Francesco Bonami Announced as 1/2 of 2010 Whitney Biennial Curatorial Team

Carol Vogel announced in the NY Times this morning that Francesco Bonami has been named curator of the 2010 Whitney Biennial and Gary Carrion-Murayari, a senior curatorial assistant on the Whitney staff, will be associate curator. The Italian-born Bonami worked on the Whitney's 2007 Rudolph Stingel exhibition, along with Chrissie Iles and Carrion-Murayari; was, in 2003, the first American citizen to serve as curator of the Venice Biennale (a technicality that must cause a great deal of pain for Rob Storr, who thought HE was the first in 2007); and recently completed a large survey show, "Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution: 1968-2008" for the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. About Bonami's role in the 2005 Venice Biennale Jerry Saltz wrote, "Bonami's show took one of the most coveted jewels in the curating crown, a top spot in the corporation, and risked it all. He gave up power and granted the art world the choice it said it wanted. Dispensing with the so-called "dictatorship of the curator," Bonami enlisted 11 artists and curators who curated 10 exhibitions and included over 375 artists." Whitney curator Donna de Salvo says Bonami has been thinking about the concept of biennial exhibitions in general. Given his predilection for shaking things up, this will be one to keep an eye on as it develops. And that alone--access to information about the process--would be a big change. In the past, most Whitney Biennials have been kept top secret until the opening, with artists having to sign non-disclosure agreements as part of their contract to be included in the exhibition.

On October 30, 2007 I wrote the following, after hearing Bonami give a talk at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Francesco Bonami gave a talk last Wednesday at SFAI. He is a curator at the MCA in Chicago and is also a freelance curator. His theme was "curator as institutional healer" and he was quite entertaining while making his points. His remarks were aimed at an audience of art students, and so were perhaps more candid and irreverent than what might have been presented to, say, an audience of art patrons. He went on at length about the lack of risk-taking in the new generation (under 40) of curators, calling them "preapproved risk takers," the "Frieze Generation," "rampant cowards." "No risk, no kiss." Under curators like these the museum-as-institution has evolved from presenting controversial and groundbreaking exhibitions such as Marsha Tucker's Richard Tuttle show at the Whitney in 1970--which got her fired, but then led to her founding The New Museum--to bland offerings of exhibition committees composed of equal parts curatorial, education, marketing, and fundraising. Museums are being run on the model of a nuclear power plant, Bonami said, where any mistake or failure is considered a huge disaster. Huge operating budgets require steady income from donors and corporations as well as box office, although admissions comprise a very small part of earned income. A museum with an $18 million annual budget will spend only perhaps $2 million on exhibitions, leaving us all wondering where that other $16 mil is going. When I asked what role he thought the audience played in all this, he replied that the intelligence of the audience is frequently underestimated by the curators and educators in museums.

Siberia, Antartica, and taking picures

Last night I watched TransSiberian, the excellent thriller by indie director Brad Anderson, with Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega, and Sir Ben Kingsley. It is a Catalan production, which is interesting--Barcelona is one of my favorite cities, and they support independent artists to a degree that not many other cities can match. It starts out in Beijing and most of the action takes place on a train crossing through the vast snowscape of Siberia. [Digression: I had heard about it from some friends when it came out in August, then sort of forgot about it. We have a BluRay disk player and a massive 50 inch plasma screen, and after my husband rented WALL.E (which is available in BluRay) the other night but forgot and got the regular DVD, I was determined to find a BluRay movie last night. TransSiberian was the only thing I could find that was interesting that I hadn't seen. I hope the BluRay production picks up soon. It really is a lot better.] I read some reviews of the film after seeing it, and without giving away the plot, let me just say that most of the reviewers seem to be focused on the marital relationship and have missed the fact that it is about chicas malas, as Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) calls them, surviving some pretty grim shit. Woody Harrelson is great, and his character is way more complex than I was prepared for, given my cultural bias against mid-western Christian missionaries.

Emily Mortimer plays Jessie, who has a nice digital Canon, and she takes a lot of pictures. Although she claims it is just a hobby, it seems like it is what she cares about most. The film shows views through her camera's viewfinder as she focuses (literally) on people, and the pictures are almost her undoing as well as her salvation. But what concerned me was the fact that she would go from the overheated train out to the sub-zero station platforms and take photos--wouldn't the lens steam up? wouldn't the memory chip freeze? Sorry, I've always been like this, always looking at practical realities.

I thought about my friend, Lisa Blatt, who is in Antarctica, taking pictures. And then this morning I got an e-mail from her with three photos! She says it is a challenge, and the glass on her 4x5 has broken, twice. But today she has e-mail, and we had a conversation.

Sixty Percent Off is the New Black

After declaring yesterday that online shopping had triumphed over stores, I read this morning that even the "luxury" stores like Saks and Bergdorf are deeply discounting now, way before the usual post-Christmas markdowns. "Sixty percent off is the new black," writes Patricia Marx in the December 8 issue of The New Yorker. I still believe that people are shopping online, but now it is a matter of weighing the cost of driving/parking against shipping. Last night SF Mayor Gavin Newsom was on TV asking SF residents to shop in San Francisco (unspoken: not online, not in outlet malls outside SF). Then someone pointed out that his new hybrid Chevy SUV official vehicle was purchased in Colma ($50,000) and the Chevy dealership on Van Ness is closing after 60+ years.

I am totally out of touch with the whole shopping thing because in October I promised my husband I wouldn't buy any new clothes until after Inauguration Day if I could just send $200 more to Obama. I also don't really have a job right now, so it has, curiously, made me feel better about myself--it's not "boohoo I can't afford to buy anything even with these incredible discounts," but more like "my priorities are good and I am so glad Obama won."

What Attracts [a click]

In an article in today's NY Times Business section, Stephanie Clifford describes the brave new world of customized ad generation (without actually calling it that), and features the work of two companies--Adisn in Long Beach and Tumri in Mountain View, both in California. (Mad Men, take notice, the '60s are over and California is now.) In a few words, it is about setting up a database with hundreds of background colors, images, and messages, and then doing the market research to see which combination most appeals to each defined target, and then delivering that custom combo when the target customer is detected by the browser. The article ends with a nod to the perceived discomfort of "great art directors" with the process, as if the multiples aren't art directed, or maybe it is because the computer/marketing generated process acknowledges the subjectivity of the design, that there are as many design solutions as there are customers (or at least customer types.)

What the article fails to address is that the real distinction lies in the wide gap between the elicitation of immediate response to the "click here" ads and the slow building of a lasting impression (brand recognition) through multiple viewings of the same image and words that will eventually inspire action. With the first, attraction leads to impulsive action. With the second, attraction is based on building good memories. It's about relationships. Or is it? How many times have you bought something online and then later been unable to remember where you found it? If it's a product available from multiple sources (printer ink cartridges is a big one for me), do you want to buy from the same source as last time or do you just start over with the search for the cheapest? I think this is where everything has changed in how we buy things--the search engines give us incredible power to find exactly what we want at the cheapest price. The old days of comparative shopping--going to a few different stores before buying, or calling around to check price and availability--seem quaint. And particularly in tough economic times, the feel-good social/civic pride in shopping locally seems too luxurious. "I got it online for 60% off" is the new feel-good. The relationship is no longer affordable.

More on avant garde

In the previous post I neglected to address the content referred to in the title: namely, the simultaneity of the possible and the impossible. Blake Rayne gave that as a definition of the avant garde, but also framed it as the never-ending negotiation between art and non-art that is part of every artist's daily life. BR mentioned a standard art school determinator: are you a shell artist or a nut artist? Nobody in the audience had ever heard this (but then we didn't go to CalArts) but it basically divides artists into those whose work is primarily a frame (shell) for content, possibly derived from other sources (Marcel Broodthaers), and those whose work is primarily about content (nut), like Elizabeth Peyton. About the shell and the nut and Duchamp and Beuys, my husband (John Zurier) says "it's like the metaphor of the difference between the coffin and the cadaver. Duchamp gives us the box, or the frame to use Rayne's language, the ritual of looking, and the ceremony, but what is inside the coffin, the mystery of death, remains unknown. Beuys is trying to bring the dead back to life, to reanimate inert materials, giving the dead body the aura of the living. Both mediate the infinitude of death and art in life. I guess its the difference between the ever tactful undertaker vs. the shaman of the tribe."

The Simultaneity of the Possible and the Impossible

Blake Rayne gave a talk at CCA on Thursday night. He is a painter and teaches at Columbia. The blurb for the lecture listed him as a believer "that painting is more than just physical...his particular "procedures" as he calls them, include translation, decontextualization, folding, superimposition, and the following of scripts grafted from other sites of production..." (confession: I thought I was going to hear Rochelle Steiner, the director of the Public Art Fund in NY and probably would not have gone to hear Blake, but my husband would have. So I took notes for him.) BR seemed very bright and open, but was talking the deconstructivist talk I am not so fond of. But he was actually making sense, unlike some people, and it was particularly interesting in terms of the artists he mentioned. Like the 70s French Support/Surface group, Cezanne, Manet, Malevich, Mondrian...There was something about the critique of composition, in terms of how does one deal with the abitrariness of it, giving as examples the chance operations of John Cage, the use of chance + gravity of Jackson Pollock, and probably others I missed. He defined abstraction rather nicely as "selection and displacement." Which for me, as a painter-turned-phototgrapher, summed it up quite well.