When Keeping It Real: From the ready-made to the everyday, presenting art works from Dimitris Daskalopoulos’s private collection opened at London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Skin Fruit, featuring works from the collection of Dakis Joannou, closed at the New Museum, New York. The first occasion both prominent art collectors have exhibited their art collections abroad, the shows also inaugurated programs at both institutions aimed at opening private art collections to the public. They also indirectly enabled a public reading of two dynamic private art collections featuring a who’s who of artists from the mid-twentieth century and beyond, revealing much about contemporary art in a changing world where value is being re-defined on a daily basis.
Skin Fruit was met with cynical backlash. Aside from the accusations against the New Museum for going ‘mainstream’, criticism was directed towards artist Jeff Koons as curator of the show, the suggestion that the exhibition was geared towards raising the value of Joannou’s collection as well as Koons’s stock (not only is Koons Joannou’s close friend, but he features prominently in Joannou’s collection), the fact that the show rather immodestly took up the entire museum space, and not to mention the fact that Joannou is on the museum’s board of trustees. Indeed, given the economic climate, the art world had found itself a target for much of its frustration. The position of the collector, the collection and the wealth it represents, as well as the incestuous relationship between art production and the art market became incredibly contentious issues.
But in some crude way, Koons, a blue-chip artist, was the perfect curator. After graduating from art school in the late 1980s, he became a commodities broker on Wall Street to support himself as an artist and, fittingly, cemented his career through the auction houses. In November 2007, his steel sculpture Hanging Heart sold at Sotheby's, New York, for $23.6 million, becoming the most expensive piece sold at auction by a living artist. Just one year later, Koons’s Balloon Flower (Magenta) sold at Christie’s, London, for $25,765,204, marking a record in the artist’s career. On the scale of artistic success, a comparison could be drawn from Picasso becoming the first living artist to exhibit at the Louvre in 1971. However, where Picasso’s accolade was exhibiting in one of the world’s greatest museums, Koons’s achievement was measured in financial worth, a telling insight into a culture that arguably worships wealth, not talent.
Filling the New Museum with some 100 works by contemporary greats, who Roberta Smith of the New York Times noted “nearly all emanate from one stratum of the art world: the one where the money is”, Skin Fruit essentially surveyed art production over the last three decades shaped by boom and bust. It was as much about excess as it was about expression and how the two intermingle. Joannou’s collection is noted for its clear aesthetic focus: big, brash and unapologetic, (Joannou’s yacht, decorated by Koons, is named Guilty), and the work included in Skin Fruit speaks for itself. As such, though the exhibition theme was looking at the treatment of the human form in art from the mid-twentieth century and beyond, the reaction to the show reflected how the human form was overlooked in discourse for the sake of the market. What does that say about the value placed on creativity, expression–and ultimately humanity–today?
The furore surrounding Skin Fruit questioned art’s relationship to the market system, encouraging a wider debate on the ethical management and distribution of wealth. (It did not help that visitors had to pay to enter the show, while at the same time one must forgive a museum for covering its costs, since the support Joannou has given to contemporary art in Greece through the Deste Foundation is undeniable). At the same time, Keeping it Real invites viewers to re-evaluate the worth and function of contemporary art in a world where humanity is often overshadowed by monetary value.
With a list of artists as impressive as the names on Joannou’s roster, the presentation of Daskalopoulos’s collection is significantly smaller in scale and presents a more subtle reading of works inside a tiny, one-room exhibition space. But it shares similar concerns with the treatment of the human body as a stage for psychological, social, and ideological struggle. Divided into four parts, the Corporeal, Subversive Abstraction, Current Disturbance, and Material Intelligence, a selection of fifty-three works by artists from the second half of the twentieth century to today, including John Bock, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum, and Sarah Lucas, will be displayed in total once the exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery culminates on May 22. (Another part of Daskalopoulos’s collection is being shown at the Guggenheim in Bilbao from April 12 to September 11.)
Keeping It Real pins itself to a central piece that acts as a starting point for the entire show, Marcel Duchamp’s historic Fountain (1917/64) exhibited in Part 1: The Corporeal. A porcelain urinal that sent the art establishment into a tailspin when submitted to the American Society of Independent Artists exhibition in 1917, was not actually displayed. Nevertheless it started a ‘ready-made’ revolution. Artists began incorporating everyday, ‘found’ objects and materials into their work, exploring contemporary media and challenging views on art’s function within society as well as society itself. Duchamp has since been named the key influence in the work of artists from all disciplines and all generations.
Duchamp’s Fountain exists as five ceramic copies of the original. Made in 1964, the sculptural equivalents of the mass-produced latrine are replicas of an artistic act. Curator Achim Borchardt-Hume’s selection of Sherrie Levine’s bronze cast version, Fountain (Buddha) 5, (1996) touches on Fountain as a gilded version of itself; a replicated icon. Using a material as traditional as bronze, Levine also remains true to what the urinal was originally noted for at the outset; the urinal’s sculptural qualities as an industrial object. The juxtaposition of Duchamp’s original and Levine’s tribute sets the tone for the entire presentation; while the past is a solid form, the present is a collection of melancholic interpretations of what has been, what is, and what is yet to come. In Part 2: Subversive Abstraction, Nikos Kessanlis’s Untitled, (Gesture) (1961), provides a connection to Duchamp. A suspended metal water tank for a toilet flush, it suggests that the life cycle of any act is fleeting. It is the memory that remains and what a work expresses that counts the most.
Perhaps this is why Daskalopoulos notes in the exhibition catalogue; “Art is both a subjective and collective endeavour which…appears an utterly natural and self-evident–yet also strangely enigmatic–metaphor for our shared existence. By putting different works of art in dialogue with one another, I attempt to find an analogy for the constant tension between life and death, between our desire for immortality and the futility of many of our daily struggles, an expression of what it means to be human with all its challenges.”
From Dieter Roth’s paintings made of cheese encased in a plastic covering, to Kori Newkirk’s Virgil (2002), a beaded curtain with a landscape crafted into the beadwork, the use of non-traditional materials to make use of form as a way in which to challenge perception. Robert Gober’s manipulation of a door’s form in Unfolding Door (1989) not only questions how objects and ideas are valued and interpreted, but how they are perceived when their form changes. With Part 2 arranged to feel like the interior of a house, the importance of experiencing art on a personal level suggests that it is the individual that decides an artwork’s value. Such judgements can be revealing and often liberating. Indeed, regardless of the debate that questions the role of the art collector in the contemporary arts, perhaps now is the time for positive contribution for the sake of dialogue, no matter where it comes from.
As Borchardt-Hume notes “collectors and collections are a vital part of the varied landscape needed for art and artists to blossom. Works need to be taken care of and the task of doing so cannot be fulfilled by public institutions alone. The question thus is not 'if' public and private should collaborate but 'how'. The collaboration between the Whitechapel Gallery and the D Daskalopoulos Collection was conducted in a spirit of curatorial and intellectual independence with a view to bringing a range of seminal works into the public arena, to encourage a fresh reading of well-known works and to bring them together with less familiar ones.”
Punctuating Part 2: Subversive Abstraction, is Damien Hirst’s early collage, Untitled 2 (1985), featuring a page from novelist Alice Perrin’s book Free Solitude written in 1907. ‘I have the privilege of remembrance’ is underlined while another quote reads ‘it is far better to be out here with your wonderful work in this beautiful part of the world’. Yes, art is a privilege. But it is also a refuge for all who dare to enter a world where anything is possible. Opening up important private collections to the public provides more possibilities for art to be presented and interpreted on a more social level. Given the current global financial crisis and the cuts made to arts funding throughout the world (and total lack of funding for the arts in Greece), perhaps the art world needs collectors and their private collections more than ever.