30/40: Benjamin Buchloh on Marian Goodman*

Stefan Stux's homepage opens with a self portrait of the gallerist and the words, “My interest lies in an engagement with art that transforms from avant garde to art history as I watch it happen.” Heavy breathing rides over a drum beat and an animated wand conjures the artists in his gallery into visibility, as though their appearance were generated from his very body. But Stux’s gallery is one of many galleries feeding in the glut. Imagine Fabian Marcaccio’s sci-fi silicone brushstrokes yawning wide at the frenzy - the urgency of there being something at stake suddenly seems lost in the din. Still, I want to imagine that galleries can have a sense of strong public art historical value, and in posing somewhere between sincerity and parody Stux reminds us that this indeed remains the ambition.

It was with some eagerness, then, that we visited Benjamin Buchloh’s curation of the Marian Goodman Gallery - it is the art historian’s job to situate cultural value as historical value. In the case of Marian Goodman and Buchloh, it is fait-accompli, as Buchloh has already written extensively about several of the artists that she carries. In fact, in a gesture not dissimilar from Stux’s above, this summer at MoMA there hung a painting by Gerhard Richter, where the painter and Buchloh, his critical champion, pose side by side before the heavy wooden doors of a church.

Buchloh is a master of describing an artist’s practice as at the cusp between one thing and another, andas the disproving of both. Goodman’s inaugural exhibition of Marcel Broodthaers is made to count in this way . Buchloh explains that Marian Goodman introduces Broodthaers to the American scene at the moment that Conceptual Art is reaching Modernism’s climax. At this climax, however, Conceptualism shed off Modernism's poetry, philosophy, historical narrative, and political representation. In the face of this, Broodthaers was acting against Modernism’s “blind aspiration” as well as Conceptualism’s “affirmative indifference towards an uncontested present.”

Elsewhere in Buchloh’s writing, Broodthaers’ work is described as an intervention of Conceptualism’s “aesthetic of administration” - the turning of pages of xerox books, or reading of wall texts as instructions, or self-referential description. In this context Broodthaers named himself the director of a museum and built the “Department of Eagles,” a manic and inexhaustible collection of all visual representations of the eagle throughout time as a symbol of ideal values, that migrates from context to context, manifesting differently in each. From Dusseldorf, Broodthaers’ eagle was a symbol of fascism, speaking from within the vehicle of conceptualism’s aesthetic of administration and simultaneously as a response to the neutralized idealist form of Minimalism’s cube.*

In the Goodman catalog, Buchloh explains one can’t deny that national cultural origins have generated the work that is accepted as international in the contemporary art scene. But how does the identity of a gallery play out in this scene? Further, how is an art historian so committed to dialectics going to describe the work of forty artists exhibited in one gallery over the course of thirty years as the expression of a gallerist? In post-historical form, that is, without “this happened and that happened,” Buchloh describes three separate epistemological force fields that give some consistency to Goodman’s discernment over the past three decades.

The first begins with Marcel Broodthaers as he is described above - the force field of those artists whose critical approach to history undoes the subject of that history. This would include not only Broodthaers but Giovanni Anselmo, Anri Sala, and Yang Fudong, and at first this is the most clearly legible category of all, depending as it does upon a cultural historical construct for its legibility.

The second epistemological field is that of chance in an administered world, and it is introduced by Sol Lewitt and Gerhard Richter. As different as their work appears, these artists are both interested in chance as well as “internalizing the very principles of technological rationality and serial production.” Buchloh describes this as a post-Cageian and anti-auratic aesthetics. John Cage is famous for deciding upon all aesthetic and personal choices in his life upon throwing the I’Ching, remaining bound to a model of self-determination as the man who throws the coin. Lewitt’s serial logic and Richter’s encyclopedic disidentification throw willfully capricious randomness into a more mechanized register. Rineke Dijkstra’s photography suddenly appears in this epistemolgical field.

The third epistemological field is that of a psychoanalytic subjectivity embedded in the phenomenological immersion of experience, where desire opens out the space of “the real” to its elisions and misrecognitions. Dan Graham’s mirrors are in the foreground here, but I see Steve McQueen’s “Five Easy pieces” as well.

Buchloh admits that there is a considerable degree of folly in his attempt to describe the singularity of one gallerist’s achievement in relation to three force fields. But the attempt has been made, and while one would be hard pressed to find a comfortable nexus for every single work in this large, two-part exhibition, there is a good deal of holding power in this articulation, and the descriptions Buchloh provides of individual artist’s projects are all the richer for them. A good art historian will always help you to see the work of art more clearly, and without any magic wands that has certainly happened here.

* This is a review of the catalog essays by Benjamin Buchloh, “Marian Goodman: Artists and Photographs,” and “40 Artists” in 30/40: A Selection of Forty Artists from Thirty Years at Marian Goodman Gallery, edited and written by Benjamin Buchloh, Marian Goodman Gallery, c. 2007.
* See Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in October, V. 75 (Winter 1996) pp.60-82.

Images:Rineke Dijkstra, The Buzz Club, Liverpool, England/Mysterworld, Zaandam, Netherlands, 1996-7. Double projection, 35mm film with sound, transferred to video or DVD; Marcel Broodthaers, Tapis de Sable, 1974, Palm tree, sand, painted cloth, 88 5/8x70 7/8x27 1/2". Both courtesy of Marian Goodman.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth