building (no longer functioning) in the form of the gold-leafed furnace.  The work was executed in 2010 by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Saul Melman (American, b. 1968) and I walked down the wooden stairs into the Boiler Room to see what was up, but Diana walks with a cane from a knee replacement, so I advised her not to venture down.

On the first floor, through another window into the Duplex gallery, I stopped to look again at Spero’s Maypole.  On the basement level, we looked out at the bottom of the pole or up at the rest of it; from the first floor, we could see the middle of the installation, look down on the bottom part, or up to the pinnacle.  For me, this was more a curiosity, seeing the work from several different perspectives, than truly revealing or artistically engaging.  (At the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial, Samara Golden’s multi-story installation The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes was much more interesting and engrossing; see my report on the Biennial, posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2017.)

The principal exhibit on this floor is Fattal’s Works and Days (through 2 September), a retrospective of over 200 of her works created over the last 50 years that includes sculpture (abstract and figurative), paintings (watercolor and oil), drawings, and collages on subjects and themes drawn from war narratives, landscape painting, ancient history, mythology, and Sufi poetry.  Fattal’s sculptures, the bulk of her oeuvre, are often tiny and frequently parts of series which tell a story when viewed together.  She works in ceramic, stoneware, terracotta, bronze, and porcelain and takes inspiration from myths such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma. 

There are simply too many pieces in this show to report on even a small portion of them.  Depending on personal taste and interest, some of Fattal’s work is more appealing than others—something that’s true of all prolific artists.  In the very first gallery however, are two pieces, both sculptures, worth remarking upon.  

Arguably the most unusual piece is the 1988 Torso Found in Today’s Downtown Beirut, Fattal’s first sculpture.  It’s a piece of alabaster the artist found and which resembled the body of an ancient statue from an archeological dig.  She added to the carving and mounted it on a simple, white-painted wooden box.  The sculpture looks like it had been pulled from an ancient ruin, but at the same time, it suggests a recovered body from the rubble of a contemporary war—a kind of artificial palimpsest.  (The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-90, was raging at the time Fattal created Torso.)

The other sculpture that struck me—solely because I liked it—is The Lion (2008).  An absolutely charming small, umber-colored stoneware statue, it’s recognizable as a little lion without being Realistic; it’s not exactly Impressionistic, either, but sort of free-form, sitting on the floor, right in the middle of the room.  Ariella Budick of the Financial Times described it perfectly: “A craggy lion with a sunlike mane and pussycat tail lolls apprehensively on a plinth.”  (ROTters will know about my mother and my “Midnight Shopping Trips” when it comes to art shows.  This is what I’d come back for out of the whole museum!)

In one of the last galleries were several small, abstract ceramic figures, including The Guard (2006) and The Wounded Warrior (2008), from the little-known Arabic epic of the 7th through the 13th centuries, Dhat al-Himma.  (Fattal made a series of figurines from this legend.  The title varies and there are differences in the narrative depending on the version and the translation.)  

In the legend, Delhemma, the heroine, is a “woman of noble purpose” (the translation of the tale’s Arabic title); she’s a warrior and a female djinn (a magical spirit, often called a genie in English) falls in love with her.  Guarded by the djinn and assisted by her son, Delhemma fights the enemies of her people and her prince   If you’re looking for a successor to TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess or the movie Wonder Woman, a feminist action hero with exotic trappings, here’s a great prospect.

In several locations around the museum, most notably on the wall beyond the reception area at the entrance to the old school building, are rectangular aluminum placards resembling no-parking signs with texts alluding to the Trail of Tears forced relocation of Native peoples from the East to Oklahoma (then designated Indian Territory) between 1830 and 1850.  The signs, white backgrounds with red lettering and a red border, bear the phrases “do you choose to walk”; “were you forced to walk”; “trail of tears 1836”; “walk to oklahoma” (Trail of Tears, 2005). 

                                                                                                                 

These are the work of Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, b. 1954), an artist, activist, and educator known for text-based conceptual art.  (Born in Kansas, Heap of Birds is a Southern Cheyenne.  The Cheyenne and Arapaho nations, both originally from the northern Great Plains, were forced to migrate to western Indian Territory after the Civil War.)  

At PS1, his main exhibit on the second floor is Surviving Active Shooter Custer (through 8 September), a large show with over 200 works which presents new and recent large-scale prints.  By using the contemporary phrase “active shooter” to characterize massacres committed by U.S. troops against Native Americans over a century ago, Heap of Birds refers to the legacies of state violence against Native communities while drawing parallels to the present day. 

All the prints in Active Shooter are not just word-based, but words exclusively; they’re mini-texts, hand-written protest posters.  The panels are presented in groups, each dealing with a particular theme or issue, unified by the background color.  

Health of the People is the Highest Law (2019), which references the health issues that affect Native Americans, is a series of red panels imprinted with white-lettered, somewhat cryptic (if often poetic) phrases such as “dance in wheel chair drum beats circle” and “she learned well gum her food.”  In Blue Tree (2005–2017), an assemblage that seems more personal to the artist, the prints are all on shades of blue with texts like “over rated human just fine animal” and “lean close be brown to me.” 

The panels are monoprints and corresponding “ghost prints” (a second print from an original monoprint plate that’s substantially different from the original print) on sheets of paper that vary from 22" high by 15" wide to 30" by 22".  They’re assembled into panels ranging from 66" by 135" to 90" by 352".  

The passages are a collage of song lyrics, references to historical events, political speeches, and other sources.  Heap of Birds strictly limits himself to six words.  The title panel, from 2019, is the artist’s evocation of “the genocide of America inflicted on the indigenous people” and contains a print that references one of our most popular patriotic songs, “American the Beautiful”: “cities gleam foul our blood stream” (“Our alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears”).

In yet another panel on the same topic, Genocide and Democracy (2016), Heap of Birds continues the implications of America’s patriotic myth-making with prints, again in bloody shades of red, with passages like “shed grace on thee american brutality” and “indian health decay twilights last gleaming.”  Our most sacred prose phrases come in for attack as well: “poverty sadness for which it stands.”

The source of the artist’s title for the assemblage is in another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer: “stop active shooter cadet autie custer.”  (“Custer was the main terrorist that came to our country,” declares the artist.  “Autie” was Custer’s childhood nickname among family and close friends, derived from his early attempts to pronounce his middle name, Armstrong.)  

This print and the others in this panel, also in shades of red, all reappear in another panel on the next wall in ghost form—second, paler-hued impressions made from the original plates.  Heap of Birds explains in a video interview that after the genocides, “what we have left are the ghosts of a whole culture.  These prints will be like their memory or their expression of the survivors, of the ghosts of what happened in the 1800s.” 

Another print in Surviving Active Shooter Custer, connecting the atrocities of the past to the present day, reads “indians still target obama binladen geronimo.”  It’s not entirely clear if Heap of Birds means that Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden have been targets like the 19th-century Indians, but inclusion of the name Geronimo in the print is telling for another reason.  

The Apache leader was looked on as a terrorist in the middle and late 1800s and the object of a vast manhunt.  But Geronimo was also the code name for bin Laden during the search for him and upon his death in 2011, the SEAL team that killed him radioed back the news by reporting “Geronimo is dead.”  Heap of Birds points out: “They named the most hated terrorist an Apache name, you know, when they were hunting him. . . .  They don’t see the insensitivity or the pain of the history.”

As with much of the work on display at PS1, I found Surviving Active Shooter more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  I have no trouble agreeing with Heap of Birds’s message, but that’s a socio-political response, not an artistic or aesthetic one.  I also have no doubt about the artist and activist’s sincerity or passion, but reading through hundreds of slogans soon gets wearing and they all blur into one undifferentiated image.  (I also must add that the constant anger, however justified, gets exhausting, too.) 

Also on the second floor is MOOD: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018–19, part of a multi-year partnership among the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1 that commenced in February.  While the Studio Museum in Harlem is closed for the construction of a new building at West 125th Street, site of its longtime home, PS1 will present the Studio Museum’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition.  

MOOD, the inaugural exhibition of this partnership, features work by Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, KY), Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, New York, NY), and Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA).  It will be at PS1 through 8 September. (Construction on the Studio Museum’s new home is expected to continue through 2021.)

According to the museum’s PR, MOOD, a four-gallery exhibition, is supposed to be an exploration of “site, place, and time as they relate to American identity and popular culture, past and present.”  The art reflects the social-media hashtag #mood, which, the PS1 press release says, “describes moments both profound and banal: anything can be ‘a #mood.’”

As I understand this (a perhaps unlikely circumstance), #mood is related to the ordinary sense of the word ‘mood,’ but its social-media incarnation is, first imagistic—that is, pictorial—rather than merely rhetorical.  It’s also sort of Yiddish-esque, if you’ll excuse the ethno-centric view, in that, like Yiddish words and expressions, an image representing a feeling or a state of being can mean dozens, scores, even hundreds of variations depending on who’s sending the image, who’s receiving it, how either of them feels at the moment, and the spin either sender or recipient puts on the image.  It’s all nuance.  (How’d I do?  Did I make any sense?  Am I close?)

Using a range of media and materials, including video, sculpture, found objects, collage, printing, painting, and photography, the pieces express the artists’ perceptions of the current moment in the United States.  This isn’t, as you might guess, an easy exhibit to characterize; each artist-in-residence works in multiple styles and means, making it hard to pin any of them down to simple or familiar (a least to me) categories.  As the press release asserts, “MOOD maps out each artist’s psychic landscape, presenting distinct snapshots that travel through and beyond the fabric of digital culture.”  

Hamilton created an installation that envelops visitors, making them wrestle with a mysterious Old South, its racial realities, and its mythic past (Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds I and Metal Yard Sign with Sabal Palm Fronds II, both 2019); Self’s series of eight paintings (most from 2019), Street Scenes, is a large-scale, mixed-media homage to street life in Harlem; and Smith’s conceptual sculptures and two-dimensional works examine the injustices of mass incarceration in the U.S. and calls attention to its consequences.

I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent (through 2 September), in a second-floor gallery into which a monitor only lets a small number of visitors to enter at a time, is the first survey exhibition of the work of interdisciplinary artist Julie Becker (American, 1972-2016).  When Diana and I first stopped by, the monitor was holding people at the door, and we decided to move on and come back instead of hanging around in the hallway.  

I must create (the title comes from a phrase from one of her drawings) alludes to the kind of temporary living spaces Becker lived in in Los Angeles, where she was born.  The exhibit of 53 works made between 1993 (when Becker was still a student at the California Institute of the Arts in L.A.) and 2015 includes mixed-media installations, models, films, photographs, and drawings.

Interior Corners (1993), a series of photographs of corners of rooms, shows two wallpapered walls and a triangle of carpeted floor.  Some of the rooms are real and others are models built by Becker; it’s unclear from the photos which are which.  There are also model rooms the artist built displayed on the floors of the gallery (not necessarily the same models from which the photos were made). 

The installation Researchers, Residents, a Place to Rest (1993–96) is in a separate space within the Becker galleries, and yet another monitor ushers in visitors one by one as previous viewers leave.  I entered the installation, which might be seen as a life-size model, through an office-like room with a desk, sofa, and table piled with magazines. The nameplate on the desk reads “waiting room,” but there are other nameplates—“psychiatrist,” “concierge,” “real-estate agent,” “entertainment agency,” and so on—displayed on the floor, as if the use of the office were flexible. 

Beyond the waiting room are other spaces set up diorama-like, including one that’s supposed to evoke the hotel in the 1980 thriller film The Shining—of which there’s a drawing hanging on the waiting room wall!  There’s also an artist’s studio in which miniature versions of Becker’s work hang, suggesting that the occupant is the artist herself.  There are several other room installations, leading the visitor to a workspace that has clues that this is where Becker did her research and preparation for the creation of her models and other pieces.  There are evocations all around, also, of Stephen King’s The Shining and Eloise, the 1950s children’s book series by Kay Thompson. 

I found, unfortunately, that the wonder of Becker’s work wore off after a few exhibits.  It all struck me as the efforts of an obsessive child (Becker was only 43 when she took her own life after struggling for years with drugs and mental illness)—or perhaps a mad set designer,  Yes, the work is meticulous and detailed, but it reminded me of the kind of art created by some outsider artists (who are often mentally ill or otherwise psychologically altered).  After a while, the repetitive nature of Becker’s creations, the focus on the single theme of living and working spaces, made my mind go numb.

The third floor has only one exhibit, Gina Beavers’s The Life I Deserve (through 2 September), which opened in March and is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition.  Beavers (American, b. 1978), born in Athens, Greece, is known for her bas-relief (and some that are decidedly haut-relief) paintings of food, makeup, and images derived from the internet.  (At first glance, her paintings reminded me of the cafeteria and diner cakes and pies of Wayne Thibaud from the 1960s.  Besides being 3-D, Beavers’s work is darker, more grotesque, and slier—sort of Thibaud 2.0.) 

This survey of Beavers’s thickly layered acrylic paintings on canvas, wood, or linen, range from her early “food porn” pictures from around 2014 to later work that's almost sculptural.  LipBalls 3 (2018), for instance, shows a human mouth in bright lipstick with huge sports balls (basket, tennis, base, and so on), plastered all over it, protruding from the canvas way more than just bas. 

The exhibit’s title is a food reference, taken from one of the exhibit’s paintings, The Life I Deserve (Ice Cream), 2016.  Beavers explains that “it’s a foodie thing.  The photo [of a rainbow ice cream cone on social media] was just tagged with #thelifeIdeserve.  It’s this very humble subject, a soft-serve cone, but at the same time, it’s self-centered: what I deserve.”  It was curator Oliver Shultz who selected the painting’s title as the name of the entire exhibit.

One example of Beavers’s “food porn” paintings is Cake (2015), the depiction of the naked torso of a man, lying prone as if he might be sunbathing in the nude.  Out of his right buttock, a cake-server is lifting a slice, which looks like the layers of an iced cake about to be served to someone.  

Another food porn piece is Van Gogh’s Starry Night as Rendered in Bacon (2016), which is just what the title says: the iconic van Gogh painting made of slices of cooked bacon!  (The Starry Night, 1889, is one of my all-time favorite works of art—I even use it as my desktop wallpaper—and I couldn’t decide if Beavers’s take is grotesque or hilarious.)

The van Gogh parody isn’t Beavers’s only paean to renowned artists of old and their iconic paintings.  Mona Lisa Nail (2015) is a rendering of a woman’s hand with one nail painted with an image of the famous Leonardo da Vinci portrait.  In Mondrian Body, Beavers shows a woman’s nude torso, neck to knees, covered in a Piet Mondrian-like geometric design in primary colors.  She’s standing in front of a red curtain holding a gold frame hung around her body with her breasts and belly protruding out from the canvas.  (This might be another piece for my Midnight Shopping Trip.) 

I found many of the exhibits at PS1 to fall outside my area of comprehension.  I’m glad I went because I had no idea what this MoMA satellite was all about—though I suspected it was really current art, which hasn’t appealed to me since the Post-modern period began.  This isn’t an unfamiliar response for me.  I noticed my lack of engagement with the latest art when I first went over to the then-new galleries in Chelsea, which began opening in the mid-1990s, in 2011 and it was undeniable when I went to the 2017 Whitney Biennial. 

I find almost all of this art self-indulgent and hyper-personal—and I’ll try to define and explain what I mean by that in a bit.  The artists all seem to be talking to themselves or to a very narrow audience of their own group (whatever that is).  Nothing is universalized or generalized so that it speaks to me, too (old dude that I am . . . ahem).  This is true even when the point the artist is making is entirely comprehensible to me and even something with which I agree or sympathize—the artistic expression of that point just doesn’t move me. 

As you’ve read earlier, I found several of the artists’ work more curious than aesthetically stimulating (Spero’s Maypole).  Another way of phrasing this is that much of this work was more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging to me, such as Heap of Birds’s Surviving Active Shooter Custer, with its word-dominated prints.  

Still other works, like the Studio Museum artists’ creations, were so hyperlocal (and perhaps hyper-generational, if I may coin a word) that I couldn’t respond to them other than academically.  Art like that of Julie Becker felt not just hyperlocal, but hyper-personal—so focused on her own life, feelings, and experiences as to be a private communication with her own psyche. 

[A few weeks ago, I posted a report on a collection of installations at the Park Avenue Armory, Drill (15 July).  The exhibit comprised 10 separate installations and I decided to try to describe each of them in my report.  In contrast, even though I visited all but one of the exhibits at PS1, I decided to cherry-pick what I’d write about in this report, so I’ve left out several about which I find I have little cogent to say. 

[The one exhibit Diana and I skipped was the Young Architects Program 2019 Exhibition (first floor; through 2 September),  Having seen the winners’ installation, Hórama Rama, in the Courtyard, we decided not to spend time with the other contestants.  (The runners-up for 2019 are Cannibal’s Bath by Matter Design [Brandon Clifford, Wes McGee, and Johanna Lobdell; Boston], Bambot: Fufuzela by Low Design Office [Ryan Bollom and DK Osseo-Asare; State College, PA], Seriously Fun by Oana Stănescu and Akane Moriyama [New York and Stockholm], and Refugio by TO [Carlos Facio and Jose G. Amozurrutia; Mexico City].)

[In the basement, Diana and I checked out Simone Fattal’s Autoportrait but decided not to stay for the whole film, principally because, as I said above, it was so old we felt it wasn’t really relevant to the exhibit upstairs.  I looked in at Saul Melman’s Central Governor in the Boiler Room, also in the basement, but found it uninteresting and, given Diana’s disability, decided it wasn’t worth her putting herself out physically for it.

[I’ve also elected not to report on rootkits rootwork by Devin Kenny (second floor; through 2 September).  The reason is simple: I didn’t understand this show at all and couldn’t formulate anything intelligent to say about it.  That’s not a condemnation; I’m sure there are many other people who will find this exhibition engaging.  The museum promo explains that “‘rootkits’ are a form of computer virus that undetectably alter the underlying operating system; ‘rootwork’ alludes to practices of Black-American folk magic, and both reference the DNA kits that allow people to explore their heritage.”  The PS1 materials go on:

In more than a dozen works across a range of media—including some created for the exhibition—Kenny draws particular inspiration from network technologies, locating unsettling intersections of complicity and exploitation, which his work often resists.  Employing the popular cultures of memes, music, fast fashion, and viral media, the artist subtly reveals ubiquitous and often invisible structures of injustice and exclusion.

[Perhaps you can see why I was uncomprehending.  On the other hand, perhaps you can follow this description and would get something from Kenny’s work.

[One more comment: when I do a report for ROT on a theater performance or an art show, I usually do a review round-up at the end.  I like the idea of presenting a summary of the published critical response, especially if the pros have opinions that differ from mine.  This time’s a little different, though: “MoMA PS1” is a report on an entire museum, not just one specific exhibit.  I covered seven separate and distinct shows in about four hours and though many of them received reviews both in print and on line—I saw many of them while writing this report—it would be hell to track them all down, read them, and summarize them.  (It would also be a very long summary, more than doubling the length of this write-up, I suspect.)  As a result, ROTters will have to look up the reviews themselves—or be satisfied with my judgments.]