THE ARBITERS
FARRAH KARAPETIAN
University of San Diego, USA
Art world institutions are premised on the fallacious notion that they are not only custodians of culture but also its arbiters. The Venn diagram of artists’ priorities with those of institutions shows few logical relations. It is therefore not uncommon to see a critical response from those who find themselves intermittently on the inside of the art world’s shifting, invisible walls. Some, like Michael Rakowitz,[1] find themselves accepted into the ranks of a survey exhibition only to depart in protest; others, like Emily Johnson,[2] write open letters exposing their experiences with institutions; and others, like Andrea Fraser, whose work in institutional critique far exceeds this sentence, contribute critical reflections about the very institutions in which the reflections are situated.[3] Still, others redistribute the attention they receive to those with whom they share priorities.
It is this latter instinct that is the focus of this writing: criticality that is a very function of the pedigree the system purports to protect. Nicole Eisenman is a MacArthur grant recipient with work included in two Whitney Biennials and a Venice Biennale. When she won a $200,000 award and traveling show from Suzanne Deal Booth and the FLAG Art Foundation, she decided that the show would better serve artist Keith Boadwee. She negotiated with the foundation that his work occupy one floor of the show as well as weave into dialogue with her work on another. Eisenman and Boadwee’s work shares priorities, and a show devoted to their dialogue builds context for those as much as for his work. “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”, a solo exhibition curated in collaboration with Trockel at el Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, devoted much of its organization to Trockel’s influences in the form of the artworks and artefacts of others’ labour. Neither Eisenman nor Trockel had to share space. Why did they do it?
On some level, these moves reclaim the territory of value and knowledge production from the institutions that sanction their work, a move that is difficult to commercialize. Institutional critique and artist-run alternatives to institutional power have always been folded eventually into the structures they resist. However much the artist-curated space or publication challenges capitalism’s strategies and the artists’ collective destabilizes related notions of artistic authority, once an institution sees for it an aperture in the market’s appetites, it can be swallowed whole and used to consolidate institutional power without creating systemic change. Eisenman and Trockel’s decisions empowered them to define a part of their context that has been otherwise disabled.
Mickalene Thomas made space for other artists when commissioned by Absolut vodka to make an installation for their bar at Galerie Volkshaus on the occasion of Art Basel, 2013. She called the environment Better Days, after a group of her mother’s friends who held events in the 1970s to raise funds to fight sickle cell anaemia. 2013’s fair featured 304 galleries exhibiting from 39 countries, selling at the invitation-only opening more than six multi-million-dollar artworks. Thomas’ New York gallery, Lehmann Maupin, sold one of her paintings quickly.[4] Five minutes from the fair, Better Days was all mirrors and imitation wood paneling, African textiles, linoleum, and lava lamps. Thomas could have stopped there, but she included in Better Days other people’s artwork. The space was not just a theatrical set re-staging blackness for the jet set: it was a mise-en-abyme of the meaning that mattered to Mickalene, such as performance provided by Sarah Reid’s experimental music, poetry, and sound, and also with artworks by multiple artists of Thomas’ choice.
At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, rafa esparza built Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field out of 3100 adobe bricks: a gallery within the Whitney’s. Inside and on his walls, he invited artists to contribute. The institution historicizes esparza’s contribution excluding its most radical gesture. It says that he “built a rotunda out of adobe bricks made by hand from a combination of clay, horse dung, hay, and water from the Los Angeles River,” and quotes his video interview where he says he is “building up a space out of brown matter.”[5] Nowhere in virtual perpetuity does the museum interpret that metaphor explicitly in terms of the gesture of inclusion that is inviting other Latinx and queer artists to show with him.
Rafa Esparza, Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field 2017. Images courtesy of the artist.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Mario Vasquez
Alice Könitz’ Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMOA) started in her studio’s driveway in December 2012: a modular wooden space and “a model for a very idealistic art institution that was solely based in dialogue between artists.”[6] Könitz came to the model from an interest in display systems and staging that had characterized her sculpture for some time. She and her friends exchanged labour on their artworks, in the diffuse reciprocity of art’s non-parallel economy. She populated the structure she built with her friends’ artwork, posing questions about institutional ownership, relationships in the art world, and value, which were soon amplified by exhibiting the museum inside of museums.
When LAMOA (Display System #2) was shown at Made in L.A. (2014), a survey exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, it performed the relationships usually underrecognized between “touring museum collections.”[7] It also, though, performed as artwork, garnering for Könitz the $100,000 Mohn Award honouring artistic excellence. The jury specifically wanted to honour Könitz for the practice of inventing new ways of operating and creating her own context “as the art market increasingly dominates the contemporary art world.”[8]
The Hammer also purchased “one entire display system complete with exhibited works.”[9] The museum paid for the construction of DS #2, as well as insurance and shipping of all works exhibited. It asked Könitz about a price for everything, including other artists’ works, and Könitz directed these queries towards the artists themselves. She did not ask for a split, as would a conventional gallery. The artists or collectors from whom the work displayed inside DS #2 was consigned and the artists could choose if they wanted their pieces to be for sale; for those who refused, the museum substituted photographs of the work, to preserve Könitz’ curatorial vision. Parsing each of these relationships is the system of the display to which the title refers, more so than the walls she built, and creating more dialogue around value is the value of the piece, as is the set of human associations Könitz revealed as a meta-curator.
Alice Könitz, Made in LA UCLA Hammer Museum, LA, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya did not build a space at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. His photographs render dynamics visible that have often not been so, in terms of spatial and human relations. They have stripped down kaleidoscopes that take cultural references from as far afield as the centrefold or the zine and consider them among the vernacular technologies we might all re-evaluate as sites of creative exchange. Many of the humans in his studio actively photograph while he does; thus, it is key that their agency should be recognized: as artists, friends, and collaborators. No photograph is an island.
Curated into the Biennial, Sepuya then curated these agents’ photographs. Of the fourteen works he exhibited, only one bore his name alone as the author; another was co-authored with A.L. Steiner. Originally Sepuya did not intend to include any of his own pictures. Sepuya’s art works are about relationships and their conditions as much as they are a photographic artefact of them. That is an essential fact of its value, and yet no commercial gallery could effectively exhibit that matrix; it confuses commerce. This was an experiment, following the idea of the value of collaboration, relationship, and mutual respect to its conclusion. Indeed, Sepuya let the artists he showed (with) decide whether or not to pull out of the Biennial; Rakowitz had already withdrawn. In the end, Sepuya’s cohort chose to stay.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, 2019. Images courtesy of the artist.
Sepuya’s gesture was remarkable – as were those of the other artists – because it took place in a context designed to highlight an individual’s practice, but it was also enabled by that context. Carlos Basualdo writes that in the case of biennials, “the production of many of the projects is largely independent from collecting… This factor facilitates the inclusion of practices of a non-objectual nature… and it indirectly winds up stimulating the problematization of the notion of art as an autonomous activity.”[10] Sepuya indeed could not have made his point outside of the context of having been honoured with inclusion in the Biennial, but that is not because the show ascribes value so symbolic to a work of art as to extract it from the exchange. Rather, because biennials have such currency, Sepuya’s choice registers.
At The Collective Body, a show co-curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Kathryn Weir at the National Gallery Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Sydney-based Taloi Havini installed Reclamation, a lightweight cane structure resting on a mound of soil. Havini emphasizes the impermanence of the traditional architecture of her matrilineal clan, Hakö; inside her structure, she also includes various collectives’ creative output, including the Mata Aho Collective, composed of four Maori women based in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and the Dhaka-based Artpro.[11]
This exhibition occurred on the occasion of the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit, the intention of which is to reconsider histories, movement, borders, and other fault lines through the lenses of art.[12] Betancourt is the artistic director of the Bangladesh based Samdani Art Foundation, which founded and manages the summit. At Shilpakala, Betancourt reconsidered the environmental and socio-cultural impact of exhibition-making. Having noticed that the build cost on exhibitions is often more than the fees provided for artwork, she began to invert her priorities, and had local fabricators create temporary jute walls on rented scaffolding, which could move with the show, but would not have to be destroyed and rebuilt every time the work was shown. The institution here begins to follow the lead of the artists and the locality, rather than presuming that conventions of exhibition-making and institution building know best.
In particular, this latter example is a revision of an ostensible narrative around power, and it’s part of Betancourt’s talent for taking an active back seat to the artistic practices local to regions where she works. In general, art’s institutions reflect the privileges of exclusive capitalist projects tied to colonial histories of exploration and conquest. The artists mentioned here created institutional spaces for knowledge production inside of other institutions that necessarily fail at that enterprise. They’re not going to always or even often show their friends’ work; many artists will never do it – never write about each other, or curate each other into shows. Community is neither the premise of every artist’s work, nor any artist’s primary responsibility. Networks and capital will always influence reputation and access, and sales are a happy part of the exchange of goods for livelihood. Artists, though, are the actual agents of the art world, and as more of these horses enter more of these Troys, institutions should take heed of the flags they carry.
[1] Small, Z. (2019, July 26). Warren Kanders Resigns From Whitney Museum Board After Months of Controversy and Protest [UPDATED]. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://hyperallergic.com/511052/warren-kanders-resigns/
[2] Johnson, E. (2021, January 22). A Letter I Hope in the Future, doesn't Need to be Written. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://emily-72967.medium.com/a-letter-i-hope-in-the-future-doesnt-need-to-be-written-52e1d6fd5350
[3] See for examples specific to this sentence the essay Fraser contributed to the 2012 Whitney Biennial, “There’s no place like home” and the related 2011 essay, “L’1% C’est Moi” at https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2012-biennial/andrea-fraser
[4] Vogel, C. (2013, June 13). At Art Basel, an Unslaked Appetite for Buying. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/arts/design/at-art-basel-an-unslaked-appetite-for-buying.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[5] “Whitney Biennial 2017: Rafa Esparza.” retrieved 22 January 2021 from https://whitney.org/media/513
[6] Correspondence with the artist, January 2021.
[7] Artwork description page, 2014. The Hammer Museum. retrieved 22 January 2021 from https://hammer.ucla.edu/made-in-la-2014/los-angeles-museum-of-art
[8] “Mohn Award Announcement,” 2014. The Hammer Museum. retrieved 22 January 2021 from https://hammer.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/migrated-assets/media/Press_Releases/2014/Mohn_Award_Announcement_FINAL.pdf.
[9] Correspondence with the artist, January 2021.
[10] Basualdo, C. (2011). The Unstable Institution. In P. O'Neill (Ed.), Curating subjects (pp. 39-52). London: Open Editions.
[11] Samdub, M. (2020, March 1). A Space for Collectives. Retrieved January 31, 2021, from https://alserkalavenue.ae/en/folio/a-space-for-collectives.php
[12] “Dhaka Art Summit, Seismic Movements, 7–15 February 2020” retrieved 22 January 2021 from http://dhakaartsummit.org
To cite this article:
Farrah Karapetian (2021). THE ARBITERS. Archivo Papers Journal, 1:2. Available from https://www.archivoplatform.com/post/apj-v1-2-karapetian-2
