Your Everyday Art World by Lane Relyea

Author:Lane Relyea [Relyea, Lane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780262019231
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 2.16

Sharon Lockhart, Untitled, 1997. Framed chromogenic print. 48 × 48 in. Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA.

There also appear exhibitions that document social networking as a historical phenomenon, such as the enthusiastically received “In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art” at L.A. MoCA in 1998, a show that curator Russell Ferguson conceded “started for me in thinking about much more recent art.”85 The London art scene was made the subject of a number of shows, at times coupled with a look at Glasgow’s scene (as in Obrist’s “Life/Live”); the Glasgow scene in turn got presented in tandem with the L.A. scene in Christoph Keller’s series of “Circles” exhibitions (which examined, the curator writes, “the conditions of local social networking and communication structures through presentation of exemplary ‘friends groups’”).86 Interaction between the scenes in New York and Cologne was given the same treatment in PS1’s “Parallax View” in 1993 (then a second time in Bennett Simpson’s “Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne” at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art in 2006).

Group shows also become occasions for artists to make work about meeting the other artists in that exhibition. Sarah Seager’s contribution to the 1993 group show at Brian Butler’s 1301 Gallery (see figure 2.8) was seven copies of a xeroxed booklet that transcribed a long phone conversation between her and Pardo in L.A. and Tiravanija and Tobier in New York. In a review of “Traffic,” the 1996 show with Gordon, Pardo, and Tiravanija, among others, and for which curator Nicolas Bourriaud first debuted his idea of relational aesthetics, Carl Freedman wrote, “Pleasure and enjoyment were not to be found in the exhibition itself but in the week-long gathering of the 30 artists involved. Under the auspices of an ‘exchange of ideas,’ the artists talked, drank, dined and danced together whilst creating, preparing and installing their different works. . . . The gathering was central to [Bourriaud’s] theme, awkwardly formulated as ‘the interhuman space of relationality.’”87

Finally, socializing not only emerges as a leading feature of the art shown at galleries as well as museums and Kunsthallen, but also becomes a service-product in its own right, which these latter spaces directly advertise and sell. Vying with hotels and restaurants to attract corporate parties and sponsorship for social events becomes a crucial source of revenue for art institutions. And so they devise numerous ways to, in the words of Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, “formalize informality . . . provid[ing] what are essentially convergence zones for corporate and creative networks to interact, overlap with one another and form ‘weak’ ties. The prominence that events such as charity auctions, exhibition openings, talk programs and award dinners have attained demonstrates how central face-to-face social interaction is to the functional capacity of these new alliances.”88 Hangar-size lobbies and multiuse or “event” spaces begin to accompany a majority of new building renovation or expansion projects at museums. According to architect Brad Cloepfil,

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