The Broad is a commanding addition to Los Angeles’ downtown cultural artery along Grand Avenue, situated beside the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall, and across from the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA). The Broad, nearly 10 years in the making, opened its doors to the public last month, presenting Edith and Eli’s massive collection of blue-chip artworks free of charge. Preceding the construction of their name-sake, the Broads had established historical ties to every major Los Angeles museum, including LA MOCA, the Hammer, and more recently the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) — a sizable gallery built on-site at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA) in 2008. The permanent collection exhibited at Grand Avenue will be familiar to Angelenos from earlier presentations at LACMA’s Renzo Piano-designed BCAM wing.

In terms of the building itself, architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro refer to the Broad’s unique design as a “veil-and-vault” structure, consisting of a fiber-reinforced concrete façade, or veil, that allows for controlled, natural light to permeate the gallery spaces surrounding the “vault” — a state of the art climate-controlled storage unit at the building’s core.

For the inaugural exhibition, Joanne Heyler, a 20-year Broad Foundation veteran and director of the nascent museum, has selected more than 250 works by some 60 artists in what she refers to as “a sweeping, chronological journey.” This presentation is indeed a journey, one that communicates the history of the international art market of the past 30 years, reified by these artists’ positions within such an axiomatically authoritative institution as the Broad. Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation further reinforces this point.

Ed Ruscha’s companion pieces, Old Tech Chem Building (2003) and Blue Collar Tech Chem (1992), open an exhibition of recently acquired works on the museum’s first floor. The works depict the 11-year transformation of a fictional “Tech Chem” facility into a space newly named “Fat Boy.” The 1992 work depicts a grey night sky, which in 2003 bleeds red. The phrase “Fat Boy” recalls the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 — nicknamed “Fat Man” and “Little Boy,” respectively. These paintings serve as an intense opening to the show: while the present is foreboding, the future perhaps radioactive, Ruscha instructs us not to be nostalgic for the past. Tech Chem limns our present experience as a product of our dark origins.

Following Ruscha’s powerful introduction, I was disappointed that the curators failed to draw any relationship between Mark Grotjahn’s poignant formal studies and the more explicitly political works on display. Grotjahn’s 2007 Untitled (Dancing Black Butterflies) consists of a series of rotating mathematical grids — vertical lines become horizontal and vantage points slant and skew. The artist’s black geometric shapes flutter to life along the length of the series, creating optical impressions that change as the viewer moves in the space. The wall text reads that these shifting vantage points provide “room for many perceptions of and points of entry into the work.” It is precisely this awareness of the capacity of artworks to read multiply, for meaning to bend and shift, which could have successfully brought historically disparate works in dialogue with one another.

The museum’s main gallery upstairs opens with Jeff Koons’ monumental Tulips (1995-2004), surrounded on all sides by Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1990), a nine-panel installation in which the words “Run Dog Run” are stenciled in repetition using black enamel on aluminum. Wool breaks apart the words themselves, the R and U placed above the N, the D and O placed above the G. With the dismemberment of these three-letter words, Wool highlights their semiotic function, encouraging the viewer to understand them as formal signifiers divorced from their meaning within the phrase.

This relationship between signifiers and concepts was explored by American artist Jasper Johns 30 years prior with his masterpiece, Watchman. This 1964 assemblage highlights the artist’s radical refusal of any single identification: how exactly is his composition ordered? Which paints are laid down first? Which are stripped away? Do his colors prefigure their descriptions? Johns’ Watchman mirrors the scale of the human form — reinforced by the cast of a human leg in the upper register — and, as such, demands to be understood as contingent upon the viewer’s own physicality, identity and experience.

Glenn Ligon also works at this intersection of language and identity, as evidenced by his series Runaways from 1993. For these works, Ligon asked friends to draft descriptions of him as though they were reporting a missing person to the police, and was shocked to find that they recalled the 19^th-century runaway-slave ads he had researched for the series. The descriptions vary widely from piece to piece — different features are highlighted, others glossed over. While the exhibition privileges formal and historical relationships over conceptual ones, it would have been inspiring to examine Wool, Johns and Ligon’s work side-by-side, as a means of highlighting the discursive production of meaning in all three. Instead, Ligon’s installation is predictably flattened, reduced to what the curators call “the parallel senses of insider and outsider in us all.”

Mysteriously, the late activist-artist David Wojnarowicz shares one of the final galleries with art star Julian Schnabel, an odd juxtaposition that the wall text fails to engage with or defend. The Wojnarowicz works are striking and impassioned, in particular The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of The U.S.A., from 1986. Here, a crucified figure is undergirded by layers of painted-over newsprint with the phrases “10 years,” “life and death,” “in the womb” and “foul” left bare. Veins extend from the voodoo figure and wrap around images of mosquitos, cowboys, blood red steak and a hand literally covered in a blood. This is a work about AIDS, homophobia, fear of infection and government inaction resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands.

Like other works in the exhibition, Wojnarowicz’ pulsing political message is tamped down by Heyler’s insistence on a chronological presentation that resists social-historical examination. The Broad falls victim to a universalizing narrative that presupposes that the meaning attached to these artworks is fixed, conveyed to a disembodied spectator that approaches the work in isolation, divorced from her own social experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s “veil-and-vault” concept then serves as a poignant lens through which to understand The Broad’s political stakes. It’s all right there in the architecture — the museum’s surface appears porous, penetrable and malleable. However, this veil is merely a symbol of access that instead serves to reinforce the institutionally fixed, guarded and rich marrow within.

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June 20 to September 13, 2015
10899 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, 310 443 7000

“Perfect Likeness,” organized by veteran curator Russell Ferguson, is an intentioned and poignant show, with moments of profound tenderness. It was without question the best exhibition I’ve seen this year. It charts a renewed interest in photographic composition beginning in the 1970s, focusing in particular on the prolific photographers of Europe, Canada and the US working between the 1990s and 2000s. The works flow beautifully without the conventional curatorial buttresses of chronology or conspicuous thematic groupings. Ferguson’s deft arrangement sparkles with the subtle lyricism of a photographer’s series, allowing for moments of affection, irony, and fascination to unfold in front of the viewer.

Ferguson’s introductory wall text presses upon our current condition of image saturation, a point which interested me less than the mid-century break he posits between pictorialism and more candid, even journalistic, photography. The return to the “inauthentic” or arranged image is where “Perfect Likeness” finds its genesis. A gorgeous Robert Mapplethorpe work, Orchid (1982), could have opened the exhibition — it nearly perfectly characterizes the pictorial shift for which Ferguson argues. It was in 1982 that Mapplethorpe found his muse in female body builder Lisa Lyon, and his evocative image of a drooping orchid is anthropomorphized on film, displaying the same elegance, grace and emotion as his expertly staged corporeal forms. While Ferguson could have just as easily chosen a nude to mark Mapplethorpe’s predilection for choreographed imagery, I appreciate the fact that the flower, itself a site of sexual reproduction, was chosen. Roe Ethridge’s work Peas and Pickles (2014) shares a wall with the Mapplethorpe, and serves as both a formal counterpart and self-aware double entendre.

Christopher Williams’ Department of Water and Power General Office Building (Dedicated on June 1, 1965), from 1994, consists of two images taken at slightly different angles in the morning and evening. The subtle change produces vastly different effects: in the first, the building’s vertical lines are emphasized, while in the second it appears wider and more horizontal. One of the aims of “Perfect Likeness” seems to be the unification of painterly technique with that of photography. In Department, Williams draws upon the tradition of Monet, who depicted Rouen Cathedral dozens of times as a means of indicating the subtle distinctions in perception caused by shifting light and shadows.

This understanding of the photographic subject as malleable speaks to the issue of authenticity, a question which photographer Jeff Wall has spent a career examining (and debunking). Wall’s 2011 work, Boxing, features two white teenage boys sparring in what appears to be their childhood home — an elegant high-rise apartment with a Joseph Albers painting hung in the background. The art historian Michael Fried has made much of the quality of absorption present in Wall’s subjects; many times they perform a task or mundane action that suggests they are oblivious to the fact that they are being photographed. This absorptive quality squares with Wall’s pictorial aims: to create an image that appears candid but is in fact painstakingly composed. While two of Wall’s major large-format works are featured in the exhibition, it was his more diminutive 1993 piece Diagonal Composition that was the standout. The quotidian image of a kitchen sink glows with the help of a light box and was so perfect, so complete, and so personal, that I was nearly moved to tears.

Lucas Blalock’s Broken Composition, from 2011, consists of a double image of a broken light bulb. The wall text equates Blalock’s visible method of technical composition to the painter’s brushstroke. Here, both the picture and its subject are broken, adding another layer of ambiguity between the photo’s “truth” and inauthenticity. Stan Douglas’ Hastings Park was another standout in the show, a composite of a photo taken in 1955 and edited using Photoshop in 2008. For the photo, Douglas restages the 1955 scene at a Vancouver horse track using models in period clothing, creating an image composed of 30 separate snapshots.

Sharon Lockhart’s evocative 1997 series The Goshogaoka Girls Basketball Team makes manifest a century-long photographic cliché: with her carefully arranged images Lockhart raises a mundane scene to the level of magnificence. By omitting the ball from the frame, the players appear to gaze up hopefully towards a higher power above. Thomas Ruff’s glossy portraits from the 1980s take up an equal amount of the exhibition’s real estate, though they’re nowhere near as compelling as Lockahart’s scenes. Ruff’s sitters look directly at the camera blankly, as though posing for an identification card. While the enormous format of these images is in itself seductive, they lose their visual punch when displayed in a series. In contrast, Elad Lassry’s Chocolate bars, Eggs, Milk (2013) is deliberately diminutive; apparently his subject of glossy chocolate and smooth eggs is plenty seductive, even at such a small scale.

The poignancy of the images on display is what left me thinking about “Perfect Likeness” weeks later. Catherine Opie’s 2012 portrait of the artist Lawrence Weiner raises him to the level of an old master, equal parts Rembrandt and Hans Holbein. However, Weiner’s soft body and gentle face lay bare a degree of tenderness on Opie’s part — she doesn’t revere Weiner, but cares for him. Equally affectionate were Gillian Wearing’s self portraits dressed as her mother and father from 2003. In these blown-up images, Wearing’s wig, glue, and mask are made visible, though not pronounced. This evidence of the characters’ construction points to the mother and father themselves as constructed figures, reproduced and reimagined in our own memories, often tainted with shades of nostalgia. Rather than recognizing “Perfect Likeness” on a register as broad as the shared human condition (as the wall text suggests), I understand it as a touching time capsule — one that, in my opinion, will mark the set of issues facing photographers today.

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John Currin at Gagosian Beverly Hills

February 19 to April 11, 2015
456 North Camden Drive (between S. Santa Monica Boulevard and Brighton Way)
Beverly Hills, 310 271 9400

John Currin’s current solo show at Gagosian Beverly Hills will not disappoint devotees of his signature style. The artist’s sensuous play between lush fabrics, fruit and the female form — while exceedingly literal — is nonetheless striking and seductive. Culling inspiration from Italian Mannerism and the art of the Northern Renaissance, Currin recasts the classical image of the female nude, limning and embracing its current cultural significance in tandem with its historical precedent. Gender and sexuality become the subjects of Currin’s paintings, and while his relationship to art of the 15^th century has been discussed at length, rarely is his work regarded in politically salient terms.

With the exception of three paintings executed in 2013, each work in the exhibition was painted within the last three months. The luscious 2015 work Maenads depicts an alabaster-skinned, auburn-haired sitter in Currin’s Mannerist style. A pink gossamer top traces her breasts and a silk scarf is draped listlessly over her lap. Two ripe apples placed at eye-level mirror her rounded breasts and belly, further emphasizing the figure’s sensuous form. In the background lie two additional women with similar coloring, one with legs splayed open and the other reaching over to touch her. However any contact between the two is obscured by the foreground sitter’s raised knee. The show’s earlier works exhibit slightly more explicit instances of sexuality, integrating what appears to be ‘70s-era pornography as background imagery. However, it serves to mention that the naughtiest bits are always concealed: no genitals and certainly no penetrative sex. So why, after having depicted explicit sex acts for years, does John Currin offer us these references to sexuality without the titillation?

The Storm (2013) similarly alludes to what appears to be an explicit sex act between a man and two women, but Currin’s languid golden-haired nude obscured our view. In this image, like the others in the show, paint is applied thinly and sparingly, the texture of the canvas visible behind his rendered satins and furs. Bust in a Convex Mirror and Nude in a Convex Mirror, both from 2015, present a refracted view of Currin’s female forms, allowing for the delectation of his figures’ breasts and buttocks without interference.

Lemons and Lace (2015) remained with me long after leaving the exhibition. A vaguely historical pastiche, the female figure bares a striking resemblance to Currin’s wife and frequent sitter, Rachel Feinstein. Posed as an odalisque, his subject is dressed in lingerie that refers in equal parts 17^th century vestments and to 1970s adult films, all the way down to her thigh-high stockings and shimmering gold mules. In the background, a snuffed-out candelabra and pieces of fruit beg to be analyzed in art-historical terms — do these props allude to fertility? Integrity? Death? Plays with translucence and opacity abound, a useful metaphor in understanding these new works.

The thread unifying these paintings is a deliberate attention to what’s exposed and what is concealed. The images are PG-13 alternatives to the artist’s previous X-rated works, and by adhering to socially prescribed limits of probity, Currin further demarcates those boundaries, naturalized for centuries via the art-historical canon.

I want to make very clear what I understand as a distinction between the operations of Currin’s nudes and those of other contemporary artists. Now perhaps cliché, Classical and Modern artists have portrayed the pliant and available female body for centuries. Understanding this cultural and historical signification as implicit in any image of a white female nude, artists of Currin’s epoch have subverted the classic trope as a means of illustrating the restrictive politics of gender and visuality. Take for instance the arresting and corpulent nude portraits of Jenny Saville, tellingly referred to as “grotesque” by art critics and historians. Or perhaps Rineke Dijkstra’s nude mothers, photographed shortly after giving birth, stretchmarks and bloated bellies proudly on display. Even pornography, as employed by Ghada Amer, serves to represent the female body as imbued with agency, deliberate and purposeful. Currin’s return to classical tropes then brings ideological markers of taste and class into sharp relief, naturalized for centuries and only very recently challenged by postmodern theory and feminist politics. And, as in the classical tradition, the sensuousness of Currin’s forms is heightened by their relative modesty.

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Queer artists in the late 1980s such as David Wojnarowicz, Gregg Bordowitz and members of the collective Gran Fury employed directive text and images as a means of addressing AIDS, its representation, and the concomitant cultural crisis in the United States. The work of artist Jim Hodges, in contrast, limns the line between the evocative and the sublime, employing minimalist forms in line with what has been recently referred to as “queer formalism:” work that turns away from aesthetics typically associated with “activist” art in favor of coded political motivations as a means of resisting censorship. Hodges’s palpable earnestness is reinforced by the lack of didactic wall texts at his ambitious retrospective, currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The original iteration of “Give More Than You Take” was co-organized by Olga Viso, from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and Jeffrey Grove, from the Dallas Museum of Art. Hammer Museum director Connie Butler organized the show’s third stop in LA, alongside curator Aram Moshaedi. Artists Julie Ault and Martin Beck were brought on as consultants to aid in the show’s reconceptualization at the Hammer, for an exhibition featuring 75 pieces realized between 1987 to present. Notably, the curators in LA reserve ample space between artworks, allowing the viewer to experience each installation individually, and draw connections between the evocative pieces and their own experiences. This notion of correspondence — either between individuals, politics or objects — is central to Hodges’s work, for which he employs delicate silk flowers, gold leaf, broken mirrors and tenuous chains, to speak to issues as varied as mortality, artifice, and the interrelation of our myriad selves.

In circles attuned to queer art and politics, Hodges is often referred to alongside the late Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres as employing the language of queer formalism. Hodges was close friends with Gonzalez-Torres, and, according to Walker director Olga Viso, produced a number of works in his memory on the day of the artist’s death from AIDS in 1996. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Hammer Museum will screen a number of Hodges’s films, including Untitled (2011), produced with collaborators Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King. The 60-minute film, made in honor of Gonzalez-Torres, uses archival material to showcase injustices throughout history. While the film pays special attention to the politics and activism surrounding AIDS in the 1980s, it goes as far back as WWII to point to ideological abuses of power in the face of cultural crises. Hodges writes of the film:

We have people in power who are disrespectful, who are prejudiced, who don’t see, who refuse to acknowledge an aspect of the society at large because of their ideological position. They won’t allow themselves to see the humanness that’s there. This is the problem that I see: this continuation — and the continuum — where the powers deny the humanness of the other.

This focus on “humanness” is central to Hodges’s delicate artworks at the Hammer, which emphasize the phenomenological effects of our own physicality. Hodges presses upon the experience of interacting with other (often anonymous) bodies in space as a means of gesturing towards a shift in the cultural understanding of the body after AIDS. His 1997 work You features thousands of silk and polyester flowers, petals and leaves stitched together to form a 30-foot-tall curtain. The installation is designed to be exhibited in the center of the gallery so as to allow viewers to walk around it on all sides, letting them catch short glimpses of one another — fluttering fingers, a tuft of hair, a flash of skin — through the work’s small interstices. Later that year Hodges produced Changing Things, which deconstructs the curtain of flora found in You as a means of recognizing each one of its disparate parts, pinning each silk flower, petal and leaf, like specimens for study. Here, the viewer experiences Hodges’ materials in the visual language of taxonomy, laying bare the slipperiness between notions of the authentic versus the fabricated, the natural versus the constructed.

Hodges is deeply interested in the effects of layering and fragmenting, and the relationship between exposing and concealing. Often described as “poetic,” it serves to mention that much of his work is markedly feminine, itself a queer aesthetic device when recognized in tandem with the works’ seriousness. For Landscape (1998), the artist places 15 boys’ and men’s shirts in successive sizes, one inside the other, to create a series of concentric collars in different colors and patterns. The outermost shirt is a buttoned-up white oxford, alluding to the disparity between our innermost and outermost selves. Hodges’s ambitious installation And Still This (2005-08) takes on similar themes of transformation over time. The work consists of a series of 10 body-sized gessoed canvases overlaid with gold leaf and arranged upright in a circle. The viewer steps into the installation via a small opening between two canvases, forcing her to confront the rarely-seen wooden stretchers as she makes her way inside the configuration of paintings. Once inside, the viewer encounters a carefully designed modern day creation myth in an abstract narrative designed to be read from left to right. This relation between interior and exterior highlights the artist’s own experience during the AIDS crisis, when revealing details about one’s self — whether one’s HIV status or sexuality — was highly politicized.

Chain-link spider webs are a recurrent theme in the artist’s 25-year oeuvre, beginning in 1991 with Untitled (Gate), a human-scale installation made of steel, copper, aluminum and brass chain. From a distance the work connotes both neglect and interdiction, though closer inspection reveals that the innermost chains are constructed of delicate girls’ charm bracelets. For What’s Left (1992) the artist has constructed a still life of rumpled jeans, a t-shirt, belt and tennis shoes overlaid with a sparking chain-link web. The installation alludes to clothes left on the bed or bathroom floor, perhaps belonging to a lover whose body has since disappeared. Hodges produced this work in New York City at the height of AIDS, again, shying away from the overtly political works that were rallied against, or worse, censored by the religious right and conservative museum structures.

Perhaps the most arresting piece in “Give More Than You Take” is Hodges’s 2008 work The Dark Gate. The viewer is invited to enter a small wooden chamber nestled in the pitch-black gallery through a pair of swinging doors. Inside, the artist has created an oculus lined in razor spikes, or, perhaps, an image of a sunburst left in reserve. The bright spot in the center again reinforces the artist’s inquiry into relativity: is the darkness encroaching or receding? The fragrance of Hodges’s mother’s favorite perfume, Shalimar, permeates the chamber, which also contains notes of the cologne Hodges himself wore at the time of her passing. In this evocative installation Hodges references danger, hope, violence, death and birth. The small dwelling is deeply personal but utterly social, a successful metaphor for his prolific 25-year career.

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“Fiber Madness,” at the Palos Verdes Art Center through November 16, showcases the larger-than-life knits of fiber artist Mark Newport, also known as Sweaterman, whose work defies its own aesthetic whimsy, tackling social issues such as labor, gender, and domesticity. The artist is the head of the fiber arts program at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, where he is also the acting artist in residence. His fiber works are both bizarre and arresting, due in equal parts to their evocative resonance and massive scale.

The exhibition’s first gallery houses eight oversized hand-knit bodysuits crafted with cheap acrylic yarn. The suits’ hoods and colors create the impression of homespun superhero costumes, which hang lifeless like misshapen, stretched and molted skins. In Hollywood movies, Batman and Spiderman wear suits made from structured latex and polymers that cling to each muscle, ripple and bulge — the actor’s athletic and masculine physique left on full display. With works such as Newport’s 2008 piece Sweaterman 5, the artist queers this conventional superhero archetype, creating an impotent, cast-off hero using a traditionally “female” craft.

Newport’s suits sometimes include a corresponding element of performance in their production: outfitted from head to toe in one of his signature knits (which serves to both glove his hands and mask his face), Newport will work quietly in a rocking chair in the corner of the gallery, fumbling over his needles with yarn-covered fingers. Here, he embodies the figure of the crestfallen hero, the speed and dexterity associated with comic book warriors is replaced by quiet, frustrating tedium. This quality of impotence, even failure, which guides the work, touches upon an inquiry into gender normativity begun a decade earlier. In the 1990s, Newport designed a series of hand-embroidered sports trading cards.

By contrasting the hyper-masculinity of professional sports with a method of women’s labor, Newport puts gendered notions of professionalism in dialogue with cultural constructions of pastime, performance and dress. Unlike more “conventional” queer and feminist practice, which often takes for granted the artist’s marginalized subjectivity, Newport’s work stems from an inquiry into his internalized conceptions of masculinity and the ways in which he identifies with the associated tropes. By both embodying and critiquing his relation to this normative position, Newport reframes our understanding of gender and sexuality to resist binaries, upend classifications and embrace failure.

In the interest of full disclosure it serves to mention that Maddie Phinney curated an exhibition at the Palos Verdes Art Center earlier this year. 

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Lance Esplund, Maddie Phinney and Barry Schwabsky join David Cohen to discuss exhibitions by Polly Apfelbaum at Hansel & Gretel Picture Garden and D’Amelio Gallery, Stan Douglas at David Zwirner, Douglas Florian at Bravinlee Programs, Ron Gorchov at Cheim & Read, Eve Sonneman at Nohra Haime Gallery, and Yang Fudong at Marian Goodman Gallery.

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November 4, 2011–January 22, 2012
1071 Fifth Avenue, at 88th Street
New York City, 212 423 3500

This Roundtable of artcritical regulars and guests took place via email over the weekend of November 19/20, 2011. David Cohen moderated.

DAVID COHEN Maurizio Cattelan announced ahead of his Guggenheim retrospective that after it he intends to retire. Do we believe him? And if so, are we heartbroken or relieved?

CARLA GANNIS I’m neither heartbroken nor relieved, because I know we haven’t heard the last from him. In interview he claims his retirement is another stage in his development, and that basically he doesn’t want to follow the widespread practices of “art stars” (40+ assistants, etc.) Maybe he’ll pull a David Lynch move and start making art on the web, i.e. web”site” specific.

Visual art culture today feels very akin to the pop/rock music scene. Staying young and pithy — and edgy and countercultural — is hard to maintain post 40 when you’re bankrolled by every major art institution and your works sell for $2 million+.

Bruce Nauman moved to New Mexico and “retired” in a sense. Cattelan’s retreat (especially when he supports it with his not wanting to play the “art star” game) gives him more cred with younger artists.

DAVID CARRIER The pop music comparison is interesting. I don’t think that any of the classic groups (The Who, The Rolling Stones) were interesting beyond a certain point because that’s basically young boy music – my baby’s left me and I’m sad – and it’s hard for millionaire grandfathers to do. One might think, visual art’s different, but maybe today it isn’t.

Pop music involves selling lots of tickets or lots of music to individuals, visual art’s still tied to objects, even if here the museum plays into the game. My view: pop music is truly accessible, there are no experts; while visual art’s inherently different, there one has critics. That’s a very basic difference that hasn’t done away.

DAVID COHEN Hmm, lots to ponder here David. (Everyone else, we’re gonna have to put friendliness aside and call David and me Carrier and Cohen henceforth). Years ago I interviewed David Bowie and his agent sent me a heap of reading materials so I could do my homework. Boy is there pop music criticism! The book deconstructing Bowie made Artforum seem like Hello Magazine by way of intellectual comparison.

DAVID CARRIER Ok, there is pop music criticism, but “Let’s spend the night together” doesn’t really demand commentary, whereas much here does: it’s this difference in attitude that interests me. It would be interesting to have figures- how many visit this show? I bet, any even C+ rock star would find the numbers pathetic. Artforum vs. Rolling Stone, very different.

ROBIN SIEGEL Funny that Cohen should mention Bowie. I could not help but think of him as I think of Cattelan re-inventing himself in the near to distant future, much as Bowie did, way before there was a Madonna or Gaga.

DAVID COHEN I suggest that formally Cattelan might be the equivalent of “lets spend the night” because there is not much aesthetic life independent of the message they are fabricated to convey, whereas, say, a sculpture by Medardo Rosso, or Brancusi, or Henry Moore is almost entirely such independence.

CARLA GANNIS “aesthetic life independent of the message they are fabricated to convey?” I’m sorry what does that mean? You seem to be implying that a Cattelan is a one-liner. A lot of more “formal” art (serious and earnest art) feels like one-liners to me. Elevated by our “faith” in it, more than what the object really gives to us. I’m sure to get hell for this response but really, Giacometti at times has felt like a one-liner to me (in form) and remove the “sublime” and “existential” from certain AbEx works, put a “layman” in front of them and there is very little but the surface!

DAVID CARRIER Everyone repeats, but Giacometti did not in 1939 envisage a large museum show, whereas Cattelan plays to this situation. A large difference.

ROBIN SIEGEL By comparing Brancusi to Cattelan we invoke the proverbial apples to oranges.

DAVID CARRIER The Guggenheim has an impossible space, by the way. I can think of only two artists who have used it (as opposed to using it as a place to awkwardly show): Daniel Buren, who emptied it out and Maurizio Cattelan. I admire Cattelan for doing that, I admire him for reaffirming what we all sort of know: in this noisy art world you have to speak with a VERY LOUD VOICE to be heard. I always resist moralizing about art. (Not, of course about politics.) So I refuse to complain since after exiting from the elevator at the top floor, I very much enjoyed my rather brisk walk, interrupted only to purchase the app. This is a circus, it’s the anti-Buren show, the opposite of empty. But I can’t imagine going back, unless one of us tells me something I don’t expect to hear. Seeing this show is like going to a carnival, it’s a fun moment that doesn’t inspire contemplation, it makes Times Square look, by comparison, like the NY Public Library.

MADDIE PHINNEY I agree with you that he used the gallery masterfully. I too find it a totally bizarre and ineffective space in which to exhibit art and the installation was a really brilliant side-step. Back to the question about Cattelan retiring, I don’t think we have any reason not to believe that Cattelan will indeed retire, but I’ve been a bit confused by this collective sigh of relief. I feel like the reception of his work as merely a series of one-liners is a bit unfair, though I don’t quite know why I’m feeling so protective. There is of course a degree, a large degree, of intended “shock” in his work, but I find he has some interesting things to say about art as an industry. His piece “Torno Subito,” just a sign that reads “Be Right Back” which hung on the door handle of an Italian art gallery in the 80s and left the gallery closed for the duration of his “exhibition” — brilliant! It goes to show that his most resonant pieces rely on their site specificity, and it seemed a bizarre choice to see his oeuvre represented as a series of art-objects in the show — almost an attempt to undermine his contributions.

BESSIE ZHU I think that Cattelan’s impending retirement is even a talking point says much about the pop sensibilities of Cattelan as an artist. Whether or not he actually retires seems largely irrelevant – the announcement reminds me of a Rolling Stones Farewell Tour. It encourages us to stop and consider Cattelan’s oeuvre, helps with the market value of his work and is also a way for Cattelan to poke fun at the celebrity status artists like him enjoy. But it also points out the problem of being the art world’s token jokester — one never quite knows when to take him seriously. That said Cattelan’s humor comes from an informed point-of-view that’s much lacking in contemporary art. He makes work that relies on and engages in political/cultural discourse, and it remains accessible enough to stay relevant.

I totally agree with Maddie about the site-specificity of his works — can a work even be specific to a site anymore what with the internet and apps constantly displacing it? Cattelan seems to acknowledge the post-specific moment and as such his retirement seems aptly timed.

ROBIN SIEGEL It’s hard to imagine that Cattelan would retire from the art world, in the purest sense of the word. Most probably he will focus his efforts more on his curatorial and publishing interests. Given his invaluable backing from and ties to the fiscally potent collector Dakis Joannou, who is in bed with the New Museum, to just name one institution, I would not be the least bit surprised to see future Cattelan exhibitions in venues where Joannou has such connections.

Artists don’t retire. They renounce, recharge, repose, and ultimately come back with renewed vim and vigor. This is Cattelan’s life, and his art is inseparable from it and intrinsically linked to it. As Cattelan would state: Is There Life Before Death?

DAVID CARRIER Perhaps there is a relationship between his retirement and site-specificity. We might discuss Duchamp as a model and precedent, both for the suitcase containing all of his art and also, of course, for retirement.

DAVID COHEN His retirement is like so much else he does, totally Duchamp derivative.

CARLA GANNIS So he’s like Lady Gaga to Madonna? (smile)

DAVID COHEN I guess if he going gaga he has to retire.

BESSIE ZHU In response to Carrier’s query about retirement and site-specificity: There is something which certain modes of viewing preclude (such as a retrospective or an iPhone app or disambiguated images on the web) and if Cattelan’s works have to rally against that impetus towards universal viewing, what’s the point of making work if it is weakened through that decontextualization? Not to suggest that’s his thinking entirely but I think the connection exists.

MADDIE PHINNEY That’s an interesting relationship. I was only bringing up his emphasis on site to speak to the validity of his practice and political motivations. I think Bessie’s comment about the displacement of his pieces through the app is really interesting, though I don’t know that his retirement has anything to do with the obsolescence of his practice, that is to say I don’t think that technology that displaces artwork makes pieces that rely on site entirely obsolete.

Going back to the show’s installation. I was walking by a tour group when I saw the exhibition and the guide was saying something about how the installation wasn’t visually designed to be pouring downwards bit instead it was supposed to evoke an ascension up. I didn’t quite buy it.

DAVID COHEN Totally don’t buy into that either Maddie. There are so many hanging corpses: ascension and lynching don’t mix. Whether the viewer is going up or down, the spectacle has a pronounced downward gravity. What I’d say about the installation is that even when they are bending over backwards to be anti-artists, Italians can’t help being brilliant designers. It is one of several recent interventions that makes sense of an exquisite, art unfriendly exhibition space: Jenny Holzer and Tino Seghal also come to mind, and Holzer falls into a tradition of Guggenheim installation already established by Dan Flavin. But the massed mobile makes as much sense of the professed retirement as of the space: “This was it, one statement, done” it says to me. Maddie, you objected to the characterization of Cattelan pieces as one-liners, but Cattelan is surely acknowledging that about his pieces by eschewing (or pointedly limiting) the possibility of seeing each piece on its own terms again and finding something new in each. It is only by aggregation that a new statement has been possible with these ingredients. Ezra Pound’s distinction that symbols age whereas signs renew themselves comes to mind: his pieces are one dimensional and get flatter and flatter with each reviewing. Their facture is fairly irrelevant to their power of communication and therefore can’t convey possible new meanings.

CARLA GANNIS Ascending. Descending. (The ropes, instead of invisible wire, take away aspects of levitation or falling honestly). It feels more like a cacophony, and he is purposefully trying to deflate the notion of any individual work having an “aura” or autonomous significance. I think the “pouring down of his works” seems to speak of the way we access images and information today. It feels matrix-like.

BESSIE ZHU I think the installation is more “suspension” than a movement towards any direction.

MADDIE PHINNEY Oh, I like that. There was something on the wall text about how the works were deliberately “disrespected” by their mode of presentation. It’s interesting I think this sort of goes back to Carla’s comment about staying young — and maybe hip — in the art world. I never read Cattelan’s work as so “punk rock” or even subversive. I think it’s operating within a dialogue on the art industry IN the art industry, how much “cred” are we willing to offer him.

CARLA GANNIS Yes, I never really saw Cattelan as punk rock. Subversive though. He’s stirred up a bit of trouble with the crucified woman and Pope piece…

MADDIE PHINNEY I read an article a year ago — of course I can’t find the source now — and the whole thing was about art in bad taste. I don’t have any moral objections to Cattelan’s work but I’m fascinated by this question of artistic responsibility. Have we just moved past that moment when political correctness was paramount? I think this is a big part of what I appreciate about the work — yes, there’s “shock” but there’s also naughtiness and cheekiness and fun. Incidentally when I was looking up the article I found this fabulous Diana Vreeland quote, that “We all need a splash of bad taste; no taste is what I am against.

CARLA GANNIS Love that Cattelan’s work flies in the face of political correctness with its after scent of over-earnestness and didacticism.

DAVID CARRIER In a gallery, one normally sees works in sequence. So there’s some implied narrative or, at least, a sense of focus on individual pieces. Even Damien Hirst at Gagosian, which had to my mind a similar ‘circus’ effect, did involve such an order. Whereas here, one walks down the ramp, sees some familiar pieces, ok, but this isn’t a situation to inspire focus. It’s the extreme opposite of another Italian show long ago at the Guggenheim: Morandi. Imagine Morandis floating in this way!

I think that there are two audiences: those who know Cattelan’s art, and so recognize some pieces; and the larger public, I am guessing the larger group, who see the ensemble of works. It’s hard to make distinctions, and again, the app doesn’t encourage that. This is a total work of art, for better or worse.

MADDIE PHINNEY I think this is really well put. I hadn’t thought much about the general public who may be wholly unfamiliar with Cattelan’s work. I love the idea of the installation as the work in itself, with the cacophony as the intended effect — perhaps then the installation was more artful than we give him credit?

Does Cohen feel like Cattelan’s work is ineffective, or just unoriginal?

DAVID COHEN Originality is certainly not his forte. His first piece, the “back soon” placard, is lock stock and barrel within the tradition of Cage’s 4’33”. Like Cage’s gesture, Cattelan’s generates meanings and observations beyond itself that constitute its originality; in this sense, originality is gifted to the viewer to gauge through personal experience rather than a chronicler to determine in relation to precedents. I wasn’t there in Italy to experience it in person, nor have I heard a live or recorded version of 4’33” but I’m willing to court the accusation of philistinism and say that I think I “get” enough from both pieces through the reporting of it, or seeing a souvenir of it, to savor its implications in my mind. As to effective, they work very nicely as one-line jokes. Sometimes they are very clever one-line jokes that make different people laugh for different reasons and maybe on a repeat visit you can have a different kind of experience from your first visit. You might therefore be able to retool the joke. If you have an alarm clock that goes off every ten minutes the first time you walk by it you will get a jolt. The second time you will simply know that ten minutes has elapsed, so you could use the clock as a ten minute warning. That’s what I mean by retooling. But regarding Cattelan’s being original or effective, I’d say that you won’t get more from looking harder. (Though I’d love to hear experiences from you all that contradict that.) And you are unlikely to cry by the way, unless you really like squirrels.

BESSIE ZHU I don’t know that originality is necessary for a work to be effective. What’s original with Cattelan is that he is in a really privileged position as an artist–people pay attention to him, he’s widely collected, exhibited and discussed. His works are provocative because they are so audaciously derivative. I think we are taking for granted that a work like “Him” (2001) (the child-sized Hitler) is not an easy piece to persuade your museum’s board of directors/major patrons to be supportive of; it’s a subject not many institutions like to make a joke of. For us rather open-minded individuals it may be an easy target but in the history of art and in the short span of contemporary art it’s a remarkably effective, well-made one-liner. It’s difficult to make an easy idea look easy and few artists can manage irreverence and effectiveness as well as Cattelan does.

ROBIN SIEGEL How is his “one liner” work any different from any other artist who consistently researches or investigates recurrent themes such as Duchamp, Rodin, or de Kooning, for that matter?

Regarding the app, it is intended as a supplement to the show, not as a substitute. For anyone unable to attend the exhibition, or for those too lazy to attend, it’s better than nothing. Just like the news has become infotainment, this is art-o-tainment. Talking heads. John Waters as narrator? It’s a match made in heaven. Cohen, if Cattelan’s oeuvre was truly simply a series of one liners, he would have enjoyed neither the longevity nor critical attention his work has thus far received. His decision to clump all his work together and suspend it from the rotunda was brilliant and subversive, and consistent with his flipping the bird to the art establishment, as a whole. Also, I do not perceive his work as strictly comical: there is a pervasive undertone of tragedy throughout; it’s funny, but not really, alas.

DAVID COHEN His view of life is tragicomic: he has a sense of humor in his nihilism than a nihilistic sense of humor, if that distinction helps. As to the one liner/originality debate: a brilliant one liner that isn’t too original is certainly welcome to the mix that is art. You could even say that being a one liner is a philosophical service in that it makes us think about why art shouldn’t indeed be a one liner. But Rodin and de Kooning are not one-liners: their work constantly renews itself and generates multiple emotional responses. A Cattelan has a singular meaning, or sometimes a binary one where the tragicomic element sets in and we can laugh while also resigning ourselves to the meaninglessness of existence. But the meaninglessness doesn’t get deeper on repeated or extended viewings, and the laugh doesn’t get louder.

ROBIN SIEGEL Cattelan is original and unique. I did not find myself laughing at this show. Perverse, sad, subversive, tragic visually amusing, but not funny at all. His subjects all seem to lose at the game of life. Hung, trophi-fied (Stephanie Seymour as the “trophy” wife mounted on the wall), suspended in time, as well as space. Death. Not funny.

One might ask if he is embracing his European roots with this over-the-top borderline Rococo installation. He is simply using the Guggenheim’s space to show his work in a new and unexpected way, as we would expect him to do the unexpected. Is this a case of Dada meeting the Baroque?

DAVID CARRIER Robin, may I steal Dada meeting the Baroque? I love that, it’s very apt.

ROBIN SIEGEL Thanks, David. Feel free.

DAVID CARRIER I do admit, this discussion makes me want to see the show again, to my surprise. And that’s one reason I value artcritical: this is like The Review Panel.

ROBIN SIEGEL I’m intrigued by the fact that you started at the top of the installation, and viewed it with the app. I started at the “base” and initially was completely put off by the show, feeling extreme dislike and resistance, despite my appreciation for Cattelan and his work. It was such a visual mumbo jumbo and I thought to myself: How on earth will I ever be able to make sense of this tangled mess? As I advanced up the ramp it became more and more intriguing to me, and it began to feel like a Cattelan treasure hunt.

CARLA GANNIS Cattelan, playing the jester again, seems to want to de-historicize himself. Oh but not really, he knows he already got a foot in the canon.

ROBIN SIEGEL Time will tell regarding Cattelan’s place in the history of art. Certainly he has left an indelible mark thus far. Regarding the recontextualization of his work, of course ALL is not the first time his work has been installed in a different way. In 2010 there was an exhibition called Is There Life Before Death at the Menil Collection in Houston, curated by Franklin Sirmans, whereby Cattelan’s work was juxtaposed against work from wildly diverse time periods, ranging from the Oceanic to Pop art.

DAVID CARRIER With an historical show, at the Met say, one would want details of the individual paintings, what do they mean, what’s the subject. Here what we get are not just the celebrities, the dealer, the critical champions, but the conservator, the conservator’s assistant and so on. All fine, but that doesn’t take us to the art. To continue Cohen’s parallel, it would be as if we got Nirvana’s recording technician.

DAVID COHEN I think there is a basic absence of curatorial integrity in not even offering, at reasonable intervals, a schematic of the “hang” which identifies the title, year, medium etc of pieces viewable at that point in the display.

CARLA GANNIS I agree that it was frustrating, given that this was a retrospective, to not have more wall texts and descriptions of the work provided to give us context but maybe the “jangle,” the “chaos,” is really just part of Cattelan’s critique. The man is smart, and I think his one liners, like any really good comic will resonate and reverberate in the future in ways we cannot predict.

MADDIE PHINNEY I agree with Carla here. Forgive me if I’m totally off but it seems that Cattelan is uninterested in participating in a debate on his work or even adding to the dialogue. He seems happy enough that viewers take away what they will – that the one liner part, right? The immediate punch of the visual impact? I too wish there was more info on the individual works in the show, but I think that was part of the point. It almost seemed more like a gallery exhibition than a major-museum retrospective.

ROBIN SIEGEL The work should speak for itself and you should not feel the need to read a bunch of gobbledygook in order to experience art. If you want to be more informed about the art, we can read the numerous books and catalogues surrounding Cattelan’s work.

BESSIE ZHU I disagree that the “work should speak for itself” Robin. It speaks to the cultural climate we inhabit, and like much art that isn’t decorative, it is in dialogue with current social/political discourse. That said the brilliance of Cattelan is that it speaks to everyone, albeit on different levels. I think anyone can appreciate a Cattelan, it may dig up uncomfortable subject matter but it isn’t alienating as more conceptual work would be. In that way I don’t read him as sardonic as much as I read him as democratic–he recognizes the importance of entertainment value and he delivers. Why should art do more than make us chuckle, even though it has the potential to? I love that a Cattelan could never move you to tears, the work plays to your intellect (which I think sense of humor is tied to) rather than to your emotions or any grand romanticism. I love that.

DAVID COHEN Cattelan’s decision to hang in such a way that militated against individual consideration was brilliant on two counts: the works, in aggregate, took on a new meaning- possibly the last they can; they do not bear individual consideration as crafted objects, as we’d get bored by them very quickly, and there isn’t progress in any traditional sense. But I don’t buy the idea of the museum being a passive medium for the artist to do his thing. Museums have obligations to viewers and lenders. The presentation was obviously the artist’s decision, and was the best thing about the show, but the label documentation was the responsibility of the museum. What if the artist didn’t want red exit signs or lavatories for males as part of his artistic intervention?

ROBIN SIEGEL Actually, David, the idea of no exit or lavatories for males as artistic intervention is swell. Are you embracing your inner Cattelan? I would be curious, meanwhile, to learn how we compare/contrast Cattelan’s career trajectory to that of Urs Fischer, yet another European artist who crossed the Atlantic to make his name on our hallowed shores.

DAVID CARRIER Fischer is another artist who worked well in a problematic museum, an even worse one than the Guggenheim: the New Museum. But he is another artist who specializes in making a sensation effect. And that makes me think of Greenberg on Surrealism: shock value quickly wears off. Stepping back, it is super obvious that any “mere painter” doesn’t have a chance in this kind of museum environment. Merlin James, forget it!

MADDIE PHINNEY I keep going back to the installation and the way in which the works themselves seemed deliberately disrespected. I can’t imagine that they were presented merely as objects in order for the viewer to appreciate the craft — it was impossible to approach the pieces themselves. Maybe this is the punk rock self-effacing Cattelan giving the finger to the Guggenheim and the viewer once more.

CARLA GANNIS I think the two Davids are asking if, once we get the joke and any other conceptual underpinnings (ie their being Duchamp mash ups), does the object really matter? I admit my relationship with Cattelan’s work is more about the ideas and the dark humor (in his best works) than desiring (or loving) any of his objects. I have cried in front of a de Kooning. Cattelan’s work has never elicited that from me. That said, I hold within my heart and mind a place for both kinds of work.

ROBIN SIEGEL Quite frankly, I am more a fan of Cattelan’s conceptual/performance acts, or gestures, than I am of his static installations: creating The Wrong Gallery, or actually taping his Milanese gallerist to the wall, to just name a choice two, or even his Permanent Food magazines, in the print milieu. While I have felt compelled to defend Cattelan’s oeuvre from harsh and dismissive criticism in our roundtable, I must concede that many of his taxidermied creatures and embalmed bodies are downright kitsch. One my favorite work in ALL is the two pigeons waiting in front of a set of elevator doors as they open and close. This is one of the few genuinely whimsical and funny works in show where flagrant morbidity is often palpable.

DAVID COHEN is publisher and editor of artcritical; DAVID CARRIER, contributing editor, is author of numerous books on art, philosophy and museum studies; artist CARLA GANNIS, represented by Pablo’s Birthday, New York, and other galleries, is assistant chair in the department of digital arts at Pratt Institute ; MADDIE PHINNEY, Assistant Editor at artcritical, is co-founder and editor at large of Continuum Magazine and exhibition assistant at the American Institute of Architects; ROBIN SIEGEL’s photograpahy is widely published in magazines including Trace, Vogue UK.com and artcritical; she teaches at Pratt Institute as well as at NYU’s Center for Advanced Digital Applications, and she recently launched cupcakeluxe.tumblr.com ; BESSIE ZHU is an independent arts writers based in Brooklyn.

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