A spot of bird-watching. From markdionbartram on flickr.

In June, the contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports (and regular columnists on this site) featured an interview with artist Mark Dion. Dion said something in the interview that has stuck with me since I first heard it, a nagging little idea, one that has the potential to undercut the relevancy of great swaths of contemporary art. Reflecting on his experience as an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Natural History in London, Dion said:

[T]here were some scientists who really could not communicate to me what it is that they do. And I’m not a scientifically illiterate person, I know a thing or two. And yet there’s some people whose specialties are so precise that it’s really hard for them to communicate to anyone but people in their field. … That creates a very complicated situation for a society that has to make things like public policy around issues like genetics technologies. …We’re no longer able to have a shared language because the fields of knowledge are so great.

Elsewhere in that interview Dion’s installation practice, steeped in natural history and appropriation, is described as an “anthropology of -ologies,” a catalogue of ways to catalogue. He describes himself, paradoxically, as a “professional dilettante,” making his living as an amateur who’s interested in everything. Dion’s work is successful in bridging gaps between the way science and art order information, but the destructive power of the idea he brings up goes far beyond what a single practitioner can repair. If there are scientists that cannot describe what they do to an informed amateur like Dion, how much worse must it be for artists? At least the diverse disciplines of science all share the basic assumptions of the scientific method. Artists, on the other hand, are not only diverse in what they investigate and produce, but also in the foundational methods and motivations for doing art in the first place.

Mark Dion, "Summum Bonum Quod Est Magia, Cabalae, Alchymae et Artis," 2004. Lithograph, 31 x 24 3/4 inches, Edition of 20. Collaboration with Robert Williams. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

Dion morns the death of the dilettante, the armchair intellectuals of yesteryear that dabbled in art, science, and philosophy with equal enthusiasm. While we’ve gained a lot by deepening specialization, something is slipping away, as well. If an intelligent amateur cannot have a working understanding of the zeitgeist of both the arts and the sciences, are the futures of each discipline doomed to exponentially shrinking audiences of super-specialists?

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Following is the second half an interview Elizabeth Wolfson conducted with Vasif Kortun. Read part one here. — Ed.

Photo courtesy of Vasif Kortun.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the trajectory of recent Turkish art history. As Chief Curator and Director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial  in 1992, Kortun completely changed the spirit of the event, shifting its focus from a national to an international one. By inviting artists from around the world to participate, Kortun facilitated the introduction of a great number of foreign artists to Turkey and of Turkish artists to the international community.

In addition to his groundbreaking curatorial work both within Turkey and abroad, he is also the founder and director of several contemporary art spaces in Istanbul that provided unprecedented research and exhibition resources to the Turkish art community and nurtured an entire generation of artists. This work began with ICAP Istanbul Contemporary Art Project (1998-2000) but was primarily conducted in the two institutions he opened in 2001, Proje4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. In 2007, Kortun began work on a new, even larger institution, scheduled to open this April, whose details he discusses in this interview, continued from Part I.

Elizabeth Wolfson: So obviously these archives, your library, are a very important part of the work of this institution.

Vasıf Kortun: It sits at the core of what we do.

EW: Where do you think the impulse to devote so much of your resources to these types of activities comes from?

VK: Well I know where it comes from personally—my father was in press distribution, so I grew up coming home to piles of printed materials. In high school we had an amazing library at a time when nobody had books in their homes—maybe some people did—or the idea of libraries in a high school was just unthinkable. I was a horrible student, but I spent most of my time in the library. And that was just great.

The lack of databases in Turkey, the lack of networked materials, it leads to the kinds of mistakes that I made as well. When I was starting out I thought “Oh I’m the first this, I’m the first that,” this kind of youthful arrogance, is actually the result of this erasure. You can do this because no one’s contesting you. Three dictatorships, three coups d’etat…. It makes it easy to make mistakes.

EW: Because with each regime change, erasure takes place.

VK: A very serious one, each time. So all of these things combined, I don’t know, from the early 1990s I really wanted to have a space in Istanbul where I could have a library. These days it’s not as critical, because the library is not a space anymore.

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Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Courtesy Patti Smith Archive.

“I don’t know why my pictures come out looking so good,” photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once told his brother. “I just don’t get it.” He had that innate knack for beauty, an artist’s touch in the most classical sense. This made his “obscenity”—those S&M images from the X Portfolio and the fetishized African-American bodies from The Black Book (after noting the X Portfolio reminded him of Caravaggio, Velasquez, and Correggio, critic Dave Hickey concluded, “These images are too full of art to be ‘about’ it.”)—so complicated. It was bathed in expertise, an expertise that made even the most liberal of art aficionados uncomfortable because of its often aggressive indifference to its own political implications.

Mapplethorpe’s expertise has now become the property of Los Angeles. Or, at least, earlier this week, when the Getty Trust and Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced they would be acquiring Mapplethorpe’s archives, reporters, critics, and spokespeople almost immediately began to postulate about what this meant for the city. It accelerated L.A.’s rise to art capital status (we’ve been “rising” for so long now we must have started somewhere subterranean), or it made L.A. the sole center for Mapplethorpe study. L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight even wrote up an argument for why the work of Mapplethorpe, an expressly New York artist, belonged in the city of angels. It had to do with L.A.’s early association—dating back to the time of Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and others—with “straight,” “pure” photography, a legacy Mapplethorpe explicitly fed off of and then “slyly” “queered.”

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Cairo International Airport, Terminal 1, January 30, 2011. Photo by Alex Freedman.

On January 31, BA177 hummed with mixed messages. Tourists who’d been vacationing in Cairo’s International Airport sighed with relief. Evacuated expats who left their homes doubled up on tiny vodkas. Several Egyptians heading out on tickets booked long in advance chatted with nervous hope about the revolution’s success. And in first class, an Egyptian family of three sat comfortably, having sped directly up to the airplane, bypassing the marathon queues that could only be described as inevitable in an airport armed on security-lite.

To counter protesters’ tenacity, the government had shutdown the Internet, the curfew had moved from 4 to 3pm, tanks had rolled into residential areas, plainclothes police offers were sparking mayhem, and fighter jets had been released over Tahrir. Concentrated on the octogenarian control freak in question, my thoughts turned to the Egyptian Military Museum and a work no one needs to be tweeting about: the mammoth painting of Hosni surrounded by parades, pyramids, and the most romantic looking pigeons ever painted by anonymous North Koreans. Letting go, I imagined the museum’s curator going rogue and burning the work as a performative gesture in celebration of Egypt Rising: Part Let My People Go, and laughed out loud wondering: had it really been only a week since I told one of my students that if she wanted to set fire to her paintings to voice her frustrations that I wouldn’t think it Haraam?

Hosni Mubarak in Abdeen, unknown North Korean painter, ca. 1993. Photo by Alex Freedman.

Last month, Lindsay Lawson and I directed a weeklong intensive Internet art and professional skill-building workshop, Future Tense, for a group of young Egyptian artists-in-residence at MASS-Alexandria, a new space opened by Wael Shawky last November. At the time, I joked that we’d fulfilled the government’s paranoid delusion that American elements were out to alter young minds, and in hindsight it seems almost too ironic that Future Tense began as Tunisia’s Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and wrapped up as Egyptians took to the streets. MASS-Alexandria’s inaugural residents are typical young artists: creative producers searching for a means to articulate themselves, the world, and the future, falling short at times and succeeding at others. But alongside the universal questions young artists wade through was their inspiringly collective desire to conceptually dwarf what they’d seen and made before. To acquire the means to renew art, their educational system, their communities, and their country. Coming into it, I never imagined that a group of ten predominately hijab-donning women, would open up so immediately, and so actively engage questions of desire, power, abuse, self, and sexuality. Or even more surprisingly, attentively critique statements in a second language six hours a day for a week straight.

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Photo courtesy of Vasıf Kortun.

Perhaps more than any other individual, Vasıf Kortun has redirected the trajectory of recent Turkish art history. As Chief Curator and Director of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992, Kortun completely changed the spirit of the event, shifting its focus from a national to an international one. By inviting artists from around the world to participate, Kortun facilitated the introduction of a great number of foreign artists to Turkey and of Turkish artists to the international community.

In addition to his groundbreaking curatorial work both within Turkey and abroad, he is also the founder and director of several contemporary art spaces in Istanbul that provided unprecedented research and exhibition resources to the Turkish art community and nurtured an entire generation of artists. This work began with ICAP Istanbul Contemporary Art Project (1998-2000) but was primarily conducted in the two institutions he opened in 2001, Proje4L Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum and the Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. In 2007, Kortun began work on a new, even larger institution, scheduled to open this April, whose details he discusses in this interview, to be published in two parts. Stay tuned tomorrow for the second half of this interview.

Elizabeth Wolfson: Let’s start at the beginning. Can you talk about your involvement with the Curatorial Studies program at Bard [College] in the 1990s?

Vasıf Kortun: Ah, the Curatorial Studies program. I started the museum there. And the library and all of that stuff. I was there for almost four years.

EW: This was in the ‘90s?

VK: ’93 to’97.

EW: Are you still involved with the college or the space?

VK: No, I was there for a couple of days last year giving a talk to a graduate class. On and off. But there’s no structural affiliation.

EW: What was that experience like, working with the college and founding that program?

VK: It was an interesting situation for me. I had never been in that situation before. There was no precedent, so you could do whatever you wanted. Or you could do anything you wanted in the sense that there was no index.

I thought it could be an experimental space, a big laboratory. That was my main position, figuring out how to move the institution from one place to another. And there was just the beginning of the first major curatorial generation, of people who are now in their forties and late forties. And none of them were in institutions at that time. And the American exhibition practice, especially institutional practice, was just absolutely awful. Extremely conservative, downright stupid, uninteresting. I mean there are always a few people doing interesting things, but overall really bad. So that was the idea, but it became kind of more corporate, after I left. It started doing regular exhibitions as if it could be in Manhattan. And then it moved again under Tom Eccles, it got more interesting.

But it was like a learning experience for me, testing things out in a genuine, almost naïve way.

EW: It seems like a lot of your work has been about testing out new ways of running art institutions and doing curatorial work.

VK:  The opportunity that was presented, that kind of method space, that kind of way of working, the Bard program was quite right for that kind of thing. And we did well at the time. In 1996 we received the biggest review that the New York Times has probably ever written on an institution. And you don’t get space in the New York Times, there are a lot of institutions out there. So all of these things are great, you get kind of a context. It also allowed me to build a kind of network context with people who I thought were very interesting at the time, people I wanted to work with. So all of those things gelled at the time. And then I came back [to Istanbul].

But the Platform thing was also kind of chance, in a way.

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Two comments from the recent When One Day is Not Enough post inspired me to write a little bit more. Plus, I want to pass along a superb video link this week before I go.

First, this from Erin:

As an art teacher, I find that the point about “Talk{ing} with kids seriously about their work” is one of the most valuable tips for incorporating art into a child’s life. I teach high school students, and they often don’t want to talk about their work, or will say “I don’t know” when asked a question. However, when I start the discussion offering constructive feedback and praise, the student opens up and will often start talking about their work as well. Simply saying, “its great” does not foster a discussion, and feels forced. By beginning a discussion, a student can begin to understand that art has the power to open dialogue and be more than just a “pretty picture”.

Erin’s point about starting a discussion is so important. Students will indeed open up if we begin to ask questions and convey that we truly want to learn more about what’s behind the work. What’s the idea? Where did the inspiration come from? I often remind students in class discussions that if they think something is great (or not so great), they need to explain what is great about it. This is obviously good to remember as teachers, too.

Responding a few days later, Martin had this to say:

Many people lose their creativity when they get older. As children they could paint, draw, sing and dance. But after a while they “lose” it. I think it is because of “expectation”. First they feel what others expect from their creative works. And after a while children expect the same from themselves.
Of course its not the “end of creativity” – it’s the end of being creative.

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The other day I was sitting in a confessional of a church and I asked the priest why most MFA programs were two years long. He replied, “my son, the Lord your God determines the length of your path. Sooner or later, the celebration must end and your work must begin.”

Jeffrey Augustine Songco, "It's Happening!" Courtesy the artist.

After confession, I sat for a while in the pews, eyeing the brown paneling creeping up the walls. I dropped my head back and stared at a black joint on the ceiling where one wooden beam crossed another, and I asked Him for help. I asked Him to help me arrive at a proper display for my thesis exhibition in May. I asked Him if the catalogue text and images I submitted that day would be relevant by the time they were published in three months. I asked Him what I would be doing the day after commencement.

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Whenever I tell someone I am studying for my Master’s at The Courtauld, I get one of two reactions. “The what?” is the first, spoken by those who aren’t in the art loop. And the second is a response of excitement and praise, spoken by those working in the arts and knowing full well the caliber of the institution. Tucked into the north-west side of Somerset House and facing The Courtauld Gallery, The Courtauld Institute of Art finds itself at the epicenter of art historical education and conservation studies as well as in the heart of London, with a finger on the pulse of the art world.

An idyllic view of the courtyard of Somerset House, the location of The Courtauld. Photo: Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin.

After realizing that art needed to be central in my life (and that an additional degree was necessary to do so), I asked around about potential programs. The refrain repeated again and again: The Courtauld. With a focused, one-year (well, more like 9-month) MA, The Courtauld seemed to be just the type of academic and artistic immersion I was looking for in taking the next step towards a career in the arts.

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Oliver Herring, " Seniors: Center Stage," 2010. Production still. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In this week’s roundup, Oliver Herring brings senior citizens center stage, Cindy Sherman shows us her favorites, Matthew Ritchie celebrates MIT’s anniversary, Susan Rothenberg straddles divide,s and more.

• Oliver Herring‘s Seniors: Center Stage, made its American debut at Goddard House in Wocerster (MA).  This short art video film was shot at three retirement communities and documents the artist working with a segment of the population that is often overlooked in contemporary art.  The film was created for the Aichi Triennale, in Nagoya, Japan, last year.

• Cindy Sherman: Works from Friends of the Bruce Museum features works, drawn from ten local, private collections in Greenwich (CT) and the surrounding communities of Cindy Sherman herself.  The exhibit is comprised of 30 artworks, including large-scale black-and-white and color photographs, and features the artist’s favored themes.  The show closes April 23.

• John Feodorov will be a part of Portland State University’s MFA Lecture Series.  These free public art lectures take place almost every Monday night of the school year. Feodorov’s lecture will be on February 14.

• Mark Dion visited Portland State University to research the concept of museum. As a result of this activity an exhibition is scheduled to open on May 14, 2010 as part of the Open Engagement conference in Portland, OR.

• Matthew Ritchie is part of MIT’s 150th anniversary celebration, a three-month festival that showcases groundbreaking projects.  A forum moderated by Professor Caroline A. Jones explored MIT’s artistic culture in the late 1960s, when concepts like cybernetics, systems theory and artificial intelligence were reverberating throughout the art world. Ritchie, a contributor to MIT’s public art collection, was a panelist.

• Susan Rothenberg debuts at Miami Art Museum in Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, an exhibition that straddles the “divide between the figurative and abstract with works depicting animals and humans rendered from odd perspectives, often in midstride.” This selection of 25 canvases spans Rothenberg’s 35-year career. The exhibition is on view until March 6.

• Vija Celmins: Prints and Works on Paper is at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery (NY). The exhibition features prints by Vija Celmins such as Star Field, a luminous night sky dense with stars; Amerique, an illusionist recreation of an antique map in color aquatint; and Web 5, a filmy mezzotint of a spider web.  This exhibition closes March 26.

All of us here at Bad at Sports have loved working on our twice-monthly column for this blog, Center Field: Art in the Middle with Bad at Sports. It gives us a chance to “slow-blog” a bit, to dig deeper into areas and issues pertaining to Chicago and Midwest-area art that daily blogging doesn’t always allow. But we’ve been feeling the need to add a bit more of that unique Bad at Sports…um… flavor that can only come from live, off-the-cuff conversations. And so…voila! A new monthly segment that we’re adding to our ongoing column called “Fielding Practice.” Each month, Bad at Sports’ Duncan MacKenzie and I, along with Chicago artist and art writer Dan Gunn, will sit ourselves down and talk about what’s happening in the Chicago art world, with Richard Holland (who co-founded the original podcast with Duncan) providing an introduction to the show and putting his own inimitable (that means awesome) stamp on the music soundtrack. We’ll be discussing hot-button issues, reviewing shows, talking about events in Chicago that we’re excited about, and generally hanging out and shooting the proverbial shoe-shine. (Since this is Art21 though, we’ll try to keep those expletives under control). In future episodes, we’ll also corral other folks from our immediate art-environs as guest panelists.

This week, Dan, Duncan and I talk about the implications of Americans for the Arts’ newly issued National Art Index, an attempt to report on the health of the arts sector in a manner not unlike the Gross Domestic Product’s tracking of the Global National Economy. We also discuss Los Angeles’ desire to host a major art fair, perhaps under the auspices of Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. (MMPI), the group that runs the Armory Show and Art Chicago; and we consider two painting shows by Michelle Grabner (at Shane Campbell Gallery) and Pamela Fraser (at the Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage) that are currently on view. We end the segment with brief plugs for upcoming (or just-opened) Chicago exhibitions that we’re especially looking forward to seeing. We hope you enjoy our first podcast produced especially for Art21 — and that you’ll join us again in March for our next round!

Listen to or download the podcast here:

Fielding Practice Episode #1

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Below you’ll find some relevant links to the topics and works of art discussed during the podcast.

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