With shirts on a rack and John McCracken by the foot, the boundaries between art and fashion are falling away in giddy purveyance at Ed Winkleman’s gallery. Curated by artists Christopher K. Ho and Ivin Ballen, the press release of "The Shallow Curator" states that this is “a summer group exhibition with neither urgency nor depth. The exhibition skims the surface of art-making, buoyed by such concerns as an artist’s sense of style.” Even the word “style” thins away from the consistency and substance of art historical proper names (the clothing is designed by George McKracken, and the John McCracken is a "forgery") and enters the simultaneously more capricious and culturally determined realm of fashion. The shallowness is real - with humor and the guise of sheer laziness there is avoidance of the “seriousness” of a theme. In conversation Ed Winkleman described it as “the smartest, dumbest show ever,” and the artists worried over whether or not a critic could even be interested in this show, laughing at the thought that it might be known in the future as “the show that no critic could review.”
This humorous bemoaning of the absence of critical understanding towards the curatorial project is an art world cliché, and “The Shallow Curator” joins such recent conversations with guffaws. It is still recently that Damien Hirst’s Levi’s line was seen on the Gagosian runway, and that Triple Candie’s exhibition of unauthorized Cady Noland knock-off’s, or the monographic retrospective of a fictitious Lester Hayes, caused a stir. By the time these two extremes - the blatant commercialism of Damien Hirst and Triple Candies’ critique of the object and the role of the nonprofit in the New York art world - reach The Shallow Curator, any dialectic between them has been sapped.
For historical comparison, there is the fictitious John Dogg, allegedly created by gallerist Colin de Land and artist Richard Prince, who in 1986 hung Econoline wheel covers on the wall of Lisa Spellman’s 303 Gallery. Here is Mitchell Algus describing what he valued about the work in 2003:
In blithe retrospect, Dogg's show was casually prescient, anticipating Neo-Geo's evolution into the proactive, materially ascetic mode of institutional critique. This shift in focus— from the accessories of power to the social organization of power—was a moral one. It shed in one shot the congenial complicity of the 80s art world. Dogg's was the smart, "I can live without that," frills-free version. Just right for the then impending bust.
The Shallow Curator is notably without prescience or shift, and avoids altogether the gesture of institutional critique. Gisel Florez’s photographs of vicious dogs ripping apart cheesy but glamorous accessories are made not in order to critique planned obsolescence but to generate more commissions for her work. One can imagine such an image very differently in the hands of Barbara Kruger. Likewise, “The Spirit’s” invocation of John McCracken for “Art Within Reach” is a spoof of the new age nostalgia mystique of Carol Bove. For all it’s shallowness and humor, this show has legible intentions, and the curators conclude, “If there is an argument at all, it is to reconsider the disinterested - or “shallow” - eye of modernism, not in order to critique it but in order to expand it.”
This disinterested, shallow eye of Modernism occupies a space without concern for either aura or effect, allowing humor to fill in the blank. But The Shallow Curator’s appeal to modernity is also made with an interest in beauty and the quality of the work, frankly understood as high end luxury goods. It is for this reason that I became interested in interviewing Ed Winkleman more specifically about his gallery’s identity, known largely through the unmoderated populism of his blog. With thousands of hits a day, it is not the postings themselves that draw the attention but the heated dialogue that ensues. What can occur is that the gallery’s identity is at once subjected to the vitriolic contempt of those who think they know it, and at the same time become lost in the fray. I felt a need to hear more specifically from Ed about his gallery programming and its success in defining an identity. The exhibition described above provides an interesting context for the following interview with Ed Winkleman:
CS: What is at stake in defining a gallery around "conceptual art," and what are its boundaries as you see them?
EW: I am somewhat hesitant to go into into too much detail on the blog because the blog is somewhat polarized between anti-conceptualist formalist and pro-conceptualist, and I’m going to throw this in here, pro-conceptualist-formalist, because the more I think of it I don’t really have much interest in anti-formalist conceptualism... I myself have seen tons of conceptualist art that hasn’t raised the bar for formalism - there would need to be in my idea of conceptual art that it must be visual, it must be compelling visually. I see what conceptualist artists are doing today as very consciously pushing past what’s been done before. What I mean by that is, and this is true for all the artists I work with, and why a lot of what our program turns out to be is art history...you have to know your art history pretty well.
Jennifer Dalton is a good example of this, she has a very firm grasp of art history, her work takes visual achievements of other artists and pushes past them, using their vocabulary in ways that accomplish new things more conceptually. In “This is not news” she was dealing with a topic that she is very well known for which is women and disparity in the arts. It’s very straightforward and clearly referencing Felix Gonzalez Torres, so she’s taking this vocabulary that people know already and what Felix was doing with it was perhaps more poetic than what Jen’s doing, but because it existed as art already she was able to pull it forward.
CS: What’s interesting about it is that when people were first defining themselves as Conceptualists, when Kosuth was first defining what Conceptual Art is he was saying “We are against morphology,” and here you have someone who has this very critical sociological perspective who is reinhabiting this morphology. When people talk about conceptual art sometimes they want to make a boundary, and Alexander Alberro limits Conceptual Art from 1966-1977 and after that refers to it as “post -conceptual.” One of the reasons for at least bracketing off the earlier Conceptual Art off from the present is that they were responding to Modernist art criticism, they were responding to Modern art and we’re no longer responding to Modernism in the way that they were.
EW: I would agree that Conceptual Art has a beginning and ending as a “large C” movement, just as every other 20th century movement did, so I am using small “c” conceptualist. I would also agree with anyone that good formalists are working with interesting concepts - John McCracken is a really good example of a formalist who leans it against the wall and kind of leans into conceptualism. Where I became involved in these definitions through the blog was among the camp who began to argue that “conceptualist” as it was broadly being used is anti-aesthetic, and I don’t think it is. If you look at the progression of formalist art it is often at the edge of an aesthetic that people would call ugly, that people would not have thought at the time were necessarily formalist achievements, even though today we would argue they were, and so my ongoing response to folks who think that the conceptualists are anti-aesthetic is that no, they are pushing the boundaries. The artist is free to say it is art, to define beauty, to define aesthetics. So when contemporary formalists describe the work at our gallery as "anti-formalist" or "anti-aesthetic" my response is to a) feel it’s not their role to define that for other artists and b) conclude that they are perhaps missing something, that they have a closed set of choices or values about art.
CS: Do you feel pigeonholed into defining conceptualism?
EW: No I talk about it all day, but I feel pigeonholed in defending its value in the context of beauty, and again, in coming from Ohio, a rusty bridge to me is stunning, this [pointing to a piece by Ivin Ballen] is actually an exquisitely beautiful piece to me, it’s gorgeously composed, it’s gorgeously painted, and yet it’s referencing graffiti, it’s referencing duct tape, it’s referencing a whole bunch of things that one might not see as beautiful, but this is the Rauschenbergian argument...can you find beauty in everyday objects? Yes you can.
CS: So you also have artists like Jennifer Dalton, Yevgeniy Fiks, and Christopher K. Ho, all people who are doing sort of sociological/ethnographic conceptual work, and some of them, would you say all of them, are engaging in art history?
EW: Yevgeniy is sort of interesting in that he’s not engaging in art history as much as he’s so aware of his art history (he teaches art history) the choices he makes are made very specifically because of that awareness. Here are some paintings where he is positioning them between the Social Realist style and Sots Art, a postmodernist sort of cynical ironic painting, and both of these are sort of kitschy, so he is interested in the middle ground. Painting these portraits could only be done with a full knowledge of the critique of both. Pure formalists will only embrace a movement or rejection of that movement and advance it, he is actually going back in time and situating himself right between two other movements, not because he sees this as an advance, not because he sees it as a matter of rejecting, but because he sees very well what those two movements did politically, and he feels the best way to represent these American communists is to balance these two out.
He’s done something else that I see defining the difference between the formalists and the small ‘c” conceptualist camps which is that he’s not invested in a medium to the point of having to defend it, he’s not a painter, he’s not a photographer, so media serves his ideas - but he is a good painter!
CS: And this is something that the latest conceptual art is now taking full ownership of: a strong return to studio practice. I’m really interested in people like Joy Garnett, I think her paintings are so lusciously beautiful, but that it’s also a conceptual practice that’s holding it together.
EW: Can I say that Joy is a really good example in that where - and I haven’t been able to say this on my blog, only because when I do people take it personally and that kind of disintegrates into bickering and unpleasantness - but Joy is a wonderful example of an artist who is painting because it’s one really solid way to explore what she’s interested in, not because she’s invested in it, she’s invested in ideas, the difference goes back to dumb like a painter, she’s not dumb like a painter she’s a scientist. The difference in my mind between the formalists and the conceptualists is that the formalists are - I’m going to really regret saying this - but they are still stuck in Modernism, stuck in the essence of their media, and the folks who have rejected that and see media as a tool for their ideas are more interesting to me, because I reject the essentialism of modernism, the question stopped being what is the essence of art and became what is art, and that’s the more interesting question.
CS: Marian Goodman started with Broodthaers, but I don’t know that you could say she had a program, and that you could say this about many of the older gallerists, that they kind of just went intuitively for who they liked and lined them up. Do you think it’s different now, at a time of branding and corporate identity, that being known as a gallery that specializes in conceptual art is of an historical necessity bound to a gallery system that has changed?
EW: There’s actually three ideas in that question, one is that the model that Marian Goodman is known for is not being rejected by every dealer, I would say that Zach Feuer is following that, he talks about his gallery as having evolved in the same way, these are the artists he thinks are important and interesting, however I think we are at this point trained in terms of thinking of a program, becoming specialists, and that probably is just a sign of the times, having a specialty is expected in any field, but it’s also a response to an overwhelming amount of information, to have the faith in your own eye, that Marian Goodman, or Zach Feuer just down the street is rare, because it is demonstrating an amazing amount of faith in what you are doing.
Why did programs become popular in the first place? About 35 years ago there were people who began to specialize, Edith Halpert, for example, specifically American Art, but now we are seeing that dealers can write with incredible precision about the artists they are working with, so what led to that are two things: one, they are starting to see themselves in more creative terms, and I think that stems from the fact that a lot of artists, art historians, or critics became dealers, with creative visions, and the number of people who can live as working artists has exploded, and so like every other field when you have that much to process, to organize, specialization becomes really attractive, and so I have admiration for Marian and for Zach. When I began noticing that Marian and Zach were not following that program model it started to make me wonder whether that was a better path, and I don’t know, I think I’ve somewhat been pigeonholed as a conceptualist dealer, and I don’t mind that because I love conceptualist work, and yet I have a few artists who I don’t think of that way and I love working with them, Christopher Johnson is a really good example.
CS: I’m using the words branding and corporate identity because not too long ago there was a posting on your blog about how you used to have this other gallery, and what this gallery was going to be and that you were refining your vision, and you used the word branding,it came up in your writing.
EW: I do discuss it in those corporate terms. But the idea of assessing a gallery as a brand is at first to recognize that each of the artists you carry is themselves a brand, and so your umbrella brand had better never compete with or undercut or interfere with your individual product brands, so it is an awareness that you have an umbrella brand. Of even Gagosian, even Zach or even Marian Goodman, you would say whether Marylyn Minter either belongs or doesn’t belong with those galleries, even if you don’t think they have a specialized brand they do, there is a loose brand that definitely has a place to be discussed as such.
CS: So to be clear, you don’t want your gallery to be identified purely with conceptual art?
EW: I do want my gallery to be identified with conceptual art, I don’t want my gallery to be identified exclusively as a conceptualist gallery. I strongly believe in conceptualism, at the point where we are a lot of the most interesting art that’s happening right now is conceptualist, but knowing that the spiral will continue around, and knowing that artists who have a conceptualist practice at the moment may veer into a more formalist mode, these are artists that I want to keep working with. And the reason I want to work with conceptualist artists is that I come out of their studio visits with my head just throbbing with new ideas and I love that, and I don’t get that anywhere else, this is the most intense education I can get, and it’s not from a book, this is as living, breathing, of-a-second kind of education that I can get, and that’s incredible, that’s the real thrill of working with living artists.
By Catherine Spaeth
Image credits: George McKracken, 2009 Spring line, Available at Bergdorf Goodman and other fine stores, Installation view; Gisel Florez, Exquisite Taste (Olive), 2007,Archival Inkjet Print, 21” x 28”, Edition of 10; The Spirit, John McCracken, 2008, Aquaresin, fiberglass, 39 x 14 x 3, Available in any finish; Jennifer Dalton, This Is Not News, 2006, 5 strings of 100 light bulbs, ink on colored paper, string, Dimensions variable (each string 101 feet), Edition of 10; John McCracken, Gold, 2006, Resin, fiberglass, plywood, 93 x 16 x 3 1/2 inches, 236.2 x 40.6 x 8.9 cm, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York; Ivin Ballen, HEAVEN, 2008, Fiberglass, aquaresin, acrylic, absorbent ground, gouche, 39” x 29” x 6”; Yevgeniy Fiks, Portrait of Jarvis Tyner (Communist Party USA), 2007,Oil on canvas, 36" x 48"; Joy Garnett, Noon, 2007, Oil on canvas, 54" x 60"; Kevin Zucker, The Shallow Painting (conceptual drawing of actual painting...don't have good image of work yet), 2008,Pencil, watercolor, silkscreen and inkjet on canvas,76.5" x 52.5", Courtesy the artist and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery; Ivin Ballen, Speakers (2-Way), 2007, Fiberglass, Aquaresin, absorbent ground, acrylic, gouache, oil, stereo components, Dimensions variable.
Monday, September 29, 2008 at 08:54AM 
