Beauty for Ashes
On deliberately anachronistic practices.
As we all know, two defining features of this time of year include a pause in all regular work activities and a heightened awareness of time and cycles (retrospective thoughts about those things that passed and hopeful expectations for renewal). In keeping with that tradition, I am really enjoying the break (more so because I have experienced the most professionally stressful fall of my life), but I also feel particularly reflective (more so because I have always had to live with an intensely heightened awareness of time). Soon our respective vacations will be over and we will all be back again at the relentless pace of exhibitions, social activities, cultural and political debates and more. Which makes me sometimes fantasize whether I could extend this leisurely parenthesis forever. What if I did like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s character in his masterpiece of a short story, Wakefield, who one day decides that he will go hide in an apartment and simply become an observer, from that apartment’s window, of a world without him for two decades?
Certainly I could never do that— not just because it would be dumb and naively narcissistic (the world would be totally unaffected and perfectly fine without my existence), but because the other overriding impulse in my life has been a form of professional FOMO— not being in touch with current issues and concerns in art. The job I had for 13 years as head of public programs at a major museum was enormously stimulating and educational as it allowed me to absorb and learn from the voices of hundreds of artists, curators, scholars, and more on a myriad subjects concerned with contemporary art. The daily absorption process was like being in a newsroom of sorts for contemporary art, or like witnessing a Borgesian Aleph of ideas that completely saturated me, an experience that I have been trying to process ever since. It also allowed me to appreciate the level of energy of investment that it takes to be continuously connected to day-to-day debates in art and also understand the point of view of whose who opt to get off the hamster wheel. Which brings me to the story of a group of artists that I once decided to take on as a subject for an art project.
Back in 2010, a group of then students from the Whitney’s independent study curatorial program (Anik Fournier, Michelle Lim, Amanda Parmer and Robert Wuilfe) approached me inviting me to participate in an exhibition they were organizing on the subject of ecosystems and networks, titled Undercurrents, Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art. Because one of the focuses of my work has always been the art system, they thought I could contribute something in that regard. After giving the subject some thought, I decided I would focus on a peculiar ecosystem within the art world: the 21st century art academy. I was interested in how this world is almost completely ignored and dismissed by our contemporary art world, with very rare exceptions. Certainly artists who work in a figurative, and nominally academically way—or at least with an aesthetic that the academic art world would embrace— have sometimes been embraced by the contemporary art system. Lucien Freud is one of them; other artists, like Charles White, who was integral and committed to the social realist movement, has only recently been fully recognized by the mainstream as a major 20th century artist and an important precursor and mentor to many artists working today. But overall, given that the academy is less concerned with present political discourse and more with tradition, it mostly exists in isolation.
The academic art world has its own institutions— galleries, academies, museums — that offer their own imprimatur of critical and financial support. I wanted to know that drove these artists— I narrowed down my focus to painting, specifically— to abandon the present art discourse to instead establish a dialogue with the old masters. I was perfectly aware about the awkwardness of that kind of outreach, and both the curatorial students and other artist and critic friends smirked at my idea, thinking perhaps that my intention was to ridicule or make fun of conservative aesthetics. But that was not the case: I sincerely wanted to know that prompts someone to work —to put it somehow– anachronistically.
My proposal was to do a salon-style display of contemporary academic paintings at The Kitchen— something that had never happened before at this radically experimental space in Chelsea. I organized and advertised a submission/selection process. The outreach was difficult, as academic painters (justifiably) saw me with distrust. However, I was able to receive several submissions, and found very compelling works, including some that showed extraordinary skill. The selected painters included Katie Clairborne, Michael De Brito, Madora Frey, Anina Gerchick, Laura Gilbert and Ernie Sandidge. Ernie in particular was important for me because he was the very first friend I made at the Art Institute of Chicago when I arrived at the school in 1989 ( I distinctly remember us having coffee at a diner on State street on that first semester of classes where we discussed art philosophically). Ernie later moved to New York and was already here before I myself arrived, and we have stayed in touch.
When we did install the exhibition at The Kitchen (sadly I can’t find exhibition display shots, but they might be added to this column later), it was fascinating to see the contrast between this salon-style display (the works of Michael De Brito had Sorolla-like, exuberant colors and brushstrokes) and the other works in the exhibition, which had the more typical post-minimal, monochrome austerity.
I decided to produce a video where I interviewed the artists in the exhibition, asking them on their artistic approach and their relationship to and views about the contemporary art world, which I include below. Their comments made me think about how to a degree no one is entirely free from a form of nostalgia, modernist aesthetics being more than a hundred years old.
I thought of Somerset Maugham’s On Human Bondage (1915) a novel that narrates the plight of the struggling painter Philip Carey in Paris, who is in the academic art environment right around the moment when modernism is being born in that same city. Maugham’s originally titled his novel Beauty for Ashes, after a quote from Isaiah: Give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness ( He abandoned the title after he learned it was taken by another, now-forgotten novel). I decided to borrow the title for this project. At the time I wrote the following:
Yet it has struck me that the title [Beauty for Ashes] is evocative of a belief in artmaking as deliverance, an idea that once was fervently held and which we in the contemporary art system are so estranged from. Or are we? Do we secretly hope for it, but instead protect ourselves with cynicism? Do we still hope for art to generate emotional and intellectual kingships, but refute that we engage in such idealistic desires? As we ask ourselves these questions, we may realize that those who make contemporary art and those who see themselves in dialogue with the 19th century are ultimately not that different in their way of understanding the problem of being an artist in the 21st century. These are questions that we can’t formulate quite clearly at this time —at least I can’t— because they exist in our present moment. The discussion may revolve around the choice that we face: to either make art as a place to lose ourselves in it as ourselves—as the Romantics did— or in hoping that we can project ourselves as someone else—as the cynics do. Both choices, nonetheless, imply a desire to freedom from history.
Of course, regarding that fantasy of freedom: we can’t truly be free until everyone is free. So the beginning of a new cycle, after our physical and reflective pause, should be a time to recommit to one another and to humanity with all the means (traditional or not) at our disposal.
Happy new year.