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On the ground
ArtForum, Dec, 2006
The map is not the territory: Mindful as ever of this classic admonition, Artforum nevertheless offers a provisional atlas of the year in contemporary art. For our third annual installment in this series, we asked six artists, curators, and writers in cities around the world to survey the lay of the land as it has appeared to them over the course of the past twelve months.
New York
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FAR FROM THE DEAFENING BUZZ that continues to emanate from the auction houses, and even further from the glossy pages of Vanity Fair, whose "art issue" hit newsstands in November, one of the most intriguing--and least commented on--narratives in the New York art world continued to unfold this year. The underreported story I refer to revolves around the unprecedented number of personnel changes that have taken place, or are about to take place, at the city's better-established, and indeed historical, "not-for-profits" (a literal term that handily serves as both a mission statement and a manifesto, of sorts). Considered as a whole, these changes can't be dismissed as a mere human-resources shakeup. Rather, they constitute a profound shift in both ambition and attitude, one that suggests an equally profound opportunity, even a mandate, to reimagine and reanimate an entire culture. The crop of recently appointed curators and administrators includes, in no particular order: Debra Singer, executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen; Gianni Jetzer, director at Swiss Institute; Benjamin Weil, executive director of Artists Space; Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, and Massimiliano Gioni, curators at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (whose new building will open on the Bowery in 2007); Rochelle Steiner, director of the Public Art Fund; and artist AA Bronson, director of Printed Matter, Inc. (And then, I guess, there's me--for the past two years I have been the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art gallery.) With the exception of Singer (formerly a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Bronson, all these people left jobs in other cities, and, in many cases, other countries, for their new positions in New York. Tellingly, about half forsook curatorial roles at major museums. Add to the mix the fact that as of this writing the Drawing Center, Art in General, and the Dia Art Foundation are all looking to appoint new directors, and you begin to perceive a historically unparalleled situation in which the opportunity--and desire--for change is contagious. It's a groundswell that could exert a broad and lasting influence on the cultural topography in and beyond New York. While much is still in flux, the general prognosis is better than good.
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Indeed, a renewed focus on artist-centric activity has been discernible in New York for the past couple of years. One particular aspect of this activity--cooperative practices--was very publicly privileged in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, "Day for Night." Cocurators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne presented a number of collaborative contributions, including the Wrong Gallery's show-within-a-show "Down by Law" and the coauthored artworks of Reena Spaulings. Elsewhere, RoseLee Goldberg's biennial of live art, PERFORMA, which debuted in 2005, has single-handedly reinvigorated a genre-performance--that seemed to have gone underground, though "single-handedly" is probably not the right term for an endeavor that includes innumerable partners throughout the city. Printed Matter's inaugural NY Art Book Fair, held in November at the now (sadly) defunct Dia Art Foundation building on Twenty-second Street, will--I hope--kick-start a similar resurgence in independent publishing. Galvanizing projects that have each, in their own highly individual ways, occupied interstitial spaces between the commercial galleries, the traditional not-for-profits, and other platforms include Matt Keegan and Sara Greenberger Rafferty's North Drive Press, which publishes artists' paper-based projects; Fia Backstrom's various and nefarious activities, including the event series "Herd Instinct 360[degrees]" and the sly design project "Tablecloths for Commercial Galleries"; Gareth James, Sam Lewitt, and Cheyney Thompson's elusive publication/"drawing" project, Scorched Earth; and the artist-run gallery Orchard, which this year presented projects ranging from Nicolas Guagnini's slide show Middle Class Goes to Heaven, 2005-2006, to "Around the Corner," a kind of psychogeography of the Lower East Side organized by Christian Philipp Muller. Maverick commercial enterprises such as Miguel Abreu Gallery, Terence Koh and Javier Peres's Asia Song Society (aka A.S.S.), and James Fuentes LLC evince an attitude close to that of their not-for-profit peers. Many of these initiatives are operating in the geographical and ideological space mapped out by Lower East Side pioneers such as Reena Spaulings Fine Art or Maccarone Inc. The latter's new space will soon debut in an area that has the makings of a true "post-Chelsea" neighborhood: the lower edge of the West Village, already home to Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Harris Lieberman Gallery.
