Lynne Cooke and Alison Gingeras

On April 12, we had the pleasure of listening to a lecture and conversation by curators Lynne Cooke and Alison Gingeras at our AAP space at 26 Broadway. This discussion marked the ending to an eventful day of gallery visits (Terry Winter’s show at The Drawing Center, and Cy Twombly’s drawing exhibition at Gagosian Gallery) for the BFA students, all as part of our Professional Practice Seminar class organized by Linda Norden. Lynne Cooke and Alison Gingeras, renowned writers and curators, each shared with us their recent projects, as well as the ideas and decisions behind their research.

Cooke introduced us to her recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Outliers and American Vanguard Art, which explores the works of outlier/outsider artists over three periods in American history. Spanning over 200 works, Cooke’s curatorial work includes self-taught artists who pushed the boundaries of the art world, concurrently with mainstream artists—and this examination extended to the more recent entry of work that questions what it means to be an outsider of the mainstream art world. Her presentation was one that compelled us to inspect more closely the definition of “American,” and all who stand outside of it—outsider, primitive, naïve, visionary, folk, however the work may be categorized. Cooke’s selection of artists and artworks, as well as the questions of “What is American, what is American art?” posed by the overall exhibition, complementing our focus on Pop Art as a recurrent subject in our recent classes (Masha Panteleyeva’s art & architectural history, as well as recalling our trip with Linda Norden to the Whitney Museum to hear Donna De Salvo’s discussion of her upcoming Warhol retrospective conceptualization and planning).

Gingeras talked about her recently published book, The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up: Cobra and It’s Legacy, and about Sex Work: Feminist Art and Radical Politics – her curatorial project that was originally presented at the 2017 London Frieze Art Fair, and will soon be presented in book form. The Sex Work project surrounded nine women in the 1970’s and 80’s whose lives and careers were hobbled by the fact that they were making explicit sex a primary focus of their work, and therefore dealt with art censorship in ways that paralleled one another and addressed the importance of intent in visual representation. Gingeras started by presenting Jeff Koons’ Made In Heaven to the audience  as a “symbol of white male gender privilege,” and stipulated that the “Jeff Koons we know today” has been formulated by the agency he derived from his porn star wife’s (Cicciolina) already developed conceptual project. Gingeras questioned “what else was erased?” and extended this challenge towards other moments in feminist history that intertwine with erotic representation, linking them with the “intellectual history of the political/activist writings around questions of sexual agency.” She threw back to us the nagging question — “is it possible to ever create a revolutionary erotica?”

During the conversation between Lynne Cooke and Alison Gingeras which followed the individual presentations, Gingeras stated that even the most radical artists can be self-centering, and described herself as a dissident feminist, or an “accidental dissident,” as termed by the artist Betty Tompkins.

The two curators also answered questions related to inclusion and integration in exhibition spaces. In our own conversations that followed, it seemed that many of us found the presentations useful and informative for our own practice, and would influence the way in which we approach conceptualizing narratives for identity.