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

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Jan Tumlir

JT: Considering all the shifts in focus "Public Offerings" has seen, just how much of the original art-school theme remains? And how exactly is it being addressed in the exhibition?

HS: Well, first, I'd like to think of it as a developing focus rather than a shifting one. When Paul asked me to work on the catalogue, the show had the working title "Global Academy," and it took LA and London as its models. What emerged from our conversations with the catalogue's writers and others was that while all the artists in the cities represented had, indeed, come young and quickly out of degree-granting art schools or university departments, the roles that the institutions played in each local scene were quite different. In LA and maybe London, the schools were, perhaps, determinant in the last instance (as Althusser might say). In New York or Tokyo or Berlin, the stories read somewhat differently, at least as the catalogue's authors address them. There, youth culture or the gallery system and the recession of the early '90s as they leaned together on the schools and their graduates worked to shape the moment.

JT: That goes back to the question of the economy.

PS: These things come in cycles. It seems at this moment that things are completely overheated with the auction houses, with the reckless abandonment of the ideas that underpin works of art and the absolute embrace of their monetary power. It makes many feel that we're at the end of a ten-year cycle, and a lot of what came crashing down in the late '80s is on the verge of crashing again. And you could say, well, that's a terrible thing, this is the end of another great period, but it's also the best of times; what the young artists in the early '9os had before them was clear-cut.

HS: For many people certain artists in the exhibition--Damien Hirst or Matthew Barney--stand for precisely the excesses of the market. That is, they occupy the position of, say, Salle and Schnabel a decade ago. But in the same way that David and Julian didn't arrive fully grown from the head of Zeus, they didn't come into a very healthy market. In fact, there was a moment in their careers-the first moment of their careers in 1990 or '91--when it wasn't clear whether there was a market at all for their work. PS: For me, the show is much more about a kind of idealism that could only happen after the elimination of the commercial construct that constituted the art world of the late '80s. It was really an act of faith in their own image, in their beliefs, in their artistic ideals, that allowed them to go forward because, by every indication, it was over! I mean, this wasn't like coming out of an art school in 1984 or '85 when you felt it was better to be an artist than a rock star.

JT: Could you say that there's almost a staged opposition between the curatorial thrust of the show and the catalogue essays that were contracted out to critics who might not be all that friendly to some of the works you've selected?

HS: I would say it was not that the catalogue and the exhibition were put in direct opposition but that the works are both exemplary and symptomatic. They are exemplary both of this period and of these phenomena that the catalogue wants to look at, and they're symptomatic--that is, one can read through them the context, or contexts, out of which they come.