SanArt

The following telephone interview with Robert Barry occurred on March 21st, 2009

RB: What did you find interesting about my show at Lambert?

CS: I haven’t been in New York that long, this is now my 7th year, but I was in Ohio for a long, long time studying the history of contemporary art with Stephen Melville, so I was familiar with your work from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s and in my course have often used your Inert Gas Series as a comparison to John Baldessari. For me this is a way to talk about different relationships to the literal, Baldessari’s being more rhetorical than what I see in your work. But also to have some fun with the sense of humor that was flying around. That was the context I knotted you into. So it was a real surprise to see your show, to say “Wow, this is Robert Barry,” and to see all of that color, I was really affected by the color and the space.

 I do write, and when I saw your show I was just sort of scouring the galleries in Chelsea and it was all a big whirl and sometimes it takes a while for things to settle. But when I knew that Jenny Holzer was coming I started thinking of your show again and got really interested in what you were doing in comparison to her work, and now that I’ve seen Jenny Holzer I’m even more interested in that.

RB: I haven’t seen her show.

CS: One of the things that she’s doing, and what surprised me about your show, is that, well, there’s almost an aggressive campaign on the part of Holzer and the curators and the museum to hook her work into a history of painting, which is very interesting to me. So one of the things I also noticed in your show was the diptych, there’s a way in which you also are thinking about what it means to hold an allegiance to painting.

RB: The diptych – of course you’re talking about 62-08, fortysix years represented in the space between the two panels. I’ve done a number of those diptychs in recent years… putting an old work next to a recent, as one piece. Only an older artist , like me, can make such a work! But you aren’t familiar with all the work from those years in between the late 60’s and what I’m doing now…. paintings, installations, videos, the photographic work, all of that. Most historians focus on the early work, the so-called “conceptual” work. But as an artist I must continue working, and trying to keep it interesting, at least for me. For many years, from 1968 to 1980 I didn’t do any painting. I stopped again for a few years in the late 90’s. Now, in the last year or so, I’ve picked it up again. So if I feel that I need to paint to get my ideas across then I’ll use paint. Right now, in the last year or two, I’ve started to do paintings again. But, as you can see in the show I’m also working in other ways.

 
CS: Is this a more emphatic return to painting that is very recent for you?

RB: I go back to it when I need it. It all depends on where my art making takes me. It really comes out of the ideas that I want to convey and where I want my work to go. What’s interesting to me is that if I need paint, I use paint. If I need photography, or vinyl letters on a wall… I have to confront the situation, the space, the place that’s given to me, and see what works. I’m doing a lot of video these days. I didn’t show one in the exhibit. Maybe I should have. I’ve always been interested in using time in my work. That’s obvious in the diptych and the “Inert Gas” piece. The videos give me another way of incorporating time. So, I call myself an artist, and use whatever I need that works for me to do the art.

CS: In the Holzer show they are avoiding certain questions by talking about the influence of both Goya and Matisse on Holzer’s painting and her work as a whole. The earlier question or comparison between painter’s works that is relevant here is that offered by Benjamin Buchloh’s 1989 essay “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions.” He was taking a position and saying that at some point you have to make a choice between Duchamp and Mondrian. Do you make that choice?

RB:  No, I don’t think in those terms, I’m really an intuitive thinker.  What works, what seems to me to be an interesting direction based on my history, my feelings, on what I know, is how I work.  We are all influenced by countless things.  Some artistic, and some are not.  I can’t isolate one over another.  I don’t like to think that one thing influenced me more than anything else.  Except, as I’ve always said that my past work is my biggest influence on me.

CS: It’s clear that you’re not a willy-nilly grab-bag sort of person.

RB: If you follow the history of my work you may see in it a kind of logical progression. People tell me that one thing seems to follow out of another. It appears logical, but it’s really intuitive. It’s not something that’s just planned out ahead. For instance, I might be looking at an old piece and some idea will come to me that I might not have even thought about originally. And that’ll set me off in new a direction.

CS: Holzer is interested in making work that is “where people look.” She’s very interested in LED’s in particular, the text pieces that stream as though they were in nasdaq or Times Square.

RB:  Well, people are always looking at what catches their eye.  Isn’t that what advertising is about?  To catch people’s attention.  I guess that’s what LED’s are designed to do.  If you put an art object out into a public space, whether it’s a sculpture or anything else, I suppose some people will look at it and recognise it as a piece of art, and think about it.  Others will just not be interested.  Sometimes it’s nice to put something outside.  I’ve done it.  However, when people go to a museum or a gallery, that’s what they do, they look – they become engaged with the art.  That’s why they go there.  So, even more quiet, subtle work can be seen and appreciated.

CS: Her installation peices are pretty difficult to escape, they’re very insistent, they don’t have the more quiet sense of text that your words have.

RB: I don’t usually use text. Occasionally I do, but in a very different way. I think the thing that distinguishes me from other so-called language artists is that I use words. Isolated words. Words as objects. I don’t use language the way that a writer would, to convey a message, or tell a story. I try not to moralize. I use the word as an object in itself. Whatever its history, it’s meaning, it’s associations. It’s look… In the context that it’s in, a gallery, an outside space. I would even hesitate to call myself an artist who uses language. I use words. Words as objects, and of course these words are loaded and meant to grab the viewer in a way that they can interact with them – if they choose to do so. Words come from us. They don’t exist in the world outside of us. They speak to us. I like working in an art context, where people come to experience art in a serious way. And, by the way, when you say “just looking”, I’m not really interested in just looking. I’m interested in looking, thinking, feeling, being engaged. Participating… Looking is what we do in our practical, everyday lives. Hopefully, one comes with expectation, and with some history, some knowledge, and will have a deeper experience that may begin with looking.

CS: I’m looking right now at a painting by Mel Bochner that was in a recent Whitney Biennial called Nothing from 2003 and on a black ground there’s a list of words, a thesuarus, “nothing, negation, non-existence, not-being, none,” etc. And that etc. is important, the painting ends with a comma as though the list is going to go on. But his sense of a word list is really quite different than your own, and so the other thing that I have in my hand here is your Word List of 2008: diffident, beyond, imply, wonder, almost, ineffable. And what’s striking me is that your words in this list do seem to have a very strong kind of pressure on a limit of knowledge.

RB: What do you mean by a limit of knowledge?

CS: “Almost” and “ineffable” are at the edge but there is a there that is palpable. “Another” you could say is a way of crossing that distance.

RB: Art is a form of knowledge. There’s this odd dichotomy, that a work of art should be both complete in itself, but should also have implications or associations beyond itself. Some artists rely solely on ambiguity. Mostly figurative artists. This kind of work I don’t find very interesting. Of course the viewer, whoever’s looking at it, is going to have their own interpretation. They’re going to take away from it whatever they want. You can’t get into their head and tell them what to think. My words are complete unto themselves, and there’s the implication that they go beyond themselves. The way I present them, they have many meanings, or no specific meaning. The person looking at the work is going to be looking at it in his or her own way and I always must take that into consideration when I make art. Once it leaves your studio, once it leaves the gallery, who knows what people are going to do with it? But ultimately, that’s where the meaning is going to be found.

CS: I do see these as related to the nouveau roman and concrete poetry.

RB: I think that’s a mistake. I’m not a poet, I’m an artist. There’s nothing new about using words and art. When I was a school kid we took a trip to the National Gallery in Washington and saw the Van Eyck picture of the Angel and the Madonna. I asked “Why are the words coming out of the mouth of the Madonna upside down?” The teacher didn’t even realize that they were upside down. Actually it’s common in Flemish paintings. Of course, if God is in heaven looking down, it’s not upside down to Him! So the idea of language or words as objects being used in the visual arts is not a new idea, the two are entwined, they always have been.

 
CS: So the word lists and the crosses are very different with regard to orientation in relation to the reader and one of the things that strikes me is that it’s a cliche about abstract painting that you can turn it upside down or sideways and whenever such a cliche is actually materialized it doesn’t become trite as an actual experience, there’s something going on that’s much richer than any cliche. I’m looking at Word List (Painting) and Red Cross (Painting) from 2008, and wondering if Red Cross has four different hooks. Does it matter to you how they are hung?

RB: It does, they are signed in the back in a certain way. I did a series in the ‘70s called “omnidirectional drawings” where it didn’t matter how the object was hung. I liked the fact that a decision had to be made on the part of the person who owned it. That they had a responsibility to participate in it’s presentation. It’s an extension of that idea that I was talking about, about how meaning can change when a work goes out into the world. So I wanted to give some responsibility to the viewer in a very specific way, how is it going to be presented. Presentation is very important to me. Where and when a painting is hung and how, in what situation, really has a lot to do with its ultimate meaning. In some sense it could be as important as what’s actually in the painting, the content of the work itself. So the idea of giving some responsibilty to the owner, the viewer, was something that made sense in terms of how meaning is made. It wasn’t a cliche, it was really a part of the work itself, built into it so to speak. It’s about how artworks really exist in the world.

CS: From there I think it’s nice to think of the installation at Yvon Lambert, and what interested me is that there were these very discrete works, Red Cross, Word List (Painting), and word lists as texts on the wall.

RB: My next show in May in Paris is called “Word Lists.” It’s a general idea I’ve been working on for the last year or so. Instead of arranging the words in a sort of random way, to cover a wall, as I’ve been doing for the last few years, I’ve decided to present them in a more direct, organized way. Arranging them in a line, cross or a circle is a returning to the past, but in a different way.

CS: What I enjoyed about the exhibit at Yvon Lambert, and what is relevant to the conversation we’re having about orientation and painting, is that while these felt like discrete presentations of words in terms of medium and space, it was also really interesting to see this installation as a whole and to think of a word list as something that is very plastic, it can be a thousand words long or three words long, and so where a work began and ended in the space of an installation that is involving such word lists became kind of interesting to me.

RB: Yes. The lists do imply extending beyond the confines of the immediate space. You may not know about the typewriter drawings from the ‘70’s that would have a list of adjectives and adverbs that could go on for 5 or 6 pages. They would describe something that was indescribable, or at least not visible.

CS:  Do you find that over the years you’ve acquired a very specific vocabulary?

RB: Yes, and I add to it all the time. I draw from a list of about two to three hundred words. I’m always adding to it and taking some away.

CS: And is there anything that you can describe as a quality of those two or three hundred words?

RB: A state of mind, or suggest an some activity, a quality…not specific objects like a table, a chair, a tv set or computer.

CS: I’m interested in these states of mind that are transmitted telepathically, and I’m thinking also of what I mentioned earlier in the Word List that has “ineffable” at the bottom and “another” at the top. What I do see in the language that you’ve chosen and some of the things that you do with it is – I looked up the word telepathy and it means ‘”to be affected by distance.” It’s intriguing to find these sentences which have a completely different force.

RB: The history of the piece… the dates are 1969-2009. Those specific ones were originally for an exhibition in 1969 but were never shown. To keep with the idea of this show, the time theme that the show was about, I wanted a work that spanned the time Lambert and I have been working together. 40 years. I first started working with him in Paris in 1969. And this show and the one in Paris is really a 40th anniversary show. I originally ment them to be shown in Sao Paolo in Brazil, but there was a political problem in Brazil at that time, and the American artists in the show decided to protest by not exhibiting our work. So the works were never shown. Originally, they probably would have been presented only in the catalogue. This time, I showed them in a different version in vinyl color letters. It’s an old work in an new format, spanning those forty years. Hence the dates.

CS: There’s another sentence from 1970, “Something only you can realize.”

RB: I thought that might be interesting to see it on the window before you go in. It does put some responsibility on the viewer. Also, I think of it as a welcome in.

CS: Looking at your own reflection?

RB: You have a responsibility when you go in there and deal with this work.

CS: Now with your word lists and crosses and circles, are you thinking less about sentences, do the words as words, as objects, have a different sense for you than they did earlier?

RB: I don’t want to think in terms of sentences. The window piece is from 1970. I don’t think it’s different, but I’m always looking for new words.

 Copyright Catherine Spaeth, 2009

Image Credits:  Inert gas Series: Neon, 1969.  Two photographs, text.  2 photos, each 8X10″, 1 text, 11×8 1/2″, 20 1/2×40″ frame, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Installation View, Exhibition: RB 62-08, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; 62-08, 1962-2008, diptych: left panel oil on canvas, right panel, acrylic on canvas, left: 56×47.75″, right: 36×36″, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Jenny Holzer, Green Purple Cross, 2008, and Blue Cross, 2008. Three double-sided electronic LED signs (two with blue and green diodes on front and blue and red diodes on back and one with blue and red diodes on front and blue and green diodes on back); and seven double-sided electronic LED signs with blue diodes on front and blue and red diodes on back. 59 x 122 5/8 x 100 11/16 in. (149.9 x 311.4 x 255.8 cm); and 85 13/16 x 109 x 100 11/16 in. (217.9 x 276.9 x 255.8 cm). Installation view: Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, 2008. Texts: Erlauf, 1995, Arno, 1996, Blue, 1998 (Green Purple Cross); and Arno, 1996 (Blue Cross). © 2009 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Lili Holzer-Glier. Collection of the artist; courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris (Green Purple Cross); and David Roberts Art Foundation, London (Blue Cross); Mel Bochner, Nothing, 2003, oil on canvas, 45×60″, Collection of Jill and Peter Kraus, image courtesy of http://www.carnegiemellontoday.com /article.asp?Aid=112; Word List, 2008, acrylic paint on wall, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Jan Van Eyck, The Annunciation. Before 1435. Oil on wood transferred to canvas. The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA.; Red Cross (Painting), 2008, acrylic on canvas, 70×70″, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Installation view, exhibition:  RB 62-08, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; A Secret Desire Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Volitional State of Mind Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Particular Feeling Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Particualr Emotion Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009; A Great Concern Transmitted Telepathically, 1969-2009, vinyl letters on wall, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Something Only You Can Realize, 1970, vinyl letters, dimensions variable, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York; Red Cross, 2008 9detail0 cast acrylic, dimensions variable, 12 words, each letter 1 inch high, each letter approximately 12 inches wide, © Robert Barry, Courtesy of the artist and Yvon Lambert Paris, New York.

I was quite flattered to be contacted by Peter Cowling for his second interview in this series for Art Connect. His first interview with Ruben Natal-San Miguel, of ARTmostfierce, makes a wonderful story of the role of photography in the post 9/11 years, so be sure to visit Art Connect and read that as well. But for now:

Peter Cowling – loveart (PC)
You first started blogging back in October 2007. What factors prompted you to commit to writing a blog?

Catherine Spaeth (CS)
I was writing for magazines and newspapers, and after studying the history of contemporary art for so long was very frustrated by the limits upon one’s writing in the established forms of print media. Many magazines, for example, are not interested in reviewing group shows. I provide well-curated art tours privately, and in New York there are amazing appearances of things down the street from one another. This is just the way that art is visible here, works of art can be like ideas bouncing off one another, and this is often very interesting. I felt compelled to write in a way that newspapers and magazines do not appreciate, and there was really nothing to stop me from doing it.

PC
It is one of the very best moments, when you are able to think ‘why not, there is nothing stopping me’.

Now, one opportunity I would like to get your thoughts on would be bloggers who want to develop the ability to produce better-written art critique. Before we start, perhaps you could set out your thoughts on the job of an art historian when writing critique?

CS
I think the first job, really, is to respond to what’s immediately before you, and this is why I am drawn to contemporary art to the extent that I am. It is the job of the art historian to be adequate to that. So description, being able to describe an experience of something, is where it starts. And then it begins to get interesting because there are always competing histories in any choice of words. Knowing the history of art criticism is crucial – you do align yourself within a history of words, carry that history forward even as you are re-writing it, bearing upon it with the inflections, corrections of your own time. The work you are doing remains that of description, these words adhere to the work of art at the same time – they are not loose interpretations and you can really tell when they are failing to stick to the object and when they are successful in describing it.

PC
Okay, so it is completely possible to critique contemporary art as an art historian?

CS
From my perspective, it is impossible not to critique contemporary art as an art historian. This is not in the flippant sense that because I am an art historian I think art historically, but because art actually thinks, and there is a history of thought that it is thinking with and inside of. I feel that if you are not attending to that you are missing the best of it.

PC
I tend to think of the writing on your blog as being highly accessible, but that is probably the wrong description. It is not accessible in the sense that any child could read it, but it is in the sense that it makes the art you critique highly accessible. Is that your intention, and do you have any perspective on the wider debate about the need for art to be ‘dumbed-down’ in order to accommodate a wider audience?

CS
I have been a strong advocate for the expression of difficult ideas in arts writing. I am quick to condemn other art’s writers who make jabs at difficult language when it comes off as sheer anti-intellectualism, and it frequently does. So by making a work of art accessible without skirting away from difficult ideas, one is acknowledging the thought of the work, making it visible – not simply glossing over it. In turn, I always write with something at stake, and those stakes are sensed out of the art.

There is no one art world, and so I don’t have much at stake in condemning art or art writing that is accessible. I do, however, take very strong objection to what you are referring to as “dumbing down” when it is relied upon as uncritical fodder for the market. For this reason there is a very important role for the academy and the museum to uphold a place for scholarly research. But I have also seen some atrocious academic writing, produced by galleries especially, that relies upon a history of philosophical thought to dress something up for the market.

PC
One way in which the writing on your blog stands out is that you do not seek to impose a single flow of thought where none should exist. It seems to me that this works because you build your thoughts around the art, rather than trying to shoehorn the art into an a-z style of writing. Is this an accurate reading of your approach? Could you give some perspective on the overall writing style you utilize when writing a blog entry?

CS
Right. I think there is a way to have authority in your writing by successfully delivering the sense of the object and it meanings, and to do this in such a way that your address to others is quite broad and generous. The form of the blog is perfect for this kind of openness in writing. And it really does start from being very open to the art, attending to it. It is not that there aren’t strong declarative statements in my writing, and I do think I am saying what things are. But there is an awful lot of room in what things are.

PC
Another aspect that stands out is your use of references, and analogies. Do you have any tips on how to balance the desire to be inclusive with the need to maintain momentum?

CS
I don’t think there are tools, per se. Inside of your question there might be something about reach, and I do enjoy having a lot of reach. This has to do with that sense of there being a lot of room in things. By this I mean that the meanings generated by a work of art extend into the larger context of the world at large, and it is here as well that you are becoming art historical. The references and analogies that appear are only appearing because the work of art as I understand it has that kind of reach, it really comes from there. As for momentum, you might call it running room. But in order to see it perhaps you need a lot of curiousity, and the self-criticism to be playfully aware of your own tics and habits. Sometimes even references and analogies are really in the way, will slow things down, and you need to bust through them entirely to get back to the work at hand. It’s not about what you already know, there is a sense of being taken up by a history of thought when you write about art.

PC
Art historians are able to build-up an extensive and detailed understanding of their chosen area of expertise. It is tempting to think, then, that art historians are just the sum of their facts, applied to a given situation. I do not agree with that view – not least because I have seen art historians who provide illuminating insight into art they have little prior knowledge about. Is it the case that art historians develop a systematic approach to viewing and thinking about art?

CS
For myself there is no system or method. If I have a system, I suppose it is that I know the history of words and their use with relevance to the objects they’ve described. So for example if a word like “complicity” shows up when I am looking at and thinking about a work of art, I am automatically beholden to that word and its histories, and can’t help writing from the perspective of the question, “What does it mean, when I look at this specific work of art, to use the word complicity as an expression of this time, given its history with regard to art?” There is a great deal of care in that. And so maybe the systematic approach would be in this way of caring.

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“A giant wave,” is how Frank Lloyd Wright described the Guggenheim, its spiral sweeping away all corners and walls for an unobstucted vision. In 1959, sheer opticality was the Modernist Absolute and painting was its model. In 1971 Daniel Buren’s Peinture/Sculpture sliced clear through the center of this unobstructed vision, but was removed before the public could see its perceived violence to the space of exhibition. However, by the late ‘80s a critique of the hegemony of vision made many an academic career.

The recent exhibition “theanyspacewhatever” was a good attempt to consider what it means to hold an exhibition at the Guggenheim in our time. I can only imagine Pierre Huyghe’s Opening from the photograph: Donning my battery-powered miner’s hat in the darkened space of the museum; gradually adjusting to the disconnect betwen the eyes in my head and the orb of light emitted from the lamp above them; losing this orb in a mass of others bobbing across the distance and chasing across the walls and floor; viewing an object in the light of a gathering upon it. This awareness of one’s own vision cut away from the self and in play with others is visible to me in the photograph. Viewers’orbs of light echo the moonless and star-filled sky above – Angela Bulloch’s Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12.

In the course of the exhibition as a whole, leisure took over as a pleasant meandering, a mood in which aesthetic criteria vanish with a casual yes to everything. The “objects” themselves were so slight and so variously and deliberately placed to the furthest edges of the space at the center that the exibition felt as well-designed as a movie soundtrack, barely noticeable but for the occasional shift in action or place, its parameters finely tuned. Here, Maurizio Cattelan’s newstand tucked in a remote service corner and offering “The Wrong Times,” loaded with interviews between contemporary artists.

The title of the exhibition , “theanyspacewhatever”, carried with it a tone of idle disinterest and a lack of care for place and historicity. Much has been made of the globalizing tendencies of the ’90s, and the title is a fine enough expression of this. But it is also a reference to the empty spaces that take the place of – serve the broken – narrative in contemporary film. Empty spaces characterized this exhibition to the extent that whatever objects there were between them – what in a conventional exhibition would have been the art – were felt more as forms of punctuation, discrete events that served to amplify the emptiness of space.

“Theanyspacewhatever” is in fact a Deleuzian term, meaning “a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as a pure locus of the possible.”* The apparent opposition between a flippant expression, “any space whatever,” and the more utopian dream of the possible, has the feel of a carelessness turning away from effort, without tension or traction. Elsewhere in this exhibition such an opposition feels more like duplicity. This sense is borne by the words ARE WE EVIL, a declarative interrogative emblazoned by Douglas Gordon on the floor of the rotunda, both a chilling statement for our time and the snide commentary of a prankster to those who are in on the joke.

Emptiness has different values – in a strictly Western sense it can mean that something is simply not there, or that it rings hollow. But in Asian philosophy there can be very different senses of emptiness, and different stakes set out in one’s relation to it. Here is Rirkrit Tiravanija, interviewed by Mary Jane Jacobs in 2004 about his artistic practice and Buddhism. Jacobs asked if Tiravanija’s work is about “trust, allowing a work to connect to people in their own way, suspending judgment?” To which he replied:

I think the idea of judgment is interesting in relation to Buddhistic practice. I always get asked, “What are your expectations?” And I say, “ I don’t have any,” because I don’t predetermine things. And, “Do you feel it’s succesful or not?” and I say, “I don’t measure things that way, in terms of good or bad, or success.” It changes how you look at what happens. And I think that is quite important in terms of living in a Buddhistic way: not to have preconceived structures or to close off possibilities; but it’s not even about being open or closed; it’s just about being blank. In a way, of course, you can receive more if you are empty.**

Tiravanija’s work does circumvent expectations and notions of success by being so out of place in its ordinariness that aesthetic criteria are no longer relevant. There is a politics to this, a critique of a productivist society that refuses to labor and seeks exoneration in the always mediated context of the the everyday. In terms of his own practice, formerly characterized by dishing out Thai curry to gallery and museum visitors around the world, Tiravanija upped the ante at the Guggenheim by having illy caffee do his work for him, a company already known for marketing its product in a gallery setting. From the Illy website:

Illy Gallery is an on-going timed event, a happening that’s adjourned in one venue in some place of the world, and then gets going again in another venue in some other place. These venues are places where visitors and patrons can get to know all the products, forms of expression, passions and people that go to make up the world of illy, places where they can experience and get a rare taste of things beautiful and rich in flavour, and discover art and culture at their best.

Strolling at our leisure through the Guggenheim we were asked to and we did suspend our judgment and seamlessly entered the “world of illy.” In fact Cinema Liberte/Bar Lounge (1996- ) is an ongoing collaboration with Douglas Gordon – on the other side of the partition were clips from censored films. The press release stated that “…this installation invokes concepts of political, social and artistic freedom, ” and that “it has been made possible by the generous contribution of illy caffee.” On one side of the partition, then, was an already long-playing liberation from censorship, and on the other the seamlessness of a life that is produced for us by a globalizing lifestyle culture of refinement and ease. Something like a contradiction is on display, but there is no real contradiction here, no traction at all. The space of opposition has been evacuated, is empty and blank.

In 1984 T.J. Clark wrote about Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882) as an expression of the blase attitude, a recently emerged public demeanor that he describes as arriving upon the heels of public censorship in late nineteenth century France. Popular cultural expression in the cafe concert halls lost the resistant political inflections inside of double entendre, and scepticism about social relations took its place. Lifestyle as a commodity appeared in this moment, and Clark cites Georg Simmel, who described the blase attitude as a psychic mood reflecting the neutrality of money, how it “hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness in a way which is beyond repair.” The blank look of Manet’s barmaid and the skewed mirror reflection displacing the viewer leads Clark to write that “Doubts about looking accumulate…all reinforcing one another. What begins as a series of limited questions about relationships in space is likely to end as scepticism about relations in general.”***

Tiravanija’s work does not function as Manet’s Bar to disturb our social relations into a quandary of doubt and scepticism as to appearances. Rather, there is a loose certainty projected upon us, and confidence that any questions about the status of illy caffee as art will be appeased, lulled by social relations. The extended psychic mood that has us drifting from marquis to magazine rack to headphones, etc., has the consistency of our pedestrian nods to others in an increasingly franchised world, and this includes the Guggenheim itself.

The strongest criticism of this kind of work so far has been that of Claire Bishop in her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” published in 2004. Bishop’s claim is that a well-functioning democracy relies upon critical antagonism and that Tiravanija’s work in particular is lacking critical consciousness, offering instead a placating and false – produced, in fact – sense of community.**** Bishop is also worrying over the loss of contemplation as a valued experience in viewing a work of art, and that social production has taken it place.

Currently on view at the Guggenheim, and in an exhibition that is handed over entirely to contemplation, is Ann Hamilton’s human carriage, 2009. The title is very much about how we carry ourselves in the world, and the work itself offers an alternate model of emptiness. As with Tiravanija’s Bar Lounge there is in human carriage a visible laborer, tending to the balance of the machinery she operates. At the top of the spiral of the Guggenheim, she hangs from a carrier Buddhist texts that have been sliced apart and rebound as dangling packages of fragments. These are then lowered to a holding place just above the dry pond in the lobby. A small carriage on wheels is then sent off down the spiral of the Guggenheim, suspended from wheels that glide along a rail attached to the balustrade exterior. When it meets the holding place at the end of the spiraling rail the text fragments are released and fall into the dry pond below. All the way down, whenever there is a bit of extra traction, tilt, or movement of air a pair of bells suspended from the carriage will hit each other and ring.

In the week after September 11th, and just prior to her collaborative performance with Meredith Monk, mercy, I interviewed Ann Hamilton. At the time she was worrying over an installation conceived in previous months, involving papers that fell from the ceiling. I wrote in my review of the performance:

…with her worries of opportunism in mind, it is striking that somewhere between our conversation and the performance of mercy, Hamilton and Monk took the risk of concluding with a spellbinding performance of catastrophe as papers falling from above. Swooping, spiraling or floating, their shadows as tangible as the actual, different temporal layers filled the air. It may be that the success of mercy will be measured by how, or even if, the socially and embodied immersion in catastrophe has a power that both exceeds and informs the actual and political specifics of our present time.*****

It took months of standing atop a ladder to achieve the right float of paper on air, and this subsequently became the foundation of corpus at MassMOCA in 2004, where 7 million sheets of paper were dropped from the ceiling of a room the size of a football field. Joe Thompson the director of MassMOCA, described it as “haunting and, in the end, liturgical, but without liturgy.”******

Removed by time from the catastrophe of the World Trade Centers and without the same sense of time adrift that one gets from a falling sheet of paper, human carriage is a different sort of utterance, addressing the space of the Guggenheim and the context of the show. It is nearly as though human carriage is passing through the works in the exhibition in acknowledgment and without attachment. These packages of text are an expression of the value of language and translation in Buddhist thought. The effort to balancing in human carriage is similar to the description offered by Dogen, a 13th century Zen master, of the fairness of the Chinese steelyard – here is an image from EBay:

Writes Dogen, “In emptiness [the steelyard] embodies equilibrium; fairness is the great principle of the steelyard. By virtue of this principle of fairness we weigh emptiness and things; whether it be emptiness or form [we weigh it to] meet fairness.”******* Emptiness, then, is not an evacuation of the world and of judgment towards an ideal blank, but is in the effortless effort of calibration, with the sense of buoyancy that one feels in the steelyard above. Hanging in the balance, discernment in human action expounds freely as though from the open mouth of a bell. Hamilton’s own work, so quickly leaving behind initial worries of opportunism in the political context of catastrophe, has been able to follow the path of its own weight in emptiness. When human carriage descends, the famous void of the Guggenheim is crowded by the faces at its edges, attentive to just this moment that the bells will ring.

By Catherine Spaeth

*Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001, pp. 107-10, as cited in Nancy Spector, “theanyspacewhatever: An Exhibition in Parts,” exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation 2008, p. 16.
** in The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, c.2009, p. 21.
***T.J. Clark,Painting in Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers, Princeton, c.1984, p. 251.
****Calire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” in October 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51-79.
*****Catherine Spaeth, “mercy: An Interview With Ann Hamilton,: in Dialogue Magazine, November/December, 2001, pp. 49-51
******Annette Grant, “Art: Let 7 Million Sheets of Paper Fall, NYT Sunday April 11th, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03EEDA1638F932A25757C0A9629C8B63
*******As translated by Hee-Jin Kim, in “Weighing Emptiness,” Dogen on Meditation and Thinking: A Reflection on His View of Zen, SUNY, c. 2007, p. 42.

Image Credits:Daniel Buren’s Peinture/Sculpture before it was removed from the “Guggenheim International Exhibition” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1971, photo Robert E. Mates and Paul Katz, c.SRGF, NY; Pierre Huyghe, OPENING, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by Kristopher McKay; Angela Bulloch, Firmamental Night Sky: Oculus 12, 2008, LEDs (light-emitting diodes), neoprene, animated program, control gear, structural elements, power suppliers, and various cables, Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; The Wrong Gallery, The Wrong Times, 2004–06 (reprinted 2008), Newspaper, Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008, Photo: Kristopher McKay, © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Cinèma Libertè/Bar Lounge, First realized 1996,Made possible by illy caffè,Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008,© Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation New York. Photo by David Heald; A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (detail), Édouard Manet, 1882, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London; Ann Hamilton, human carriage, 2009, Installation composed of cloth, wire, bells, books, string, pipe, pulleys, pages, cable, gravity, air, and sound, Courtesy the artist, photos by photographer David Heald, © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.