When a work of art disgusts you, is it wrong to avoid it? When
an artist prefers “disturbing”
and “challenging” you to displaying beauty and refinement, what
does this say about the function of art? When the audience for art
accepts assaults on taste and on aesthetic achievement, what does
this indicate about our culture? This summer, I went to the Venice
Biennale to find out.
My story begins with
Robert Storr, an art-world impresario whose career raises these
very questions.
While maintaining his appointment as
Dean of the Yale University School of Art, Storr
came to Venice to share with the world his vision of art in the
twenty-first century.
As the
director of
the 52nd Venice Biennale—the sprawling
international event’s first American-born curator—Storr mounted
an exhibition called “Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind:
Art in the Present Tense.”[1]
Featuring the work of one hundred contemporary artists, hand-picked and
displayed by Storr in two massive venues at the heart of the Biennale, it was
his largest and most far-reaching exhibition to date.
The show has set attendance records. An unpalatable indulgence in violence and
pessimism, it is also unapologetic and trendy,
forestalling criticism by labelling its critics
“traditionalists” out for
“pure aesthetic reductivism.”
Why this cycle of recrimination should be so common
in the world of contemporary art is one of those questions I may never be able
to answer.
At the end of the last century, as part of a series of events on its history and
collection, New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted an
exhibition that first interested me in Storr.
Titled “Modern Art Despite Modernism,” the show had a
worthwhile goal: to acknowledge artists who had made
contributions to twentieth-century art out-
side of modernism’s
avant-garde.
Subjects ranged from
“Depression Era Realism & The American Scene” to “Latin American Figuration.”
Artists included Andrew Wyeth and John Graham.
The exhibition set out to demonstrate the “exceptional catholicity of taste”
in the museum’s founding father, Alfred Barr. In this regard, it largely
succeeded. Robert Storr, then the senior curator in the museum’s department of
painting and sculpture, put it together.
Storr’s own apparent “catholicity of taste” well-suited him for the job. Since
arriving at the museum in 1990, Storr had organized exhibitions
of the works of Chuck Close, Robert Ryman, Tony Smith, and Bruce Nauman—two
very different painters, a sculptor, and a dandy.
In the years following “Modern Art Despite Modernism,”
Storr went on to mount exhibitions of the works of Gerhard Richter, Max
Beckmann, and Elizabeth Murray—a postmodernist, a figurative
painter, and a pop sculptor. All along, his interests remained
unpredictable—whether motivated by a sense of the next art-world trend or some
greater aesthetic, it was hard to say.
Although a member of the board of the College
Art Association’s Art Journal from 1985 to 1995, Storr wisely
sought to rise above the trappings of the academy. He knew to avoid
the dogma that had bogged down art discourse in the past thirty years.
He was never much of a stylist, but he
steered clear of the theory-speak and unreadable prose that are the
hallmarks of so much contemporary academic work. Instead, he wrote criticism
for the popular press.
An air of
knowingness
and the promise of contemporaneity contributed to the
popularity of his arguments. He was a hyperlinked workaholic with
connections extending far beyond the walls of the museum.
While not exactly warm, his inquisitive
personality endeared him to the art world at large.
Storr’s essay for “Modern Art Despite Modernism,” written seven
years ago but still characteristic of his work today, exemplified the
nature of his approach. While acknowledging his distaste for
much of the “antimodernist” art in the 2000 show, he wrote that “I do not
regard the disturbance it causes as a verification of the work’s
unredeemable nullity but rather as a useful challenge to my
habits of mind and eye.”
Faint praise, perhaps. But his willingness to reserve
final judgment was welcomed by many as a new spirit of openness that appeared
to rise above the culture wars of
the previous years. He
dismissed Marxist utopias on the left. He called Hilton Kramer
“pessimistic” on the right.
As the twentieth
century came to a close, with the darkness of history apparently
coming to an end, he sounded an upbeat note:
“At the present, the fences, walls, and glass houses around modernism are down.
Wildflowers have invaded its gardens and conservatories; hothouse flowers are
trying their luck in the open fields. Hybrids abound.”
Storr
had good reason to sound upbeat.
In 2002, he left the Museum of Modern Art to occupy a
newly endowed chair at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York
University. Four years after that, he moved on to
become dean at Yale. Emerging from the ranks of mere curator, he
has quickly become a leader in the world of art.
Storr knows how to play art politics. He well
inhabits the role of kingmaker—a curator who understands the many benefits
that come from preferring the right art at the right time and place.
For the artists he likes, Storr can be doggedly loyal, a
gallery’s and collector’s dream, parading the same people
time and again. Ordinary careerism perhaps, but Storr has not
become popular merely by being a careerist.
Which brings me to the show he mounted in Venice.
Storr’s press conference and the preview of his latest exhibition went off just as I
arrived in early June. Storr addressed the international audience in
English. With his khaki suits and floppy hair, Storr presents himself as the
earnest American—straight-talking, decidedly un-slick, a workhorse.
“Think with the Senses” occupies two facilities in
the Biennale: the Arsenale, the long shipyard buildings of the
once-mighty Venetian navy, and, within walking distance, the
Padiglione Italia at the corner of the Giardini, a park that also
contains many of the permanent national pavilions.
“It is not a political
show,” Storr promised at his press conference, but a “sober show
at a time that lots of people are intoxicated by cash. The cash
will go away some day. I hope the works in this show will not.”
But in fact, Storr has put together a very political show, of a very particular
sort.
The Arsenale, which houses his exhibition’s
less-established artists, comes off as
an assemblage that luxuriates in violence and sloganeering.
Here, one of the first rooms is dedicated to the theme of crashing
airplanes (by Charles Gaines and León Ferrari). There is a work that
explores the “politics of flowers” (by Yto Barrada). There are machine guns (by
Nedko Solakov). There is a meditation on the Pinochet coup (by Melik Ohanian).
There is a video of a child playing soccer with a rubber model of a human
skull in the bombed-out ruins of Belgrade (by Paolo Canevari). There are portraits of tenured
radicals like Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm (by Rainer Ganahl).
In his catalogue essay, Storr preempts criticism of his selection by
deflecting it back at those who launch it: “Such
exhibitions are not for people who experience uncertainty as an
ordeal. Indeed, those for whom doubt, inquisitiveness and effortful
self-questioning are exceptional or unbearable should spare
themselves the disorientation and discomfort of a situation
where precisely these states of mind and spirit are required.”
Storr continues,
“Looking at, and thinking about, contemporary art demands
appetite and a tolerance for things that may cause irritation as much, or more
than, they do taste [sic].”
By discounting taste, Storr not only insulates himself, he also provides a
convenient excuse for the tasteless, the outrageous, and the
unrefined.
Only someone with a perverted sense of priorities
would rush to embrace the violent rather than flinch
and escape from it. To resist images of brutality is, after all, not to
censor reality but to rebuff what debases it. Perhaps the only person who would choose to
“think with the senses, and feel with the mind” is the one who
cannot think with the mind and feel with the senses.
For anyone who likes
art that ennobles life, Venice has little to offer.
Instead what we find here is art
that diminishes us. The perfect example of this phenomenon is the
work of Raymond Pettibon. In one corner of Storr’s Padiglione
Italia, mixed in among the same oil-on-canvas warhorses Storr has
spent his career promoting, this California artist has embroidered up a room with a
diatribe against America. “American loves (adores) Israel,”
“Hillary Clinton, Hillary Kristol, Hillary Kramer: Post-op or
same person” and “Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz” are scrawled
besides sketchy images of the Star of David. Here angry clichés
are fired by anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic sentiment. No
further explanation for this work is given in the exhibition, but
Storr does find occasion to write about it in his catalogue: “the
origins of Pettibon’s dystopian vision can be found in the dismal
corruption and collapse of [the] Counter Culture of the 1960s and
1970s when Hippiedom’s aimless, impotent Flower Power ended in
revolutionary zealotry’s mindless, destructive Days of
Rage… . [Who] will paint Hell on Earth? Pettibon is just the
man.”
That sounds like praise to me. Now consider these further
examples. In Storr’s own words, one artist in the Arsenale
reminds us of “coils that are used to create flesh-
tearing
barriers between countries and communities” (Adel Abdessemed);
another references “the many sided conflict between narcotics
gangs, their paramilitary adversaries and sometimes competitors,
politically motivated death squads and the army of Columbia
[sic] where the artist lives and works
… flesh and blood and
stump” (Oscar Muñoz).
“Flesh and blood and stump.” That’s ugly stuff—but,
for the unimaginative, praiseworthy, because it
requires little sense of aesthetic discernment and no more than a passing
acquaintance with Nicholas Kristof’s column in The New York Times to understand
it. Yes, you read that article about the
plight of sex workers in Swaziland. Now you can see the art inspired by it.
Robert Storr can be particularly adept at scouring the galleries for work that
fills just such a role.
Storr has an eye that is focused on—I might even say blinded by—“the present
tense.”
Storr’s practice as a curator leads him to follow what is trendy, but
it also encourages him to elide the distinction between art that defines an
age and art that merely reflects it.
Some might suppose that Storr’s
popularity justifies his approach, but his acceptance really
bespeaks confusion in the culture at large.
Here is one frightening example.
Storr presents the withholding of judgment as a strength rather a
weakness. One area where this
approach becomes most suspect is in his indulgence of violence.
A self-described member of the “Generation of ’68,”
Storr has a sweet tooth for terror that goes back
years. Take his embrace of a series of paintings by Gerhard
Richter, “October 18, 1977,” featuring portraits of the terrorists
in the Baader-Meinhof gang. Storr organized an exhibition around
these paintings in 2000 and again in the Richter retrospective of
2002. Hilton Kramer called Storr’s interest in this work
“tendentious in pretending to find problematic what is plainly
evident to the naked eye: that Mr. Richter has produced a series
of paintings that attempt to aestheticize the politics of
terrorism.”
Storr well knows the disgraceful history of
modernism under Mussolini, most notably the Futurist F. T.
Marinetti’s embrace of fascism. In fact, he seeks out such
connections.
He writes that the design of the Padiglione Italia is “a monument
to the conflation of Italy’s modernist and Fascist aspirations.”
He says of the history of Italian extravaganzas like the Biennale,
“Fascism in its modernist guise produced many innovative
examples.” A “monument”? “Innovative examples”? Is this meant as
criticism or a justification? For Storr, the answer may not really matter.
What interests him is art that “is intrinsically a critique of
the ugliness of so much of reality, of mediocrity in all its
manifestations, and of high-brow as well as low-brow kitsch.”
But
little prevents these “critiques” from themselves becoming part
of the ugliness and mediocrity of so much of reality. When they
do, Storr does nothing to prepare his audience to reject them.
He expects a “tolerance for things that may cause irritation”
and demands no further committment in return. Moreover, the sort
of “challenge” posed by moralizing the conflicts depicted in
Storr’s art shifts responsibility away from judging the art as
it is presented. It is far
easier for Storr’s audience to come down against the
Pinochet coup, which they already revile, than to release
their imagination to beauty and wonderment, or what Storr derides
as “complacent delectation.” When Storr rationalizes that “artistic
beauty
does not condemn true artistic ugliness,” I beg to differ,
but many now happily agree,
which may go a long way towards
explaining his popularity.
In his “Salon of 1846,”
Charles Baudelaire suggested that “the life of the city is rich in
poetic and marvelous subjects … but we do not notice
it.” Storr clearly sees himself as a curator of modern
life, but he too has fails to notice the poetry in it, bringing
little in the way of marvelous subjects to Venice. Here he has
also promised a show that “focuses on areas of current art
activity that hint at what emerging patterns might be without
presuming to map or foreshadow them in their entirety.”
But no one can suppose that Storr’s
selection of prim political art
in the Arsenale represents anything close to a cross-section
of current art activity, or that the work in the
Padiglione Italia represent all that’s left of the modernist
tradition.
Jerry Saltz, in his review for New York magazine,
got it right: “if I were in my twenties or thirties, or even (alas) my forties,
I can imagine being impressed but also a bit let down and
oppressed by it.”
A Generation of
’68er, Storr has become a part of the problem and not the
solution.
Seven years ago, Storr concluded his essay for “Modern Art after Modernism” with
these words of Picasso’s: “All I have ever made was for the present.” In Venice,
this city of the past, the present tense now makes its case. Here you can
forego the art of the future in favor of
the images of the present. You can substitute a “catholicity of taste” for the
abandonment of taste. Rather than encounter fresh experience, you can find art
that is a flattering—but also warped—mirror of your own
assumptions.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
“Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense” opened at
the 52nd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale on June 10 and
remains on view through November 21, 2007. A catalogue of the exhibition has
been published by Rizzoli (736 pages; $85).
Go back to the text.
