The Global Rules of Art by Larissa Buchholz;

Author:Larissa Buchholz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

As we have seen, Orozco’s work for the Venice Biennale, Empty Shoe Box, was particularly daring. This heightened the effect of his foreign debut at this highly prestigious, international venue. Later, Bonami would judge the work as belonging “to the trinity of conceptual art,” together with Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (1961).139

A similar overdetermined evaluation underpinned Lynn Zelevansky’s invitation to Orozco to have a solo show at MoMA. At the same time, her case points us to the way she excluded alternative positions of artists with Latin American roots, which did not fit into her “autonomous” agenda.

Orozco’s opportunity to show his work at MoMA, one of the world’s most prestigious museums, was again impacted by multicultural discourses, which were exerting increased pressure on established art institutions to become more inclusive. In fact, in the early 1990s, MoMA had already begun organizing exhibitions by Latin American artists, including in the Projects series. In 1993, it also hosted a major group show of twentieth-century Latin American art. This show did not garner much approval from the museum’s trustees, however, and MoMA remained hesitant to fully pursue such new directions.140 This reluctance was evident from the fact that these shows had either been organized by assistant curators or people who were not part of the museum’s regular staff. More established curators at the museum, who could have used their symbolic power to give novel curatorial directions more authority and force, were not involved.

This generational dynamic is consistent with the idea of a heterodox-orthodox polarity, which implies that agents who are not yet well placed within a field are more likely to pursue innovative strategies (see chapter 1 and part 2). Indeed, in 1992, when Zelevansky met Orozco, she had recently begun her first curatorial position and was frustrated with the New York art scene. She thought it had been too heavily affected by an “era of Wall Street greed” and “garish and overproduced art,” a view alluding to the wave of neofigurative painting that had dominated in the 1980s.141 Her own interest in art from Latin America took root during a trip to the São Paulo Biennial in 1989. And when Zelevansky returned to New York, multicultural debates were becoming increasingly prevalent. She felt encouraged about pursuing her interest further, and she looked for ways to distance her curatorial work from the market-driven art of the 1980s in a way that resonated with emerging historical trends.

However, in Zelevansky’s view, most of the artists who produced work within the context of multicultural discourses appeared “not right for the museum,” since “these artists were really consumed with identity politics.”142 While she sensed the importance of showcasing “minority” artists, she needed to find artists whose work also resonated with the art historical (Western) discourses that were still at stake at MoMA, artists who would allow her to inscribe her curatorial strategies into the existing aesthetic possibilities.

Given this dilemma, Zelevansky was glad to encounter Orozco’s work. She found it “refreshing” that he was working

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.