Anna Kryczka

The exhibition Your Pal, Cliff at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum features art objects as well as ephemera derived from the collection donated to the museum by the estate of Westermann’s widow, Joanne Beal Westermann. Getting a chance to encounter even one of Westermann’s works is always cause for celebration, so it is a true windfall to see a show of this magnitude. Not since the MCA’s excellent 2001 retrospective has there been a comprehensive exhibition of his work.

Westermann’s work is notable for its profusion of diverse source material. Notable for their sophisticated and humorous linguistic and philosophical play, the objects combine a Donald Judd-like interest in the well-made (perhaps indicating a shared affinity for Shaker and other American craft traditions) with an interest in vernacular architecture, like roadside grottos or urban churches. However, unlike Judd, Westermann’s well-made objects are the product of his own fastidious hands. The two-time Marine Corp veteran and sometimes acrobat’s carpentry skills are matched only by the sincerity of his expressive syntax of forms. The objects are distinguished for the way in which they fuse a myriad of sources to produce a strikingly direct and profound result, that somehow exhibits both multiplicity and specificity.

Westermann’s prints, drawings and letters are equally compelling in their combination of personal, collective and vernacular histories. While it is difficult to envision a peer group for an artist as singular as Westermann, artists such as Judd, Claes Oldenburg, John Wesley, Jasper Johns, Richard Artschwager, Joseph Yoakum and Yayoi Kusama do come to mind. However, even the diversity of this hypothetical grouping is still an inadequate measurement of what Westermann is really up to.

To stop one’s inquiry at the level of form or process is to neglect the unparalleled integration of Westermann’s life and art—Westermann’s home and workshop in Connecticut, built from the ground up in collaboration with his wife, is a testament to this fusion. While on the visiting artist circuit in the 1970s, Westermann would skip the requisite artist talk in favor of going out with his wife, their dog and the graduate students. While buying beers for the grads, he would tell stories of war, adventure and craft.

The integration of his mode of expression, manner of living and personal comportment suggest a genuineness (worlds apart from the perversions and nonsense of the mainstream art world). It is impossible to put Westermann’s art in brackets; it necessarily bleeds into his life, and—while his is an extraordinary story—there is something for everyone embedded in his richly textured formal grammar.

On view through Sept 6, The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue, 773-702-0200. Hours: Tues–Wed & Fri 10am–4pm, Thurs 10am–8pm, Sat–Sun 11am–5pm.

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Cultural institutions in crisis…so what else is new?

by Natalie Edwards

If Chicago’s 10.5% sales tax and the constantly unfilled potholes didn’t clue you in on the economic collapse, then the demise of cultural institutions should tip you off. Early reports of the recession pointed towards a sustainable, resilient art market, with the economically street-wise talking heads projecting that the wealthiest would continue to act like the wealthiest, doing what the wealthiest do: buy, sell and trade commodities (like big ticket art that most people can’t touch).

But, the wealthiest aren’t acting like the wealthiest after all, affecting everything from museums, university galleries, orchestras and even arboretums and aquariums. Prominent institutions like the Getty in Los Angeles are among the many suffering from declining ticket sales, dwindling endowments, hiring freezes, disappearing board members and dips in donations. Doors are closing, buildings are stopped mid-construction. There are layoffs, and fine art yard sales.

Some cultural organizations are being priced out of their homes, prompting unconventional partnerships. In St. Louis, a prominent arts organization is using a mall food court as a gallery. Hundreds of people came out for the first open house, held in the glow of a Panda Express.

Some museums are renting their collections out to museums and hotels. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is currently renting art from its collection to Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel and Casino at a bargain price. The museum will receive a flat fee based on revenue received by the Casino, which charges $15 to view the exhibit.

The Art Institute of Chicago, which can’t be moved to a food court, has raised prices (from $12 to $18 for general admission and $5 to $12 for students and seniors) to make up for rising operating costs and to accommodate the costs of the new Modern Wing; AIC hasn’t increased prices in five years—although they did eliminate the suggested donation admission several years ago.

Even The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a seemingly untouchable institution, is in trouble. The museum is firing 74 retail workers and closing seven of its shops nationwide. They have already closed eight stores and fired another 53 retail employees in recent months. These are the first lay-offs since NYC’s financial crunch in the ’70s. While the Met’s chairman, James Houghton, says their budget, which has projected a 25% decrease in their endowment, is not set in stone, layoffs are permitted to continue throughout June (although no more are scheduled).

Many university and major museums are so desperate for money they are selling portions of their collection. The Museum of Modern Art is also gearing up to auction off a chunk of its American art collection.

The National Academy Museum in New York decided to sell two Hudson River School paintings for $15 million dollars to help keep their doors open, and Brandeis University, expecting a budget deficit of around $10 million dollars over the next five years, closed its 49 year-old art museum, The Rose, and will sell their collection, which includes Warhols and de Koonings. The collection was appraised at about $350 million in 2007. The Rose Art Museum situation is particularly complicated, because it was not only affected by the general economic crisis, but their most important donor was substantially hit by the Madoff scandal.

Locally, I Space, which is associated with the University of Illinois, will be closing its doors by the end of the summer, and the Terra Foundation, a Chicago-based source of funding for artists and art institutions, has pulled out of their Paris museum to reallocate their resources and focus their interests more closely to home.

And, after 43 years in business, New Yorker Films, an independent distributor that owned the rights to a vast collection of foreign and art-house works, closed its doors on February 23 2009. Its collection remains in the hands of Technicolor, the company that forced New Yorker Films to cease operations due to an outstanding debt.

Somehow, according to the New York Times, “cultural professionals” remain optimistic. Many hold out hope that President Obama will be “The Arts President”—following in Roosevelt’s footsteps. He has dedicated a good $60 million dollars to the National Endowment for the Arts and has also  (unofficially) chosen Chicagoan Karem Dale to head his newly created Cultural Ambassador-ish post—a position that artists and organizations have lobbied for years to introduce. Baby steps.

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Photos of faith in movement

“Sacred Waters” at the Field Museum

by Aurélie Beatley

“The independence of the journalist is a myth,” says Jean-Marc Giboux, over a café au lait in Wicker Park’s Café De Luca. I cannot remember if he said it in English or in French, but I am excited because that is a great, sweeping quote and I have never really interviewed anyone before. He is speaking about his photography work, which is stunning. “You have to be in the moment to take photos, you have to feel things…” he follows up.

Mr. Giboux’s photography exhibition, “Sacred Waters: India’s Great Kumbha Mela Pilgrimage,” opened at the Field Museum on March 5 to a small crowd of cultural relations people. It is one of the few shows to have opened in the Marae Gallery on the second floor of the Field, in which the work actually seems too big for the space. Giboux’s photography is riveting. It displays a worshipful veneration of humanity, of a magnitude that is not often witnessed in the Western world.

The photos document the Kumbha Mela, Hinduism’s biggest event, and the largest religious gathering on earth. The pilgrimage spans four different holy sites, with one visited every three years, following a 12-year cycle. Giboux’s involvement with it began in 1998 when he went to shoot it with the Gamma-Liaisons photo agency, for whom he was working at the time. He tells me he went four times and was supposed to stay for a week, but he was so taken with the experience that he ended up staying for a month. What attracted him, he says, was “the India of villages, traditional India.” He speaks of socializing with people to gain their trust so that the photos would be honest. “At first, when you come to India as a Westerner you’re the center of attention,” he explains, but with time people get used to the interloper, which is when he starts to take pictures.

He deplores the trend among the younger generation, mostly brought on by the incursion of Western companies on tribal land, to reject their cultural attachments. “Looking into Indian culture,” he told me, “the kids spend so much time in the virtual world, and they create stories there, as if the real world had nothing rich enough for them.”

There is something of the turn of the century adventurer in Giboux, though he tells me repeatedly that what he does is not glamorous. He likes projects with a wider scope, because they present him with the unique opportunity to step out of day-to-day modern life and into an experience that is utterly alien. While shooting the pilgrimage, he tells me, he lives on the ground. He sleeps on it and eats on it like everyone around. He spends a month away from the Internet—which to most of us is hopelessly exotic—and keeps a hotel room not for himself but for his photo material and the occasional shower. “People idealize this sort of life, but most people probably couldn’t do it.”

Giboux started taking pictures in high school after a drawing instructor gave him a demonstration. The gift of a Nikon F from an uncle cemented his fate, and he learned as much as he could on his own, due to the dearth of photo programs in France at the time. In the mid-80s, he relocated to the United States—Los Angeles specifically—in order to cover news, social issues and cultural trends in LA for various European publications. Giboux worked with current events—specifically gang violence and societal problems—for several years. America, he says, was like a laboratory for Europe at the time.

France was perhaps a decade behind the U.S. and picking up all its bad habits, so being on hand to watch as the cultural force behind the modern world developed was a singularly privileged experience. Doing news work was draining however, “because you have to do it all the time, you can’t turn it off.”
His interest in people and cultural phenomena seems to have lingered however, because while he began to work on more large-scale projects his strong humanist bent brought him to several humanitarian endeavors: for Doctors Without Borders he shot immunization campaigns, and for the World Health Organization he documented the attempt to eradicate polio. Throughout his photos and in his manner of describing what he does, the most obvious trait is a strong sense of integrity, coupled with a deep compassion and genuine interest for his subjects. “There needs to be meaning in your art,” he tells me. “I need emotion in my photography. Good light, good composition and emotion.”

When I ask him about funding, he smiles and tells me that that was obviously the most difficult part. Outside of a major grant he got from the Rotarians to shoot the polio project and a couple of excursions with Doctors Without Borders, his projects are mostly self-funded in a poetic Robin Hood sort of way, by his corporate work done in the States. He does not particularly enjoy shooting corporate events (he says he prefers to be an adventurer), but his attitude is that you do what you have to do in order to get to what you love.

I tell him about my own attempts to find balance between my professional life and my artwork, and he tells me that there has to be some compromise, but that anything is possible. That sort of statement usually sounds patronizing, but I believe him because he reminds me a bit of Indiana Jones, and his photos are so honest that I cannot help but think he might be onto something. After all, the work in “Sacred Waters” feels real; presenting a working artist doing it right.

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by Tristan Hummel

As an emerging artist there are some serious roadblocks to financing your ideas. Whether you want to create a painting or open a gallery space, there is a significant amount of capital that you need to invest. The first step towards securing seed money is not just figuring out how to get it but who to get it from.

So whom does the artist go to? Major financial institutions are out, so let’s look at the other possibilities, which include almost anyone. Your friends, family, professors, that guy who owns a bar down the street, your landlord and your cable guy are all possible financiers. Don’t be shy about asking for money if you believe in your idea. My friend’s mother used to tell him, “You get 80% of what you ask for.” In my experience this number is closer to 45%, but that’s still huge.

Speaking of mothers, ask your folks for help. I’m not talking about hitting them up for cash—your parents have been on this earth for who knows how long and have spent most of that time meeting people and forging connections. Ask your folks who they know, and who could lend you time, advice, or even capital. Most importantly, don’t forget to ask for advice, not money. Never ask for money on the first conversation, you need to talk to people and feel it out.

Anyway, catastrophe: you asked your parents about possible contacts and nothing turned up. You even asked them for money and it turns out their entire savings, and the savings of everyone they know, tanked with the stock market. In fact they are counting on you to make enough to care for them in their old age. It’s OK, you go to SAIC, you know at least eight people who are wealthier than most third world countries. Get together a professional proposal for them, offer them some return and make it worth their while. They may come to your aid.

The point of all of this is that every person is a potential investor and you should ask them for their help. Nothing wagered, nothing won. A single large benefactor is amazing but rare, a few smaller revenue streams are more likely and may be to your advantage.

There are three main categories of financing available to you: investments, indirect returns, and donations. A standard investment is when you receive a set amount of capital and pay back the initial amount plus interest (usually 6% to 10% annually). An indirect return is when you receive money and do not have to pay any of it back because your investor believes there are non-monetary rewards to funding you. This type of investment is similar to advertisements. The last and most tantalizing type of financing is donations. The basic idea is that you get a lump sum and are sent on your way to do whatever you wish with no financial obligation in return. Oftentimes, however, there are progress reports or other ‘check-up’ strategies employed by the donor.

When you approach any of these resources, follow the same basic guidelines. Presentation is the first key step. Make it look like your idea already exists, have a rough draft, a super-imposed graph of a planned location for the piece, a timeline for completion or any other sort of information that shows that your project can actually be realized. Your investor is going to need help visualizing what you are talking about, so your proposal should show exactly what you want to do and how you are going to achieve it. Be brief with words and heavy on images. As part of your proposal include a supporting document defining why you will be able to get this done. If an investor likes your work but hates you they are not going to give you money, conversely if they aren’t moved by the artwork but like you personally they may still invest.

If people have confidence in you and can clearly visualize your ideas, they will give you money. Remember that they are more interested in you than your work at this point in your career. You aren’t expected to have everything figured out yet, people will give you breaks because they see that you’re a good long-term investment. Show them you have it in you, and you will be able to catch a lift out of the “emerging artist” world and make a living selling your work, at which point (congratulations) you’ll be able to start worrying about banks. Good luck!

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By Emily Bauman
In 1976 the Metropolitan Museum of Art put on its infamous “King Tut” exhibition, which broke attendance records for the New York epicenter, and ushered in the era of blockbuster exhibitions. Blockbusters draw in huge crowds of out-of-towners and, thereby, huge sums of money for both the museums that host them (which often charge an additional fee for admission to the special exhibitions), the cities they are in (local businesses, hotels, restaurants, etc.), the galleries that surround them, the curators who produce them, collectors who own works by artists in the shows, and more.

The old faithful blockbuster is generally an Impressionist exhibition—Monet really knows how to draw in the crowds—but they have ranged from national treasure exhibitions to kitschy subjects that bend the definition of fine art. However, in an 1980 interview with Brenda Richardson, Richard Serra snarkily remarked: “I’m never sure anymore when I go to the Whitney [Museum of American Art] whether I will see Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing his muscles in the hall or another Edward Hopper retrospective, either one of which is essentially a sales pitch to bring in the masses.” In 1998 when New York’s Guggenheim opened its “The Art of the Motorcycle” exhibition, I have to admit, I had exactly the same feeling. In fact, I swore off going to the Guggenheim ever again, (that is, until they drew me back in with Daniel Buren in 2005.)

But during recessions, or when public funding has been cut, or even during a renovation, the publicity and funds that a blockbuster can bring to a museum can prove invaluable. Take, for example, the “Matisse Picasso” exhibition that the Museum of Modern Art put on during its tenure in Queens (while it overhauled its Manhattan site). Billed by New York Magazine as “Picasso vs. Matisse: MoMA’s Subway Series—The battle of the titans of twentieth-century art is taking place in Long Island City, which brings up a new issue: Which is New York’s left bank?,” the show was an attempt to maintain the museum’s stature while it was in (metaphorical) exile. With over 3,000 visitors a day, at 20 bucks a pop, I would guess: it worked.

AIC has been complicit in this strategy over the years, mounting a Monet retrospective in 1995 that drew about 965,000 visitors, and a Mary Cassatt one in 1998 that charged a $14 entrance fee. But things have (supposedly) changed since James Cuno came to town in 2004 with his anti-blockbuster stance. Cuno views the internationally touring major exhibition as a distraction from the permanent collection of a museum—it doesn’t hurt that he is now working with the nation’s third largest encyclopedic collection. Ironically, though, AIC is known for is its Impressionist collection, theoretically making the works on permanent display a perpetual blockbuster.

But it is also the gift shops, restaurants and commercial partnerships that Cuno rails against. Even wall texts, catalogues and education have come under his scrutiny. “The author of the discourse replaces the maker of the object as the primary agent in the experience,” Cuno told The Harvard Crimson in 2004. “We have to see that museums are not only places of learning…We shouldn’t presume that the only way to justify the museum experience is the extent to which you learn something.” He believes that the museum has a responsibility to the public to gain its respect and trust: members should not be paying for special access to traveling exhibitions, but should be investing in the institution, its collection and its goals.

And, who can argue with his basic point? Exhibitions like “Sensation,” back in 1999-2000, and the circus that surrounded it, definitely take the attention away from scholarly genuine endeavors and give undue power to collectors like Charles Saatchi. But, it also put the Brooklyn Museum of Art back on the map, and names like Chris Ofili and Damien Hirst on the front page of the news. But, while Saatchi and Hirst have helped make the art world what it is today, they haven’t necessarily done so without sullying the waters.

Cuno argues that the money made from such exhibitions does not outweigh the toll it takes on the museum’s reputation. But Cuno is known for raising money for museums via other means. During his nearly 12 years as director of the Harvard University Art Museums (1991–2002), he doubled the size of the staff, budget and the collection, raising $55 million in a capital campaign there in the 90s. He has managed to raise more than two-thirds of the money needed for the Modern Wing during his tenure (he came in with around $120-125 million of the approximately $370 million price tag already accounted for). However, during the renovations and construction of the Modern Wing (set to open on May 16), Cuno has made a couple of moves that seem to question his anti-blockbuster commitment.

For example, the museum loaned almost 100 of its famed Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, for an undisclosed, but hefty sum. The works were presented as a blockbuster exhibition in Texas under the title: “The Impressionists: Master Works From the Art Institute of Chicago” (June 29-November 2, 2008), with an accompanying catalogue used to bolster the image of AIC. So, even though the blockbuster wasn’t held at the museum itself, there is no doubt of its complicity and intentional self-promotion in the loan agreement’s conditions. This practice is not unusual however—using MoMA as our comparison again: parts of its collection were sent during its renovation to Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin and Frankfurt. Fees were charged for these shows (it was reported that Berlin paid $2 million for the loan).

And, while Cuno derides the tendency to focus on the “theme park” experience of the museum that blockbusters, gift shops, cafes, etc., bring, the first major changes that were made to the Modern Wing’s plans upon his arrival were the addition of a restaurant, an elevated sculpture terrace and an 800-foot bridge over Monroe St. that leads right into Millennium Park. The restaurant (not unlike MoMA’s exquisite The Modern), will be run by a top Chicago chef (Tony Mantuano from Spiaggia) and will be separated into a bar/lighter meal area and a fine dining space. Cuno was quick to credit the popular draw of Millennium Park and its accessible public sculpture program with the revitalization of and additions to the new wing’s design.

The museum’s recent program has betrayed some ambiguity as well: while Jasper Johns’s “Gray” show may not be as colorful and crazy as any Picasso exhibition, it, along with the recent Turner, Homer and Hopper shows were definite crowd pleasers. (Not to mention the exclusive showing of the Benin exhibition earlier this season and last year’s “Silk Road Chicago” extravaganza, which were nothing to be scoffed at either.) Meanwhile, the current Edvard Munch exhibition got first page billing in the New York Times, and, like blockbuster shows at most museums, the museum is charging a separate entrance fee—a full entrance fee during February’s “Free Month” and about a $5 add-on to admission for March and April.

Only a month and a half away from the greatly anticipated opening of Renzo Piano’s new Modern Wing, AIC is expecting major publicity and record attendance to its new galleries and its inaugural special exhibition of Cy Twombly’s 2001-07 paintings (not a blockbuster per se, the Twombly exhibition is spuriously rumored to be a bid for the artist’s estate). So, while some of AIC’s recent exhibitions appear to have been blockbusters-by-accident and the new wing’s opening is so much more than a blockbuster, which should be bringing in a financial windfall starting mid-May—especially with the newly instituted $18 entrance fee—it is possible that the traditional blockbuster is not a necessary avenue for AIC at the moment.

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