Category Archives: General

Saint Precaria

Did you know that Saint Precaria has been determined to be the patron saint of adjunct faculty?

A judicious amount of research (one Google search) makes it reasonably clear that there is no such person, this is a fictional creation, presumably the sister of “San Precario,” a fictive patron saint of precarious workers invented in Italy in 2004. The “precariat” now includes many who formerly would have been considered privileged members of society, the educated and the educators, categories which now include students burdened by debt and their adjunct faculty of all ages. Students pay exorbitant costs to participate in a system where a larger proportion of their faculty may be members of the precariat, part time adjunct faculty, many of whom once were students in the system themselves and in many cases are living proof that student debt cannot be paid back on adjunct wages.

February 25 was National Adjunct Walkout Day. As a member of ACT-UAW, a union of part-time and adjunct faculty at The New School and NYU, I was contractually unable to participate–and in fact I don’t teach on Wednesdays so there was no class to walkout of, or to conduct a teach-in during–but it was a useful opportunity to mark the plight of Adjunct faculty in higher education.

What a Victorian term I have used–plight, “a dangerous, difficult, or otherwise unfortunate situation” according to the definition that springs up on a Google search. Dangerous, yes, that is the operative word–it is dangerous not to make a living wage, and here I want to stress that a wage is different than a living wage, and dangerous again when you realize that wages are reflected back at you later in life in Social Security benefits which are based on taxable wage income. I realized the other day that my anticipated benefits, even if I wait the longest possible to receive these benefits (should SS still exist at that time), will be lower than what I currently pay for art storage. Not a cheery prospect.

In recent months I have been tempted to reveal this “plight” more fully, on the chance that whatever prestige I may have, whatever respect in which I may be held by some would give some weight to my experience of the financial as well as other institutional realities of part time faculty. But why would I worry about that and cling to my resume for protection against Darwinian staffing practices? Because in America, and probably everywhere, it is always easier to believe that someone’s fate is their fault. This is of course a deep philosophical argument but you always have to think about what power wants versus what might be valuable in other ways. We love the myths about geniuses who died penniless but in the present tense we despise someone who ended up making choices that were financially unwise even if the reasons and even some of the outcomes were important contributions to the culture. Someone actually suggested to me a while back that I was in my own way the cause of the crisis of the adjunct and of my own problems at that particular moment–*as a threat to the tenure system* (the speaker was tenured)–because I had accepted adjunct positions in the first place! Thus my precarious position, as well as the threat posed to the tenure system(!) by management’s exploitation of adjuncts, was my fault.

And, further, I assume that from the point of the administration, a person’s willingness to be paid a below poverty wage is a demonstration of their worth, or rather their worthlessness. If you are stupid enough to accept low wages, you must not be worth more anyway. It’s one of the reasons one rechecks one’s resume on occasion, to be reminded of proof to the contrary.

Of course personal back stories abound, some details of my situation certainly are the result of my own decisions and my preference for staying in New York–I could in fact right now be retiring from my first job, a full time teaching position at NSCAD, where I was at 24 the only woman in a 14 man department–but other scenarios have to be understood or imagined: a feminist walks into a room full of men wearing tight jeans and cowboy boots interviewing her for a job and… — a feminist seen as “essentialist” walks into a room of students empowered to influence hiring decisions and…the university loses a tenured line because of…..Also I must add that for a long time the adjunct situation worked for me: for various reasons which unfortunately no longer pertain I could get by, for quite a long time I enjoyed agency as a teacher, I was able to work on projects which I might not have been able to do if I had a full-time position. I was not as aware of the precarity of my situation as I perhaps should have been because things seemed to go along as they always had. Perhaps some understood years ahead the direction that the economy and working conditions would take, but I was not one of them. My mother had a clearer view: once, when she was in her nineties, she turned to me from a story on the news and said, “so, in America soon it will be the corporations and the slaves.” That was in around 2005, when a lot of things began to change, certainly at the level of my experience of academic politics and employment.

In recent years, it is clear that things have changed, in education and in the economy, and so now this is the way that the current economy works, all blame and shame falls back upon the individual, the meaning of “the personal is the political” has reverted back solely to the personal, the individual and all efforts to break out of the isolation of the individual are the target of national, state, and corporate power, to crush workers and particularly unions. The flaw in pridefully resorting to my own accomplishments as proof that I should be exempt from such difficulties because of whatever I think is special about me is that all faculty who work as adjuncts have their own story of accomplishment. Most of the people I know who teach as adjuncts are experienced and dedicated teachers, particularly given the short remuneration. Beyond that, by resorting to claims of one’s own uniqueness, one loses a sense of solidarity with others, and that is of course exactly what the power structure wants.

Another reason to hide the details of one’s employment are not just the fear of retaliation from the institution–an issue covered in “The Teaching Class,” an interesting article by Rachel Reiderer–but of the resentment of full time faculty: adjuncts after all don’t have to do often soul numbing service to the university. It should be noted that the work load and corporate pressures on full-time faculty have increased as the administrative wing of universities is increasingly impinging on the educational, although an early reader of this blog post noted a situation of indentured servitude I had not imagined, where tenured faculty were increasingly using adjuncts to do the administrative work, for paltry additional sums, so that they could concentrate on their own work and research. He even suggested, in jest but with purpose, that soon the adjunct system would be replaced by the model of the unpaid intern, with a tenuous promise of perhaps ascending eventually to adjuncthood! Whatever the situation of full-time faculty, the work load and extra-curricular demands on adjuncts has also increased in recent years. Last year I put in 40 hours of extra unpaid work–basically a full semester of work hours extra–since I was at my computer I could mark the time very exactly–in order to insure that the “product” of my students in one class would be adequate. I did so partly out of a sense of duty and perfectionism that is just habit, but also because there is always the fear that you will suffer if the student “learning outcome,” the educational product is deficient. Whether that fear is justified or not is irrelevant to the general atmosphere of a student-as-consumer educational system where an individual student’s complaint can be a very useful tool to displace part-time faculty.

Another anecdote springs to mind, from a period in the recent history of my institution when the full time faculty were in full revolt against the President for blurring the lines between/privileging business over educational elements of the administration of the university while all hell was breaking loose in other departments, all of this well-documented in the New York Times and a dozen other major news hard copy and online magazines at the time. At that time I wrote to a full time faculty member on the Faculty Senate “I think that the Faculty Senate must support the part-time faculty in the Fine Arts Department. This is not just a matter of fairness and compassion for colleagues during an economic depression, or just a Union matter, what is at issue is the inexorable enactment of a totalitarian take-over of a major area of study by a business oriented point of view. ” His reply was basically, “must we?.” He resorted to rules of order of the Faculty Senate, bla bla..and this from a Marxist, naturlich.

On the other side, one worries about the possible loss of face in relation to students who respect power and fear a less than rosy intimation of their own future. But as faculty today, teaching in a private institution, one is torn between a mystery and a sad reality. The mystery is that one does not always know which students are rich enough through family wealth to weather the direction of the economy and support their art practice when they leave school. The sad reality is that this is increasingly an economy trending towards work for no pay: unpaid internships, publication for no wages, graduate students and adjuncts carrying the teaching load instead of tenured faculty, the examples abound. Since my area of teaching is art, there too appearances are deceptive, since anyone in the know knows that most artists don’t live from sales of their work, that most of the young artists one reads about who do have flash successes may quite rapidly find themselves devalued and out of favor. And a whole other text would have to be devoted to efforts to create new systems of education than the current MFA, but a typical example is one that I read just this morning, Andrew Berardini’s “How To Start an Art School.” Berardini notes the failure of the current MFA/debt model, praises some alternatives, and speaks with fondness of some models of free education: “For the past six years, I’ve been teaching at the Mountain School of Arts, an artist-run school based in Los Angeles. All the faculty, staff, and lecturers, including myself, work for free, and none of the students pay to attend.” This again is part of the sad reality part of the situation: there may well be tremendous pedagogic freedom in such models of free education, but unfortunately most people have to deal with one of the mysteries of life–how to pay the rent.

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I admire adjunct faculty who are beginning to spell out the details. Last spring I was particularly impressed by a Facebook post by artist and activist Caroline Woolard, who broke down where the tuition dollars for a course she co-taught at Parsons the New School for Design (my employer) went. Woolard wrote,

I got paid $1854 to teach half of a 15 week course. It cost each student $4,155. With 16 students, the New School made $66,480 for the course, or $64,626, after they paid me. If each student gave me $14.60 a class, they’d have paid my teaching fee. Instead, they each gave the New School $277 for each class. Of course, the New School must pay their landlord, and their staff, but taking 95% ($277 vs. $14.60) per student per class is unjust. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=567431575700&set=a.514378734020.2016859.28901120&type=1

(Price per credit: $1,385) x (3 or 4 credits per course) x (number of students) … so ($1,385 x 4 credit course) costs each student $5,540. Then there are 18 students, so the New School made $99,720 before paying me. Subtract my fee, and divide that number by the number of classes (15), and you get $370 profit per student per course.

Next Woolard posted a number of jpegs, of the cost of various degrees at the institution and more significantly the annual compensation of the top academic and administrative officers in the university, information she found available online.

Compensation NS top officers

The issue of administrative salaries and the corporatization of universities was a topic discussed at The Artist as Debtor Conference at Cooper Union last month, though at that conference the ironies of having the difficulties of adjunct faculty explained very clearly by someone who herself had fired twelve of them in one day were particularly pungent.

The role that administrative salaries and structures have played in the corporatization of higher education is the subject of a number of books, including Benjamin Ginsberg’s The Fall of the Faculty and I highly recommend Bill Reading’s 1996 book The University in Ruins, which focuses less on the economy of the new university than on the rhetoric used to transform education into product.

The College Art Association guidelines for part-time faculty are interesting in all that they specify about advisable employment practices and all that they leave out, most notably the right to be paid a living wage.

On Wednesday February 25, National Adjunct Walkout Day, I had planned to write a long post about my experience as an adjunct but instead I napped for two hours in the afternoon because on Tuesdays this semester I have a challenging schedule that takes its toll. Remembering the one year in the late 1980s when I taught in three schools in three states, anything in one city should be a piece of cake, but I was younger and hardier then, and my lower overhead made the gap between wage income and living wage smaller. So just one more anecdote: ten years after my 3 schools, 3 states year, I told one of my Parsons grad students, after she had graduated, that my salary for teaching 3 and 3, then the teaching load of a full time position in most schools, was lower than her annual tuition. Her jaw dropped.

A more recent anecdote: this fall I asked one of my former students, a newly minted MFA, how much he was being paid for a course at my institution mainly to be sure he was being paid as fairly as possible, but when his wage turned out to be only about $7 less per hour or session or whatever it is that is the unit of our contracts than mine, with my 25 years at the institution and 40 years teaching experience, my jaw didn’t so much drop as my desire to break someone else’s flamed.

And finally, since ultimately the politesse of academia is just a tweed suit worn over an economy whose profile is total, here is a recent story on WNYC, where the CEO of Comcast meets with union employees in Canarsie, what happens when the gloves come off.

It used to be the economy, stupid but now it’s the austerity, stupid.

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*Please join us for the Act-UAW Local 7902, The New School Part Time Faculty Union Rally!

This blog post was inspired by my union’s current negotiations for a new contract. Faculty “disqualification,” dramatic reduction of health care benefits and of already tiny salary increases are among the major issues on the table, while a new “signature” building was recently erected at enormous expense while problematic enough to inspire many faculty and staff critiques in submissions to an exhibition at the school, “Offense and Dissent.”

Union-RAlly

“The Ground”

I’m delighted to have “The Ground,” a text about my work, published in the current issue of Cultural Politics, a Duke University Press journal

Issue cover, detail of Mira Schor, Conditions of Contemporary Practice, 2013. Ink & oil on gesso on linen, 24 × 45 in.

The full text online with color reproductions is here (scroll down to “figures” and click on “view larger version” )

The PDF of the text as it appears in the hard copy is here (reproductions in b/w)

Special thanks to the journal’s editors and to Arts Editor Joy Garnett for inviting me to contribute an artist’s project

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From Joy Garnett: Announcing the arrival of:

Cultural Politics Volume 10.3

Featuring cover art and an essay by Mira Schor, this entire issue is available open access, courtesy of Duke University Press.

Cultural Politics (ISSN: 1743-2197) is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It investigates the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and interdisciplinary subject area.

Edited by:

John Armitage, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
Ryan Bishop, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Mark Featherstone, Book Reviews Editor

Joy Garnett, Arts Editor

Each issue includes essays and projects by visual artists solicited and edited by New York artist Joy Garnett. Contributing artists include Stephen Andrews, Paul Chan, Christos Dikeakos, Gair Dunlop, Yevgeniy Fiks, Zoe Leonard, David Humphrey, Dominic McGill, Julia Meltzer & David Thorne, Arnold Mesches, Carrie Moyer, Richard Mosse, Steve Mumford, Sarah Peters, Mira Schor, Nancy Spero, and others.

Cultural Politics is published by Duke University Press. Access all articles online. Artist contributions are freely available (pdf and html) courtesy DUP.

Additionally, an archive of artist contributions can be found here

Nights and Days of Chris Ofili and Benny Andrews

In recent days I have posted on Facebook galleries of photos from recent exhibitions I’ve just seen, with a brief text which I typically write quickly, just enough to give readers a quick sense of the work. Since Facebook’s algorithm is notoriously unreliable, I thought I would republish two such brief reports, about works I saw in the past two days, especially since the works presented here propelled me into the studio, an effect of art work that I particularly noted when I began this blog. As is often the case, happenstance unexpectedly reveals thematics. This is a case in point.

Sunday December 21 * Here are some pictures of my visit to Night and Day, the Chris Ofili exhibition at the New Museum. I should say my first visit because I intend to go again, this is a show it is a pleasure to spend time with and the works make you spend time. I very much wanted to see the show although/because I haven’t seen that much of Ofili’s work, and my attitude was in a sense neutral because on the one hand I am not necessarily a fan of a kind of stylized style of figuration and yet I love cartoon figuration. Same duality about vivid color. So, needle set at neutral but looking forward to and anxious to see.

It’s a great show and by far the best use of the New Museum’s awkward cold space I have ever seen. Each floor tells a story and each room is not just a space to stick some work, but to consider a body of work. Important to go in order, second floor, third floor, fourth floor, and fifth floor for small exhibition of his work for ballet.

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On the second floor, first thing you see coming out of the elevator is an installation of works from Ofili’s series Afromuses, 170 small framed watercolors (looks like watercolor and ink) of silhouetted heads of African women and men, emphasizing the abstract design of hairdos, patterned textiles of clothing and jewelry. These works, a selection of a larger series, emphasizes the importance of drawing–these were works that the artist did every morning for about 10 years for about fifteen minutes as warm ups for painting, and they serve here as a warm up to the rest of the show.

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One experiences them twice, as you loop back to them after going around the corner first into a large space with a great group of large paintings from the 90s, including the notorious Holy Virgin Mary of Mayor Giuliani fame.

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These paintings have a great sense of scale, and the fact that each rests on a ball of elephant dung adorned with the title of the work rather than being hung on a wall keeps them at the level of the viewer’s body. They are intensely surfaced, vividly pigmented, very funny–at one point I started thinking about the Simpsons–and very moving: particularly striking from across the room as well as directly in front of is No Woman, No Cry about the mother of a black teenager killed in a racially motivated assault in London. This painting’s use of the ball of dung is particularly striking, as a piece of jewelry which is also a weight, a scar, a tumor, at the core of the painting.

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So already two impressive groups of works, but the show really gets impressive when one walks into the next room, lit slightly differently, with large paintings which share a color scheme of green, black, pink, red, and white, and a lush sexuality and sensuality.

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At this point in the show looking at these works I also felt strongly that these paintings were made by the artist, that he was engaged in the painting, even though these are not conventional paintings–there is neither brushwork, ton smooth flatness, the surfaces are complex, textural, layered, constructed, but they are convincingly by one person making decisions as he goes along

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The next floor is dedicated to a darkened room with dark paintings which at first are nearly unreadable, somewhat like figurative Ad Reinhardts. Strangely my iPhone camera was able to pick out forms that my eye could not. The darkness hides dark subject matter including a lynching. It is a room I particularly want to return to, must return to, to see what more I can see.

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The next floor (4th fl of the museum) is the total opposite, an emotional reversal: a knockout of color and sensuality, yet painted much more flatly than the first large paintings. No more stippling, no more varnish and glitter, no more elephant dung, in some cases figures appear to be drawn on the linen with charcoal. They bring to mind William Blake (an important artist to Ofili) and Nabis and early 20th century Viennese Orientalism, and also a lot of mid-twentieth century European artists, Matisse’s cut outs, late Picabia, Chagall even. The walls of the room are painted a light violet and blue floral pattern (based on images from Powell and Pressburger‘s movie Black Narcissus–a movie about Western sexuality repressed by religiosity and unmoored by its encounter with the exotic eroticism of the Himalayas–and painted on the wall by a team of professional scenic painters, according to the guard we spoke to). This helps transform the scale of the room in a way that is humanizing and welcoming, a large public space that one wants to spend time in, go back to, a vivid Botanical Gardens of painting.

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The way I’ve described the show here is to give a sense of the experience floor by floor. There are some critical issues, or issues one could have a discussion about: how do these work somehow radiate a sincerity opposite from works from the New Expressionist period that share some of the same references to between the World Wars European stylization of the figure? Is the role and critical reception of stylized figuration, vivid pigmentation of painting, vivid patterning and gaudy surface different when the artist is a person of color with ties to Africa , now living in the Caribbean? How is the reception different if similar images are presented by a male artist or a female artist? The work itself resists these, often unspoken problematics, and this is part of their strength and affirmation.

Monday December 22 *

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I went to MoMA yesterday and saw this really interesting painting by Benny Andrews: it is large, bold, arresting. Not a perfect painting–what appears to be a mutilated body covered by a crumpled American flag is awkward, not just disturbing, which it is, but awkwardly drawn, with strong foreshortening and the crumpled three dimensional cloth of the flag intruding into our space, and yet the painting, No More Games from 1970–is all the more powerful because of that awkwardness, a smoother painting would not be as effective, would be a contradiction. Each element means something, in the way that everything means something in a Northern Renaissance painting, there is iconography going on here, but iconography that is invented and adapted to speak to a desperate situation, a broken dream, the desperation of rebellion perhaps. Iconography is an important terms because in fact the painting also has a strong biblical reference, the painting is organized around a tree of knowledge and of patriotism that has been ravaged, leaving only the stump and the snake. Eve has been murdered for her sins–not sure about the sexual politics of this painting because its overall politics seem mainly about something other than sexual politics–and Adam sits with the body. Is it his crime?

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The sun shines bleakly on bare canvas, it has burned the background away to a stark empty apocalyptic desert, and the figure of the man, “Adam” has a shade, a flat black shadow silhouette who springs from the same pair of high tops as the figure. This figure is very inventively painted and very sculptural, both representationally and literally, wearing a real T-shirt stuck on him like clothes on a paper doll.

No More Games. What a title for this moment, what a day to see it, when the senseless massacre of cops in NY arrives to devastate and demonize a budding civil rights movement.

A really strong painting, it would be nice if the museum saw fit to put some more lights on it, though the lower light on the right hand side and the fact that the painting is right off the escalator, in the hallway, means one comes upon it, the way you discover something powerful in the subway or on a street wall. By the way, the hallway seems to be the installation spot of choice for–often figurative (and perhaps not coincidentally often political)–paintings by “others,” Alice Neel, Robert Colescott near the bathroom a few months ago. No More Games is by far the painting that remains with me from all the paintings I’ve seen in the past few days, it is a political essay–a trying something out, as a painting it is trying something out in painting: Rauschenbergian–that is, post-War, use of the real on a flat modernist picture plane, within a Renaissance representational program, to speak to a political history that is rarely faced, especially within painting.

The painting is on the third floor, just outside a really good installation of late 60s/70s painting, sculpture, and video. The painting’s installation outside of the illuminating historical presentation is both insulting and fitting, given its subject matter, which cannot be properly contained within the institution.

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The mice will play

If you are an artist or just about anyone participating in the art world, this is not the week to email anyone, or send announcements about anything, or, indeed write a blog post that focuses on anything but the shiny smooth surfaces presented on art media coverage of the fairs: nothing will be heard except the concentration of commerce in Miami.

The cats are away, so at what will the mice play?

Meanwhile at night the streets and highways of New York resonate with people materializing in one neighborhood and then another, chanting “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” What can the mice who are not gathered in the brightly lit agora, and those who are, do about the present injustices, if anything? What is the worth of a single artist’s voice or even the voice of a people?

This summer I was captivated by an essay by Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig, “Josephine, Or Streaking The Territory,” in his 2013 book Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity.Through it I learned of a short story by Franz Kafka, his last short story, “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.” The concept of an artist’s work as a “weak event,” barely different from the work of the other mice people yet vital to their sense of community, the image of the artist who is as conceited and contemptuous of her audience as she is justifiably admired and heroic, the artist whose song is at best a “gentle streaking of the territory”–all these weak indicators of the generous egotism and valiant futility of the artist offer a model for artistic engagement with the body politic which, by recognizing futility and significance alike, might give an artist some tiny bit of hope for the meaning of the work.

Here are the pages of the short text interspersed with some quotes from Kafka’s story:

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Is the artist any different than the rest of her people?

Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

Is it in fact singing at all? Although we are unmusical we have a tradition of singing; in the old days our people did sing; this is mentioned in legends and some songs have actually survived, which, it is true, no one can now sing. Thus we have an inkling of what singing is, and Josephine’s art does not really correspond to it. So is it singing at all? Is it not perhaps just a piping? And piping is something we all know about, it is the real artistic accomplishment of our people, or rather no mere accomplishment but a characteristic expression of our life. We all pipe, but of course no one dreams of making out that our piping is an art, we pipe without thinking of it, indeed without noticing it, and there are even many among us who are quite unaware that piping is one of our characteristics. So if it were true that Josephine does not sing but only pipes and perhaps, as it seems to me at least, hardly rises above the level of our usual piping—yet, perhaps her strength is not even quite equal to our usual piping, whereas an ordinary farmhand can keep it up effortlessly all day long, besides doing his work—if that were all true, then indeed Josephine’s alleged vocal skill might be disproved, but that would merely clear the ground for the real riddle which needs solving, the enormous influence she has….

After all, it is only a kind of piping that she produces. If you post yourself quite far away from her and listen, or, still better, put your judgment to the test, whenever she happens to be singing along with others, by trying to identify her voice, you will undoubtedly distinguish nothing but a quite ordinary piping tone, which at most differs a little from the others through being delicate or weak. Yet if you sit down before her, it is not merely a piping; to comprehend her art it is necessary not only to hear but to see her. Even if hers were only our usual workaday piping, there is first of all this peculiarity to consider, that here is someone making a ceremonial performance out of doing the usual thing.

But we listen to the artist precisely because of her imperfections, which attract more than the artist who is trained and proficient:

She gets effects which a trained singer would try in vain to achieve among us and which are only produced precisely because her means are so inadequate. …This piping, which rises up where everyone else is pledged to silence, comes almost like a message from the whole people to each individual; Josephine’s thin piping amidst grave decisions is almost like our people’s precarious existence amidst the tumult of a hostile world. Josephine exerts herself, a mere nothing in voice, a mere nothing in execution, she asserts herself and gets across to us; it does us good to think of that. A really trained singer, if ever such a one should be found among us, we could certainly not endure at such a time and we should unanimously turn away from the senselessness of any such performance.

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The artist is the individual who steps forward at times of need and gives all her strength to the song:

Our life is very uneasy, every day brings surprises, apprehensions, hopes, and terrors, so that it would be impossible for a single individual to bear it all did he not always have by day and night the support of his fellows; but even so it often becomes very difficult; frequently as many as a thousand shoulders are trembling under a burden that was really meant only for one pair. Then Josephine holds that her time has come. So there she stands, the delicate creature, shaken by vibrations especially below the breastbone, so that one feels anxious for her, it is as if she has concentrated all her strength on her song, as if from everything in her that does not directly subserve her singing all strength has been withdrawn, almost all power of life, as if she were laid bare, abandoned, committed merely to the care of good angels, as if while she is so wholly withdrawn and living only in her song a cold breath blowing upon her might kill her.

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The audience is in part competitive and dismissive, in part enraptured:

But just when she makes such an appearance, we who are supposed to be her opponents are in the habit of saying: “She can’t even pipe; she has to put such a terrible strain on herself to force out not a song—we can’t call it song—but some approximation to our usual customary piping.” So it seems to us, but this impression although, as I said, inevitable is yet fleeting and transient. We too are soon sunk in the feeling of the mass, which, warmly pressed body to body, listens with indrawn breath.

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The artist feels “it is she who protects the people. When we are in a bad way politically or economically, her singing is supposed to save us, nothing less than that, and if it does not drive away the evil, at least gives us the strength to bear it.”

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Those who feel that art must have an objective function based on objective research that is objective, or those who both insist that art fulfill a transformative critical function yet reject fantasies of resistance, might find what Josephine gives the people a bit too idealistic:

Here in the brief intervals between their struggles our people dream, it is as if the limbs of each were loosened, as if the harried individual once in a while could relax and stretch himself at ease in the great, warm bed of the community. And into these dreams Josephine’s piping drops note by note; she calls it pearl-like, we call it staccato; but at any rate here it is in its right place, as nowhere else, finding the moment—wait for it—as music scarcely ever does. Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated. And indeed this is all expressed not in full round tones but softly, in whispers, confidentially, sometimes a little hoarsely. Of course it is a kind of piping. Why not? Piping is our people’s daily speech, only many a one pipes his whole life long and does not know it, where here piping is set free from the fetters of daily life and it sets us free too for a little while. We certainly should not want to do without these performances.

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What will the artist have contributed? What will be left of the song?

The time will soon come when her last notes sound and die into silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing was already past losing in this way that our people in their wisdom prized it so highly?

Georg Flegel (1561-1638), Still Life with Mouse and Parrot, Coll. Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

Thanks for the Memories: The Whitney and The Breuer Building Years

Today the Whitney Museum is ending its 48 years in its Marcel Breuer building on 75th and Madison with a 36 hours marathon. The building was open through the night last night and will close tonight October 19 at 11PM.

I had thought about going at midnight but decided that I had said my goodbyes earlier in the month when I was one of the last people in the New York art world to see the Jeff Koons show.

Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that every New York artist has a deep relationship of a kind of ownership of the Whitney in that building, which is the only place where most of us knew the Whitney Museum. Perhaps because it felt like family, we often have been angry at it, the Biennials rather like Thanksgiving dinners, something where you’re disappointed by some of the food, you have a lot of resentment about who was there, you feel it’s gone downhill but you’ve learned a lot from it, and you look forward to the next one. There have been so many exhibitions of note in this building and it has been such a quirky idiosyncratic but intimate place to experience art! I have not yet seen the new building, all the way on the west side, huge, filled, we are told, with the requisite large performance spaces for a more spectacular culture, and not near any public transportation, which marks it as another kind of place entirely than the cosmopolitan urban space and the kind of urban life that marked the New York of the modernist era.

On my last visit, ostensibly to see the Jeff Koons show, I also felt I was saying goodbye to the building, even though that is irrational since the building will remain as a space in which contemporary art will be exhibited. The Metropolitan Museum has deep pockets and takes good care of its properties, and also they have a limited multiyear lease only, until 2023, not ownership, but the Met, as much as I dearly love it, also has a tendency to tart things up with little extra luxuries that might be in the wrong taste in Breuer’s austere though warm building, so a lot depends on how much of the building’s interior is landmarked and how much the Met is interested in respecting the building’s interior as a modernist art work. The size and proportion of the rooms, the elegant brut nature of the stone floors and concrete ceilings, the inset lightbulb fixtures, and the relaxed configuration of the small lobby, the quiet of the stairwell, are as much part of the experience as the art seen, and confer dignity to the visitor to the museum. The art’s adaptation to that space, and the fact that the museum was just not that big also contributed to the possibility of an intimate experience, something that is now considered undesirable by most museums because it relies on art and the individual experience of the viewer with the artwork, rather than on a contemporary social network experience writ large and targeted for iPhone documentation rather than contemplation and private thought.

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Even the Koons exhibition benefited from its interaction with this space. I had seen the blue balls works at Zwirner a couple of years ago and the chill of the white plaster in the large white space, clean bright white on clean bright white–which I somehow imagine will be the temperature of style of the new Whitney’s interior–was synergistically antipathetic to the human whereas at the Breuer Whitney, the concrete ceiling with its service ducts bare, created a useful counterpoint to the chill of these particular works by Koons, just as the sculptural ceiling of the 4th floor provided a counterpoint of some helpful gravitas to Koons’ Play-Doh sculpture.

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I started my last visit at the top on the 5th floor, where some of the museum’s permanent collection was on view arranged along the theme of gifts to the museum. I was particularly struck and moved by the fortuitous juxtaposition of two large square paintings, one by Helen Frankenthaler, the other by Grace Hartigan. Hartigan has never struck me as the strongest of the three major women artists of the Abstract Expressionist New York School era, the third being Joan Mitchell, and Frankenthaler’s mid-late career works could get very rote and boring, but this was a very strong Frankenthaler and a complex Hartigan which seemed to gain strength from its neighbor’s bold clarity.

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Like everyone else I took lots of pictures of Koons’ shiny objects. I happen to like some of Koons work very much, while despising other works and the show was equally distributed among the ghastly vulgar sexist, and the sublimely mirrored iconic. I particularly enjoyed taking a picture of myself in the purple balloon tondo that reflected the entire room it was exhibited in, including the great asymmetrical window.

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I also noted on a trip to the ladies’ room on the second floor that the Whitney was acting like anyone who is moving out of a place: there were empty shelves where exhibition displays normally would be, the utility closet was gaping open in the bathroom, and why repair loose fixtures, let the next tenant take care of it.

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Finally I sat in the lobby. The museum bookstore, in recent days reduced to last bits and pieces, was once one of the really useful art bookstores of New York, it had no special room, just shelving in a smallish area near the coat check–hey guys I know many of your faces and you’ve been nice and I hope you all keep your jobs– and in addition to the requisite museum-branded chatchkes, there was a great selection of art books including art theory and criticism, selected by people who cared about books (I was honored to have my books there, or maybe just Wet, not sure now but anyway, honored because the selection was thoughtful and the space limited). In recent years there were fewer books and a less diverse and critical selection. The Met has a talent for proliferating gift shops, I don’t mind so long as they leave that open casual feeling that made the lobby of the building seem like a living room of a family you knew.

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I thought of all the exhibitions I had seen in this building through the years. I decided to look back through the Museum’s website of past exhibitions to recall some great shows but their current website only goes back to 2006. I won’t go hunting through my notes over the years, but will just select a few from over the years that have stayed in my memory.

Starting from the top of my head, some of the memories have not been substantiated by factual research: I distinctly remember a work by Richard Tuttle that was simply a white wall that one gradually realized had inset into its flat surface a rotating disk, white on white. The wall turned. I think I did see such a piece but I don’t think or haven’t been able to prove that it was a Tuttle, so I did see this but now I’m not sure whose work it was (this goes back to the 1970s I think). An early reader of this post tells me it was most likely Rotating Circle by Charles Ray from 1988, must be, and most likely then in a Biennial from that era, interesting how the memory shifts information from one place to another.

In a Biennial before 1974 or 75, or in a group show at any rate, I noticed little oval steelwool-like pads installed in spaces that normally would not contain art–above a red exit sign, outside the building–but that called attention to themselves with a strange intensity that marked them as art. Some time later later Richard Artschwager gave a lecture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and I discovered that these mysterious piece were his blps which also appeared in other media in other exhibition/non-exhibition spaces over the years.

In a Marsden Hartley retrospective at the Museum in 1980 curated by Barbara Haskell, an early Hartley painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, from the early 20th century, its forms abstracted and the surface painted in a late pointillist Signac-inspired manner, was hung at the beginning of the exhibition in a large room to the right side of the elevator, and as you stood in front of it, you could see from across the floor to the last room, to the left of the elevator, one of his last group of paintings of the same subject, from the early 1940s, the forms even more abstracted with a flatter surface, with bolder, less sugary colors, and a more extreme sense of emotional definition. Thus one could see embodied the meaning of a lifetime of work as an artist.

In a Biennial in the early 1980s, from across a very large space, I spot a very small painting, the first time I recall seeing a painting by Bill Jensen, when his surfaces were thick, scraped, much more intense and dense than his most recent work. In that period I was beginning to consider painting with oil and both Jensen’s scraped, palette knifed surfaces and the surfaces of Hartley’s late works, painterly and sculptural also, even when relatively thin, were both helpful mentors in my transition to this difficult rich medium.

An mid-career retrospective of Elizabeth Murray: at the opening I seem to remember that Elizabeth is carrying one of her young daughters in her arms, a powerful image for people to see. A painting I have never been able to see or find an image of since remains in my memory: a large work though made of relatively small shaped fragmented parts arranged in the shape like a giant abstracted question mark. Did I see this? Have I reshaped it in memory the way I did the Tuttle? Possibly.

More recently, at the 2013 exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective, sitting alone in a room, trying to outwit the guards by just getting my iPhone enough out of my bag to surreptitiously snap a picture of works by DeFeo from the early eighties which I had never seen and whose greatness left me feeling crushed because I had never seen them before, because they needed to be in the history of American painting from their period, not an addition after the fact.

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Some more personal memories: of the night my mother dressed up to go to the opening public reception for the 1966 inauguration of the new Breuer building as the guest of a friend who taught architecture at Harvard and I think was friends with Breuer. She fussed over the right dress and to find the best dress she could afford, and then I remember hearing about the crush of people. The last art exhibition I took her to see was Picasso and American Art, in the fall of 2006, forty years later. The rooms were very crowded, she felt unwell and had to sit down while I looked at the second half of the show. In a further concession to the frailty of her great age, we took a cab home across the park instead of the bus as we once would have done. Nevertheless, sitting in the cab, she said firmly, “it’s the kind of exhibition that makes you want to go home and work.” I should add that my mother Resia Schor was an artist. She was 94 and died a few weeks later, just before her 95th birthday.

Another memory: someone gave me an invitation they couldn’t use, to the opening of Jasper Johns’ retrospective at the Whitney in October 1977. I floated around, young and solitary. At that point in my life, at 27, despite personal ambition, I could look at art world events and careers with a sense of impersonal distance, or rather, I had ambitions certainly but no expectations in that moment, I could watch the scene with interest but not personal jealousy. At one point I found myself in a small room off the main hall, from which I could see Jasper Johns, surrounded by admirers, magnetically elegant in an impeccable tuxedo. I happened to be alone in the room with Richard Serra, who, surly and probably sweltering in the heavy wool brown tweed jacket he was wearing, seemed like a working class character at an upper-class gathering in a 1920s British novel. I didn’t know him of course, but I did know it was him. I was struck by the discomfort of his jacket, and I sensed his fury at being at an event glorifying another artist–Why not him? When him?–and why was that artist such a James Bond like character, damn him, so handsome and so beautifully dressed!

The 2005 exhibition of Edward Ruscha’s series of paintings, Course of Empire, his contribution to the 51st Venice Bienale, was one of the most unusual exhibitions at the museum in recent years and the most strikingly effective uses of the space. This exhibition as I recall was an opportunistic event, arranged in a relatively short time frame, and taking advantage of all the walls from a recent Biennial (or perhaps some other major exhibition) having just been taken down to create an unusually broad open space for a very interesting installation of the paintings in a kind of foreshortened vista, an avenue bordered by paintings with a small room to the side a few versions or the complete cycle of The Course of Empire by the nineteenth century American artist Thomas Cole. The contrast between Ruscha’s flat portrayals of American commercial architecture and Cole’s bizarre imaginings of the rise and fall of ancient Rome was very curious and thought provoking. When I saw this show I was practically alone with the work and the space, one of my favorite experiences.

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Many many more memories of so much art, thanks for the memories, and goodbye Whitney Museum of American Art at the Marcel Breuer Building, it’s been swell, and I hope the Whitney comes to regret its decision to leave it, and returns when the Met’s lease is up, to have a second, more intimate and experimental space for its collection and special exhibitions.