Featured White Papers
Content provided in partnership with
The trouble with Christian - Whatever Happened to - Christian Leigh - Biography
ArtForum, March, 2003 by Alexi Worth
HURRICANE/BLOWFISH
It's impossible to have a conversation with anyone who knew Leigh without their bringing up Patricia Highsmith's Ripley, The Grifters, or The Duke of Deception, not to mention Catch Me If You Can. Few people would argue that Leigh was a crucial figure, but he remains a subject of speculation, irritation, and wistfulness. Could Leigh have succeeded in the long run? Could he have ended up with his own Twenty-fourth Street gallery? Was he a casualty of the recession, a spendthrift caught up in a moment of austerity? Or on the contrary, was he a beneficiary of the recession, a huckster who was tolerated because times were slack? In the art world, whatever legacy Leigh left remains divisive. He may deserve, as Adrian Dannatt points our, a niche in gallery folklore. He was, in a sense, a deliberate embodiment of the bad, self-serving curator--the paradigm, in Dannatt's words, "of what you often see curators accused of." For admirers, Leigh's amazing six-year run of exhibitions makes him an avatar of something large ly missing from today's art world--a reckless, crackpot, outscale energy. Leigh himself was fond of this view. In the "Enunciator" catalogue, he wrote approvingly of an unnamed friend who likened his exhibitions to "an exploded movie with a thousand levels" and called him "Mr. Hurricane." The harsher view is that Leigh is a blowfish: a small creature puffed up by desperation and chutzpah. That he had charm and drive, but no ideas of his own--or ideas that were little more than rhinestones and marabou feathers.
Perhaps the most damning assessment is that Leigh wasn't particularly discriminating, that he mirrored downtown establishment taste, that his shows were so big simply because he had a hard time saying no. From this angle, too, Leigh is a tempting synecdoche for his times--the manic, spectacle-driven, rhetorical decade that he outlasted by just a few years. "He understood," says the dealer Jeffrey Deitch, "how to do something that gets a lot of coverage. He mastered the system, but it was all on the surface. That's the '80s--very much about the surface." Deitch, like nearly everyone in the art world, speaks about Leigh in the past tense. But Christian Leigh--whatever his actual name and whereabouts--is almost certainly alive, not yet forty, and as ambitious as ever. It's way too early to write his epitaph.
New York--based painter and curator Alexi Worth, a frequent contributor to Artforum, is currently a senior critic at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History