Posts Tagged ‘Marcel Duchamp’

His Twine: Marcel Duchamp and the Limits of Exhibition History

October 29 2012

[Note: The following piece was written by ICA’s Spiegel Fellow, Grace Ambrose, for Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp, a program organized by ICA Student Board member Isaac Kaplan that was held at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania on October 9, 2012.]

-post by Grace Ambrose

Open any account of the history of 20th century exhibitions and you will see this image.

 

The First Papers of Surrealism

John Schiff, Installation View of Exhibition ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ Showing String Installation. 1942. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy the Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY.

 

It is an installation view of the First Papers of Surrealism, an exhibition that opened seventy years ago at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan. It was, at the time, the biggest surrealist show ever seen in the United States, and included works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, amongst others.

The exhibition’s organizer, Andre Breton, asked Marcel Duchamp to propose a design for the installation. Duchamp had previously designed the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, in Paris, lining the ceiling of the main hall of the Gallerie des Beaux-Arts with 1,200 empty coal bags, lighting the room with a single light bulb. Visitors were handed flashlights to navigate the space, which was filled with art objects that took the form of mannequins, plants, and even a taxi cab.

This time Breton had warned Duchamp to err on the side of economy. In response Duchamp purchased what was rumored to have been 16 miles of ordinary white string and used several hundred feet of it to festoon the mansion’s gilded moldings, ornate ceilings, and crystal chandeliers with a tangled mesh of webbing, stretching what came to be known as “his twine” across entrances and around the temporary walls which heaved with artworks. There were no mannequins this time, just lots and lots of paintings. The string criss-crossed the canvases, concealing the mansion’s opulent interior but also acting as what seems to be a literal barrier to the works on view.

Writing about Duchamp

Writing about Art: Marcel Duchamp. Photo: Arielle Brousse

Accounts of the experience of viewing the exhibition vary. Some said the twine was like a guide, directing them toward paintings. Others saw it as a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary art, saying that its presence “symbolized literally the difficulties to be circumvented by the unititiate in order to see, to perceive and understand, the exhibitions.”[i] Many of the participating artists were upset, insistent that visitors to the show would be unable to actually see the paintings that they had struggled to get out of war-torn Europe.

The exhibition’s legacy exists in the form of a handful of photographs. The one above, by John Schiff, is by far the most cited. Invariably, it will be accompanied by an emphasis on the string’s obfuscating qualities, a description of how Duchamp, when asked to display paintings, had actually made them impossible to see.  The image has come to stand in for the irretrievable experience of the exhibition itself. In it, there is no imaginative entry point to the room, no space that allows us to occupy the same area as the paintings themselves. The string stands in the way. It is difficult to visualize walking up to the Mondrian on the right, or even to the Klee directly in front of us, let alone proceeding through the rooms of the exhibition. We can only feel our ankles getting tangled in the web.

Duchamp himself posited the string as more transparent than opaque. “It was nothing,” he said. “You can always see through a window, through a curtain, thick or not thick, you can see always through if you want to, same thing there.”[ii] If you go to archives, if you look at other images of the exhibition, you can see that Duchamp’s intervention was in fact more permeable than the dominance of this one image has led us to believe. You could walk around in the space, you could approach the paintings. It must not have been so treacherous – during the opening, children ran through the rooms playing ball and tag. When asked what they were doing, they only said “Mr. Duchamp said we could.”

It cannot be denied that the presence of the string must have highlighted a series of confrontations: between the works and their installation, the installation and its viewers, the viewers and the work. It would have been an active force in any experience of the show, necessitating side-stepping and ducking and leaning and bending to get around. But rather than preventing us from seeing, it seems to have been Duchamp’s attempt to encourage a new awareness of the processes of vision. To this day, when we enter spaces lined with art, we fall into a set of prescribed choreography – we know that we should keep a certain distance from the objects, that we should look from afar. In the First Papers of Surrealism, these rules must be broken, if only out of necessity. Here, Duchamp reminds us that vision is corporeal – that it is made possible through the approach of the body. He questions what and how we see, and also, how art institutions themselves dictate both the subjects and the processes of our vision.

In the absence of being able to attend an exhibition that took place nearly a century ago, I think instead of an experience I have had many times, of the immediate approach to Duchamps’s Étant donnés. The terms of Duchamp’s gift of the work to the museum explicitly forbade any reproduction of the image through the peepholes for 15 years after his death. To this day, in order to properly experience it, we all must take the same steps into its dark room before leaning forward and pressing our faces on the grease-stained wooden door. I’m reminded also of the longer approach to it, of the idea that one cannot, and will not, ever see it without first passing through the shadow of The Large Glass. Here, Duchamp forces us into a new choreography, one that reveals his preoccupation with visuality. He famously shunned the retinal, embracing instead the whole body as eye.

It is funny, then, that our experience of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition and Duchamp’s intervention in it is necessarily reduced to a two-dimensional photograph. We come up against the limits of an exhibition history, confronting the fact that as crucial as an understanding of individual exhibitions is for our conception of the trajectory of 20th century art, the shows that make up this trajectory are in fact unknowable, tied specifically to time, place, and lived experience. Looking at his twine, our vision becomes flat again, disembodied and autonomous. Separated from a physical experience, we once again are shut out.

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Dancing Around the Bride, an exhibition exploring the interwoven lives of Marcel Duchamp and four major American artists—John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg—opens tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Contemporary artist Phillipe Parreno collaborated on the exhibition design, choreographing encounters within the galleries which invite visitors to “dance” with the artists and objects on view. The exhibition runs through January 21, 2013.

Grace Ambrose is ICA’s Spiegel Programming Fellow. She recently received her Masters in Curatorial Studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, writing her thesis on the practice of restaging seminal exhibitions.

To sign up for the criss-crossing twine of Miranda’s mailing list, email miranda@icaphila.org.

 

[i] Harriet and Sidney Janis, “Marcel Duchamp, Anti-Artist,” View 5, no. 1 (March 1945), 18.

[ii] Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 183.

 

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ICA’s Story

September 2 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I like thinking of ICA as a character in a book,” Ingrid says.

We are at a presentation by Sarah Fritchey, a graduate student in curatorial studies at Bard, who has spent her summer in Penn’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library combing through ICA’s archives. She has dug out treasures from many of our past exhibitions and made wonderful outlines and lists to describe her findings.

She has unearthed historic images, like this one of Marcel Duchamp talking to ICA board chair Lally Lloyd at the opening of The Other Tradition (1966).

The idea is to take representative images from landmark shows throughout our history and put them online as part of ICA’s 50th anniversary observances next year.

Sarah shows a slide of our first-ever announcement card, for ICA’s inaugural exhibition of Clyfford Still paintings in 1963.

Clyfford Still invitation

There are press releases, attendance counts, newspaper articles, floor plans. There is a letter describing how ICA’s early trustees worried over whether or not the new museum should be called an “institute,” and one between the curator of 1974’s Robert Morris/Projects and the fire chief about concerns that the installation would break fire code. Some shows have almost no artifacts at all; on the other end of the spectrum, there are thirteen boxes of material about the incendiary Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1988.

The Highway (1970) falls somewhere in between. “The invitation was kind of eccentric.” Sarah shows an image of a yellow-and-red paper stop sign. “The r.s.v.p. says, ‘Informal or highway gear.’ People literally wore street signs!”

“Do you have a picture, please?” Ingrid asks.

Sarah does.

Inquirer piece on The Highway

She also has radio announcements—PR blurbs for radio announcers to read, composed in 10, 20, and 30 second spots. “I’m really obsessed with these: ‘There’s no toll charge for The Highway…’ ”

One of the most interesting discoveries is a short, unpublished essay by the late curator Harald Szeemann on “the death of groovy,” intended for the catalogue of 1977’s Paul Thek exhibition. Invited to contribute a piece of 3,000 words, Szeemann instead wrote a mere 1,000; the essay was not, ultimately, included.

More images slide by: the galleries in ICA’s three locations; letterhead designs; correspondence from various directors in a wide variety of tones; a ticket to a Joan Jonas performance of A Juniper Tree. Slowly but surely the nature of ICA is revealed, the way the nature of a leading character is revealed over the course of a book.

As Ingrid says, “This is ICA’s story, after all.”

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People’s Conference, Part II: Art in Your Own Back Yard

March 9 2012

post by Rachel Pastan

“I’ve taken art to non-art spaces,” Astria Suparak says, “and non-art to art spaces. Before YouTube, when people had much less access to alternative, unconventional, experimental work, I did a lot of shows in places like bars, skating rinks, and living rooms…Some people have called this the rock band model: taking the work to the people, rather than waiting for the people to find to the work.”

Left to right: Andrew Suggs, Nato Thompson, Astria Suparak, and Jens Hoffmann. Photo: William Hidalgo

Astria, curator of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, is the first of the flock of creative, forward-thinking curators to speak at People’s Conference at ICA. They’re here to discuss the variety of relationships art institutions can have with their local neighborhoods, what’s alternative about alternative art spaces, and other issues arising from People’s Biennial, an exhibition organized by Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann, in collaboration with Independent Curators International (ICI), which looked for art in unconventional places. One of the artists in that show, Warren Hatch, makes nature films of microscopic life he finds in his Portland, Oregon neighborhood. This is a good metaphor for most of the curators here today, whose missions are bound up with the art and artists in their own backyards.

Astria, for example, told us about a show she organized in Syracuse, Embracing Winter, “repositioning winter as an opportunity to view your surroundings in new ways.” Video, installation, and photography were all on view, along with an enormous knitted sculpture of a mitten. A chart on the wall showed area snow fall levels over fifty years. Big piles of sparkling, environmentally sensitive ice melt were arrayed on the floor for people to take, decreasing in proportion to the increase in the snow outside. Perhaps most delightfully, in what Astria called “a reversal of Duchamp’s readymades,” an array of snow shovels was hung on the wall for visitors to borrow as needed—the object returned to its usefulness.

Embracing Winter, curated by Astria Suparak, at Warehouse Gallery, Syracuse University, 2007.

Andrew Suggs, director of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi, recounted how this alternative artist collective was launched (legend has it) at a bar called Dirty Frank’s one night in the late 80s “by a group of art students who were drunk and decided they wanted a place to show their work.” Andrew raised useful questions about the world alternative, for instance: An alternative to what? He quoted curator Lia Gangitano who wrote, “While some of us continue (perhaps out of respect) to use terms such as ‘alternative space’…it’s not clear anymore what, exactly, we mean.”

The biggest institution heard from was the Queens Museum of Art whose director, Tom Finkelpearl, gave an eloquent overview of how his museum—located in a borough where 47.6% of the residents are foreign born—serves, woos, and otherwise engages with its community. Art exhibitions, usually with some tie to the area, are an important part of the program, but so are local community festivals that offer cultural celebration along with access to social services. The museum staff speaks eight languages. “Our goal is to be the most community-engaged museum in America, without giving up on the complex contemporary art practices,” Tom declares. “We may be outside of the mainstream of the art world, but we’re not outsider artists.”

Photo: William Hidalgo

A third model for combining art and community was presented by Ruthie Stringer and Dana Bishop-Root of Transformazium, a small artists collective working in Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh. The young members of Transformazium originally moved to Braddock from New York City on a wave of optimism, largely because a lovely old building was available for sale very cheap. Part of the building, however, turned out to be uninhabitable and had to be deconstructed, a huge undertaking that Transformazium approached in the spirit of an art project. Once settled in the community, the artists worked hard to develop good relationships with their neighbors, seeking creative ways to kindle meaningful conversations. One program they dreamed up paired artists with Braddock youth to create site specific installations in the kids’ neighborhoods. A screen printing shop was opened, and an artist-in-residency program begun—all on the proverbial shoestring.

Jim Kidd, Resident Artist in Residence, and Leslie Stem, Transformazium at the Neighborhood Print Shop

Which brings us to the crucial, interesting, and often uncomfortable question of money. At about this point in the conversation, an audience member called out, “Who gets paid? Where does the money come from?” I was relieved, having been wondering about this myself.

In this realm, too, many models were represented. Transformazium members, for example, have day jobs, get small grants, collaborate with established non-profits like the local library, and sell art when they can, plowing the proceeds back into their project. The Queens Museum, by contrast, is largely foundation funded. Tom Finkelpearl went right to the heart of the issue when he said, “Can you remain idealistic and true to your goals if you take money from foundations and corporations? That’s the challenge. But it’s important to have health insurance for your employees.”

So many important, awkward, interesting questions raised over the course of one day! Not just Where does the money come from? and An alternative to what? but also, What if you’re somewhere there’s nothing you’re an alternative to? What happens when social practices are framed in terms of artistic production? Could it be an advantage to a curator to be untrained? Have we moved beyond the provocation of Duchamp’s urinal?

Coincidentally, I was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art last weekend and happened upon Duchamp’s “Fountain” sitting placidly in a bright room at the end of a hallway. A man was showing friends the gallery. One of the women, after looking around, turned to the man. “But is it art?” she said.

I confess I felt a little thrill. My guess is that object is not quite ready to be returned to the restroom yet.

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917

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Look!

February 18 2011

post by Rachel Pastan

Last week’s ICA lecture, “The Artist as Curator,” was introduced by ICA director Claudia Gould standing behind an unfamiliar podium. “For those of you who are regulars here,” she said, “this is a very new podium, made by Paul Swenbeck [ICA’s head preparator] and his team. It smells of paint.” The new podium is indeed very nice: sleek and white, with a convenient shelf for presenters’ laptops. As someone who cannot make anything, I love working at a place where no one would think of going online and ordering a podium. Obviously someone who works here would just make one.

Over the last few weeks I’ve written a series of essays for this blog about Virgil Marti’s show Set Pieces, curated from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), for which Virgil explored the depths of PMA storage and arranged an assortment of the pieces he found there in intriguing mash-ups and suggestive vignettes. In these posts I’ve been poking away at the question of how Virgil approached that task, and, more generally, what it means to curate an exhibition. How do curators organize the art they present? Is it their job to make a story out of it? An argument? To show the art off to its best advantage? To make you see it in a new way?

Virgil and Ingrid squaring off in Virgil's show, Set Pieces. Photo: J. Katz

How serendipitous that all the time I was writing those little pieces, ICA’s Ingrid Schaffner—a thoughtful and insightful person and an actual curator—was getting ready to address herself to this very topic! It was, in fact, the underlying subject of tonight’s lecture.

Standing at the new podium, Ingrid told an audience of about 100 that the idea of an artist making an exhibition out of a museum’s collection goes back to 1969, when Andy Warhol lifted all kinds of things from the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art’s storage and arranged them—or sometimes declined to arrange them—in the galleries. The resulting show, Raid the Icebox, featured rows and ranks of Windsor chairs, racks of shoes, clusters of hanging umbrellas, and lots of baskets, blankets, paintings, ceramics.

Even before artists were raiding museums’ iceboxes, of course, they were curating. In 1938 Andre Breton invited Marcel Duchamp to organize a surrealism show in Paris, which Duchamp did. There were no lights in this exhibition; visitors were given flashlights to illuminate the paintings as they made their way through piles of leaves and under the 1,200 empty coal sacks dangling from the ceiling.

I’d love to just list all the intriguing shows Ingrid mentioned. A 1989 Brancusi exhibition at MoMA organized by Scott Burton helped viewers see that Brancusi’s pedestals should themselves be seen as sculpture. Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society displayed artifacts from that state’s history—like iron shackles and silver spoons—side by side. John Waters Curates Andy’s “Porn”, at the Andy Warhol Museum in 2005, was viewable in a wooden cubicle complete with glory holes. Of this last, Ingrid quoted then-Warhol museum curator John Smith who said, perhaps a little wistfully, “I don’t think I could have gotten away with that.”

Which brings us to the crux of her lecture: what is the difference between the way an artist curates and the way a curator curates?

“It’s my job as a curator to minimize the distance between the viewer and the object,” Ingrid opined, whereas, as an artist, “Virgil inserts himself.” He paints the wall purple; he builds white fluffy poufs to display stuff on; he offers us a marble bust resting on its side. The professional curator is not supposed to indulge in such high jinx.

But doesn’t the professional curator have a point of view, too? Doesn’t she have style? Of course she does. But she’s supposed to be less flamboyant in the way she conveys it to us, adhering to a kind of institutionalized modesty. If you stop to think about it, though, what’s the least bit modest about choosing art, spending a decent amount of money to organize it in a room, inviting the public, and saying: Look! This is worth looking at!

At the end of her talk, Ingrid related that thinking about how Virgil inserted himself into the making of Set Pieces threw into relief for her how made all exhibitions are, implying that the exhibition-maker—the curator—is really a species of artisan. I liked that: the exhibition-making artisan (Ingrid) talking about an exhibition made by an artist (Virgil) known for his décor-as-fine-art (chandeliers, wallpaper, poufs), while standing at the podium made by an artisan (Paul) who is, in fact, also an artist.

Paul working on the new podium. Photo: William Hidalgo

I’m starting to think of the curator as a kind of marionettist, pulling the strings from behind the curtain. Just because we don’t see her hand doesn’t mean her hand isn’t there: assured, controlling, and potent.

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Posted in Curating and curators, Public Programs, Set Pieces | 2 Comments »