Finding a good 'Home' for contemporary art
A decade-old exhibit poses fresh questions
WALTHAM - A lounge chair made out of a ladder - a place to rest or a means of escape? Bare light bulbs hanging from porcelain sockets, blinking out - a picture of hope snuffed?
In 1997, curators Meg O'Rourke and Caroline Schneider organized "Broken Home," an exhibition at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York. It took on the fraught metaphor of home, which represents domesticity, familial strife, and a longing for security, and included Vito Acconci's "Ladder Lounge Chair" and Felix Gonzalez-Torres's "Untitled (March 5th) #2."
"Broken Home" was also something new - a thematic exhibit put together by professional curators, with the intent of staging a museum-quality show, rather than the usual commercial gallery fare. Most of the works didn't sell, but the show garnered plenty of attention, thanks to the appearance of such artists as Acconci, Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Gober, and Thomas Demand.
Michael Rush, the director of the Rose Art Museum, has reassembled "Broken Home" for viewers to consider more than a decade on. Nationally, our sense of security has dramatically eroded since 1997. Many of the works that deal with fear and protection, such as Jane and Louise Wilson's darkly romantic video installation, "Normapaths," featuring women prowling and breaking into rooms, and Nils Norman's little model of how to undermine police action, "Tompkins Square Park Monument to Civil Disobedience," take on an added charge, thanks to the overlay of history.
But Rush's intent is not to re-examine how we relate to home in a post 9/11 world - that's just a meaty byproduct. He's using "Broken Home" to shine the light on how more and more, the market prompts discourse about contemporary art, taking over what has been the museum's role.
The contemporary art market has been hot and hungry, and the process of anointing art stars and ratcheting up prices has sped to a frenzy. Art fairs are now the place to sell, which opens up gallery walls for more creative endeavors - but that doesn't make them any less commercial.
Museums are not as fleet; it often takes a year or more to organize a museum exhibition. Directors of museums who have a stake in contemporary art, such as Rush, must feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. "Broken Home" is his way of seizing back a little power.
It's a daring move, because museums, as places of scholarship, tend to focus on the content and form of art. They turn a blind eye to the market, at least in the cant of their exhibitions, if not in the acquisitions department. It almost seems undignified for a museum to spotlight the market's effect on art.
Yet it's necessary. Museum curators were once the tastemakers, and so were critics, and both sought to maintain a distance from the commercial end of the art world. That distance had a purpose: curators and critics should not be bought. They should be able to maintain an independent and discerning eye, and not be asked to shape exhibitions according to the whims of the market. If they're hired by commercial galleries, do they risk compromising their integrity?
Rush asks that question in his brochure for the show. It's noble, but naive, because so many art professionals have their hands in many pots. Look at O'Rourke, one of the organizers of this show, who has been critic, curator, and art dealer; today, she's a dealer for Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. Schneider, who founded a publishing company for art books, has apparently been more an observer than a seller of art.
The questions raised by this new version of "Broken Home" are still worth asking, because the system is changing. I'd love to see an exhibition of work by artists addressing this directly, but that would be difficult, because the market feeds the artists and their children.
In the meantime, we have this exhibit, which in some instances slyly nods to contemporary art's swelling, perhaps soon-to-burst bubble, by virtue of the inclusion of certain artists. Gober had a piece sell at auction last year for $550,000 (back in 1997, he didn't do too badly either - he was selling work for $100,000). Here, his "Half-Stone House" is about two feet tall, much smaller than his big-selling pieces. It has his trademark whiff of the sweetly domestic gone awry. The house hovers a few inches off its platform, ungrounded. The door is open, but the windows are dark. Ominous music should be playing in the background.
Demand's photo "Badezimmer (Bathroom)" portrays a squeaky clean corner of a bathroom. It's actually a model of a bathroom in which a German politician died under suspicious circumstances, but here it glistens, as if scrubbed of history, yet still, by virtue of being reconstructed and photographed, haunted.
A Demand photo sold at auction in February for $80,000.
The twin messages of this iteration of "Broken Home" make it a dense dose of recent art history. The Rose lets on in a brochure that some artists here sell today for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they don't stamp prices on the labels. That would color the experience of the art. But maybe they should. Because these days, a lot of art seems to be colored green. 