Speeches

"Just let me Change and I’ll be Right With You...."

Richard Tuttle: Skowhegan Award for Sculpture

Marcia Tucker

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"Just let me Change and I’ll be Right With You...."

A talk delivered to New Museum donors and patrons,

March 9, 1993

© Marcia Tucker
(NOT FOR PUBLICATION OR DISTRIBUTION OF ANY KIND WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR)

One day, a long time ago, I came home to discover that my husband had moved a table and a few small pieces of furniture from where they had been for quite a long time. I was shocked—actually, I was devastated, and immediately sat down on the floor and started to cry. When he asked me what on earth was wrong, I sobbed: "The only thing I ever want to change is MY MIND, not the furniture! I want everything else to stay exactly as it is!!!" But I admit that the feelings I had then are not the ones I have now.

In our society, change is upon us as it has never been before in our lifetimes. We have a new government, and we’re coping daily with what that really means in terms of what we do and the way we do it. We are living through the fin de siècle and the end of the millennium, with all of the trepidation and anticipation these markers bring. We have upheaval, albeit of different sorts, in virtually every part of our planet, and even the future of the planet itself is uncertain. That’s the big picture; closer to home, our private lives have been entirely shaken by the recent events at The World Trade Center.

In the art world, this is a time when great changes have come about, due in part to a drastic swing in the economy. Artists, dealers, collectors and critics are questioning the art market and the roles they play within it. The commercial viability of works of art is seen as both inflated and threatened. Artists are pulling out at the same time that arts institutions are pulling in.

And for The New Museum, it is a time when many other museums and arts institutions have begun to adapt strategies, attitudes, and practices that we first engaged in and made possible, pushing us once again to reexamine our own mission and methods.

What exactly is "change?" What is its impetus, and what are its symptoms? Our experience tells us that we actually spend enormous amounts of physical and psychic energy resisting change: trying to keep ourselves young through any means at our disposal—and some that aren’t!; using tried and true methods to solve problems rather than trying to find more interesting solutions; trying to prevent our children from thinking or acting in ways that are very different than our own.

On the other hand, we need to adapt continuously to changing circumstances. And therein lies one of the greatest paradoxes of human behavior: we are programmed to resist change, but if we don’t change it means we’re dead. Literally.

Let’s take this a step further: just short of death (and to some, just about as dire), lies obsolescence. But obsolescence actually means change, because if you’re going to be successful, you have to let go of old ideas and ways of doing things, and allow that they are no longer appropriate.

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Now let’s step back a minute. Could change actually be "progress" instead of planned obsolescence? For thinkers in a variety of disciplines, the very concept of progress is being contested as uniquely Western, linear and teleologic, not to mention expansionist and colonialist. The historian Howard Zinn points out that even if we do accept the idea of progress, whose standards do we use to measure it? He says that "we are accustomed to measuring the state of the nation by the numbers on the stock market... rather than by how many children died of malnutrition."

But regardless of whether change is thought of positively or negatively, it creates stress and anxiety, even fear. Carol Becker of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (and an expert in anxiety!) thinks that breakthroughs tend to destroy belief systems that people feel are essential to their survival. And those who create new paradigms know that they’ve unsettled the intellectual and spiritual foundations on which culture is built. As a result, she says,

Clearly, there are real dangers inherent in trying to make major changes in one’s art, one’s life, or one’s society. Revolutionary innovations that are deliberate create major and threatening changes in just about all the conventions governing works of art and their support systems. First of all, to quote Howard Becker,

So here we are, resisting the new because it seems aesthetically repellent and therefore morally offensive, and also because we stand to lose if it replaces the old. In the face of all these conflicts, it’s no wonder that someone might choose to resist change altogether.

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As individuals, one way of resisting change is to work from our successes rather than our failures, to become "virtuosos" or "experts". An artist friend once commented that "a virtuoso is someone who looks at where they’ve been instead of at where they’re going." According to this definition, the work then becomes a mere pastiche of past successes, and the artist is known as a hack.

Similarly, an "expert" is someone involved with what they already know; unfortunately, there’s a tendency to believe that experts are objective, without bias, altogether credible. But we should remember that everyone is influenced by their backgrounds, by where they came from, by who they are and by what they have or don’t have; neutrality is actually impossible and perhaps even undesirable in this day and age.

Given the paradoxical and painful nature of change, and the risks for those who initiate it, why is it that we should ever want to change? Well, there’s the very human need and desire to surprise oneself, something artists struggle towards constantly. I remember when I organized the first major exhibition of the work of Lee Krasner at the Whitney, we battled over who would install it, her or me. I won. I did let her come in a day early to see it and to make any changes she really thought necessary. The appointed day and hour arrived, and she swept past me into the galleries imperiously, swathed in fur. When she finally came to a rest, she didn’t say anything for a very long time. There I was, cautiously hovering around trying to figure out what her reaction was, when I heard her mutter, "I’ll be damned if I’m not a really good painter!"

So change can mean learning, and learning means expansion, excitement, and growth. Growth is often precipitated by a confrontation with anxiety-producing situations, and, as Carol Becker points out, this is true at the cultural level as well," where anxiety [marks] the tension between what is and what could be. Its presence signals a time of change; its disappearance indicates a time of submission." Furthermore, she says,

Some people, of course, try to have it both ways. There is always the danger, especially in the arts, of creating new models and then using them to conform to conventional ends. If your allegiance is basically to the conventional, then you’re confined to producing the same predictable results. You’re only changing the process so that you, on the inside, can remain interested in working.

So it’s not just a question of finding a new product, but of moving away from thinking of the product as an end in itself. Of course, changing one’s focus from product to process means that you won’t know ahead of time what the product will be. But does a focus on process, artistic or institutional, mean that you will then disappear because you don’t have a competitive product—or indeed, any product at all?

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We don’t really know. But we can’t keep addressing the same challenges, nor remain locked into the same products—or even processes—which worked in the past.

What is true of products is perhaps true of definitions as well. I believe that they have a limited usefulness, and actually can serve adversely to limit the imagination. After all, if we’re looking for something that lies within an accepted definition, we’ll only find what we’re looking for.

In order to work with people outside the art world—"the public"—in meaningful ways, we need to question and expand our definition of what constitutes art, of what an artist is (and does), and what a contemporary art museum (or arts institution) is, and does.

We need to create a dialogue among and between forms of art that have been kept rigorously separated since the advent of the art museum in late 18th century Europe — folk arts, crafts, indigenous art forms, popular culture.

Even today we have fairly rigid ideas of what art is and should be. Howard Becker notes that artists often find their innovations criticized as incompetence, even if they’ve abandoned traditional standards and skills knowingly and deliberately. "The tyranny of such proper modes of artistic work can be found in every field,"

he says. We need to be receptive, open to innovation, even—or especially—when it comes in forms we deem "unaesthetic." As we know from the often-cited example of the Impressionists, it takes quite a few years for any new form to be seen as "aesthetic."

We need an expanded definition of what constitutes an artist to account for the new conventions, languages, and processes used by artists today. Is an artist a single person, or is it possible for a collaborative group of anonymous artists to be considered "an artist?" What about the folk artist or craftsperson? What about kids who make graffiti? Or the performance artist who works in Hollywood, like Eric Bogosian, or one who becomes a pop star, like Laurie Anderson?

We also need to think about what change, real change, means for art institutions in general, and especially for the future of an organization like The New Museum, which is predicated on creative thinking, and at the same time taken to task for it.

Does it mean acting as a facilitator rather than a dictator? Would facilitating mean that we have to abandon a critical premise and voice? Should we do so? Does institutional change mean refusing to impose the institution’s viewpoint on the public, despite what museums have been doing for centuries? Or does it simply mean that we must account publicly for the institution’s own biases? If we look to organizations like community art centers as a model for achieving non-hierarchic and relevant relationships to ordinary people—the kind we say we want to visit our museums—does that mean that we will no longer be a museum?

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Under any circumstances, what it does mean is leaving behind the way things are done in favor of thinking about how they might be done.

America has a history of understanding and tolerating, if not overtly appreciating, protest, rebellion and resistance. But even dissenters can (and do) create their own orthodoxies. I no more like hearing the voice of authority wagging its verbal (or proverbial) finger at me from the left than from the right—or from anyplace, for that matter. The only thing that works to ward off that voice of certainty and orthodoxy, the voice that resists, devalues and demeans change, is, as Zinn puts it,

How do we do this? By entertaining the paradox. We need to be both open and skeptical, challenging and accepting, independent and cooperative. We need to acknowledge our fears, but insist nonetheless on being motivated by our desires. By moving the furniture, we can see the space differently.

I believe that this has been The New Museum’s mandate and struggle from the outset, and I thank you all, our greatest friends and supporters, for making it possible for us to do so.

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Richard Tuttle: Skowhegan Award for Sculpture

April 28, 1998

You know, I really have no idea why I’m up here tonight, because Richard Tuttle ruined my life. I should never have gotten involved. First of all, he thought he could get away with making work that everyone knew wasn’t even art. It was too small, for one thing. Not organized enough, what with stuff thrown on the floor and hung from little nails. And he didn’t even use the right materials. Wire. String. Tin. Pieces of plywood. Pencil lines on the wall, for God’s sake. He never even bothered to get rid of the messy part when he tore his drawings out of the sketchpad.

I confess that I was blinded by his brilliance, and completely convinced that his work was the real thing. When I finally organized a show of it back in 1975, did he warn me that people would be outraged because they thought the pieces were materials left over from the installation? Because his paintings weren’t rectangular? Because they weren’t even paintings? Because his sculpture wasn’t "sculptural" enough? Did he give me so much as a hint that I’d be fired from my job? I’ve had to spend the rest of my career showing all kinds of stuff that doesn’t meet the public’s standards, just to prove they were wrong about him! Thanks to Richard, I’ve been stuck for over 20 years working in a place that even my own relatives don’t want to visit.

You’d think he would have learned a lesson from all of this, and shaped up. But no, nothing stopped him, not even Hilton Kramer. Almost a quarter of a century later, and he still thinks he doesn’t have to play by the rules. Not too long ago, another critic was complaining that Tuttle "hasn’t given him anything that he has any use for." I don’t understand why Richard doesn’t just make something useful, and stop the guy from whining.

Anyhow, it was because of my early exposure to Richard’s work that I’ve spent years troubled by persistent dreams about a one-inch piece of rope on a huge empty wall. I also developed a taste for single malt scotch that I can’t afford, but that’s another story. And I’m quite upset that Tuttle’s influence has so many younger artists convinced that art doesn’t have to shout loudly to be heard—thereby ruining it for everyone who knows that noise means something’s happening.

But the worst of it is that thanks to him I’ve become hopelessly addicted to art that doesn’t behave properly. I’ve developed these insatiable cravings for works that say, "The hell with them—let’s just do what we want to." I’ve become co-dependent—on art that I have to spend so much time thinking about that I can barely get anything else done. It’s Richard’s fault that I haven’t gotten any rest since 1975.

Now, to add insult to injury, Tuttle gets an AWARD for his work. A prestigious one, at that. And I get asked to give it to him, after he ruined my life. Go figure.

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