Man of his words: Pepe Karmel on Kirk Varnedoe - Passages - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Pepe Karmel

The attacks on "High and Low" pushed Kirk away from exhibitions devoted to critical issues. Why address theoretical problems when it was a foreordained conclusion that he and the Modern would be condemned as defenders of the status quo? Furthermore, he concluded, such "thesis" shows posed almost insurmountable installation problems. It might be true that Robert Crumb had influenced Philip Guston's later work, but when you put them together in a gallery, as in "High and Low," Guston's large canvases inevitably overpowered the small panels of Crumb's cartoons. Such arguments worked better in book form, where reproduction could equalize disparities of size and medium, and the text could explicate the connections between physically dissimilar but conceptually related objects. After 1990, Kirk focused increasingly on exhibitions of individual artists--such as Cy Twombly (1994), Jasper Johns (1996), and, of course, Pollock--in which the art came first and foremost and where any critical "argument" could be made by the installation of the exhibition. These exhibitions won nearly universal praise.

Meanwhile, Kirk quietly carried on with the essential task of expanding and upgrading MONA'S permanent collection. By 1988, the Modern was widely perceived as having lost touch with contemporary art. In fact, this was a long-standing problem. In the '50s and '60s, even as MONA'S exhibitions helped promote Abstract Expressionism, its acquisitions had not kept pace. When Rubin arrived at the museum in the late '60s, he moved rapidly to make up for the oversight, acquiring key AbEx works such as Pollock's mural masterpiece One: Number 31, 1950. Twenty-five years later, recognizing that the museum had again fallen behind, Kirk negotiated the acquisition of major examples of Pop Art such as Andy Warhol's Soup Cans of 1962 and James Rosenquist's F-111 of 1964-65. Ranging over the modern era, he pushed for the museum to purchase remarkably diverse works, from Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Joseph Roulin, 1889, to Jeff Koons's iconic Rabbit, 1986, to Richard Serra's monumental Intersection II of 1993.

Kirk also did his best to make the permanent collection more inviting and accessible. Where Rubin had installed the collection to offer a single trajectory through the history of modern art, Kirk punched holes in the walls, allowing visitors to enter and exit at different points in the story. Finding the final galleries of the permanent collection inadequate for the display of the large-scale art made after 1960, Kirk had the ceilings raised. Into these new, beautifully proportioned spaces went a superb installation of the work of Donald Judd, Eva Hesse, and other artists of the '60s and '70s. This reinstallation lasted around three months. Recognizing that Kirk had created the best exhibition space in the museum, other curators began requesting these galleries (rather than the usual temporary exhibition spaces on the ground floor and in the basement) for their shows. Ironically, the end result of Kirk's improvements was that the museum usually had less post-1960 art on view than it had before. (This is one of the problems that will be rectified with MONA'S current expanson.)