Curator's Forum: Enrico Lunghi

© Jacques Charlier

During my trip to Helsinki for the IKT conference, Enrico Lunghi, current IKT President and Director of the Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Mudam) Luxembourg told me about curating Belgian artist Jacques Charlier's "100 SEXES D'ARTISTES" for the French-speaking (Wallonia) community at the Venice Biennale.

Charlier eats at the edges of bourgeois pretension, like fellow Belgians Renee Magritte and Wim Delvoye, and the "100 SEXES..." project continues Charlier's quasi-scientific exposition on the genesis of creativity in artists by making drawings of their genitalia. This project, begun in the 1970s, is Charlier's mockumentary-style reduction of artistic "style" to secondary sexual characteristics (and a form of "macho feminism"?).

After being submitted to be part of the collateral events (in the form of posters scattered around Venice) for the Venice Biennale, supported by Ministry of the French Speaking community of Belgium (Wallonia Brussels), the Department of Plastic Arts with the help of Wallonia-Brussels International (WBI), Lunghi received a letter from Biennale artistic director Daniel Birnbaum disinviting the project. After an appeal, the disinvitation was confirmed.

So the posters can't be shown in Venice, but they will be in seven European cities (Antwerp, Belgrade, Bergen, Luxembourg, Metz and Namur) during the months of June and July, with other cities expressing interest as well. In Venice, however, the team will show all the documents relating to the project on a boat which will be moored along the Grand Canal, close to the Giardini, during the professional (pre-opening) days so visitors will still be able to see the drawings--and decide for themselves. It does mean, however, that the general public, tourists and residents alike, will not see the works--and weren't they ultimately the artist's target audience?

I wonder why this form of nudity--and a project with funding and support from legitimate institutions--would be censored and not, say, Francesco Vezzoli's 2005 "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's 'Caligula' "? In Vezzoli's trailer--produced with blessings from Gore Vidal, who sued to have his name taken off the 1979 movie--the artist was drawing a parallel between the excesses of Caligula with the art world's "desire for visibility" as represented through the Venice Biennale. (Other soft porn / corn, Italian-themed works are Jeff Koons's performances with former wife La Cicciolina, intended to skewer American--and the art world's?--puritanism, image below).








© Jeff Koons

Birnbaum told Lunghi on the phone (and confirmed subsequently via e-mail) that the reason for censorship was a fear of offending the artists whose genitals are represented. One might ask, cynically, does this have anything to do with the art market instead?

Is quasi-pornography and art world critique acceptable in forms of high production (Vezzoli, Koons) and not, as in Charlier's place, base modesty? Are the Charlier works just, too, well...naked?

To quote Enrico Lunghi regarding the censorship: "It only remains for the art world and journalists (at any rate, those who don’t just parrot the official press releases) to ask themselves what values the Venice Biennale is promoting if it censors an artistic project in such a dubious and irresponsible manner. Is it up to the Biennale to castrate artists by deciding for them what might offend those whose very existence consists of forever extending the limits of freedom?"

This preemptive self-censorship seems familiar to Americans caught up in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Does this censorship suggest an Americanization of European sensibility, or simply the manifestation of personal taste? In any case, a vigorous dialogue around this project that has already begun, and we'll learn a lot from it.

June 4 up-date (sent in by Anila Rubiku):

From an interview of Daniel Birnbaum by Nicola Davide Angerame at
http://www.exibart.com/notizia.asp?IDNotizia=27815&IDCategoria=1&MP=true

"In Italia ci sono stati recenti casi d’intolleranza e censura. Da Cattelan a Milano alla mostra di Sgarbi, sempre a Milano, a quella di Adel Abdessemed a Torino. Dove inizia la libertà dell’arte e degli artisti, e dove deve finire la libertà della politica e della società quando applicano la censura?
Gli artisti dovrebbero essere liberi quando creano i loro lavori, ma sono anche semplicemente esseri umani, che dovrebbero mostrare rispetto verso gli altri esseri umani, come deve fare chiunque. Non ci sono misteri. Nella maggior parte dei casi è una questione di decenza." (I would translate this but my Italian is a bit rusty, it would only be an approximation...)

Curator's Forum: Silvia Cubina

Pieter Hugo
Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007
digital c-print
© Pieter Hugo, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York and Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, Courtesy the Margulies collection at the WAREHOUSE, Miami

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Hans William Bentinck, Earl of Portland, K.G., 1698-1699
oil on canvas
Collection Bass Museum of Art

I'm asking a range of curator colleagues from around the world to send me brief posts about what they are up to or thinking about as part of the continued (hoped for) critique here.


For my first Curator's Forum I've invited Silvia Cubina, director of the Bass Art Museum and most recently director of The Moore Space, Miami. I met Silvia in Milwaukee many years ago through inova, and have gotten to know her through our various roommate experiences.

Silvia has recently made the leap from working at a kunsthalle to an encyclopedic museum. Given how the art world and art market is so obsessed with the contemporary, leaving historical context behind, how does a contemporary curator create a dialogue between these two areas of research? Artists need to know at least some history in order to understand the world they have inherited, just as curators need to know history in order to educate audiences (my favorite insight was when I was working with Yoshitomo Nara, and I asked him if he knew Giotto's work since there seemed some lovely formal overlap. It turns out Nara has been greatly influenced by that Italian master.)

Silvia's notes on "The Endless Renaissance," a show juxtaposing the Bass's eclectic collection with the rush rush contemporary community around it:

"'The Endless Renaissance' addresses the perceived polarization in Miami between contemporary art and art that was made in the past. Our city is swimming in the best contemporary art today. Contemporary art, nevertheless, was not created in a temporal void and the dialogue 'The Endless Renaissance' creates with old master works serves to reflect on thematic and art historical references that make all art richer and more layered in meaning and thought."

The show's primary intention is to demonstrate that the Rigaud was just as contemporary in its presentation of politics as is the Hug. The figures are enormously different, however: the Hugo figure is from a family of hyena handlers who make a living doing performances, while the Rigaud figure is of a patrician politician, who helped the British extend their colonial rule.

It seems that the Bass Museum can take advantage of the hiccup in the contemporary market and introduce some notions of the past in that new town of Miami.