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

ArtForum, Nov, 2003 by Pepe Karmel

Installing exhibitions was one of Kirk's greatest satisfactions as curator, and one of his greatest skills. While planning the Pollock show, we struggled for months to figure out how to display the three great mural-size paintings of 1950 in the Modern's central galleries, which were constricted by a twenty-foot column bay. We arrived at a merely adequate arrangement, cramming them onto three walls of a long, narrow space. On the morning we were to install Autumn Rhythm, Kirk came up with a better solution, placing each painting in a room of its own but arranging them so that all three were visible from the central room. The arrangement created the illusion of a single large space divided by free-floating panels. When the three paintings were all in place, the effect was magnificent. "With the possible exception of the main gallery at the Frick," I said to Kirk, "this is now the greatest space in New York."

"Fuck the Frick," he replied.

By the time "Pollock" opened, Kirk's cancer seemed to be receding. It returned, suddenly and severely, in spring 2001. It was mostly the demands of battling his illness that led Kirk to resign from the Modern a year later. But I think he was also glad to get back to being a scholar. "When you teach," he once said to me, "you're continually charging up your batteries. When you're a curator, you run them down. You use up whatever ideas you have, and you don't have time to generate new ones." After leaving MONA, he became a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and returned to writing and research. It was a race against time. As one chemotherapy regimen after another proved ineffective, Kirk responded by working harder, as if he could force the cancer into remission by being more energetic than it was. Almost to the very end, his energy seemed to triumph over the disease, but late last summer the cancer began to spread with wildfire rapidity. Kirk died on August 14, 2003.

Looking back, it seems to me that Kirk's brilliant career as a curator obscured the importance of his scholarly work. His style and convictions, furthermore, made him something of an outsider to the critical establishment. When obscurity was considered a sign of profundity, he wrote clearly and with gusto. Kirk's politics were liberal, even leftist, but he had no patience for academic neo-Marxism. His writings and exhibitions of the '70s and '80s, focusing on artists such as Gustave Caillebotte, Vilhelm Hammershoi, and Edgar Degas, offered a radically new approach to late nineteenth-century art. Rather than considering the innovations of early modernism solely in formal terms, Kirk saw them as a group of strategies for foregrounding visual subjectivity. Caillebotte's "photographic" distortion of perspective was as modernist, in this sense, as Monet's intuitive brushwork.

In his essays and lectures of the '90s, Kirk was clearly working his way toward a new understanding of modernist abstraction, one inhibited by neither Greenbergian formalism nor semiology. His Mellon lectures, delivered with heartbreaking eloquence at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, last spring, provided a compressed overview of this new understanding. Kirk was fascinated by the continual exchange between abstraction and figuration and by the way that abstract marks and structures echo those of everyday life, from chalk scribbles on blackboards to the rusted hulls of ocean freighters. While admiring the Apollonian purity of Donald Judd and Agnes Martin, he responded most strongly to Dionysian artists such as Cy Twombly and Richard Serra, whose work is rooted in an awareness of the human body--its actions and reactions, weight and frailty, crevices and excretions. Ironically, Kirk was often drawn to the same art his critical opponents championed. But where they saw a demonstration of "abjectness," he saw a joyous evocation of the human condition.