Artistic Kinship

Bonding in an atomized art world.

Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2012-2019). Dinner discussion at the home of Jessica Stafford Davis on “Prospects of Race Relations Post-Obama.”, 2016. In attendance: Clifford Owens, Yasmin Ramírez, Jessica Stafford Davis, Sheldon Scott, Adrienne Childs, Julie Chae, Holly Bass, Brandi Summers, David Driskell, Lisa Gold, Larry Ossei-Mensah, Hosan Lee, Earl Stafford, Marta Perez García, Aaron Meier, Rocio Aranda, Dulcina Abreu and Elia Alba. Courtesy of the artist.

The greatest paradox I have always observed in this art system of ours (and something that defines practically everything I have done related to its social dynamics) can be cynically summarized thus: the art world is a place dedicated to artistic authenticity at the cost or social sincerity.

It is a comment that I know needs to be unpacked, and December happens to be a perfect month to do so.

This month, as holiday stress sets in (i.e. the familiar anxiety produced by the collective demand to be happy and work toward having a perfect season) the other familiar feeling that also arrives during this period is a bittersweet nostalgia, a state of mind where we think about our own childhood experiences we shared this time of year with loved ones who are no longer with us. I will not discuss the family aspects of this as I don’t want to overshare (but suffice to say that I am very lucky to have a loving family that I always look forward to being with).  Instead, I would like to focus on our artistic community.

In recent weeks I have thought about the art friends I have lost— not through death or tragedy, but just because we simply stopped being friends. It is an unsettling feeling:  ironically, I feel in much firmer ground with people (very few, thankfully) who never were my friends in the first place and/or have told me that they don’t like me to my face. But with (also few) people who were once my friends and then the friendship vanished into thin air, true disquietude is not knowing what happened. In any case I think of my “unfriends” every now and then.

 In most cases it was a very slow, gradual process with a familiar pattern: first an initial encounter in art social circles such as openings, other common friends, being part of the same exhibition or other similar experience. Especially when I first came to New York and was eager to engage with the artistic context I made strong bonds with artists, curators, and others, often individuals of the same generation than I, who shared similar interests, dreams, passions and were motivated with specific artistic or social justice goals. And I saw my friends often, going to their openings, celebrating their successes, doing lunches or dinners. Some of them, the more ambitious and talented, landed increasingly important curatorial positions or increased their visibility as artists; others did less so; some even left the art world. One of them, with whom I collaborated a lot and shared lots of common interests, over the years started getting irritated with me (and to be honest, I with him) about what he saw as my naiveté and lack of scholarly rigor (point well taken, although I have never claimed to be a scholar), and what I in return saw in him as political opportunism and lack of principles. Over the years, we seemed to agree less and less in things, and what was once a rich and dynamic friendship became much less enthusiastic and spontaneous, we started seeing each other less and less, and today we no longer reach out to one another. If we see each other at an opening we will greet each other as if nothing had happened, but we both know that the common bond we once had is gone.

What went wrong? In a way, this is absolutely normal:  we all encounter each other in life and form friendships particularly with those with whom we share a common path—colleagues working at the same museum, artists showing in the same gallery, art students in the same program.  I came from Mexico City into art school in Chicago with excitement but also with the great sadness of having left my close friends; I remember arriving to my first class (2-D) and seeing my classmates, naively thinking that we would all become best friends, or a legendary artist generation like the AbEx painters hanging out together in our art history-defining art journey. I tried to talk to some of them with my broken English; they were polite but didn’t care to engage too much. When the class ended they all left and I was left alone in the classroom. The same thing happened the next week and the following. I was in for a rude awakening.

Among artists this type of friendships confusingly mixes with our professional paths, and when those paths are not perfectly aligned — let’s say, one starts having more success than the other—, strains begin to emerge. Soon it becomes difficult to maintain that relationship, and because friendships are not marriage nor are we connected by blood to them, nothing prevents one to move onto other social circles. All that is usually left is the memories of those shared experiences and the emotional bonds that they created.

James Rosenquist and Robert Rauschenberg, Los Angeles, CA, 1995. Photo: Sidney B. Felsen © 1995Photograph Collection. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York

Sometime in late 2003 or early 2004 I organized a panel discussion between Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Rosenquist at the Guggenheim as part of Rosenquist’s retrospective at that museum. I believe that was one of the last public programs Rauschenberg ever participated in.  Rauschenberg was already in a wheelchair and not in great health, but he was talkative and cheerful as always.  It was an unforgettable conversation between two dear friends who had known each other for half a century, — a Texan and a North Dakotan who encountered each other in New York in the early 1960s and remained friends until the end of their lives.

That conversation was memorable—for sure fascinating to any art historian, but really for anyone who wanted to learn about a defining moment in 20^th century American art (which is, by the way, wonderfully told by Prudence Pfeiffer in her book The Slip, now long-listed for the National Book Award).  Both Rauschenberg and Rosenquist went down memory lane, taking all of us along with them. Mainly what their conversation revealed to me was that they were depicting a New York that was long gone. It was the New York City art world that seemingly was populated by only a few hundred people, where everyone knew each other, visited each other studio lofts in Tribeca and SoHo, saw each other’s gallery shows on 57^th Street, and saw the same exhibitions at “The Modern”. For those of us who didn’t live those legendary times it is hard not to romanticize them. The bottom line for me was primarily of the strength and impetus of those relationships between artists, dealers, and curators, the fact that they seemed to be all focused on something larger than themselves, which turned out to be our contemporary art world. So it wasn’t just two old artists talking about the good old times: it was the palpable intensity with which they described it and their commitment to one another. Would I be ever able,  I then thought, to describe my own artistic youth in that same way?

Suzanne Lacy with Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, The Skin of Memory Revisited (2011). Courtesy of the artist.

Another artist who exemplifies to me the commitment to friendship is Suzanne Lacy. Having known and admired her work as an art student, I was starstruck when I first met her, but Lacy exudes generosity and makes anyone feel comfortable, so we bonded almost instantly. I have always admired how for artists like her, art is always and ultimately a collective project, even in the projects of her own authorship she invariably gives credit to those who contributed to thinking or developing the project, often as collaborators, even those who are not artists. An example if the project she developed with the Colombian sociologist Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, professor at the School of Social Work and Family Studies, University of British Columbia. Together they developed Skin of Memory (1999)in Medellín, consisting in the creation of a mobile temporary museum (build inside a bus) titled  “Museo arqueológico del Barrio Antioquia” where they invited families of people who had died as victims of violence to commemorate their loved ones with small altars and personal objects.  Part of Lacy’s commitment to others is that she always insists in equal credit to her collaborators (as she does with Riaño-Alcalá) and acknowledge the roles played by project participants.

But Lacy’s dedication to people in her work extends naturally to other artists with whom she has shared a professional journey in spite of their different artistic approaches (such as Judy Chicago, Judy Baca, Sandra de la Loza, and many others—incidentally when I texted Lacy to ask her permission to reproduce an image of her project for this piece she told me she was hanging out at that very moment with several of the ones mentioned above).

Making these generational reflections, I can’t help to see the contrast between the artists who started becoming active in the 1970s and the emerging artists today, including my students. In Mexico (which as many know I tend to use as a case study), artists working in conceptual practices knew there was little to no market for what they were doing; so supporting one another was paramount. The fact that their practice could hardly be monetized also became an equalizing factor. After the 1990s, contemporary art in Mexico generated international attention and a market— both things which caused the emergence of a “professionalized” infrastructure that arguably affected the way artists socialized. For my generation (not only in Mexico but also in the US) the boundaries between business and professional friendships became weirdly blurred and often confusing. And social media has made the pull toward artifice even worse: the authenticity we are now required to perform is a full-time job that might seem to serve us but instead serves the corporatocracy run by tech companies that monetize our curated narratives. Most disturbingly, I wonder whether the process of professionalization that we all have had to go through in the 21^st century and our being thrust in the process of self-social media curation is affecting our ability to authentically engage with the non-art world from which we draw our inspiration. In other words: to what extent does the demand of presenting a carefully constructed public façade in social media endanger the ability to remain authentic to one’s social principles and commitments in one’s work?

Going back to where I started, one of the great challenges we face in the next few years in art is the ability to reclaim social authenticity at every level; for that, we also need to create support groups of individuals who are in the same place where we find ourselves.

A project initiated in 2012 by artist Elia Alba titled The Supper Club, sought to bring together over 50 contemporary artists of color in conversation about the issues around race and culture in the US. As Alba describes the project: “More than just dinner talk, these conversations have included topics such as police violence, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando and the need for sanctuary spaces; black female and male subjectivity; and racial subjugation in Latin American history […] The Supper Club is a critical historical archive of this moment documenting African-Americans, Latin Americans, LatinX, Africans, South Asians, and Caribbean cultural producers as a collective group as they weigh in on the historical significance of the last decade and the enduring power of art, food, and conversation in our everyday lives.” I do believe that when we look back at this period of art in New York, The Supper Club will be a key reference that will help encapsulate the many concerns around race and culture in art today, but it will also be a generational marker, not least because it created a bond among the artists who participated and who Alba documented.

Projects like that give me hope— hope that we can live in an art world where we value authenticity not only in objects, but in people.