Episode 007: Chrissie Iles
Show Notes
On this week's show we chat with curator Chrissie Iles, who since 1997 has been the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she has built a singular collection of time-based media art. In this extended chat with host Ben Fino-Radin, Chrissie tells the tale of how she built this amazing collection, her general approach and philosophy as a curator, her roots in artist-run spaces, and her vision for the future of the art world.
Links from the conversation with Chrissie
> The Whitney Museum of American Art: https://whitney.org/
> Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/into-the-light
> Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/dreamlands
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin, and on this show, I sit down with artists, collectors and collections professionals that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. Welcome back, it's been so fun hearing from all of you about how much you're all enjoying the show and it truly means everything to me. If you're new here, welcome. I think you'll like it here, so why don't you go ahead and hit that subscribe button? Well, folks, you better strap in because today's chat is with a real heavy hitter.
[00:00:33] Chrissie: I'm Chrissy Iles and I'm the Anna Joel Aaron Krantz Curator at the Whitney museum of American. Art.
[00:00:40] Ben: Chrissie has been specializing in time-based media art at the Whitney for almost 25 years, and in that time, as you'll learn from today's conversation, Chrissie has built an incredibly rich collection of over 800 works. Many of these are really complex immersive time-based media installations.
Now, so much of what defines the success of a curator, a conservator or a collector's work is their relationships to artists, and as you'll hear from Chrissie she has built decades, long relationships with artists, engaging them over the course of time in the shifting and evolving manifestation of their practice.
Before we get started just a quick production note. This conversation was recorded way back in January. So just bear that in mind, in this ever changing world, in which we live in.
So with all of that said today, we're going to kick things off with a deceptively simple question, and that is what is the work of the curator?
[00:01:36] Chrissie: well, it depends on the museum and its mission of course, and the particular curator, but at the Whitney, which is a museum founded by an artist and is known as the artist's museum. We curators curate exhibitions. We build the permanent collection.
We develop research and scholarship at the heart of everything we do is a support of artists, whether by acquiring their work, showing it, having an ongoing dialogue with them and building in our case, the history of American art, really building it in such a way that future curators can tell many, many different kinds of stories.
And there's also because we take care of the works in the permanent collection on an ongoing basis, curator works with other departments such as conservation especially in my case with time-based media to really ensure the proper care of the work into the long-term future.
All of its artists centric and every day is different. Studio visits with artists at the moment virtual are at the heart of everything I do. So I go and see artists in their studios or now at the moment virtually give them studio visits on an ongoing basis every, every week.
So there's no typical day, but if you take, say a week rather than a day, it might consist of a number of meetings with different departments to talk about different aspects of our work and our collective work. So for example I'm on the loan committee. So we discuss loan requests for works in all mediums mainly paintings. And we discuss whether, you know, the workers in a fit condition to travel and we just, we discuss all sorts of logistics together. I'm also on the replication committee, which is a cross departmental committee of departments all over the museum, that meets to discuss issues of replication of artworks.
Those issues are very complex and they vary according to the medium and so there are lots of philosophical as well as practical issues to discuss and come to decisions about as a committee. The curatorial committee meets once a week and we discuss all kinds of questions and issues related to the exhibition programs, specific shows artists, shifts that we want to make, especially after the events of the summer and the ways in which institutions are being questioned and challenged and our role within that and our collective role as a department and all sorts of research and philosophical questions as well about our work and the future.
There's also a wonderful committee. We have called the emerging artists working group that discusses emerging artists and at the beginning of their careers and so I will sometimes join that committee to talk about artists. We also have the indigenous artists working group, and I will talk to members of that group because we're all guests on native American land. And in our case, Lenape land which I'd like to acknowledge also in this interview. And so we've been working very closely in dialogue with that community.
We also work with artists of color and scholars and curators to discuss issues of equity and inclusion, not in a performative way. We want to do the real work and all of us are doing that in different ways. From my point of view, I'm doing that in the way I research and build the collection. We have over 60 works by Black artists in the collection. TBM works, for example, including historical works more than any other museum and the ongoing research into those works into that history or those histories plural.
Also my work on a daily basis is concerned with really digging deep into sort of dismantling those assumptions of whiteness around the kind of cultural frame of what we do. So for example, surveillance. Surveillance reads extremely differently for the Black community than for the white community.
So how do you deal with those issues of surveillance as they pertain in 70's artworks in which white artists are engaging with the camera in ways that are purely formal and conceptual and phenomenological but which do not have the same meanings at all for Black artists and David Hammons Phat Free for example is a very good case in point.
So how to understand How the artworks in our care and how the exhibitions we're making are also reading to different audiences. Also as a white curator, especially from Britain, I'm very conscious of the importance of amplifying others' work of giving up power and, and sharing space and sitting down and listening.
That's in my daily practice too. We also also deal with contracts, I work a lot with my colleague in the legal department. We co-own a lot of TBM works with other museums and we have to have contracts that conform to both what the artist wants and also to the different practices of two different museums who just do things in slightly different ways. So there's sometimes some very detailed, detailed admin work that that takes place.
One of the projects that I'm working on with our media preservation initiative, which is a team of experts who are working to conserve not only the, the sort of physical material, technological integrity of a TBM artworks in the collection, but also the experiential integrity and that involves bringing together all of us to discuss issues of how to install the work, how to ch, how to deal with changes in technology that might affect the integrity of the work and things like, for example, captioning the works, which is something that is being discussed now in relation to access. My argument for example, has been, well, I don't think we should put captions onto the artwork, but we do need it to be accessible. So let's talk with the artists and to think about ways to address this in ways that both provide the access that's essential and also keep the integrity of the artwork, intact. I'm constantly thinking about and rethinking as things change how to preserve the experiential integrity of an artwork and its presentation, when, when things move on in 15, 20 years time when certain Issues like the common understanding of what a wall means, the common understanding of what's acceptable in terms of the flexibility to show an artwork in one way or another. For example, I've noticed in museums, this strange tendency to take a moving image, single screen, moving image work, and then project it 12 feet above the rest of the artworks in the room and make it small and put captions on it. So it starts to look nothing like itself.
Let's take, for example, Yvonne Rainer's Hand Movie. Yvonne Rainer made that film when she was in hospital. It consists of her hand moving from side to side as though it's a sort of representing her entire body, but she projected that and a group of other films that have now been gathered into something called Five Easy Pieces on a screen, on a stage, large, and in front of those films dancers made a series of movements that she had choreographed. Now, the relationship between the size of the projection and the size of the dancers bodies was very deliberate.
So to see it reduced in size, put on a digital screen and hung 10 feet in the air. Within a room with sculptures completely removes its relationship to the stage, to the floor, to the dancers bodies, to the view's body, it's large size and those kinds of relationships. So one of the things I do is to really study the history including talking with the artists, so that's where the long dialogue with the artists is important. I was talking with Yvonne about those films. I mean, talking with about them for about 15 years. So I know how they were originally shown not only through documentation, which you sometimes have to really spend a long time looking for because certain books are out of print or they're not online. Half the research you need is not online, which is important to remember. A kind of disturbing amount of what is online is completely inaccurate. So part of my job is to actually untangle that. So like being a detective, what is the truth? You know, because, because you can change the size and even aspect ratio of a projected image or a TBM work, some curators do for some strange reason.
So in order to protect these works and ensure that they are shown properly into the future, and to almost explain in advance to people working in 30, 40 years time, for whom we can't presume anything is, as we understand it now, including materiality itself for 3d printing and all kinds of things, one has to explain very clearly what the parameters are.
Don't project something 10 feet, high project it at eye level just as you would have painting. For example, we have Sharon Hayes', wonderful work the Symbionese Liberation Army, when that worked first was shown, it was shown as a projection documenting a performance or re speaking.
And when you came out of the room in London, there was a pile of VHS tapes that Sharon invited us all to take. And that was part of the work. So we talked to her about eight years ago about this work, which she's shown in three different ways. I did a survey show of her work, where she occupied, as she said at the third floor of the Breuer building and showed the work in a completely different way to how she'd shown it to the Reina Sofia in Madrid and in London.
So I was trying to capture these different ways and talk to her about the VHS tapes, now that VHS tapes are not the medium through which we watch video. Recently I spoke to her and we recorded it on zoom to have another discussion about the work, to review it now in relation to our media preservation project and the current situation, the questions I asked her were completely different to the questions I asked her years ago. And her answers were also different. The other interesting thing that happened was that through the entire discussion, which was nearly two hours, she was making bread. She was in her kitchen, kneading the dough of the sour dough bread she was making.
And it became this very intimate and very intense and analytical discussion of this work that was captured in a way. It wouldn't have been 10 years ago. So this kind of ongoing care of the work and support of the artists and capturing of research that can become scholarship is something very key to time-based media works, especially because of the ephemerality, because of the conceptual nature of them, which is different in each case. And so my work can often involve wonderful moments like that.
[00:12:44] Ben: You know, I'm really struck hearing you describe your work. In some ways, it sounds so similar to the work of an artist in the sense that you have to oscillate between very, very big picture, high level mission oriented, thinking down into the nitty gritty little details. Very similar to how an artist has to have that kind of big open blue sky headspace to find their creativity yet at the same time, they're essentially running a small business.
[00:13:13] Chrissie: Yes, and In terms of building the collection, which is a major part of my work, the big picture starts with the history of American art. You know, what is the history of American art what time-based work has been made over the past 80 years, and why, how does every major moment in the history of American art surface time-based media and why? Many of the most important periods in American art involve time-based work in one way or another. And America has frankly led the field in time-based media.
I think it's to do with the open structure of American society, especially in New York because our museum is in New York. So my work is national international, but also very local and addressing a local audience and the local artistic community and that history and the history of the museum within that community.
I think that the sort of open structure of American society allows for a level of experimentation that is also very much to do with the way in which immigrants come to this country and bring their ideas with them and then transform them in relation to each other. It's also very much to do with regionalism. I remember sitting with Hamza Walker in Chicago and he was telling me about the importance of regionalism and I didn't really understand what he meant at the time, because I was so New York focused and then LA, and then, you know, Chicago and then going out from there now I understand much more clearly what he meant.
I see an example of that in Philadelphia. Philadelphia has the most extraordinary community of artists. And when I say community, I really mean community and TBM artists, time-based media, artists, and scholars and curators. So if you think of Philadelphia, you think of Tiona McClodden the curator Meg Onli the Blackstar Film Festival, the fact Sun Ra was there, Ephraim Asili his incredible new film The Inheritance was made there. He, as a young artist spent a lot of time in the Sun Ra house. The incredible history of music in Philadelphia from the Philadelphia sound spoken, word, poetry, Ursula Rucker is there, I mean, it's extraordinary. Alex Da Corte is there. There's so much in Philadelphia and its power is also to do with that deep history and the history of that city that's very, very specific. So I find myself paying attention much more to that. Now, Detroit is another example. Chicago is another. And so How does New York relate to that? So when I'm looking at the history of art and I'm looking at what time-based media work was made by artists in relation to each other and why, and when, where by whom and where is it now? It's with historical work. It's a constant process of reading, talking to artists, talking to historians, listening to lectures, and then paying close attention because that's how you develop those histories.
So for example I was, I was reading about the Egyptian composer, El-Dabh who it turns out, made the earliest examples of Concrete Sound and experimental electronic sound that he showed in a gallery in Cairo in 1944. He then came to America on a Fulbright scholarship stayed, became an American citizen, wrote music for Martha Graham, knew John cage. There's a show that happened in Africa, in Dakar I think it was last year where a curator invited a whole group of young artists to respond to the work of El-Dabh who just died. Well, that's in effect an American artist and a major figure in the history of sound art in America.
Therefore the Whitney should collect his work. He should be present in those histories. How does that relate to loft jazz, to very experimental music, Black music, and the relationship between music, the spoken word, literature, poetry, and the moving image. So in other words, I'm constantly interrogating certain kind of white colonial art historical structures that leave those aspects, very, very crucial aspects out. So I'm constantly working to resurface those in a collaborative way, because I only know about any of what I learned about through a dialogue with others that is ongoing every webinar, every conversation, every book I read, every article, every Instagram post, that's a scholarly resurfacing of something.
I take it all in and then look at the picture and how to shift it and how to kind of build those, those narratives in a way that really creates the deepest and most comprehensive understanding of what all those artists contribution is and their relationships to eachother.
[00:18:22] Ben: Over the many years you've been at the Whitney, you have built a comprehensive collection of media art and you are of course an immensely influential curator, but let's go back, in time. There's so much, I don't know about your story. Where did your life in the arts even begin, and what eventually led you to curation?
[00:18:42] Chrissie: I was born in Beirut and I grew up in the Mediterranean until I was 10 and then in London. So from the beginning, I was exposed to a very rich mixture of ancient history and culture and European art history. Then when I was 12, a friend's mother took us to visit an artist in their studio. It was the first time I'd been inside an artist studio and that private kind of creative space of thinking and making, and there's a very haptic quality of the physical materials in the space had a huge impact on me and I knew from that moment that I wanted to work with artists and be in as close of a proximity to this kind of creative space as possible, and I knew that I wanted to share that with others.
[00:19:27] Ben: Did you think you were going to be an artist yourself at the time when you were that young?
[00:19:30] Chrissie: No. I absolutely understood that my role could be to understand the artist and support them and introduce their work to others. I understood that at a very early age, maybe it's like deciding you want to be a doctor or something. It's very much like a calling or something. I, I felt it very strongly.
My mother wrote poetry and played the piano. And so I played the piano from the age of eight too and music was always very important in our family, my father worked at the British embassy. So we had a, you know, diplomatic life, but he was a passionate amateur photographer and filmmaker by which I mean home movies. And He printed his own photographs. And he was also very interested in drawing and painting. And we would paint together on the dining room table and he taught me how to observe. He also taught me how to use an SLR camera and the basics of photography, which I wanted to learn about.
And he would take home movies with his super eight film camera, and then I would love to set up the screen and then we would watch them together at home. So made a little cinema in the house. And so the combination of music and photography, film, painting, everything was all around us. And also because of being in Lebanon, we would go regularly to places like Byblos and the Temple of Baalbek. And then when we lived in Cyprus, we would go to Salamis, which is an ancient Roman city. So when you really look at ancient culture and you look at that part of the world, which is where pretty much almost everything was invented: Africa and Mesopotamia, and this whole area of the world, it gives you a very important perspective when it comes to understanding contemporary art and technology.
And it also helps you to understand culture from a perspective other than a white European art history, colonial narrative, which is critical for all museums to do and which museums are doing some of them have been doing it for longer than others. Some of them are very slowly beginning. Everyone's getting there one way or the other, because there's no alternative.
But from that very early childhood experience, I went to study medieval history and history of art at Bristol University in the west of England, volunteered as a guard in an art center called Arnolfini where it's a bit like the Walker Arts Center, there was a gallery, a cinema and a theater.
So again, from that early experience, I always saw everything in relation to everything else. You'd see an exhibition of paintings of film, some kind of live performance, and it was all taking place in relation to each other under one roof.
So then after university, I went to London and with my mission to work with artists, I found a studio building in South London near where the Tate is now, called the Waterloo studios and gallery. It was a big old warehouse and there was a big gallery in the middle, which the artists were programming.
So I just boldly walked in at the age of 21 and said, can I run your space? Having had zero experience and they agreed and so I had a little office by the space it was a huge space. And the artists and I would talk about the program and I raised the money for my salary and the through the local arts council.
[00:23:07] Ben: How did you even know how to do that at 21?
[00:23:10] Chrissie: I just looked it up. I just improvised, you know, some of the best things happen by accident or through improvisation and through sheer energy. I think I just had a lot of energy. And from the beginning, you know, as a child, I would both write and also put on plays and, you know, theater and the presentation of sort of thea trical events is in the DNA of British people, of English people.
It really felt very natural to invite an artist to do a performance. One of the shows I did was a big sound installation, by this band called Wire and what they did was they stretched high tension wires from floor to ceiling at different angles across the space, in the semi-darkness.
And then you moved through the space and touched these wires, light like an instrument, and sort of basically played the space. I remember Brian Eno being there, it was all a big experiment. And there was one young artist there who was my age, which is a little bit older and he also mentored me and he really encouraged me and supported me.
So my early work was very artist centric. And then when the building closed because the local council owned it and they wanted to demolish it. So I spent a few months looking for alternative buildings, which there were quite a few in East End of London, but the lease was only for a year and the artist wanted, you know, more security. So in the end that didn't happen, but it could have. I could have been running this other space, but we couldn't get the building for long enough. So I went to work for Robin Klassnik at Matt's Gallery in east end, which was another artist studios building at 10 Martello street and Robin Klassnik taught me everything. I know about how to work with artists. Here's an artist himself and he transformed his studio into a gallery to show artists work. The model was based on Jarosław Kozłowski, a conceptual artist from Poland who had a similar space in Poznań. What he did was he invited the artist to come and make a work in the space for three months.
And then the show would be open for two weeks. In other words, it was the opposite of what usually happens, where it shows on for three months having been installed for one or two weeks. So he basically handed over his studio to another artist and show the result. Every show was a new commission. It was always site-specific.
And I was Robin Klassnik's assistant. He taught me that the most important thing was to listen to the artists, pay close attention to what they were saying, what they needed, and to really support them in the fullest way possible and not to impose an idea of what you wanted as the institution or the showing space onto the artists, but to allow the artists to tell you what's needed and to give them what was needed within reason.
So we did, and, you know, he once spent, I think three days lighting one painting and this one painting was the entire show. The level of detail, the level of care was something he taught me and I had to do everything from writing the press release, cleaning the floors letting people in it was again, very close to the artists.
So this was a very great early training. And that also introduced me to artists working with the moving image, like Susan Hiller so we produced the work An Entertainment, which is now in the Tate's collection. And that was my first experience of trying to find a video projector four video projectors, which were very hard to come by.
And that was the first involvement I ever had in installing a video installation. Another early experience was that just before Robin Klassnik for a year, I worked with Peter Kardia who was head of basically it's a time-based media department at the Royal college of art. And this was different from the film department, which is where Isaac Julian was and the time-based media department wanted to do a show of two generations of time-based media artists that the department had trained. I mean, it was everybody. And so I was Peter Kardia 's assistant for that show. He made me a little office inside his office in the Royal college of art and I organized a time-based media show, which was two generations of artists working with film, slide, video, everything you can name.
That was another trial by fire very early and very complicated experience of all the issues that can happen with time-based media and the very rigorous needs of artists of two generations who thought very differently. So that was a very early experience that grounded my thinking.
[00:27:51] Ben: You know, I was going to ask you what drew you to focus on time-based media in your career, but from the sound of it, it seems like it kind of just found you, each of your early experiences just so happened to include very prominent artists working in time-based media. It sounds like it was just in the air, so to speak.
[00:28:11] Chrissie: Yes. I think it was also because at that moment in London, There was a lot of fantastic energy around ephemeral events. There was also a lot going on with sculpture and painting.
It was a very strong moment for Britain in general, but for me, I was interested in the sort of interdisciplinarity. So I went to see Sun Ra play. I went to see Fela Kuti. I went to see experimental film. I went to performances, I went to sculpture shows. I was just absorbing everything.
I decided that I needed to ground was I was doing within the art, historical and scholarly context, which I had emerged from and really felt very grounded in. So I applied for and got the job of Curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. And this provided another very important, context for the way in which I work with time-based media in relation to other areas of art making.
I was mentored there by my director, David Elliott, who was a great scholar, fluent in German and Russian, a Russian expert. And he was making a series of shows that were groundbreaking. The first show of Chinese after the Tienemen Square. The first show of art from South Africa, after a apartheid had ended, an exhibition of Rodchenko the first outside Russia. And when I arrived, he was making an exhibition of the films of Sergei Eisenstein taking up the entire museum with Naum Kleiman from the Eisenstein museum in Moscow, for him, a painting show and a film show was all part of the same cultural fabric.
So his interdisciplinary approach and the level of scholarship that he applied to it aligned with my own thinking. And he, he mentored me and allowed me to develop shows. So one of the things I proposed, as soon as I arrived was a film installation to compliment the Eisenstein retrospective, he immediately said yes, and I did it. So he was very open to new ideas. So I found myself doing a Louise Bourgeois retrospective on the one hand, a time-based media thematic show on the other hand, a Donald Judd survey, the next year, John Latham retrospective with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in another year and everything was positioned in relation to everything else.
We were also grounded in the scholarly environment of Oxford university. And again, David Elliott would say to me, not hold the Fort while I go and see Baudrillard who's in town, but come with me which we did and Umberto Eco, and Isaiah Berlin had all these figures. So the scholarly environment within which we were working also created a context for what we were doing that was very specific and allowed us to really engage with the university and the scholars who came and went in a really serious way.
[00:31:11] Ben: What happened to lead you to the Whitney from Oxford
[00:31:15] Chrissie: My interest in interdisciplinarity led me naturally to American art, because American art has always led the field in terms of both time-based media and also radical experimentation ephemerality, and time-based experiments in art, from Destruction In Art symposium in London, New York to performance, to film and video installation, to expanded cinema America led the field.
And so, you know, I wanted to really go to the heart of that history to meet the people who had made that history to look at the works, which were still largely invisible then except in history books, as images on a page and to really show this work, which hadn't been seen. I also wanted to move away from a rather limited environment.
Especially since I hadn't grown up there and be part of a more international community, which is more familiar to me. And so New York was a natural goal for me because that was where so many artists lived and where so much of that history had unfolded. And I was particularly drawn to the Whitney because it was so artist based, the Whitney was founded by an artist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney with a purpose of supporting other artists and building an environment and a collection that was about supporting artists and really talking about artists at the beginning of their career.
And that related very much to my own experience. With artists as a young curator and the grounding of everything I do and did in a very direct relationship with artists and the Whitney had that very powerful mission and history that was continuing through the biennial and in its work in general. Whitney he also had a very strong history with interdisciplinary time-based media.
You may have listened to child's Trisha brown, Yvonne Raina, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas. So many of the most important moments in the history of interdisciplinarity in American art had happened at the Whitney. Not to mention film through the incredible program of John Hanhardt, the LA Rebellion filmmakers.
There was so much. What the Whitney didn't have was a collection that reflected that. So I wanted to build a collection that would reflect the Whitney's own history with this medium, and also really map out the ways in which artists have worked with time-based media in the broadest most comprehensive sense from basically the late 1950s to the present.
[00:34:00] Ben: When you arrive at the Whitney in 1997, what would you say the collection looked like when you arrived compared to what it looks like today.
[00:34:08] Chrissie: So time-based media in the Whitney's collection was a small group of superb works. Nam June Paik's V-yramid, and Magnet TV, for example, Dan Graham's Video Pavilion, but it was not comprehensive and it didn't reflect the ways in which artists had been working with time-based media from the sixties to then present in a way that also connected with those same artists work in other mediums.
I made a proposal to form an acquisitions committee devoted to time-based media. The proposal was approved. And I set about finding a group of supporters and several of those founding members are still with me. And we've grown the collection from 28 works to 800 works.
[00:34:58] Ben: Wow.
[00:34:59] Chrissie: We have the largest, most comprehensive collection of American time-based media.
[00:35:06] Ben: I knew the collection was that big, but I had no idea that you were responsible for growing it that much. That's amazing,
[00:35:14] Chrissie: When I first arrived at the museum and formed the committee, I went straight to the artists.
So I called up Robert Morris. I called up Joan Jonas. I called up Carolee Schneemann. I called up Jonas Mekas, everybody, and explained what I wanted to do and asked them about works that I've read about in books and mostly they said "oh, I don't know, I haven't showed it since 1976."
[00:35:42] Ben: Was there even a market for that kind of work at the time?
[00:35:46] Chrissie: There was a market beginning for work by a new generation of artists who were making work that was video installations of one or two or three screens. And there's a small number of galleries, a fairly small number of artists. And those works were being collected slowly by museums. And I'm talking about Steve McQueen, you know Tony Oursler, Doug Aitken but the historical installations were invisible and they were not paid attention to by galleries, nor were they sold.
They certainly weren't editioned. So I set about making them visible by finding out what they were restoring them and then bringing them into the collection. Sometimes as gifts, sometimes as purchases, I'm always working closely with the artists and I proposed the exhibition Into The Light because it became clear that the projected image was a major aspect of a sort of process-based approach to art-making and especially sculptural space in the sixties and seventies that hadn't been paid attention to in curatorial terms.
So given an exhibition, so the proposal was approved and the show opened, I think it was two weeks after 9/11, and the show was a result of a lot of close work with artists. For example, Robert Morris. Remade with him, French College Project, as a result of looking in his archive, which at that point was housed at the Guggenheim offices downtown.
And I discovered a diagram and this diagram was projectors and a circular turntable, and it said French College Project. So I found Robert Morris' phone number called him up and asked if we could meet for coffee to discuss this diagram, which we did. He explained what the installation was, and I said, well, I would like to remake it.
At the beginning he was very reluctant, "oh, that was then this is now. I don't know." But he went from reticence, vague interest, to quite a lot of interest, to complete involvement. We had to go through a long process. We had to install something and de-install it, six months before the show actually happened, it was a very long process, but we did it.
And as a result, people were able to see that installation for the first time, since 1969. And you cannot understand these works unless you experienced them photographs in a book, don't do it. So this is another reason why I felt it was so important to resurface these works. That's why we have such a high number of historical film and video installation works, which, you know, there's nobody else that has those and in some cases they're unique, so nobody else has them anywhere.
[00:38:32] Ben: It's interesting because throughout your entire career and evolution, as a curator this interdisciplinary approach has been so critical to your entire mode of working.
But would you say that there are any unique particulars to the work or approach of curator in time-based media art different than say a curator of painting or sculpture or works on paper?
[00:38:57] Chrissie: Yes. There are many differences in my work when I bring a work of art in it's just the beginning. So not only do you have to check a lot of things that you don't have to with an object beforehand, if you're bringing in work on film, for example, where are the A and B rolls? Where are the other original materials? Sometimes it involves some dialogue with the film world. If the work also lives in the film world and film archives. There's a, a film installation by Roy Lichtenstein that I saw a diagram of in a catalog from 1971 from the wonderful show art and technology curated by Maurice Tuchman at LACMA.
I saw a diagram by Lichtenstein for three screen film installation, which of course Lichtenstein is not known for, but he'd been commissioned as part of this show to do it. So I contacted the foundation, they had some film materials, we examined them, and that began a three year process of restoring the work working closely with Cineric Film Lab, bringing it back to life, doing an exhibition of it. It joining the Lichtenstein retrospective me writing a 6,000 word essay on the film installation in the catalog. And then eventually I was given a gift of the installation by the Lichtenstein foundation.
You would have thought that might be the end of the story. A wonderful, happy, great story. No. Several years later, LACMA, where the work was originally commissioned and shown a colleague at LACMA found another film in the archives. Is it a full film, even though the film is called three landscapes? What should we do this with this full film?
Does it belong to three landscapes? Does it belong to another work? Because he wanted to make many more like it, but never got round to it. What is the mystery of this fourth film? So my colleagues at the Whitney in MPI, our colleagues at LACMA, we are working together to solve this mystery.
So in a way with time-based media, you're never finished with the work. There's always something else to discover. There's new scholarship, there's new, sometimes technical information. There's new ways. You have to protect the work. So for example we need captions of some kind for access, but captioning, the works would destroy.
Artistic integrity of the work. What should we do? We started talking to artists with we're figuring out solutions with our access colleagues and the artists, the so many ways in which with time-based work, you're constantly re evaluating the parameters of your ongoing stewardship of the work in response to changes that occur in the wider world.
Be it technological, social, all kinds of different reasons. So this ongoing work is very comprehensive and very collaborative and it never ends.
[00:41:48] Ben: So lots of detective work constantly. I'm curious, Chrissie over the arc of your career have you seen any shifts or changes in how artists work with technology? When you work with these pioneers who were creating these very first video and sound installations and you see the way they think about, the medium versus you know, the way you see artists thinking about technology when they're making contemporary works today is there anything that's changed?
[00:42:19] Chrissie: I think the biggest change I see is the impact on moving image work made by digital media and social media and the fluidity that's created by the prevalence of moving images on our phones, laptop, screens in the street and everywhere else and that's become even more prolific because of the pandemic.
Because of this year, we've seen artists invent ways to work with this increasing sort of accessibility and fluidity to challenge power structures and institutional gatekeeping and how artists have used technology to create a much broader accessibility to each other's work, and also, to build conversations around it. I think the open structure and immediacy of Instagram has leveled the playing field and really allowed a community building in which artists voices can have a much greater visibility and agency.
And I think were seeing the hierarchy of the pyramid transform into a kind of network or a matrix of community scholarship, creativity. A place where ethical concerns can be asserted in a powerful way that really challenges traditional institutional power structures. I think Instagram has become not only an information sharing hub and a publishing platform. It's also a screening space and small organizations and artists can have the same visibility if not even greater visibility than larger institutions. So one example I think is very interesting is Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's video series Two Lizards, which they made during quarantine and which Meriem posted on her Instagram page over five months from March to July.
And it documented their experiences during quarantine and locked down in New York. And it really captures what New Yorkers were going through. This kind of direct access was incredible. I mean, tens of thousands of people watched those videos.
They didn't have to wait for a gallery or a museum, or, you know, cinema showing space online to do anything with them. They just put them up themselves and immediately they got an equal number, if not a greater number of viewers. So I think that kind of shift that's occurring is actually mirroring what's going on in the larger society.
And I do think that's going to actually be permenant that shift. You can't put that kind of accessibility back in a box and you also saw it with you know, time-based media artists like American Artist who's creating his own scholarly course in the summer. It was a course called Dark Matters on Blackness Surveillance and the Whiteness of the Screen.
That was run through the artist's run School for Poetic Computation, and I audited that course, and it was wonderful. It challenged whiteness as the kind of neutral default in technological interfaces. It really engaged with very important issues around that. And then it produced collaboratively, a book. I mean, that is the way that technology is changing the ways in which artists work rather than, you know, some shift in where you can do with a camera or something like that.
[00:45:19] Ben: I've only lived in New York for 10 years or 11 years at this point but you've lived here kind of during some real boom years for the art world. And I'm curious, how you've seen New York. And the art world locally change over the years for better or worse.
[00:45:37] Chrissie: I think the two most dramatic changes I've seen are the monetization and corporatization of the art world that took place during the two thousands. And then the recent challenge to that by this new generation for whom it's transactional values, unequal, power structure, privilege, racial and gender discrimination,are unacceptable.
And it's very interesting to see the difference between 2008 in this present moment. Those two moments are the biggest moments of change I've seen since. I arrived in New York and there of course, completely interrelated. And I think that's, what's exciting about the current moment.
The seismic shift we're experiencing as a kind of pushback to that earlier two thousands moment. And of course, again, this reflects what's going on politically and all over the country. In general, in this country's history, it would be astonishing if the art world didn't reflect that. New York is always about real estate.
And one of the things that was happening in 2014, 15, 16 was the flourishing of a group of independent spaces and shows that were taking place everywhere from parking lots to rooftops, to people's apartments to one off shows here, there, and everywhere, as well as shows that were taking place in spaces like Signal Gallery, which is now closed. Interstate Projects, which is still open, a number of small galleries, like Real Fine Arts and other galleries that have since closed. There was a very strong energy in that moment after the crash. And then what we're seeing now is a kind of collapse of that sort of inflated impossible to sustain gentrification that was turning New York into a mall of Starbucks, CVS and whatever and you know, everything had become so unsustainable. What's happening now is it's gone absolutely in the other direction, it started off with that silence of the pandemic, the empty streets, then the uprising in June, all the events that followed and the transformation over this past tragic year in New York City has been quite extraordinary.
It's similar to 9/11 in that it really reads very differently if you spent the entire period in New York City, versus if you were out of the city, looking in on what was going on to be in the city to be in the streets with everybody, the energy of everybody protesting to hear the helicopters overhead to connect it to the media and what was going on and to see how artists were responding. Mutual aid fundraisers, I mean, it was just incredible, the energy, and this transformation took place both in New York, but it took place everywhere. So every part of New York City was being activated by everyone in terms of being on the street and meeting up through Instagram actually exchanging where everybody was cycling or walking over bridges around parts.
The entire city was activated. Artists were responding to what was going on when I was responding to the artists. Completely changed everybody I followed almost completely on Instagram to kind of be more connected to everything that was taking place. It was like, again, it was almost like a sort of TV news every alert and then what was going on in Philadelphia and what was going on in LA and then what was going on also in England and then different parts of the world.
I mean, this transformation of the city has also made everybody think twice about New York. What's the city for who's the city for who are New Yorkers. What's the role of art now? What's the role of the museum? What's the role of the moving image within that landscape? What's the role of the moving image in a city that's half empty, but everybody's on their screen, no matter where? All these questions shifting us into another future, a different future, hopefully more equitable future.
[00:49:42] Ben: So that's a lot of things all coming together in one year in a way. Where do you think that's all going? Like, what is, what is the art world gonna look like, post pandemic?
[00:49:51] Chrissie: I think the changes are going to be permanent. I think that people will continue to work from home because it suits most people very well. I think that the breaking down of old hierarchies and conventions will accelerate as paralleled by the increasing need for something like universal income, because we haven't seen the last pandemic.
We're not going to wait a hundred years till the next one. The next one might be just five years away. And frankly, we're not going to be done with this one for another two years, because unless the whole world is vaccinated and protected, we aren't. So the pandemic is a catalyst for change and it's up to all of us, how we respond to that lesson that it's giving us in terms of the art world, the powerful and wealthy will become more powerful and more wealthy.
The small gallery will also thrive because they're cutting out the middle person. So I think that what's happening is that just as academia is being challenged with artists, creating their own independent courses, museums are being challenged in many ways, but there is still a need for a social space, a social artistic space that the museum provides as well as the museum being an important, crucial archive.
We are a scholarly archive at bottom, but all those things are being rethought. So I'm very excited about the future. And I'm terrified about the future. I'm terrified about the future because of climate change. The scientists have been knocking on the door for decades and the response is still sluggish.
There's going to be massive migration north when the temperatures increase, there's going to be huge issues with rising ocean levels. Everything is going to shift the kind of shake-up we're feeling now is going to be tenfold within a decade. How the art world functions in relation to that will be, I think, a mixture of equally as transactional for those who have the means to continue that system.
And also more democratically dispersed because technology is allowing that it's allowing that In politics, it's allowing that socially it's allowing that on every level. I don't think the storming of the Capitol might've occurred, were it not for social media the ability of people to connect so instantly that fluidity and instantaneity without which also the Arab spring wouldn't have occurred in quite the way it did, that's here to stay.
So I think that's going to continue to transform the way in which the art world, the contents of the art world develop on a certain level. It's always going to depend on real estate in terms of galleries. We still need galleries. Museums are a given galleries are a more kind of fluid situation, but I think that we will continue to see an increasing independent agency of artists, curators because technology does allow us to connect with each other in ways that both challenge those traditional structures and transform them. This is also a generational shift. So I think a generation who are just appearing now for whom the pandemic has been their primary experience as a young adult will really also change things because sustainability and mutual support, and frankly, the ethics of our responsibility to each other they're going to continue to be very polarizing questions. The social contract is increasingly important for one part of the population and absolutely not important for another part of the population. I think our roles as part of this art community, I think are going to be increasingly defined by our ethical responsibility to the social contract and how art functions within that. For a young generation of artists that ethical responsibility to the social contract will be more and more of a given.
[00:53:56] Ben: Speaking of that younger generation of artists you just so happen to be an expert because something we haven't talked about is that your CV as an educator is actually quite extensive. We haven't really talked about that much. You've lectured and taught far and wide. How has your work as an educator influenced your work as a curator?
[00:54:21] Chrissie: For me, they're indivisible from each other because they both involve engaging deeply with artists and they both involve a kind of collective building of culture through an exchange of ideas and to discuss if dialogue and a kind of mentoring that's part of both teaching and curating. I teach both curatorial students and art students and traditionally art history and the practice of art making have been in college life, quite separate. I teach in both parts of the academy in a way that I feel is very important to sustain because it helps to prevent curatorial work from becoming part of a transactional system. I'll do some kind of instrumentalizing. It regrounds . All our work in the process of dialogue and study and mutual support. and also an interrogation of, particularly in this country, art histories, I mean, this country, the fictional histories that are told about this country by themselves, it's quite astonishing.
And so the, the unraveling of that, and the rethinking of that is what I find both young curators and artists very concerned with. And also it's part of what we do as curators in a museum.
[00:55:41] Ben: What's coming next for you.
[00:55:43] Chrissie: I'm curating with Clemence White, a show of Madeline Hollander's work. Madeline is a artist, choreographer and dancer, and we're showing a video installation called flattering, which is a film that she made in response to learning that crickets are going silent. Because of climate change, crickets are becoming silent and she went to an island in Hawaii where most of the crickets have become silent, placed an infrared camera on her head and walked through the rain forest at night, filming her journey to the rainforest to try and film the silent crickets. Her intention was to try and film the silent crickets in order to try and study their movements and then create a choreography that would engage with their own choreography of basically survival, because what they do is mimic the few chirping crickets, still left by moving close to them and intercepting the female as they come towards the chirping cricket, the chirping crickets being consumed by a parasitic fly, which is why the other crickets who are silent are the ones that survive.
However, without attracting females, they too will become extinct. So this video installation is a kind of journey into the utopian hope that those silent crickets' choreography might lead them to survive. When in fact it won't, so the show consists of the projection floor to ceiling of, this film onto a reflective floor, which reflects that image, and so the entire space becomes almost like the inside of what Madeline saw and thought and felt in the rainforest. And then outside is a wall of her diagrams and drawings connected to the making of the work from her studio and then a new sound piece she's making in which you will hear the sound of crickets who chirp with a speed between the chirps that corresponds to the temperature outside. I'm also curating a show of time-based installations at the Aspen Art Museum which is centered around the time-based media collection of Robert Rosenkranz a very key collector of time-based media, one of the few, and one of the very serious and engaged collectors in our field. And that will open in May 2022.
[00:58:11] Ben: If you could give any advice to aspiring curators, what would it be?
[00:58:17] Chrissie: Challenge every colonial art historical idea you've been taught and challenge everything you think, you know, recognize we're guests on indigenous land always, be bold in your thinking and in finding a place for your ideas, support artists and listen to them. Always. Everything we do is about them. Don't be performative ally, do the real work, give up power and space to artists of color, amplify their work and listen, and figure out what you can meaningfully contribute.
There are many different ways to curate a small show in independent space or a parking lot can be as meaningful and significant as a large museum exhibition they're all equally valuable. Critical, I think is to find the space and the environment that best suits your own curatorial, sensibility, museums, are not the only places where important curatorial work happens.
So it's very important to find your own space, where you can best express what you need to do. Curatorially. The other advice I would give is as you build.
Always mentor others because it creates a community of exchange that builds the field and builds the community that is solid and meaningful and that protects our work and artists from being instrumentalized. So that is a very important aspect of curatorial work. And of course always be open to new ideas and new thinking,
[00:59:43] Ben: Chrissie, Iles, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much.
[00:59:49] Chrissie: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
[00:59:50] Ben: Phew! People, are you as blown away as I am? I think it's quite rare to meet someone like Chrissie that is so deeply academic and rigorous and has spent nearly their entire professional life in institutions and rubs shoulders with incredibly powerful people on the regular, and yet is just such a real one.
Thanks again, Chrissie for taking the time, but most of all, thank you, dear listener for joining us for this conversation today. Before we go, I want to send a huge, huge thank you to the folks that have donated to support the show and our mission to equitably pay artists, guests. If you haven't contributed, you're enjoying the show and are able to help, I hope you'll consider. Art and Obsolescence is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, which means that when you go to artandobsolescence.com and click on donate, your donations will be handled and managed for us by NYFA. Operating costs for the show are incredibly low because this is a one person operation in case that wasn't clear, I'm doing all this myself. But again, I want to ensure that I am able to support an equitably pay artists that come on the show. So if equity and supporting artists is important to you, please help me make that happen by going to artandobsolescence.com and click on donate. If you are in a position to help, you can make your tax deductible donation there.
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