Tenth Reunion - Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition - Interview

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Jan Tumlir

JAN TUMLIR TALKS WITH PAUL SCHIMMEL AND HOWARD SINGERMAN

The exhibition now titled "Public Offerings" has undergone a lengthy and complicated gestation. The idea of exploring the impact of art schools on the production of art in Southern California first came to LA MOCA curator Paul Schimmel when a series of ever more derisory articles looking at the phenomenon--Dennis Cooper's "Too Cool for School" in Spin (July 1997), Andrew Hultkrans's "Surf and Turf" in these pages (Summer 1998), and Deborah Solomon's New York Times Magazine piece "How to Succeed in Art" (June 1999)--began to appear. To endow the proceedings with the requisite critical breadth, Schimmel brought an authority on board: Howard Singerman, author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University(University of California Press, 1999). However, as the curators increasingly discerned analogies between LA and a range of other "art centers," the initially local (and largely sociological) focus started to blur, and the scope expanded. First there was London, then Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg--and let's not forget New York. As it stands now, "Public Offerings" will include some 100 works by 25 artists from these cities, all young, gifted, and internationally known, all enjoying careers that can be seen as following a very similar, very '90s arc. Artists like Jason Rhoades, Laura Owens, Matthew Barney, Sarah Lucas, and Takashi Murakami "took off" during or right after school with their very first shows. Hence the cheeky Wall Street IPO conceit: Central to "Public Offerings" is the concept of "formative works," which, as Schimmel puts it in the catalogue introduction, "offer insight into the making of the artist in its most fragile moment." Many of these debut shows will be reproduced in their entirety when "Public Offerings" opens in April, offering us the first comprehensive overview of the decade just passed. Right before Christmas I sat down with Paul Schimmel in his MOCA office to discuss the show; Howard Singerman joined us by speakerphone from Virginia.

Jan Tumlir: I just read Howard's piece for the catalogue ("From My Institution to Yours"), and it occurred to me that citing Mike Kelley at the start of the essay serves to establish a link between "Public Offerings" and "Helter Skelter," where Mike was clearly an artistic presence. Here he could be considered present in absentia, as a teacher perhaps--is this a fair reading?

HOWARD SINGERMAN: Well, I'll let Paul talk more about the relationship between "Public Offerings" and "Helter Skelter," but Mike was clearly one of the crucial members of a newly emergent art scene in Los Angeles. His decision to stay put rather than go off to New York like David Salle or Matt Mullican or Eric Fischl or other CalArts graduates marks a kind of shift. And then, you know, his appearance in my essay also had to do with the fact that he came up with the perfect title.

PAUL SCHIMMEL: I feel this exhibition has very little to do with "Helter Skelter" and a lot more to do with thinking that goes back to my more historical exhibitions, "The Interpretive Link: Abstract Surrealism into Abstract Expressionism" or "Hand-Painted Pop." Both dealt with issues of formative work and work that occupies an in-between space, at the end of one thing but before the world has recognized the beginning of something else. That said, obviously I'm looking at art that was made at the same time as "Helter Skelter." These artists were very much on the scene and aware of that exhibition.

HS: Unlike "Helter Skelter," "Public Offerings" is not a survey of the present; it's a historical survey, if you will, of the "just past." It wants a certain kind of distance and, for Paul, that distance is historical and tied to his earlier historical exhibitions. For me, the distance is sociological, in that I want to look at what these works can tell us about the context in which artists produced work and became visible in the recent past.

JT: Paul, you emphasize the impact of Conceptual, performance, and process-based art on the generation of the early '90s, which might have something to do with the art-school question. These various movements are being forwarded, obviously, by a certain generation of teachers.

PS: There is always a tendency for a generation to break with the preceding one, so it's not surprising that much of the "impact" the painting of the first half of the '80s had internationally is of little to no importance to the generation of the '90s, and that, in fact, they would skip that generation and go back one more to the '70s. And, of course, that's partially in the hands of the teachers. But I also think there is a lot more left unsaid with Conceptualism, performance-based art, and Minimalism; there's a lot more that you can pick up and work with.

HS: The other thing, I think, is that painters, particularly successful painters from the '80s, didn't necessarily have to find themselves back teaching at art schools. So it's those other ways of working in the '80s--photographic, Conceptual, or in that vein--that stay in school, if you will. As you know from the art schools in LA, there are three or four different generations wandering the halls. I mean, Baldessari is still there, and in England, Jon Thompson, who is I think an almost exact contemporary of Baldessari, was teaching at Goldsmiths along with Michael Craig-Martin when Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume were there.