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

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Jan Tumlir

JT: Well, even the use of those two terms, exemplary and symptomatic, shies away from the question of value or quality with regard to the judgment of the works themselves.

PS: I was choosing works of art as much as I was choosing artists themselves. The works are all made in a very particular context: right after school, or within a couple of years. I felt my biggest responsibility was the task of being first up to take a historical look, a revisionist look, at this period that is now ten years old. And I do feel that my responsibility was to examine this period and try to make judgments about those artists and works that were really of lasting importance and merit. I mean, of course, names like Barney and Hirst are obvious, but I'm not sure that it's the same for Toba Khedoori or Manfred Pernice or Tuyoshi Ozawa or Michael Joaquin Grey. I was interested in not just making the "Dream Team."

HS: Along with "formative," a word that comes up a lot in the exhibition's literature is "breakthrough." And in this last decade and a half or so, what the word has meant concerns not only the space within an individual artist's oeuvre but also the space between the art school and the increasingly cosmopolitan and knit-together art world. So, there's a geographical breaking as well. It's formative within the artist's own practice, but it also marks a number of territorial shifts, or category shifts, from the local to the global or international, from an essentially private or not-yet-named practice to a public practice. And, in our narrative, the art school is the crucial switching station for that. It is, to borrow a phrase from Renee Green, a kind of import/export site.

JT: Again, that sounds to me like an explicitly sociological take on the '90s, and there are all kinds of sociological or economic reasons we could give for this acceleration of the cycling process of artists through art schools and the galleries. But, I'm wondering, how else can one define this quickening pace? If younger artists were more successful In the '90s because they were making the most Interesting works, statements, or whatever, how else would you go about explaining this phenomenon? You started to talk about globalization, which is of course related to the explosion of information technology, an area in which youth has a certain expertise.

HS: Well, because these artists are working in places like LA or London or Berlin or Tokyo, their purview is much more quickly international. I don't even mean their career, I mean their interests. They travel more frequently; there is a broader exchange of images and language and discourse. And there's a way in which they've seen more.

PS: And really, for many of these artists, the usual trajectory of two or three or four shows within your community of artists and then, in the case of Los Angeles, the next step of going to New York, and from there Europe--all that's been thrown out the window. Now you go from LA to your next show in Berlin, and from Berlin back to London, and you wait five more years before your next show in LA. While you may call this your home, the art world itself is by no means confined to that home. In fact, for many of the artists of this generation, their entrance into the art world was frankly global from the get-go.