Stuart Comer, one of the curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Geordie Wood.
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Ken Okiishi, gesture/data, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York. © Ken Okiishi.
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Ken Okiishi in his New York studio. Photo: Geordie Wood.
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Stuart Comer meets Bjarne Melgaard in his studio, Bushwick, Brooklyn. Photo: Geordie Wood
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Jacolby Satterwhite, Transit, 2014. Courtesy of Monya Rowe Gallery and Mallorca Landings Gallery.
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Dawoud Bey, Maxine Adams and Amelia Maxwell (from The Birmingham Project), 2012. Courtesy of the artist. © Dawoud Bey.
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My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade), still from Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, 2013. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
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Robert Ashley and Alex Waterman, Performance of El Parque, Vidas Perfectas, Irondale Theater, Brooklyn, NY, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Phillip Stearns.
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Dashiell Manley, Scene 3 Version B 2, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist, Redling Fine Art, and Jessica Silverman Gallery. Photo: Jeff Mclane.
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Tony Lewis, peoplecol, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman.
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Charline von Heyl, Folk Tales, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella.
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Relationship (Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, 2008). Courtesy of the artists and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles. Photo: Zackary Drucker.
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There can hardly be another curator who has worked as passionately for the medium of film as Stuart Comer. His knowledge of cinema is encyclopedic, which is why Tate Modern hired him in 2004 as its first curator of film, in which area Comer has developed an excellent collection in recent years.
Comer’s
career began in Los Angeles, where he spent his twenties befriending
many of the protagonists of the LA art scene while working in the
bookshop at the Museum of Contemporary Art. For his master’s degree he went to London—to the Royal College of Art. Now, after ten years in Great Britain, he has returned to the US as chief curator of media and performance art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and as one of the three curators of the most prominent American art event: the Whitney Biennial. Comer lives for art—in every moment.
Like Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner,
Comer is not a New Yorker, which is no bad thing. This time it was the
express goal to select curators who do not come from the city and can
bring an outside perspective. Comer is also the only curator in the
conventional sense. Grabner and Elms are both artists who have
distinguished themselves as curators, in addition to running magazines
and working at universities.
Whitney Biennial 2014The
Whitney Biennial in New York regularly ignites heated debate. Every two
years, what is arguably the most important show for US contemporary
art, sponsored since 2006 by Deutsche Bank, ventures to take stock of
the current scene. This year the three outside curators exhibit trendsetting works by
over 100 artists. Important topics are interdisciplinary works and
collective actions, abstract painting, artists and filmmakers who
write, and writers who experiment with language and sound. 7.3. – 25.5.2014
whitney.org
Rather than organizing on a single
large show, each of the three curators has been assigned their own
floor in the museum. And yet there are several common themes, such as a
concern with writing and a focus on positions that are usually
neglected by the art world, as well as an emphasis on debate around the
concept of artistic authorship, which in the twenty-first century has
become increasingly blurred and replaced by multidisciplinary,
collaborative work—for which Comer and his co-curators could also be
models: autonomous and yet cooperative.
While his appointment
caused a stir in the art world, it came as no surprise to those who
know Comer well. He is driven by an exuberant passion for art and film,
for which he works around the clock and around the globe. Indeed, the
day I speak to him is his first day off since arriving in New York, and
rather than start unpacking the moving boxes in the apartment that he
had already been in for three months, he instead opts to go out and see
the latest exhibitions in Chelsea. Cognizant of Comer’s activist stance
towards film and writing this from the unusual position of being one of
the writers that he has included on his floor, I am curious as to the
curator’s stance on the prominent role of language within the context
of this year’s Biennial.
“All art, even going back to the Renaissance,
has involved language in some form. I was always obsessed with these
Renaissance paintings where the angel would be speaking words to God
and the words would be written upside down so that God could read them.
You think about the history of language appearing in painting or how
language has informed art-making in general. In the twentieth century,
you clearly have the Dada and Surrealist movements, which were heavily involved in language. Moving forward to the concrete poets
and conceptual art, where language clearly played a central role. In
the 80s, you had loads of photo and text work where people were
constantly thinking about the media’s usage of language. The way I
think about it now, with technology and the Internet, the boundaries
between language and image are becoming much more slippery. Just as you
are constantly touching images on your iPhone—I don’t think we ever
touched images to the same degree in the past—those images are
constantly embedded in a matrix of language. For years W.J.T. Mitchell
has written about the parallels between architectural space and the
structure of cities, how such structures often resemble linguistic
structures. Similarly, a lot of visual art practices are echoes of such
systems. That’s why I was so eager to include somebody like Channa Horwitz,
where what initially looks like an abstract drawing or a
two-dimensional image is actually mathematical and the score for a
performance.”
Additionally, Stuart’s floor features some bigger
name artists who are using the Whitney Biennial as a platform for
experimenting in new, often collaborative ways. Multidisciplinarity is
key here. Bjarne Melgaard,
better known as a messy expressionistic painter and sculptor, is
working with film and furniture makers to create a room installation
based on my novel The Suiciders. Catherine Opie and Richard Hawkins have teamed up—not to show their own work, but to curate a selection of works by the deceased artist Tony Greene, whose paintings are very much involved in a dialogue with the medium of photography.
Much
of the buzz surrounding this year’s Biennial has been centered on the
curators’ inclusion of abstract painters. Curator Michelle Grabner,
herself a painter engaged with abstraction, has selected a number of
high-profile female abstract painters, including Amy Sillman and Jacqueline Humphries. Stuart points out, however, that his floor will actually contain more figurative painters, such as Tony Greene and Keith Mayerson. “I also wanted to seek out other places where painting continues to exist but in non-literal ways. There’s Jacolby Satterwhite,
who is making a video, though he studied painting and spent a lot of
time looking at the work of Renaissance painters in Italy. He thinks
and works very much like a painter.”
One of the most interesting artists in the exhibition is Ken Okiishi,
who is currently engaged in work that brings painting to the digital
realm. Okiishi works with the decay of language and images in digital
society. His canvases are flat screens upon which old digitally
reworked VHS videos, which have become abstract through the process of
reproduction, are playing. Okiishi paints over these digital
abstractions, reacting gesturally with his brush to the electronic
rhythms and patterns.
“I find this work very compelling,” Comer
enthusiastically agrees. “You get a real sense of a dialogue between a
brushstroke and the invisible act that forms the degraded digital
image. The idea that you can control a brushstroke more than you can
the technology behind a monitor that is hidden from view in this
minimalist monolith . . . I think his work is embedded in so many
conversations that go beyond merely the digital world and what the
screen means now.”
Comer doesn’t see Okiishi’s work as part of the so-called “digital art”
craze. Comer’s unusual talent is to be able to capture the Zeitgeist
without simultaneously getting swept up in it. This has a lot to do,
also, with the language he uses—sophisticated and urbane, without
having to fall back on jargon. With words like “conversation” and
“dialogue”—rather than, say, “discourse”—recurring frequently
throughout our conversation, it becomes clear that Stuart’s nurturing
of work that stretches beyond fixed media and generations of artists is
probably rooted in a desire to evolve a conversational poetics that
also erases the dividing line between artist and audience.
After
a pensive pause, Stuart continues, “I am not that interested in current
talk about the ‘new objecthood,’ ‘the new materiality,’ and misuse of
terms like ‘precarity.’ All of these buzzwords are relevant—I’m not
questioning them per se. But what I don’t want to see is a really
obvious Whitney Biennial that makes its point with young artists making
work that merely looks ‘digital,’ full of colorful pixels and USB
sticks. There’s a lot of that work being made, but I don’t think it’s
where the most interesting conversation about the digital era is taking
place. Extreme mutability is our defining condition, and I'm
particularly invested in artworks that function much like what Beatriz Preciado
calls ‘molecular doors,’ thresholds through which a multiplicity of
forms, histories, and possibilities are perpetually imminent.”
Whitney Biennial 2014
The
Whitney Biennial in New York regularly ignites heated debate. Every two
years, what is arguably the most important show for US contemporary
art, sponsored since 2006 by Deutsche Bank, ventures to take stock of
the current scene. This year the three outside curators Michelle
Grabner, Anthony Elms, and Stuart Comer are each in charge of one floor
of the Whitney Museum, where they will exhibit trendsetting works by
over 100 artists. Important topics are interdisciplinary works and
collective actions, abstract painting, artists and filmmakers who
write, and writers who experiment with language and sound.
7.3. – 25.5.2014
whitney.org
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