1968: Eloise Spaeth and the “Art-For-Everybody Movement"

All the art supply stores had one - a freestanding circular revolving rack of books for 99 cents, with titles such as “Drawing Cats,” “Finger Painting,” or “Oriental Brushwork.” It was my grandmother, Eloise Spaeth, who in 1968 wrote “Collecting Art.” She writes,”...we live in a period more favorable to the arts than any other period in our country. Local museums and art centers are boiling with change. That bang you hear down the street is not a manhole cover blowing off; it’s the cultural explosion. Even local newspapers treat exhibitions as news, and national magazines give art valuable and expensive space.” As though describing our own time, she is also strongly against what she refers to as the “stampede collector” - those who "unwillingly help create and support an artificial art market and discourage potential collectors.” In her 99 cent pamphlet, “With a $1,000 budget you are moving into the big time.”

Her advice to the novice collector:

1. The best education you can get is from visiting the museums.

2. Do not fall into the trap of falling in love with subject matter.

3. Be aware of fads. (Apparently, in 1968 this was African art: “...word seems to have gotten about that it is the thing to have - rush out and buy African art to hang beside your Motherwell.”)

4. Do not be seduced by what is hot off the easel - ask to see those earlier works.

5. “Buy the painting that looks all wrong over the mantle, over the sofa, or in your favorite room.”

6. Your errors are half the fun.

7. “The best way to protect yourself from the scoundrels [is to avoid auctions and] make your purchases at a reputable gallery.”

8. “...don’t allow yourself to become so dependent on one dealer that your walls will look like a showroom for his group of artists.”

9. A visit to the artist's studio is not a way to buy on the cheap, but to better understand the artist and his work.

10. Most interesting is the excellent advice my grandmother had for purchasing work at department stores and museums. Here is a paragraph from the section on buying art in a department store:

Sears Roebuck pioneered in the art-for-everybody movement by employing Vincent Price, whose talents range from depicting suave movie villains to astute collecting, to roam around the world gathering vast assemblages of original works of art. But, as the operation at Sears grew bigger and more people were involved, the quality of the art declined. In the beginning, many “name” artists did original etchings for the collection; and at the present time the print section is the best in the art departments at Sears. However, it is in the complicated area of prints that many department store galleries, whether intentionally or not, are unreliable. The fact that they are ignorant of the techniques and the ethics of the print world is no excuse. They would not sew a Balenciaga label in a Seventh Avenue dress, but they will sell a restrike as a first edition print. Of course there are stores with good print departments, headed by knowledgeable people: Dayton’s in Minneapolis, Hudson’s in Detroit, and Sloan’s in New York, for example.

Fascinating is that in 1968, you could rent a painting from MoMA for a few months, with the option to buy should it grow on you. The idea began in Dayton, Ohio in the 1930’s:

The Dayton Art Institute opens its fall season with an exhibition of its rental gallery works. The director takes great pains with this show, visiting many galleries in New York City and artist's studios so as to have a wide range of paintings for the members to choose from. The paintings are hung in a large gallery with labels showing rental prices, and a calendar is prepared for every month in the coming year...The rush to get in can only be compared to the Oklahoma “run” when, as the gun went off, everyone dashed to stake out a claim.

By Catherine Spaeth

Images: Eloise Spaeth, Collecting Art, NY: Pittman Publishing Corporation, c. 1968; "The Art lending Service, Sponsored by the Junior Council of the Museum of Modern Art", ibid., p. 27; Louis Bouche, "Portrait of Eloise Spaeth,"det., oil on canvas, c. 1940s, Collection of Otto L. Spaeth, Jr.

Catherine Spaeth

Flags of Revolt and Defiance: Polly Apfelbaum

Flags are to be seen clearly from the distance of the moon, but Polly Apfelbaum’s Flags of Revolt and Defiance (2006) are sharply cut away from their traditional field. A folio of vivid silkscreens on paper, blossom templates are taken to flags of resistance ranging from the Bourbons to the Black Panthers. These templates lend themselves to the logo - typically identified more with a corporate brand than with the explicitly political communication of a flag. In collaboration with Tomas Vu-Daniel and his assistants at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Apfelbaum’s exacting precision in this medium (a precision that required two years of effort) heightens the intensity of color. Their cut of line is completely different than the bleed of color Apfelbaum is most known for, but the hold upon the viewer is no less saturating.

That these flags are intended to be hung vertically on the wall also shifts them from their horizontal register, further emphasizing the graphic field of the logo. Tacked to the wall at the top two corners and lined in rows, their presentation mimics that of a logo design exploration, as in the c. 2000 ExxonMobil example below. In viewing Flags of Revolt and Defiance, however, there is no acceptance or rejection on the basis of a desired unifying concept.

I have always associated Apfelbaum’s work with a powerful phenomenological insistence upon the materialism of direct experience, and this insistence occurs most forcefully in the horizontal field. According to the official code, a flag must never touch the ground. That a flag should have both avoidance of and claim upon the ground as what constitutes it places Flags of Revolt and Defiance in an important dialogue with what Apfelbaum refers to as her “fallen paintings.” Standing at the edges of a piece like Blossom (2001), currently on exhibit at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia , your own body defines the impermanence in the actual fragility of velvet petals laid upon the floor, and is at the same time held by the absorption of their color stains. The immediacy of “one shot painting” has been taken over and fleshed out at our feet in an array that summons the discretion of touch.

In the early ‘80s Apfelbaum was in Spain, away from the New York art scene at a time when cynicism had crept into painterly practice. While Douglas Crimp wrote “The End of Painting,” Apfelbaum was learning from Arte Povera and Supports/Surfaces that the conventions of painting and its exhibition remained quite full. More recently she began to think explicitly about horizontality and verticality as different registers in dialogue with each other.

What space does the logo occupy? There have always been the occasional artists to use a personal logo in the place of signature, such as Leonardo’s flying eyeball, or Whistler’s butterfly. And since Andy Warhol, numerous artists have appropriated corporate logos into their work. In 1968, Richard Artschwager, like Apfelbaum occupying a space somewhere between Minimalism and Pop, began to distribute his blips across a variety of architectural surfaces. But these were of a time that emphasized local incident as much as the more abstract mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. For Arstchwager, there was also the psychic effect of horizontal and vertical format - formats owing the force of their address to the difference between landscape and portraiture. When Apfelbaum flips her flags from the horizontal to the vertical register, she is also thinking of this psychic address, and at a time when the personal logo is all the rage.

For a while now I have been thinking about the increasing mobility of art. People first began talking about this when the international art star appeared, moving from site to site to install a project. The distinction between artist and curator increasingly blurred in this context. As the market for contemporary art accelerated, the walls between the museum and the market became permeable in the speed and fluidity of movement. Further, since Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton in 2003 an artwork has the mobility of a logo across a variety of surfaces. This is apparent in The Gap t-shirt campaign, and we can see it now in Google’s artist theme.

Google’s artist’s themes are a new feature for the personalized home page that, from a list of artist’s names, provides an artist's work as the banner backdrop to the Google search bar. The work of art will change over the course of the day - it is a fragment without title, known only by the proper name of the artist. And the artist’s names will range from Jeff Koons to Lance Armstrong, a bizarre blurring that can only come from the notion of art as simultaneously popular and distinctively elite - a marketer’s dream.

I can think of no artist other than Polly Apfelbaum who in Flags of Defiance and Revolt has critically inhabited the structure and history of the logo as an enterprise. At the same time, few have so critically occupied the horizontal field, exploiting the difference of its register from the vertical as a dialogue with the different aspects of each and their corresponding histories. In considering how firmly these registers can stand apart in her work, I asked Apfelbaum if she thought that while her floor pieces should not appear on Google’s theme palette, her Flags of Revolt and Defiance might have a different relation to mobility and make absolute sense there. The artist agreed.

It used to be that the autonomy of painting in the vertical register was challenged by the threat of becoming wallpaper. In our time, this threat is as likely to be seen as an invitation without challenge. In responding to the visual culture of the logo and its mobility, Flags of Revolt and Defiance positions art’s relation to visual culture in critical dialogue, rather than choosing between flight or embrace.

Image credits:Polly Apfelbaum, Portfolio Title: Flags of Revolt and Defiance, 2006, Color silkscreen, Paper Size: 30 x 19 inches each panel, Carrier: Coventry Rag, smooth, bright white, Edition Size: 27, Portfolio of 31, Courtesy of Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies; Exxon/Mobil logo presentation, c. 2000, private collection; Bubbles, 2001, synthetic velvet and fabric dye, 12 ft in diameter, Courtesy Locks Gallery, Philadelphia; Richard Artschwager, blips, 1976, Photo by Matthew, Septimus, Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; Pollly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revoltand Defiance - Yippies; Polly Apfelbaum, Flags of Revolt and Defiance - Kurdistan Worker's party; AT&T logo exploration, private collection.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth

After May: Paula Cooper's Inaugural Show, 1968

During the auction house bidding already begun over at Artworld Salon, we have to fess up to an artworld driven as much by history and the engaged dialogue of criticism as by the numbers game. That this awareness hits us in May 2008, the 40th year anniversary of May 1968, is the sad fact of our war and disaster-ridden time. Reading Arthur Danto’s take on the student take-over of Columbia doesn’t assuage the mood. He writes, “I have a kind of theory that when great social changes are about to take place, something happens in the arts first - think of Romanticism and the French Revolution...” and that “Columbia students back then had little interest in advanced art as such.”*

In France they already thought they knew this about America. The 1966 student manifesto “On the Poverty of Student Life” explains that Americans did not have a theory and as a result their actions ‘were spontaneous mass movements which collapsed because they proved incapable of grasping more than the incidental aspects of alienation,”and that American students would never come to understand that everyday life is controlled by the “psycho-humanist police force.”** Because the events of May were so huge in Paris, and artists so involved, artists there were faced with how to continue to practice on the heels of May - one example is that the Comite du Salon de la Jeune Peinture committed itself to the Communist Party, desiring to continue the project of the Atelier Populiare to change the structure of the artist’s relation to capital.

In the New York October of 1968, Paula Cooper’s inaugural gallery show was the “Exhibition to Benefit the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.” Along with Lucy Lippard and Ron Wolin the exhibition was primarily curated by Robert Huot, whose work was at that time traveling in “The Art of the Real,” MoMA’s USIA-funded show, just closed in September and about to open in Paris. Lucy Lippard described the Paula Cooper show as “a kind of protest show against the potpourri peace shows with all those burned doll’s heads,” and the first benefit exhibition of non-objective art.*** The statement of the exhibition was that:

“These fourteen non-objective artists are against the war in Vietnam. They are supporting this commitment by contributing major examples of their current work. The artists and the particular pieces were selected to represent a particular aesthetic attitude in the conviction that a cohesive group of important works makes the most forceful statement for peace.”

In appealing to an aesthetic attitude the artists were likely thinking of the recent exhibition curated by Barbara Rose, “Towards a New Aesthetic”, held at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1967. Arguing that there is nothing to constitute a style or a school in the history of American art, Rose believed that the literalism Michael Fried condemned in “Art and Objecthood” was in fact a powerful moment in contemporary art and the measure of its success. E.C. Goossen’s “The Art of the Real,” soon followed, and there was overlap between artists in each, artists who were quite willing to adopt the rhetoric of “the real” as an expression of a specifically American “aesthetic attitude.”

However, the exhibition statement prompted critic Gregory Battcock to write that while he very much liked the exhibition, in these terms it might as well be a wine tasting or a fashion show, and that “We are, as usual, being sold a package. The Modern philosophy of Madison Avenue and the packaging technologist has become everyday fact.”****And Leo Steinberg was critical of the rhetoric of the real as well, in his lecture “Other Criteria,” read at MoMA only months before the opening of The Art of the Real, stating that contemporary art has become the technological research in which the art object ‘”is declared at last to be a real thing, possessed of more “reality” than mere art ever had.”*****

The language that surrounds this show - the curator’s desires to articulate what is art historically of note for their time, and the condemnation of these attempts as mere packaging for a growing market impressed by clean and technical professionalism, belong to it equally and are by now familiar. Responding in a quite physical way to the photo of Bill Bollinger’s floor-to-ceiling tension cable as sculpture, and to the art historical fact that it was in this show that Sol Lewitt made his very first wall drawings, I find this divide to be a curious moment in the history of American art, a moment in which to have an aesthetic attitude was at the same time to get real.

As a “cohesive group of important works,” standing together to fund student opposition to war, does such an attitude count for something more than what any of these works might bring in todays auctions?

The artists: Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Robert Barry, Bill Bollinger, Dan Flavin, Robert Huot, Will Insley, Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt, Robert Mangold, Doug Ohlson, Robert Ryman.

By Catherine Spaeth

*Arthur C. Danto, “Before the Revolution,” in Artforum, May 2008, p. 100.
**Members of the Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg, “On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in it’s Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for its Remedy,” in Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968, texts collected by Dark Star, London, :A/K Press, c. 2001, p. 26.
***As quoted by Grace Glueck, Artnotes, Sunday October 27th, 1968.
****Gregory Battcock, “Reviewing the Above Statement,” in New York Free Press Critique, 31, October 1968.
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other criteria, NY: Oxford University press, c. 1972, p. 1963.

Image Credits: Installation views from "Exhibition to Benefit Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam," October 1968. Installation 1, Will Insley, Jo Baer; Installation 2, Carl Andre, Doug Ohlson; Installation 3, Robert Huot, Dan Flavin; Installation 4, Robert Mangold, Bill Bollinger, and Donald Judd. All images courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery.

Catherine Spaeth