Dunkerley Dialogue: College Museums: A Visual Laboratory?

PDF: College_Museums.pdf 

Friday, April 7, 2006
Dunkerley Dialogue
College Museums: A Visual Laboratory?

Adam Weinberg, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Fred Wilson, Artist and Luce Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, Skidmore College

Welcome and Introductions: Susan Bender, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Luce Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge, Skidmore College; and John Weber, Director of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College

Conference transcript editing by Sarah Goodwin, Professor of English, Skidmore College; copyediting by Kathryn Gallien.


John Weber: Welcome. I am John Weber, the Dayton Director of the Tang Museum. It is great to see everybody here for our conference on “The College Museum: Collision of Disciplines, Laboratory of Perception.”

Sue Bender: And I am Sue Bender, Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore and Director of the Luce Fellowship Program at the college, and it is my pleasure to be able to join John in welcoming you to Skidmore and the Tang. We are delighted to have colleagues here from so many museums from across the US and a representative of England. Before launching into the rest of the afternoon and the evening, I would like to thank all of the workshop chairs for giving us such a wonderful session in the last couple of hours: Associate Professors Debbie Fernandez [Dance] and Margo Mensing [Studio Art], joined by their fellow performer President Emeritus David Porter; Ian Berry, associate director and Malloy Curator of the Tang Museum; Mary Crone Odekon, associate professor of astrophysics at Skidmore; Mason Stokes, associate professor of English; and of course, John.

John: Thank you. We structured the conference to begin with workshops that can engage all of us actively in discussing what museums are on college campuses and how they function, because we really see the museum as a laboratory, not as a theater of passive contemplation. So we wanted to start out really actively. We also believe that one of the great benefits of a conference such as this is to talk with our colleagues while we are away from our offices and our e-mail, and—if we turn them off—our cell phones. We are proceeding now with the next phase, which is a dialogue between Fred Wilson and Adam Weinberg, Director of the Whitney Museum. But before we introduce them, we would like to say just a word about Fred’s presence here, which has really been the catalyst for this conference.

Sue: Fred began coming to Skidmore two years ago, spring semesters, under the auspices of a Henry Luce grant. He has worked with faculty to help us understand the nature of museums and to explore how we might use our own museum more effectively as a part of teaching in our educational program and in higher education in general. Since then we have been talking, traveling—oh the traveling!—and reading and thinking with Fred about all of the questions that we are engaged in today. The decision to create this conference and the selection of the perspectives represented in our panelists also reflect the work that we have done together, so we wanted to share some of that dialogue with you at the outset; and we are grateful to Fred and Adam for bringing that to us.

Before I turn the podium over to John to do a short introduction, I want to share just one short story about planning the conference with Fred. We had been agonizing about a name for the conference for months, and we had finally come up with “The College Museum: Archive, Laboratory, Gallery, or Classroom?” Well, none of us liked it very well, but we were basically just sick of talking about and needed to go to press. At the last moment we got an e-mail from Fred, sent at about 3 a.m., saying he couldn’t sleep thinking about that title, and it was just way too boring. So he said to us, “How about ‘The College Museum: A Collision of Disciplines, a Laboratory of Perception’?” We all said “Perfect;” and here we are today.

John: So we are going to be colliding in the lab all weekend long, and we are happy about it. I will make my introduction short because I know what we really want to do is hear from Fred and Adam, who are probably familiar at least as concepts, if not as actual people, to many of you here.

Adam Weinberg is the Director of the Whitney Museum [of Modern Art] and he has also been a member of the Tang National Advisory Council. I met Adam a long time ago when I was a young curator at the Portland Art Museum and Adam was a young director at the Whitney Equitable Museum. I am sure Adam has forgotten this a long time ago, but I recall very well that I was working on a sculpture show at the time and met with him at the Equitable to try out a few ideas and pick his brain. He did have some good ideas, and I ended up showing one of the artists, Carol Hepper, that he shared with me. And then towards the end of the conversation, sensing that I was still pretty green in the New York art world, he left me with a piece of advice that I have never forgotten: “Don’t let anybody talk you into anything.” That was really good advice, and I try to follow it daily. Since that time he has gone on to the American Center in Paris, back to the Whitney, curating their collection, and—I am not sure if the order here is correct—then to the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Andover Academy, and then I think in 2003 back to the Whitney as the director. Like Fred, he has thought a lot about museums; he even did a stint in education at the Walker early on in his career. He has thought about what museums are for, how they engage audiences, and how they teach. I am deeply grateful to Adam for joining us today, fitting this conference into an extremely busy schedule, in the midst of the Whitney Biennial season and as the Whitney forges ahead with exciting new architectural plans for expansion with Renzo Piano. So thank you very, very much, Adam, for joining us today.

Fred Wilson, a MacArthur fellow, has been exhibiting and curating for over 20 years. It is no exaggeration to say that his breakthrough exhibition, Mining the Museum for the Baltimore [Maryland] Historical Society, and the museum interventions and shows that followed, changed the way museums think about what we do and how we do it. I also want to note that the curator for that show, Lisa Corrin, will be coming tomorrow; she is now the director of the Williams College Museum of Art. It is a privilege and a delight to have Fred here, and I want to thank him personally and professionally for all he has done to nudge us here at Skidmore, push us, interrogate us and—through an indescribable gravitational force that his presence exerts—pull us toward a kind of self-criticism and critique that is both invigorating and much needed, intellectually and ethically. We would not be gathered today without him, and this weekend’s events are only a small measure of his impact. I also want to note that he has a show up through next weekend, at Pace Gallery in New York, for those of you who may be combining a trip here with a visit to New York City. And so, and you can count the red dots, virtue is sometimes followed by rewards. Many thanks, Fred and Adam; please, everyone, join us in welcoming them here to the Tang Museum.

Adam Weinberg: Well, I have to say I am a little bit embarrassed on at least two counts. One is that I never thought of myself as a concept; second of all, I have never followed the advice that I gave you, which I don’t remember having even given to you—which is an example of why I am here today—though I must say I am truly delighted. In the five years that I was at the Addison Gallery I would have very much wished to think of such a great idea as this conference that the three of you have helped put together. It has been long overdue, and I am happy to take part.

Fred: Yes, it is a culmination for me of my three years here. For an artist like myself who travels around the country and knows museums in ways that many professionals don’t really know them, it was something that kind of screamed out to me, a perfect kind of conference to do. So this is just a terrific way to culminate my stay here at Skidmore.

Adam: Today, Fred and I decided that we would try to have a little fun with this. Not knowing which one of us was the speaker and which one was the interviewer, we thought we would take turns. So we drew straws, and I get to ask the first question. What we are hoping to do is explore two concepts here, because you know the point of view of Fred as curator, Fred as artist; we also want to think generally about the curator as curator and the curator as artist, and what that might mean. Just a quick anecdote: I remember about 20 years ago being at a conference for the Society for Photographic Education. Weston Naef—who is the curator of photography at the Getty now, but at the time was the curator at the Met—was there, and I remember saying to him, “Don’t you think a curator has a somewhat artistic function?” He just laughed hysterically; he thought it was the most ridiculous thing. I think it is interesting because now this is a real question. The idea of some kind of objectivity on the part of the curator is truly questionable.

Fred, my first question to you is: how do you feel that a teaching museum—and this [the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery] is the only one I know that is called a teaching museum per se—how do you feel that the role of the teaching museum differs from that of a public museum as a laboratory?

Fred: Well, I guess in a lot of different ways. Calling the Tang a teaching museum, having it in the title, I think, has allowed a lot of things to happen that might not have happened had it not been constantly reinforced and become so important to the college. But there are more similarities to a smaller regional museum than to a large city museum in that there is a noble community, to a certain degree. Then again, the difference between a college museum and a regional museum is that there is the local community and then there is the college community. The teaching museum is working with both those two constituencies, as it were, and trying to get its program to reflect the interests of both constituencies. Whereas a city museum—you know, we basically have the same question for each other, we are so much alike. This is what I was going to ask you. A city museum, your community and your audience—well, I will save that for you. The city is a much larger community; it is less noble, in a certain way.

Adam: What do you mean by noble? I probably agree with that, but…

Fred: Not the museum, but the city, because of the large populations in a city, the various communities. Museums generally focus on one small group that they see coming through the doors. For the museum, that not only is the audience, but that becomes the city. That is the question that I would have for you. This is just me on the outside looking at the city museum and wondering: can we wrench ourselves away from that one constituency?

Adam: Well, let me first just ask you to follow up on something. I often thought when I was at the Addison Gallery I had a sort of schizophrenic existence. I didn’t know entirely whether my audience was the school first and then the community, or communities, second, and I was constantly going back and forth between the two, because they really were two different worlds. How does that schizophrenic existence affect you as an artist, but also how do you think that is either beneficial or negative for a university museum?

Fred: Well, as an artist, when I am involved with museum projects, the project is always the same. I try to get to know as many people as I can, just physically meeting people, talking about what I do, so in that way what I do at a college museum is not really different from a city museum. But of course when I do something in a city museum I am very well aware that I am not going to know every community, because it is not particularly possible. But I always believe even that realization helps you make an exhibition that is better for a broader community. Because I think a lot of times one makes exhibitions and pretends to know who the audience is, or pretends to know who is in the community, what their interests are. So you make work for that imagined community, and then you lose a lot of people because of it. By understanding you are making an exhibition that is on a particular subject and for particular people—but with the cognizance that there are many other people from very different points of view coming to this and seeing it in different ways—you change what you do, even though it is very specific.

Adam: So do you think that when you are doing a project for a university museum you are foregrounding the audience of that university, in effect looking at them as your primary audience, and then the community audience is secondary?

Fred: What I do has a lot to do with the kind of informal research that I do. It really revolves around who I get to know and get to speak to and how these relations develop. I try to insert myself into as many different environments as possible to get a sense of the lay of the land, knowing that I am not going to know everything about it. But it is kind of remarkable how much you can get to know in a short space of time if you are open to knowing. So, it could be in a college community or, say, in Venice. The longer I am there, the more conversations lead me to other communities, other groups of people. I try to get a sense of what they are about and what their relationship is with the community, with the city, and with the museum itself, and of course with the university, from outside the university or within the university. That all affects what I do. If I am doing a project it may not necessarily be the topic of the project that we talk about—usually not. But our conversations affect how I think about the material I am looking at and how I read it. What I do is not so different from one place to another. The longer you are in a place, the more you change how you relate to people. So this is how I work; I change and the questions change—the longer you are in a place the more the questions change.

When I did a project in Liverpool for the Liverpool Biennial, of course I went there thinking, well, I will do something about the Beatles, you know, what a no-brainer. Of course it didn’t take me very long to realize that was the most boring thing for people in Liverpool. And it became boring for me too, because I was in that place for quite a while, and so the questions got deeper from knowing people and looking at everything that was there, rather than just something that I knew was there before I came. So my work is pretty much like that. If it is a college community—and they are all extremely different—that part makes it interesting. If it was all the same it would be pretty boring to do what I do, to make a project, since it is largely—as you were going to tell me—about the frame more than it is about the things. So I come into Skidmore, knowing that I have preconceived notions about, say, a college and the town-gown thing, but also knowing that if I stay with it long enough I will get beyond those stereotypical ideas about what the faculty is like, what the students are like, what the administration is like, what the local community is like, and start to see it as how it is different from everything else, from other places that may seem similar. Then you get to something that is really special about that place. You know, it’s like an onion: the people of the school, the museum, the university, the college, the outside community, they can read that exhibition in a way that nobody else can because it was developed in that location.

Adam: I am thinking, as you are talking, that the audience for the artist, for each artist, is almost a construct of that artist and what they imagine the audience to be. Some artists do what they do no matter what the community is. Does that make you as an artist much more reactive, as much as proactive? Because then the work is always based on the frames and the containers of what’s there, as opposed to saying, “Look, this is what I do.” I mean, clearly there is a through-line in your work, and what you do is that reaction to the community.

Fred: And it is extremely important for me in my practice that each project does not look alike from one to the next. So there is a sameness there, but then the topics that I am finding, as I keep listening to people, make all the difference. I am much more interested in a new topic than in a retread of something that I have done before. This is a large part of my practice, and it informs it in a way that is different. It doesn’t mean that the end product is about a community necessarily; it is just a way to look at a collection. That’s what shifts: how you look at the collection. Of course, it is me looking at it. I am not foolish enough to believe that I am challenging everyone and that it is coming out of them. I mean, it is obviously me too.

Adam: I am curious: in one of the conversations we had a little bit earlier, we were talking about the idea of the artist as a kind of adjutant to the museum, whether it is in a university museum or any museum. I’m wondering if you would reflect a little bit on your role as the outsider. Particularly in a university museum you are coming in from the outside—in a way you are a double outsider because you are not an academic, you’re an outsider to the community and to the museum. While the museum is a home base, it’s a new museum. What does that mean particularly, coming to a place like the Tang?

Fred: Well, I can really compare and contrast my experience here and my experiences at other museums. I didn’t do an exhibition here, which is a very specific way of working, and very different from this three year residency. I just did the project at the Hood Museum in Dartmouth that was very much my looking at the collection and responding to it. I wasn’t there during the school year, for most of it, so my interactions were really different than here at the Tang, and then the outcome was very specific, very concrete: there was an exhibition. But coming here, I guess I came in as a sponge. The learning curve in an academic community, as opposed to the art world, was much greater than I thought it would be. So it was all very new for me. I have taught at art schools, but working here it is almost more similar to working in a small town, for example working in North Carolina, where I got to know the people on the city council and various local museums at all different levels, trying to understand how all that works in another part of the country. It is much more similar to that. Small towns and college museums have in common that they both function very well, very differently, extremely complicated, and so bridging the two beyond the brass tacks of scheduling and the structures of managing both, that’s a challenge. The thing that really works is good will. If you have good will, which happens here at Skidmore, you can bridge a lot of the differences. But the major things, once you understand that there are very different—extremely different—structures that have to somehow work together; once you realize that, that’s when it all begins.

Adam: Did you see yourself as an emissary of the art museum, sort of a mole in the academic community?

Fred: Yes. I mean, I wouldn’t use the word mole; I can’t quite say that I am invisible around the campus. But it was really important for me to be the emissary, and to go into environments where the topic of the museum did not really exist, and to try, at least, to bring ideas about objects and exhibitions, not only at the museum, but at other locations, with things that are actually at the locations themselves, try to bring those ideas out to the rest of the campus.

Adam: So did you find actually your role as emissary also then reversed itself over time, so that as you understood more the needs and the strictures and structures of the academic world you would bring that back into the museum? Because you really weren’t here, as you said, in a residency for the museum, you were really here in the academic program, on the faculty.

Fred: My office was here, but really, since I wasn’t making an exhibition, my desire was to get to know the campus and bring it back into the museum. Also, as you said, understanding the structures outside the museum and bringing them into the museum, or making some of those issues important to the museum—that was one of the things in my stay that I was very interested in doing and am still very interested in doing. One of the projects that we are working on is an experimental gallery where students and faculty can actually work on exhibitions over a long period of time, a changing exhibition space that is less formal than what museums normally do. Another thing that I was very much interested in was having exhibition spaces around the campus, not only just to show a collection of the Tang, but to help faculty and students see what they have there, and to see their own locations as sites of visual culture. The third thing that we are actually doing right now is a thing I call Nomad. It’s a mobile lounge reading room that will be in the Tang. It is also modular, so it will be put together in different ways in different locations in the museum and will have Internet access and books and materials put together by faculty about topics that are on view. There will be an expressive part, which of course the staff here would like and I am sure students wouldn’t mind either. We will try to make this location a normative part of the campus environment, normative for the college. Museums themselves are pretty alien—contemporary art museums, anyway, are pretty alien structures; they may look totally like something from another planet, and then what they do is different from everything else around it. But Nomad is saying: we are different, but everybody can find a place here. I wanted a place here that would mean that students could come and spend time here, rather than just coming for the opening or just coming for the exhibition or just coming for a class. So that’s in the works.

Adam: A lot of what you’ve done is—well, you use the word normative, but it is also breaking down the walls of the museum itself. If you were going to be given a certain amount of money and you could design what we think of as a museum experience on campus—and I say experience because it might be not a place, but that the ideas or the visual aspects of what we think of as a museum would enter into a particular college—have you ever given thought as to how you might do that?

Fred: Well, what I like about the Tang and this residency is that it embodies some of my interests. Museums were originally created as separate entities. You have the anthropology museum, art museum, the science museum, the history museum, the children’s museum: they are all separated out. Of course, prior to that they were all together, and then they were separated out into their various fields for very specific, important reasons. However, I think now a college can integrate different aspects of these various museums into a place that destabilizes you, that makes you want to come back and to break down your notions about these various subjects. The Tang is really interesting because it does mix those things, and I think it really could be done on a grander scale. Major museums could do this, not necessarily changing their focus, but realizing that by being so specific in an area of contemporary art or visual art or history or science, and pretending that is the only subject to think about on the planet, they are limiting themselves. Either changing the ways things are displayed, or just acknowledging that, for example, that is a beautiful chair, but it also has historical significance, or it also has connections with artists which are not just the history or not just the aesthetic importance of that object, I think would be the exciting thing for me.

On a college campus these inter-dialogues occur all the time, and essentially the Tang makes that visible. That is the kind of public museum I would like to see, one built specifically around integrating multiple aspects of works that are displayed. Again, perhaps having a college museum that sits in one location, but also with satellites in other parts of the campus and buried within the different disciplines, would make that museum experience an important thing for both students and faculty. If museums are about lifelong learning, trying to understand how to negotiate a museum should be a part of a college environment. Unfortunately, in city museums they focus a great deal on young children, which is wonderful, but then they forget about older children, teenagers and young adults. It’s as if they say, “All right, but after that you have to figure it out all by yourself.” Museums are extremely specific environments, very culturally inscribed, and you are just supposed to know how to negotiate them. The college environment is the perfect place to learn how to read the museum, so you can use it, so it can be useful throughout your life. And so to me it would be a very essential part of the university environment.

Adam: Your work has focused so much on the idea of the museum as container, on the frame of reference that the museum provides. Does that diminish one’s thinking about the object itself? Is one then always looking away from the object itself, looking instead at the object as a reference to something larger, something out there? How do you feel about that in relationship to your work, and in particular in relationship to university museums?

Fred: Okay, well, I have two thoughts about that—or maybe more. I went to a ballet performance with a friend and I was really enjoying it, and she was sitting there saying, “Oh, look at the foot, it’s not pointed the right way,” all those kinds of things. She was looking at all these technical things that I would not see. I was just enjoying the larger picture. When I go into museums I have to decide if I am just going to ignore some of these funny little things I see because I am so in tune. I am sure many museum people have to do the same thing. We are all doing this because it is our profession. So let’s say I hear this show is really spectacular; I am just going to ignore that these labels are up too high, you know. [Laughter.] The public just doesn’t see any of that, but I would. It is just something we deal with; you just decide one way or the other how you are going to see it. But I would focus on the frame because museums are so good at making you not think that there is a frame. There is always a frame, and if you don’t know it is there, you are being misinformed. As I say to students, if you’ve read one newspaper all the time and you believe that’s the news, you may not realize that another newspaper will present the same information with an extremely different point of view about that same news story. The news story is a communicative tool. Museums have been very good about making you not think about it that the frame is telling you something. Even though it claims to be telling you about the specific object, it is telling you a whole host of other things about who they are, who you are, how you should act and how you should think about the world. So when I do what I do, it is because I want people to leave the gallery and see everything else—everything else—as a constructed environment, as a communicative tool that is kind of seamless and now no longer is seamless for you.

Other people have then had this experience that we as museum professionals have: okay, we are here to see this wonderful object, but there is this other kind of lesson to be learned from this exhibition. There is a show right now about Dada that was in Paris and is coming to MoMA [Museum of Modern Art, NYC]. It is in Washington, DC, right now. I really enjoyed it. The first gallery that you come into about Dada is this big screen about the First World War, a newsreel of the First World War. Then you leave that, and you see the exhibition. Now there is very little after you leave that experience that is related to the First World War in the rest of the exhibition, except that in the paintings there are people who are wounded, who have lost a leg, or there are images in the abstract that relate to that moment of the world war. So you are affected by that experience. You are in the moment of when it was made just by looking at those news reels, even though after that the exhibition is just displayed the way any other museum would display it. I don’t know what MoMA is going to do with that, or where those newsreels will be.

I don’t think that forcing our awareness of that historical moment diminishes your experience of the object at all. Because as an artist you make work within a certain time period, you make a work that is relating to yourself, but also you are making it within a moment. You don’t necessarily want people to exaggerate the importance of what is going on in the world, but you don’t want them to fetishize a valuable object. I mean, that is a whole other fallacy, the idea that it is this thing that existed, and the artist is the master who existed, and there was no one before or after, no context that it happened within, and that you yourself, the observer, or the artist, don’t have other things going on that affect you. Unfortunately, even when museum curators do try to infuse that notion of context into an exhibition, it is so muted, it is so quiet, that because of the other things that the museum is screaming at you—about how important the museum is—it just sort of disappears. I live in a world where everything is in a context. I can’t divorce it, I don’t want to divorce it—the context—because it is a fallacy that anything lives without a context. Things are seen in various ways by different people and differently in one place or another place: that’s the most wonderful thing about being alive, that there are these various experiences you can have with the same thing. But I should also say I am really not about totally changing the way things are done. I am not a revisionist in that way. But if you do something only in one way, and there is no acknowledgment that there are many ways of thinking about it, if there is only way that things are displayed or thought about, that is a problem.

Adam: I am supposed to give you equal time for questions, but I am just going to bring that last thought back. Do you think that university museums have a special obligation to provoke understanding of these frames as opposed to other museums? Given the academic context?

Fred: Well, I would say everyone, all museums, should have that responsibility and should do it in the way that makes sense to them. It would be different in a major museum in a city than it would be in a university. College museums are poised to do the work of figuring out other ways of doing it, because—and this is the laboratory part of it—if everyone gets on board to do that, if anything it will trickle up, or down, whichever way you want, to the major museums. Given other kinds of constraints at major museums, that may be a very slow process; but I do think college museums are a perfect location for that to begin to happen.

Adam: So, I am going to give you unequal time: 15 minutes.

Fred: I would like for you to juxtapose your Addison experience and your Whitney experience. You asked me if I approached a college museum differently than other museums, but how about you as a director, or even as a curator? I am sure there are very different experiences there.

Adam: Yes, that is a big question. First of all, at the Addison I think I did have a better sense of who my audience was. It really was fairly clear to me that there was the school audience, and then there was the community audience, which was then made up of other audiences. As you said it is sort of like an onion that you unpeel, and bit by bit you start to know that audience. Andover is a small community, a town of 30,000 people. Granted it is in the larger Boston area, which is a much larger community. But you did at least believe that you knew who your audience was. I think at the Whitney I have some sense of who that audience is, but it depends on the day of the week, the show that we are doing, the time of the year. My ability to at least believe that I know that audience—because I am sure part of it is really only belief—is not as great at the Whitney. Maybe if you ask me 10 years from now I will have a better sense of what I think that community is for the Whitney, but I think also that community changes. It has also changed over time—it has changed because the art community has changed. It has changed as the Whitney has changed. I think that it is very, very hard to think that you are ever speaking to an audience. You are always speaking to multiple audiences. In any exhibition program—and this was even true within the Addison—it is not unlike Howard Gardner’s views of multiple intelligences. There are multiple ways people experience exhibitions, and I have always felt that my role within a museum was to provide different ways of reading or different ways of doing things. That includes everything from who or what you select for your exhibitions to how you present those exhibitions.

I remember growing up and going to museums in New York. You would go back to the same paintings and the same places all the time, and there was something wonderful and sure about it. We have all had those experiences. I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing the great Tchelitchew painting. It was always in that location, which as a seven-year-old I thought was the most amazing thing. I am not sure where it is now, or if it is even up right now. But one of the things I discovered in a museum is that you have a deck of cards, so to speak, you have a collection, and the collection is mutable. There are great pleasures and benefits from going to a place like the Frick and knowing that the Ingres painting is going to be in a certain location, or the Sargent, there is something reassuring about that. And when you have an experience with a work of art that you particularly love, you can go back to that work. There is something wonderful about that. On the other hand, in institutions—and most of us are in institutions where we have more works in our collections than we can ever show at any given time—we also have an obligation to shuffle the deck. Also, the meanings and the references that you are talking about, Fred, change by virtue of juxtapositions and relationships and connections. I guess this is where you and I are similar, in that I feel an obligation to be making people aware of the frame in a museum by making conscious decisions about what we put together and how we put it together.

It is interesting; both museums where I have worked in recent years have been museums of American art, and for many, many years people thought that American art was like an artichoke—if you just kept peeling away at it, you would eventually get to the essence of what American art is. That was the dominant thread of thinking in American art for probably the first 50 years of the century at least. I myself don’t believe that was ever the case. It is not just that we are living in a multicultural environment, within a much larger global environment, but that the museum has to be a place, not where you promote the fiction of an essence or a core, but where you get a sense of shifting and changing meanings and ideas. That can be done by the curator, within the exhibition. I like to think of the director as the curator of curators. I am not sure the curators always love that; in fact they usually don’t. But I often talk about the Whitney as the total work of art in thinking about how all the pieces come together. And then, the artists are always throwing us curveballs. That is the best of all things: the artist as an agitator. As hard as it is sometimes, one of the best things is not knowing what is going to happen when the artist comes into the museum. That’s the excitement of it. The excitement of living in the present moment, and working with living artists, is knowing that instability.

Fred: Do you think an educational museum in an urban setting would be different from what the Addison was?

Adam: Yes. I have often said that the Addison is the best job I will have ever had and the Whitney is the most exciting job I will have ever had. What I mean by that is that the Addison is actually special in terms of a teaching museum, because it was established very early, relatively, and it is extremely well endowed—I always thought it was pretty well endowed, but now that I am at the Whitney it is extremely well endowed—and nobody ever asked me in the five years I was there how our attendance was. I never had to focus on marketing campaigns. I was focusing on the art, the artists, and the audience, which is the essence of what museums are about. I try to make that the centerpiece of what I am doing at the Whitney; I try to focus on the art, the artist and the audience. But you know, as most people know, in the museum field there are so many things to distract from that. The trick—and this is where university museums actually have a lot to teach public museums—is to try to remind us of what we can be as our better selves as institutions. You have certain opportunities. On the other hand, I can think of exhibitions that we did at the Addison that were a bit disturbing to the students or even faculty. I remember we installed a Kara Walker piece that was in Peter Norton’s collection, about five or six years ago, and we had several weeks of discussion about whether this was appropriate, particularly for high school students. It actually made the museum a forum for all of these ideas and for all these questions. This proved the point even more so that it was not only appropriate, it was critical, because it raised all of these questions.

The thing that happens at a place like the Whitney is that people are so totally jaded that you can do anything and almost nothing seems to be a risk. If you have seen the Biennial [2006], there is a piece by Richard Serra in the show. It is a single print that he did, an impressionistic silhouette of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib: you know, the man standing on the block. And then it says “Stop Bush” on the top. When the curators brought it forward, they said, “Well, how do you feel about us putting this in?” And then Richard wants to have a box with copies which he hands out, because originally the piece was done on the Internet as an Internet piece. I probably thought about it more, frankly, than anybody had thought about a piece since they have come into the museum. I thought, gee, is this going to bother one of my Republican trustees? But actually, I got very few comments. The only thing is today, somebody has shown me a xerox of a flyer from the Serra piece, and I thought, oh, that is great—and then I looked down and I did a double take: instead of saying “Stop Bush,” it said “Stop Serra,” and it was signed by Bush. Somebody had put it in the box with the others.

A university museum is a more cloistered environment. People take speech more seriously, in a way, than they do in a public environment. I mean that they are more responsible, on one hand, and maybe more conservative by the same token. In a place like the Whitney, or in a lot of city museums, I wouldn’t say curators are irresponsible; but I think that we have been living with risk for so long on so many levels at the institution, it is second nature to almost everybody who works there.

Fred: Do you think that is particular to the Whitney?

Adam: I think it is particular to the Whitney. But I do think that many urban museums—I mean, John [Weber], when you were at SFMOMA [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art], you could take certain kinds of risks there that you might not take at the Tang. No? Okay. Well, maybe also the Addison was a high school, so perhaps that is part of it, I don’t know. I would be curious to know from some of the audience members if there are certain pieces or works that you would be hesitant to show or have to think twice about.

Fred: Well, in that situation, do you have different measures of success?

Adam: Well, there are my measures of success and then there are the measures of success. The measure of success for me has to do with the engagement of the audience and the involvement of the artist. That to me is the fundamental, and then also the way the curator is engaged in that process. I have always felt that if you produce something with integrity, eventually somebody is going to get it. When you are dealing in the contemporary art field that has to be the way it is. Now, who decides what the integrity is may be the curator or the director or the artist. At the Whitney, one measure of success is how much money we bring in, or what our attendance is, what the critics say, you know. At Andover I would say the primary measure of success from the outward point of view was whether the students were engaged and whether the faculty were engaged, which to me was the right measure of success. And again, in the Whitney at its best, people do measure it for the right things. They do measure it for that degree of engagement, and for the way the museum serves as a catalyst for ideas. People have said to me, “What do you think of the Whitney Biennial as a success?” I think it is really up to them, but I could only measure the success on the basis of which people I feel were really engaged in the show. I was very pleased, for example, that this show felt like an exhibition and not just a selection of works. Did I like everything in it? I don’t like everything in every Biennial, but that is not the point. It’s that there is a concept, a structure. I have had enough bad reviews at the Whitney in my past lives that I have learned that if I don’t have to believe the good press, then I don’t have to believe the bad press. So the good news is not to take any press too seriously, positive or negative. You get this armor.

Fred: So do you think that in a college museum or a teaching museum exhibition there are things that you could do there that you couldn’t do at major museums?

Adam: Probably there are. I would have to think about it. There were residency projects that we did at Andover; there is a residency program that was set up by my predecessor, Jock Reynolds—I don’t think Jock is here yet, but I think he will be here tomorrow. Jock has been a great promoter of the idea of artist residencies and has been establishing one up at Yale now that he is there. One of the things that I used to hate when I was a curator at the Whitney is that most artists came in and you would work with them while you were installing a show, you would have a quick dinner, and then they would disappear. When artists came to Andover you would spend days, if not weeks, together. Now if the artists didn’t like you or if you didn’t like them, that could be a problem, but I felt much more engaged with the artist in that environment. Going back to what you said about the petri dish: it was a petri dish in the best sense, and the community benefits from that as well, from that long-term presence of the artist. And you also benefit from the lack of distractions. The minute you walk out of the Whitney you are out in the streets of New York. You walk out of the Tang Museum and you are walking through the fields there under an umbrella in the rain, and you are with your thoughts for at least three or four minutes, instead of being run over by a taxicab. There are benefits to that.

Audience member: I have a question for Fred. What are you going to do next? What are you going to do to challenge us next?

Fred: I am being much choosier right now about what I do and why I do a project. I think I will always continue to make these works. But I am no longer the outsider that I was when I first started this by any stretch. When I go visit a museum, something has to spark my interest in a way that it hadn’t before in any other institution or environment. It has to be so different for me in some aspect that I know that I will come to something new that I hadn’t thought about before. It is a lot about me—you know, someone wrote about my work that they were illuminated by it, and asked did I like that. I said, “Well, I want to be illuminated too; it is an investigative process for me as well.” For me to repeat myself would be—if ever that starts happening I will just be out the door, it is not why I do art. When I am in an institution and I see things—where something is being said in one way and actually it is being done another, or where there is something being talked about in one way and there are many other ways to think about it—if the museum is screaming that to me, I find it interesting to work on that, especially if it is something that I haven’t really thought about it in that way before. I will continue to do that kind of work; it is just that there will have to be something special about it, something new. I would love to do something in a zoo, or in different kinds of environments and historic sites or something. But, in southern France, no; never mind. But, yes, I will continue to do that kind of work.

Audience member: [Inaudible.]

Fred: My assumptions about museums? Well, I guess knowing more museums, my assumptions are not really assumptions anymore. [Laughter.]

Audience member: One of the things that I say after visits to American museums is, “Why are you repeating yourself, why are you taking fewer risks?” Or am I wrong?

Adam: No, I agree with you. I think it is a fairly conservative time right now, to say the least. Museums are taking fewer and fewer risks. I think part of it is that there are some people in the museum field who don’t feel that it is necessarily the role of the museum per se just to take risks, to be politicized. The interesting thing that people have said about this Biennial is that it is more political than, say, the last one. And I think part of it is too—and this sort of goes back to your question over there—that artists have really changed in terms of thinking about how they present themselves politically. The 1993 Biennial, which was thought of as the most political Biennial—I always go back to the Guillermo Gómez-Peña of him in the cage as part of the piece where he was the man in the cage. Many artists are seeing that direct political assaults are not always the best way to do things and not always necessarily the most successful. The Richard Serra piece that I was just describing is an interesting piece, but it feels very much like an artwork that somebody would have done in that generation. Or another example, for those of you who have seen the Biennial: the Peace Tower that is in front of the museum, which was originally done by Mark di Suvero and a group of artists in the 1970s, and it was then appropriated by a contemporary artist, Rirkrit Tiravanija, for this Biennial. Those pieces have a kind of historical quality. If I look at more political works by younger artists, say these great rocks by Dan Colen, they are much more oblique in their political qualities. I have always felt that art is inherently political in one way or another if it causes people to ask questions and to wonder what they are seeing. With some of the frames that Fred and I were talking about—and this is why I think Fred’s work has been so important—if you don’t take that frame of reference as being the only way to look, that is inherently the most political thing that a museum can do. It’s not just trying to depose a rule; it is to get people not to take the authority for granted. Sometimes that is more up-front and sometimes it recedes more. But yes, I think it is much more a conservative time.

Fred: The risk for museums is not the dud that sputters; the risk is when it goes up in flames. That’s what they really are afraid of happening, because it affects the bottom line. I am trying to think through my mind of risks that I took that I feel did not succeed. What is interesting is that sometimes things that I thought did not have the impact I wanted, I found out years later had affected people, and so that has been quite interesting for me. I don’t really make work thinking that I am taking a risk. The museum is the one taking the risk. When I made art in the museum, it was actually a cathartic experience for me. I was seeing all this and I just let it out, but I did not realize what was really going to occur. If I had thought about it too much, I wouldn’t have put that Klan hood in the baby carriage; but no, to me life is a risk.

Adam: For me, it is not risk perhaps in the way that you think. I was trying to think of things that I thought of as failures. The risk is to try something and to see whether it even succeeds, but also to give it the time to succeed. I just remembered back actually to an early experience that I had when I was director of education at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The Walker was known for its great performing arts programs. It had been a real pioneer for performance art, and they had no program in performing arts for young people. I thought we needed to have one, and first of all I didn’t know a hell of a lot about performing arts. It is probably good to be naive about things. But I remember the first performing arts program I organized: one person showed up. I had been at the museum for six months and I thought, oh my god, I am not going to have a job because there is only one person here at this. Now, the first mistake I made was that this was mid-January in Minneapolis and you don’t start a program in mid-January. But actually that performing arts program took probably the better part of two years to get going, and it is flourishing now at the Walker. I have been gone now 15 years, and it is far more interesting; somebody who actually knows something about performing arts is running it. In risks, I think the trick is not giving up, or knowing when to give up, knowing when you really don’t have something. It is not so much that, you know, you did a show and it wasn’t great. I don’t think those are risks that are ever not worth taking; I think it is enough to know when to keep going and to keep trying and then also when it is time to quit.

Audience member: Can a university museum actually take more risks than a big public one?

Fred: I really think it could and should, if you have all your ducks in a row. They are different ducks in a major museum. If you have the college president and others understanding that the museum is very similar to the rest of the university; if you can make them understand the connection—that this is what we are, we are active and provocative rather than something that you just come and passively enjoy—I think it very much could be that and should be that. Whether it will transfer over to the major institutions, I don’t know; certainly not at the Smithsonian, because Washington, D.C., right now—it is just not going to happen.

Adam: And I think that the power structures in the university are not really any different than the rest of the world. Bottom line: a college president still has to raise money and has trustees and I don’t know whether a college can—well, that is where the risk taking is. And that’s where it goes back to my little example about the program I was putting on: there are different kinds of risks, and the risks that matter are testing ideas and holding on to ideas and finding the cracks between things. You raised that point about shocking and offending. A lot of what Fred has done has neither shocked nor offended, although sometimes it has. But the greater risks and the lessons are not necessarily just about the things that were shocking or offensive; the risks we are talking about are more than that. There is some danger in just thinking about it that way.

John Weber: Thank you. That was really wonderful and I would love to keep going, but our next opportunity for risk and collision is coming up. What we actually did—and it was a risk—was to ask the Theater Department if they would create something for us. One of the things that the Tang has done is a lot of performance, a lot of working with people, in dance in particular but also theater. We asked Carolyn Anderson and Gary Wilson if they would work with students to create a new piece from scratch beginning on February 11 in response to the show in the Wachenheim Gallery, and so that is what they have done. We basically said, “You can go almost anywhere in the museum and do almost anything.” So now what is going to happen—it is about a half-hour piece—is that we are going to be taken right out to our places where we’ll be spread around the museum. There will be ushers who will move us through three very short movements to watch this piece. Then there will be a reception and a chance to talk more with Fred and with Adam, and amongst all of yourselves. So on we go.