What influences outside the visual arts inspire and impact your approach to curating?
Musicians engage in practitioner’s critique; that is, the makers respond to other makers, saying what’s good by doing: copping, quoting, imitating, recognizing, preserving. Artists work similarly, how they respond to each other is a good guide for curation and criticism. I also like a certain kind of DJ-ing that teases out and forces relationships across eras and styles, defying consistent thematics, and finds conflicts, tensions, conciliences between differing intents. In a more personal sense, the literary work of Paul Metcalf has been a big influence. Metcalf invented a form of novelistic text-collage wherein his authorial work is invisible, but felt, palpable. He researches and stitches together diverse sources of original material to address a particular topic: locale, personae, event or speculative reconsideration of history. He works with the work of others, his voice only resonating in the background through the research, editing, arrangement of existing material—this is my curatorial ideal. But then, TV haunts me, at least those few instances of someone slyly doing good in the world under cover of doing something else. Mary Hartmann, Mary Hartmann. Larry Sanders. Generation Kill. This is serious stuff.
For whom do you curate?
An institution is a real place, it exists in a neighborhood and city and state and region, it must acknowledge itself as an essential part of that weave to fully thrive. At the same time the goal is to reach across whatever boundaries exist. A friend and colleague, the experimental filmmaker Stephanie Barber, says that she makes films for an ideal audience, the person who will eagerly soak up every detail, lovingly caress every nuance, ponder every intellectual stimulus, and carry the film around inside them afterwards. I suppose that describes my ideal audience as well. While pointing out that the audience for experimental film was something like 200 people worldwide (and mostly filmmakers), Barber used to organize the Experimental Outdoor Film Festival here, in a public park in downtown Milwaukee, where a family could bring a picnic to sit and watch 12 minutes of all-brown lobster-scratched film (What the Water Said, 1998, by David Gatten), and a couple hours of equally challenging stuff. Yet the event managed to consistently attract hundreds of viewers from across the whole spectrum of the city. I’ve personally had the luxury of deciding to curate in not-for-profit and not-profitable contexts, so I can consider a small but deeply focused audience as my ideal. For most of us, the primary audience is artists and I curate for artists, for the high standard that demands, but I welcome anyone who walks in off the street and think it essential to offer engagement on any level, with whichever mutual language is available. Ultimately, if I don’t curate for everyone—and be able to defend that idea—I’m doing something wrong.
Tell me about a show you can only dream of doing – that is, in your current circumstances, impossible.
It’s hard to answer this question. In a sense, I feel all my exhibitions have seemed impossible, given Milwaukee’s marginal situation. To be blandly general, there’s little money here, little audience, little critical dialogue. Thus, the situation is rife with possibilities. Or impossibilities? That the Milwaukee International art fairs managed to attract thirty-odd galleries from their locations literally around the world (Beijing, Tokyo, Havana, San Juan, Miami, New York, LA, Oslo, Zurich, London, &c.)—twice—to participate in an art fair in a bowling alley seems impossible. To realign the precepts of this slice of the international art world towards Milwaukee’s implicit ethic of free-wheeling regional improvisation, even for a moment, seems unlikely, but it happened, and it was successful in the way we measure things here. Prior to that, the Hermetic Gallery took the international critical dialogue as its context despite being in a zone where that context was almost entirely absent. I think it has to do with the notion that it’s possible to substantiate efforts based on actual one-to-one engagement between curator, artist and audience, on ‘idea commerce’ rather than the standard power dynamics, prestige and monied interests.
Is there such a thing anymore as an undiscovered artist?
Absolutely, all the time. It depends on the frame of reference. We have information saturation and total networking, but isn’t it funny that we’re always finding artists we’ve missed? Overlooked? Misunderstood? I’m pleased to see that Leon Kossoff has some currency lately, I’d like to see some focus on Ibram Lassaw. A recent trip through French public collections exposed me to the work of François Morellet and Aurelie Nemours, who were totally new to me. On a recent visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art I discovered the work of Sylvia Fein, a Wisconsin artist of the 1940s previously unknown to me. The work of her male peers is much better-known. (I think the main reason there is obvious.) It all depends on where you place the brackets. My greatest curatorial effect is bringing attention to work that has been missed, passed over in the careening steamroll of art history, overlooked, underappreciated, ignored, dissed even. Opportunities for revival are always there, latent, reminding us that hindsight corrects our present vision. I’m uncomfortable with the notion of “discovery’ in the first place, maybe partly because I’ve been researching the history of Indian tribes in Wisconsin. It depends on where you place your focus, how you recognize the limits of your focus, of your ability to see. We are discovering new things all the time, most of which have been right under our noses.
There’s a painter in Milwaukee, Greg Klassen, he’s been painting here seriously for 20 years, and he hasn’t been discovered yet. And he’s a very good painter. But he and his work don’t fit into an existing and current dialogue, which as we know moves the focus around and delimits it, sometimes to the detriment of “discovery.” He studied under Gerhard Richter in Düsseldorf in the early ’90s, then came back to Milwaukee and continued his project, which is a kind of tendril of Richter’s concerns. He has produced a great body of work. Does it apply anywhere else? I don’t know. It’s a risk for a curator to do a show with little exterior justification. It’s all on you, on your word, your research, your care and concern that this artist’s work is well-represented. It’s hard to gather support behind any idiosyncratic choice. But those risks are always worthwhile.
Why should government fund the arts?
A great question. I’ve been poring over old issues of M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine, which arose (publicly funded) right around the time of the demise of the NEA individual artist granting system. Reminded me what a difference an annual $170-odd million could do for art and artists in this country.
The first thing is to recognize that even the most detached forms of contemporary art are absolutely essential to society. My bottom line is that anyone in this profession who thinks otherwise, or doubts this, even for a moment, should consider a different line of work. I don’t like to lean on statistics, especially economic justifications, like the fact that more people visit the Metropolitan museum in a year than Yankee Stadium, but this one makes an elegant point. The effect of art is hard to gauge, however, and gets grossly oversimplified. The whole point of the thing, for me, is to keep complexity alive and breathing, resolutely and defiantly, within the popular discourse. Our government is actually designed to promote dissensus, the sustenance of the minority. I feel I must remind my fellow citizens that the essence of democracy is to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority, and arguments toward popular opinion tend to speciously overlook this essential fact.
Nicholas Frank was curator at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) in Milwaukee from 2006-2011, and currently teaches in the Integrated Studio Arts program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. His heavy metal seance band, Demono, will release a live recording on the Augurari label in late 2011.
