The days of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings at the Museum of Contemporary Art are numbered. These meticulously executed, vibrant and cerebral works won’t be hauled away after Oct. 22 and sent to the next venue. Instead, crews will simply cover them with layers of paint in preparation for the MCA’s next exhibition.
Before long, these same works will be resurrected by a group of LeWitt’s assistants at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Such is the paradox of Conceptual art, in which the artist’s idea takes precedence over the work’s physical form. A lot of Conceptual artwork is, in fact, considered documentation–evidence often presented in the form of notes, maps, charts or photographs–of the primary concept or action.
These works lead short, albeit celebrated lives and then are tossed away like yesterday’s news.
Since its beginnings in the middle to late 1960s, Conceptual art has forced museums to come to terms with a variety of issues and challenges. What are a museum’s responsibilities in owning and exhibiting Conceptual artworks? How does an institution designed to cherish and protect objects deal with an ephemeral or even object-less work?
For instance, how would a museum lend Tom Friedman’s “Untitled (A Curse),” which was recently exhibited at the MCA and consisted of a space 11 inches above a pedestal that had been cursed by a witch? How would a museum buy and preserve Friedman’s “Snow Angel,” which was made by the imprint of the artist’s body in a pile of laundry detergent?
“Because Conceptual art tried to eliminate the object or go beyond the object, its relationship to the institution representing it is very, very different than other kinds of art,” says Dan Cameron, senior curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo. “It’s not about making the painting look beautiful or figuring out how to get the video to run. Very often it’s about setting up specific conditions that have to do with a certain sensitivity to the environment and space.”
“Whenever the Art Institute installs any kind of art, we want it to be installed the way the artist intended,” adds Stephanie Skestos, a curatorial assistant in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. “With Conceptual pieces sometimes it’s hard to nail that down. A lot of times the changing quality of a work is the artist’s intent, a way to show that he doesn’t have control, that the institution doesn’t have control, that it ages with time and chance.”
In most cases it all comes down to a piece of paper. When museums and collectors buy Conceptual art, they get a certificate of authenticity and ownership that contains detailed instructions by the artist for set-up and exhibition and essentially defines the work’s existence. When lending Conceptual works, many times all that’s exchanged is a loan form with instructions. The rest is up to the exhibitor.
LeWitt, a pioneer in Conceptual art, was one of the first to produce art based on a list of instructions meant to be carried out by others. After working early in his career as a graphic designer for I.M. Pei, he began to envision his relationship to his own art as an architect to a building, a creator who designs plans and then oversees construction.
A more recent Conceptual artist who expanded the role of the exhibitor was Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban-American who died in 1996. One of his works, “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.),” has been on loan to the Art Institute for the last few years. The piece consists of a pile of candies in brightly colored wrappers that sits in the corner of a gallery. A sign encourages viewers to sample the candy, which steadily diminishes the heap.
“It’s a strange thing to be in a museum like the Art Institute where you can’t touch anything or take anything, and here we’re encouraging that,” Skestos says.
Gonzalez-Torres created the work as a portrait of his partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. In its most literal interpretation, the installation becomes a metaphor for Laycock’s body as he wasted away.
The artist’s instructions for exhibition, now handled by his dealer, are explicit. At its largest, the pile should weigh 175 pounds, which represents Laycock’s healthy body weight. Ideally, the candy should be the “Fruit Flashers” brand manufactured by Peerless Confection Company in Chicago and wrapped in multicolored cellophane. Once the number of candies becomes low enough, an art handler at the Art Institute replenishes the pile, and the process starts anew.
In this way the work becomes a collaboration between the artist, the museum, the candy company and the viewers. The Art Institute becomes an integral part of the piece, responsible for re-creating it on a regular basis.
“At the very root of Felix’s work is the struggle of how you sustain something that is both permanent and constantly changeable,” says Andrea Rosen of the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, who is the executor of Gonzalez-Torres’ estate.
“Really the only thing that is permanent is his incredible trust in the audience and the owner. If someone didn’t think it was viable, it wouldn’t be re-created. His work is amazingly brave in dealing with the ambiguity of the physical object,” Rosen says, adding that she has made it her mission to ensure that the artist’s original plans are clearly communicated to owners and exhibitors.
Indeed, museums must be careful not to take any aspect of the work for granted when exhibiting Conceptual art. “It’s best to start with the assumption that each choice in a work is strongly imbued with meaning,” explains Elizabeth A. Brown, chief curator at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. “It’s important to accommodate the meaning of the work and really respect the intentions of the artist when you present it.”
Lela Hersh, director of collections and exhibitions at the MCA, spends a lot of time figuring out exactly what artists’ intentions are. The MCA sends all artists a questionnaire that documents their desires regarding their works before they go on exhibit. “If we have a bronze piece, we have to find out if the artist feels the bronze should patina or should be kept very shiny,” Hersh says. “If something happens to the work, can we conserve it? Sometimes an artist won’t want us to–it’s part of the idea of deterioration.”
If the artist has died, Hersh contacts the person who holds the copyright to the work. “We want to preserve the artist’s intent for generations, so my children and your children can see the work the way the artist conceptualized it. Some artists have specific ideas and some don’t, but we try to get everything in written form. Otherwise, in 50 years it could become another work.”
Conceptual art can also have financial ramifications. For instance, when the Art Institute bought the certificate to a LeWitt wall drawing, it had to hire one of the artist’s assistants to come to Chicago for three weeks and execute it.
When the museum bought Bruce Nauman’s installation “Clown Torture” a few years ago, it received four laser discs. But the purchase didn’t include fulfilling the artist’s directions for exhibition, which involved building a room of specific dimensions and setting up a monitor, among other pieces of equipment. And that’s not the end of it. “This is a piece that over time will have to be upgraded once laser discs become obsolete,” Skestos says. “Originally it was on videotapes.”
Museums’ diligence in presenting Conceptual works may be paying off, however, because it seems audiences once alienated by this type of art are growing more comfortable with it. Citing crowds that flocked to a recent Martha Rosler retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo and other conceptually oriented exhibitions, Cameron thinks the tide has turned and predicts that someone will organize a Conceptual art blockbuster exhibition in the not-too-distant future.
“This is a very important turning point in visual culture,” Cameron says. “We’re showing what would have been considered difficult work 10 years ago, but now the public seems very responsive to it. I think it has to do with the presence of the media and computers. We’re being demanded to live our lives in a more conceptual way.”
