Episode 047 Stuart Comer

Show Notes

This week on the show we are visiting the one and only Stuart Comer, chief curator of Media and Performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Stuart is not only prolifically active as a curator at MoMA doing all of the things curators do: building exhibitions, building collections, building relationships with artists, the public, and patrons, etc – but as a department head at a museum the scale of MoMA, Stuart is also very much a leader. The department of media and performance art at MoMA comprises a whole team of professionals, and the work that Stuart and his colleagues have been doing over the years to build upon the legacy left by their predecessors, and the ways in which they’ve expanded and branched out into new arenas has been nothing short of incredible. In our chat with Stuart this week, we hear all about his department’s leading work in shaping what it looks like for art museums to exhibit, collect, and conserve performance art and dance, as well as Stuart’s origins as a curator, including serving as the Tate Modern’s first-ever curator of film. Tune in to hear Stuart’s story!

Links from the conversation with Stuart
> https://www.moma.org/about/senior-staff/stuart-comer
> Barbara Kruger's Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5394
> Studio Residency: Okwui Okpokwasili https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5226
> Simone Forti: https://www.moma.org/calendar/performance/866

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Transcript 

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Feeney Radin. And on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week on the show, we are back in the curatorial world. 

[00:00:16] Stuart: Hi, my name is Stuart Comer, I am a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where I oversee the department of Media and Performance.

[00:00:25] Ben: We have had the treat of visiting with some incredible curators on the show so far and I was so keen to add Stuart's voice to our growing archive. His role is quite unique in the sense that he is not only prolifically active as a curator at MoMA, doing all the things that curators do, building exhibitions, building collections, building relationships, with artists, the public and patrons. But also as a department head at a museum the scale of MoMA Stuart is also very much a leader. The department of media and performance art at MoMA comprises a whole team of professionals and the work that Stewart and his colleagues have been doing over the years to build upon the legacy left by their predecessors, such as Barbara London, see episode 11, and the ways in which they've expanded and branched out into new arenas has been incredible to witness. This includes, as we'll hear about the department's leading work in shaping what it looks like for art museums to exhibit, collect, and conserve performance art and dance. But Stuart is so much more than just his work at MoMA. Prior to this, he was the Tate Modern's first ever curator of film. It was such a treat to sit down with Stuart and to hear his story and I am so thrilled to share our chat with all of you this week. Before we dive in just a reminder that if you have been enjoying the show, leaving a review on whatever platform you're using to listen to the show is deeply appreciated. It really helps other people discover the show. Thank you so much to all of you that have already left glowing reviews, you are appreciated, and a huge shout out this week to Emma who recently joined our Patreon if you have been enjoying the show and want to help support our work and mission of equitably compensating artists, guests, head on over to artandobsolescence.com/donate this week, there is an exclusive portion of my conversation with Stuart for patrons only. Thank you so much to all of you that have supported the show over the past year. It truly means the world. And now without further delay, let's dive into this week's chat with Stuart Comer. 

[00:02:24] Stuart: I started drawing obsessively at a very young age and continued to really through high school. Early on as a child, I would frequently visit museums in New York with my family. So, it was definitely a happy place for me and somewhere I gravitated as often as I could. And that led me in professional terms to having an internship at the Metropolitan Museum, uh, when I was still in high school, actually. So that was a really formative experience and sort of, confirmed a really deep interest in museums quite early, but then it was also at that same time, which was roughly around 1985, that another intern at the time was working downtown at Mary Boone Gallery. And I remember him inviting me to an opening they were having one evening and we went down and it was actually ironically given the show that's up now here at MoMA, it was a Barbara Kruger opening. And that just opened my mind in ways I had not expected. And so really shifted my interests from more historical art, like the Renaissance to being hyper invested in what was happening right here in New York and I became far more concentrated on contemporary art from that point on. as I got a little bit older, the new museum was a real draw for me. And I ended up being an intern there as well in 1989, which was also extremely formative. And that was really the crucible year of the culture wars. Cause it was the maple Thorpe controversy amongst others in the Tomkin square park riots. and so it was kind of a turbocharged summer on that front. As a Teenager at that point, to encounter something like experimental film or video was not straightforward in most cases. And so luckily I specifically remember seeing a Bill Viola installation, the Sleep of Reason in the lobby gallery at the Whitney. And that's certainly one moment where I really remember, you know, recognizing video art for what it was and what it was capable of doing. But I am embarrassed to admit that I also watched a lot of MTV and also would stay up until like two in the morning to watch really obscure films on cable television in the 1980s and, you know, it was actually pretty amazing offerings if you stayed up until two in the morning. I had a very big appetite for that sort of, I don't know off center film and video content on television. And then I went to school at Carleton in Minnesota. And so one of our professors was John Schott who produced the PBS program Alive From Off Center. And they commissioned work by people like Bill T jones and Laurie Anderson and Charles Atlas and Marlon Riggs and many others. For me, that really was, uh, a very legible way into understanding a relationship between more progressive forms of art making and the vast audience that was potentially available on television and that interested me enormously, this kind of question of broadcast and relationship to spaces like the Kitchen or PS122 or the Walker. I was really, really fascinated by how, what was considered a very niche almost a subculture was finding a different kind of audience through television as well.

 And then I actually didn't go back to grad school for almost a decade. Cause I think I was really trying to sort out what I wanted to do and like how I wanted to find my way in. And to some extent, you know, that moment, which was 1990. And because of the stock market crash in 1987, like the financial landscape was not a happy one. And there were very, very few jobs available in the art world and they tended to go to people that were already fairly well established. And so that ended up, encouraging me to move to Los Angeles and it took a while to sort of get my bearings. Cause it's a fundamentally different city obviously than New York, but also there I was connecting with artists like Mike Kelly in particular where performance and video were very central to what they were doing, although clearly not the only thing they were doing, but that just read much more, that work was more legible to me than work. That was still entrenched in some bizarre notion of medium specificity that I did find New York still far more invested in than the west coast or much of what was happening in Europe at that time. And I was more comfortable, I think, in that space where there was just more fluidity between forms. And I actually think all art is time based to some degree. Even as I started to think about painting or other forms that are somehow conceived of as static like it was in a broader conversation and that's why artists, I think like Mike just felt extremely urgent to me at that time. When I finally did go back to grad school, it was for curatorial course in London. And it was at exactly the moment that Tate Modern had opened. And so Tate also was, you know, really championing video. And I think it's not often discussed that, you know, the Turner prize was clearly a major engine for the success of contemporary art in the UK. It was like a really important kind of promotional arm of that effort and many of the early winners of the prize were working in video, whether it was Steve McQueen or Gillian Wearing or Douglas Gordon. So it just somehow felt like it was absolutely central to the conversation at that time. And then Tate of course also had incredible and innovative figures like Pip Laurenson who I think were also asking important questions about the preservation of that work and its legacy and so that all became extremely interesting to me and. There was also a very robust experimental film scene that was largely centered around the LUX and at that moment, LUX had its own space, including a cinema and a gallery in Hoxton square in East London, but then after about two years or so, they lost their public funding as many organizations did and similarly, a lot of the more art house cinemas or alternative cinemas were also all closing. And I had recently begun working at Tate Modern primarily doing public programming and as part of that, I argued that we really needed to provide a platform for experimental cinema because the others were all disappearing. So began to really organize important collaborations with the British Film institute and the LUX to try to grow the audience for that work. And there were a lot of interesting curators and artists in London that were really, I think, pushing the boundaries of the presentation of cinema and media and Ian White in particular, I think who sadly passed away in 2013, but he later became the film curator at the White Chapel, but was organizing a lot of events at the LUX and the Horse Hospital and other organizations in London. And there was just a really special and experimental energy in the air. And that helped produce a lot of interesting artists at that time, such as Ed Atkins or Luke Fowler or James Richards and a number of others. But it just felt like there was a very vibrant conversation around time-based media , and, experimental film and video and so we really made a major effort to create a robust platform for that at Tate. And so then it just sort of grew and grew. 

[00:10:00] Ben: So you were eventually Tate's first ever curator of film. So I'm just curious. I mean, what led to that and, what was it like to be such a massive first at such a large institution?

[00:10:14] Stuart: It was really um, part of that moment and Gregor Muir, who's now the head of the international collection. He actually had been the curator of the gallery at LUX and then moved to Tate where he was the first Kramlich curator. So that was an endowed position when Pamela and Richard Kramlich really began the New Art Trust and this deep commitment to championing both the acquisition and the preservation of media art and formed a consortium with Tate, MoMA. And SFMOMA, and then there were named curatorial positions. So Gregor occupied that and did begin to acquire a number of videos primarily by British artists at that time, like Mark Leckey and Nick Relph and Oliver Payne. And then I think he'd been in that position for approximately a year and then ended up moving to Hauser & Wirth and went into the commercial sector. At that point, I think they recognized the need to really develop that general area of focus for the museum. We had really began to build a successful audience for the film programming that I was doing. And Francis Morris had become the head of the collection at that time. And I think she was very interested in beginning to develop a real strategy for what an acquisition strategy for film and video and time based media would look like. And so that took quite a while to develop, and they were also shifting the acquisition focus away from more medium, specific committees to regional committees. So there was a Latin American committee. There was a new MENAC Middle East, North African committee and an Asia Pacific committee, for instance. And so it was also an exciting time to really broaden the scope of what we were presenting and acquiring and really look at a more global history of these mediums. So it was a very exciting time to both really a build an audience for this work, uh, in terms of the screening programs. And that's just a fundamentally different culture than encountering the work in galleries in a more passive way. And I think, you know, people who really make the commitment to sit through a screening and stay for the Q and A, and a lot of people did. You know, it did build up a really rich conversation in the city at that time. You know, we were trying to reflect that energy as much as possible in the acquisitions that we were making as well. And still one of the events I most vividly remember was there was a riot, a race riot in 2011, I believe, based around anti-Black police violence and so we ended up doing a screening of Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs, which we had also recently acquired at Tate. And that screening happened within I think 24 or 48 hours after the eruption of this uprising and it sold out instantly and I remember there were BBC journalists in the audience and there was just this incredibly robust and exciting and tense conversation. And just to be able to see a museum working that way to see a film from the 1980s still have such power. And that was also a film that was again, broadcast on BBC at the time in the 1980s. So it just, for me kind of closed the loop a little bit on, you know, how we think about these different spaces of presentation and how to make them as urgent as possible. And it also just sort of reinvested my interest in civic institutions and, you know, how they might be able to frame artworks in important and dynamic ways for the public. I should also really mention that around the time that this was all really starting in earnest at Tate. There were two really important figures and collaborators, and those were Chrissie Iles and Mark Weber. And even though Chrissie was obviously in New York already, but her legacy in the UK was still quite present. And Mark was actually in the band Pulp, but was also incredibly knowledgeable and majorly proactive about ensuring experimental film and its history were championed and somehow both presented and just remembered. He was really trying to keep it alive. And so we had many, many conversations about what it would mean for Tate to become more active in that field. And this was all around the same time that Chrissie was presenting Flashing Into the Shadows, which was a film program related to Into The Light, her her project at the Whitney. And there were also exhibitions at the time, like X - Screen at Mumok, and there was a really major resurgence of interest in expanded cinema and expanded media at that time. So I just feel like there were so many key. Allies and people that I really respected and looked up to who had really helped, I think innovate a lot of this in ways that we were able to bring into Tate and then kind of develop it further, in a way that made sense for that place and that time.

[00:15:09] Ben: So eventually, you made your way to MoMA. So I'm curious what led you to MoMA and what was that moment like? I'm sure that was a pretty massive decision.

[00:15:19] Stuart: It was to be very candid it was really a weird moment for me because I had left New York in 1991 for Los Angeles and it took at least three years before I really felt like I even understood Los Angeles much less like it. And then I grew to really love it and be really invested in it. Moving to London then in 2000 was a little more straightforward for me. I sort of felt at home there and had a number of friends there when I first arrived. But throughout a lot of that time, New York was still in my center of gravity, as much as I really deeply loved London and Los Angeles. But then gradually I, to be very frank fell out of love with New York I wasn't that invested anymore and a lot of what I was seeing here, I don't know, it just, felt like things were kind of almost on autopilot and going through the motions of previous more urgent moments in the culture here. But then I do remember when some smaller spaces like Orchard opened on the lower east side and artists like Sharon Hayes were emerging and then suddenly it felt like there was an energy that I could connect with here again. And various other encounters occurred that just made me think, Hmm. You know, New York is definitely still interesting to me and. At the same time, it felt like it was in a really fragile place as was London for that matter, just because purely the cost of living made it so difficult for artists or any sort of maker or creative community to survive. And I was really interested to think about, you know, what would it mean to come and work in an institution like MoMA. And MoMA approached me for this position and so I started to have to kind of think through those questions. And I was still very much in love with London and it was sort of right after the period of the Olympics. And again, it just was culturally extremely dynamic there, it just felt full of possibility and sometimes I would come back to New York and it felt the opposite. You know, it was still a great city, but it felt like maybe that moment of urgency had passed a little bit. And at the same time, I kept encountering artists that I was really inspired by here. And I was just debating, I guess in my own head what could one do with the sort of very rich and dense institutional infrastructure in New York to better support that community, you know, is that even possible at this stage? And so I had some very interesting conversations with Glenn Lowry, with various curators here and clearly they were beginning to contemplate the expansion that would open in 2019 and so that created a number of different opportunities that were very exciting to me. And I had just come out of the opening program for the tanks at Tate modern, which I had, co-create with Katherine Wood and Kathy noble. Having really thought about the meaning of a performance space or a time based media space in a museum was something I had found really, really interesting and inspiring. And so the opportunity to kind of do that again here with the Kravis Studio was definitely exciting. And again, I, I actually sensed, there was a sort of growing urgency again here and I did make the difficult decision to move back and definitely don't regret it. But it was interesting I remember then I guess 2014 or 2015 being at an opening for John Akomfrah at the Lisson gallery in Chelsea. And there was a dinner afterwards and sitting there with John and David Adjaye and Christopher Ofili and all these cultural icons from Britain and when we sat down to dinner, the deliberations over Brexit had begun and by the time dessert was being served, Brexit had happened. I certainly could not have ever imagined that that would happen. And so yeah, I mean my own relationship to the UK has also changed a lot, I think because of that. Now I, I'm frequently asked to kind of compare MoMA and Tate and Tate is, emphatically a national institution. It is a public institution, and MoMA is a private institution with a civic remit. So there are many overlapping concerns, but they are fundamentally different models. 

[00:19:15] Ben: It's also really interesting to hear, I mean, of course the expansion that would happen a few years later was already being planned, and discussed. But you know, being a former colleague of yours, that just never occurred to me that, of course, I would imagine the moment you hit the ground at MoMA, you were probably already beginning to think about what could this new building offer for time based media and performance, and all of that. So that's super fascinating to hear. I never really thought of it that way.

[00:19:39] Stuart: And even some of the first meetings I attended, I think there were one or two in summer 2013, and I officially started in September, but I remember being here over the summer, just getting things ready and was invited to attend a couple of meetings and with Delco video Renfro. So they were already in the, early planning stages of the building. And it was exciting to be able to work with architects who had done major theaters and really did understand the specific needs of time-based media and performance, because I don't think a lot of museums do enter the conversation with those concerns in mind. For so long, you were lucky if you even had a sort of black box closet where you would get to show one video a year and usually that black box was by the bathroom in the basement and so I, I think, the whole art world has come a long way in that regard, but it has been really exciting to be able to develop spaces with very thoughtful architects and other colleagues and collaborators that can really try to do justice and better support artists and their intentions

[00:20:42] Ben: So I have a lot of like really nitty gritty questions about your work and practice, but before we dive into that I wanna take the thousand foot view first. So how would you describe your role and your responsibilities, not just as a curator, of course, but in your capacity as a leader of a whole department of curators?

[00:21:06] Stuart: It's a great question. To boil it down to the simplest common denominator, I guess I would say really it is about a 24 7 commitment to thinking about how best to bring art together with its community. And so that means both building a collection and trying to come up with the best possible strategies for how to give that collection, meaning through the exhibitions in the collection displays and also through conservation and preservation. And I think for reasons very well known to you, I, I feel like media art cannot be separated from conservation. It has to be one of the first questions you ask in any acquisition, you know, what is the work and how does it exist? And I think unlike a lot of other artworks you can't reduce it just to an image. It's not always about the image. It's about a whole network of hardware and software and people and people complete the work, but people also make the work happen. You can't present the work without conservators and the AV team and curators and so then in terms of being a department head, it's . Obviously a very large part of my time and something I'm deeply invested in is building a team where we can hopefully rethink the structures here, which are very hierarchical. And because every member of this team is constantly working with AV, with exhibition design, with our producer in the studio, with conservation, with our producers. So it's really trying to find better ways to think about the broader bureaucracy and how it's structured here and working with the senior leadership to reflect what we hope is also reflected in the galleries, which is a de-siloizing of this museum and its collection. I don't know that you can ever completely dissolve that structure because I think there are also very significant advantages to the depth of knowledge that's housed in each of the departments, but I think we've gotten better at, cross pollinating those departments and trying to really give agency to younger colleagues and voices that are coming into the department as well, whether it's through internships and fellowships or whether they're curatorial assistants really trying to listen to them too cause I do think this is a part of the field that is always very future minded. And for me like really thinking about the community of the staff is, essential to the success of acquiring and presenting and preserving the art that we are committed to. You know, again, this is certainly I think what should have been more clear for decades, but I think since 2020 and the pandemic, the uprising following George Floyd's murder, you can't just hang a work of art, particularly one that purports to deal with complex social and political and cultural issues and not reflect on the wider infrastructure that is presenting that work. And obviously there are generations of artists that have asked these questions far more eloquently than I am now, but the urgency of those questions has only gotten louder. And so I think it is a challenging time for museums, but also an exciting time. And we do need to fundamentally rethink many aspects about them. But I guess I have worked in large institutions, as I said, literally since I was in high school. So it's just an environment in which I'm well acquainted to at this point. And you do have a degree of freedom and flexibility if you work for smaller institutions or artist run spaces and I continue to get a huge amount of energy from those places. And sometimes I'm even jealous of the freedoms that they have, but I guess I have a high threshold for bureaucratic pain so it's, um, I guess it's just a process I'm willing to be patient with. And you know, it's exciting to see an institution as deeply meaningful as MoMA find the capacity to change. And that is not done by one person, like you have to do that collectively. So just trying to find ways to achieve that in dialogue with the work that we are presenting, is really life giving on some level.

[00:25:10] Ben: I love that. So what was the MPA department like at MoMA when you arrived not just in terms of the collection, but how the actual department was structured and it's remit and how it functioned, and, I guess I'm curious, what were your initial priorities in terms of the ways you wanted to reshape it?

[00:25:32] Stuart: I mean, clearly I wanted to reflect on and build on the contributions of major pioneering colleagues like Barbara London, and Klaus Biesenbach and Sabine Breitwieser. Barbara had not been chief creator of the department, but clearly had effectively established the museum's commitment to video roughly at the inception of the medium and so had a huge impact, I think on certainly how video was conceived and structured at this institution. And then because Klaus was still at that point at PS1 he was still very active in the conversation and there were definitely many artists he had committed to that you know, I shared his commitment to them and so, we were able to collaborate on a number of occasions with PS1 with exhibitions, like Carolee Schneemann and Mark Leckey and Ian Cheng. So that was exciting to be able to work with them. And then Sabine as well was a curator I had always deeply respected and had, done something very important, which was to collect artists in depth. You know, we have a very, very broad body work by Valie Export for instance in the institution's collection now, which would not have happened without Sabine and so again, I'm very committed to the central role that women played in the development of video in particular, and clearly uh, they were very central to histories of performance as well. So it felt like there were many opportunities to build on what Sabine had been doing to continue to center those figures. But there were a few artists that for me, just felt like they absolutely had to be represented with significant works in the collection. So Dara Brinbaum for instance, and Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann, so we were able to do major acquisitions of all three of them finally. And I think in Barbara's case, she had managed to acquire certainly in Dara's case, a number of single channel videos, but had met resistance at different points because it was a battle to get video recognized and she definitely deserves the credit for having fought that battle hard and for many, many years and so I definitely wanted to sort of acknowledge her work by building on it and then bringing in works like Dara's PM Magazine. Sabine as well, had done a major Carolee Schneemann retrospective in Salzburg and then we effectively brought that to PS1 but had also made a number of key acquisitions building on her own acquisition of Up To and Including Her Limits, which for me is one of the really watershed works in the Media and Performance collection now. Klaus and Sabine had also both been deeply invested in Simone Forti's work and had presented it in various ways. So we were finally able to make an acquisition of the Dance Constructions happen, which quickly became the most requested work in the department of Media and Performance's collection. Which I think suggested its urgency. So, I do think museums operate on very different clocks and timelines and a lot of the rest of the world, but it is really exciting to be in dialogue with the work that had been done prior to my arrival and, finding ways to extend that, through new and different voices, whether it's artists or new colleagues coming in. Trying to keep that conversation evolving in important ways and recognize the artists who might not yet have been in the collection for various reasons, and I've really tried to commit to not always being hesitant to acquire works by emerging artists. Landmark works by artists like Sondra Perry or Tiona Nekkia McClodden, or Ian Cheng and many others within a year or two after they were made and I think I remain confident that these are really important works of art. I think each of those artists is contributing to the history in profound in very different ways. I also feel all of them are in dialogue too with, innovations that all of my predecessors had done. So I kind of like that fluid sense of continuity to some extent.

[00:29:17] Ben: Yeah, with a collection, as large as MoMA's, do you think of the collection as being in indexical, or even at that scale, do you think of the collection as having, some sort of focus or core competency? Like it's slanted in one direction or another, and that's something that you try and think about when you're considering new works.

[00:29:40] Stuart: It's a good question. I mean, it is a sprawling collection, across all of the departments, for sure. And even in terms of, quote unquote performance I mean, Drawings and Prints for instance, has a lot of scores or drawings that resulted from performances like Trisha Brown's and Simone Forti's. And so it's an interesting question, even in terms of the performance side of the department, how it should define itself and its collection, and certainly in relationship to even photography, which they certainly acquire photographs that are ultimately performance documentation. And so to the degree that things have de siloed a little bit, it's also really exciting to be able to have these cross departmental dialogues. So I think in the same meeting that we acquired Dara Birnbaum's PM Magazine, we also acquired Charles Gaines Manifesto's 3 and that was a collaboration or a joint acquisition with drawings and prints, because it's both a video work and the videos correspond to very large drawings of musical scores. So even at my first acquisition meeting, it just felt very exciting to be able to have that connection to the way the other departments were working and thinking also. And so I think we are still slowly moving out of a very long era in which each department functioned pretty autonomously and had its own agenda and ambitions and through a lot of different avenues I think we've tried to identify ways to have, more of an institutional synthetic strategy on some level. And each department still often does have its own interests and agendas as well. But I feel like more broadly things have started to crystallize into strategies that, you know, reflect the way that artists work, which is often not bound to a single medium. Single channel video is something that we do hold in great depth and some of that material came in through Electronic Arts Intermix and obviously, I mean, they are one of the major standard bearers in the history of video distribution and have developed really exciting model for institutions to be able to bring those works into their collections. But then there's a lot of material that Barbara brought in and Klaus and Sabine as well. To try to build on that, we've also really tried to emphasize larger scale installations too. And so again, with Adrian Piper we were able to acquire What It's Like, What It Is, number three, which Rob Storr actually commissioned for major exhibition in the 1990s. But we didn't have any of her videos and she's clearly one of the kind of major figures in that history. So it felt important to have those kind of markers in the collection. And to engage both with the question of distribution and broadcast, but also a commitment to architecture and apparatus and infrastructure, and having just seen the great Dara Birnbaum survey at CCS Bard that Lauren Cornell just curated and even how that relates to Martin Syms' work and this question of the apparatus of media architectures is, clearly central to both of those artists and a lot of others. And I guess to some extent, this also comes out of the work I was doing at Tate around expanded cinema and expanded media and just artists who were always questioning. What a lot of British filmmakers called the politics of the room. So acknowledging again, that it's not just an image, but it's an image that occupies a certain technical and architectural apparatus. So I think we focus a lot on works like that. We're in the middle of installing Tiona Nekkia McClodden's the Brad Johnson Tape, which again is for me a really fascinating way of rethinking an archive and how it might exist in a museum through a more performative and immersive and time based installation. I first encountered her work when Vivian Crockett who's now at the New Museum was a fellow here and Erin Christovale at the Hammer Museum, co-curated a screening for world AIDS day with Visual Aids and they included Tiona in the program and I was really struck by her video. So we then invited Vivian to host a modern Monday with Tiona which just deepened our interest and then around that time, Meg Onli at the ICA Philly also presented the work that we ended up acquiring and an exhibition called Speech Act. And so the work builds on the history and the archive of Brad Johnson, who was a Black gay poet who was published in compilations like Brother to Brother that had been put together by really iconic poets like Essex Hemphill, and she did a really deep dive into his life and his work. And then effectively ended up performing a reading of some of his texts while she's sort of suspended on a rig upside down. And so she's a very active participant in BDSM culture and then other forms of sort of African diasporic spirituality and she brings those together in a really, really powerful way. So this installation having had the great privilege of seeing her install it this week you realize how much of the process and the performative side of her spiritual practice, her BDSM practice led to the physical installation of this work it's sort of . Anchored with the rig from which she was suspended, which then frames the video, documenting that reading. And then it has a range of objects and effects and archival materials that surround it and then today she effectively came in with many bunches of roses, which she then almost whips the rig or the structure with. And so then the roses effectively fall to the floor. So it's, almost a sort of memorial and a shrine and it feels very much like a living artwork. It's a very, very powerful piece.

[00:35:15] Ben: How are you thinking about the long term care and re exhibition and re performance of a piece like this?

[00:35:22] Stuart: Conservation is often the first question. Partly it's a budgetary question because whatever the gallery or the agent selling the work to us quotes as the price of the work you often have to add on significant extra costs because we have to acquire monitors or other hardware and Or else the work just won't survive. And so we need to constantly assess those costs. In the process of sort of vetting the acquisition before we take it to our committee. So that's on a more practical level on a philosophical level too you know, we all know that these technologies become obsolete fairly quickly and so we really need to be quite strategic in making the commitment to this work and ensuring we can preserve it for posterity. And then we really did learn a lot from the Simone Forti, Dance Construction acquisition and it's a body of performances that are all effectively tethered to some kind of an object with the exception of Huddle, which is arguably her most iconic work which is literally just that it's a huddle of humans negotiating one another. But it is a body of work that we work really closely with Simone to be able to preserve and so that process of preservation includes roughly annual workshops, where we bring together a group of teachers from around the world who work with Sarah Swenson. Who's been working closely with Simone for many, many years. We've extensively interviewed Simone, both in writing and on camera. And we have a real system so that if we get a loan request for the work, which we do frequently that, there's a really great process whereby we know there is this kind of direct body to body transmission from Simone to subsequent dancers for generations who will perform that work. But even how you think about living artworks or artworks involving living bodies in the collection, which asks so many fundamentally philosophical questions about, what constitutes an artwork, what is the relationship of museums or institutions that have largely been geared to preserve non-organic material and objects, and that shifts so crucially, when you start to talk about dance or living bodies, but how that extends to a work like Tiona's is really, really interesting, even the sort of black cording that's used to suspend the screen on which the video is projected. It becomes really clear when you're installing the work that her practice in BDSM is fundamental to how those knots are tied. And so effectively, even the knots in the screen are a kind of document of that performance. 

[00:37:57] Ben: As you've been engaging with a lot of these practices that involve much more performance art, and MoMA has just been doing that more generally, has supporting work like that outside of acquisitions, been something that you've been engaging with.

[00:38:13] Stuart: We have, and at the moment we're hosting our first ever residency in the new Kravis studio with Okwui Okpokwasili who's a New York based dancer. We really wanted to make sure that occasionally that that space is made available to the dance community here because real estate is so difficult to have access to in New York so often, and especially to the dance community. And, you know, it just felt really important to be generous with that space and make it a generative space for the artists we're really committed to. So there's no immediate outcome that we will either acquire or commission. It really is just a free space for Okwui to develop new work. And then there will be a series of events that will allow the public to engage with that process later in August. We've also recently commissioned works by artists like Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou- Rahme, and that was a video installation that could more easily potentially be an acquisition and we're presenting a performance commission this fall as well with Yve Laris Cohen. MoMA did not really commission much, and so that's something that's changed dramatically. And that includes the Barbara Kruger installation. That's up now in the atrium, as well as the Adam Pendleton commission that I organized last summer in the atrium. And prior to that, the Haegue Yang commission that we presented in the atrium. And Yasmil Raymond , a former colleague had also led on a number of other artist commissions were part of the 2019 reopening. So it's exciting to see that kind of energy in the museum and I think it does shift the focus away from one that's purely about ownership and acquisition to one that is about engagement with artists and having a kind of living conversation with them. It is a very different way of working. With live art there has been a lot of resistance to the risk of commodifying, an art form that was always conceived to be a more radical way of resisting that commodification. There are a lot of other ways of just thinking about performance as a form of resistance in itself and so obviously we would want to be thoughtful and careful and respectful and not compromise an artist's intentions at the same time. I do feel like we are agents that need to resist historical amnesia and that it is meaningful for artists to, you know, have access to their forebears and be able to engage with that work. And it is exciting to think through the possibilities of, you know, how might we capture something like a performance in a way that we can represent it beyond just a film or a photograph and not all work lends itself to that. But that's what was exciting about Simone Forti's work is that it actually does and I think aspects of Trisha Brown's work does for instance. So having also done the Judson exhibition, I think, you know, we really are invested in that group and generation of artists and I think there still are a lot of lessons to be learned from them. And because they did emerge and parallel with forms of institutional critique and other forms of art, that again were time based and were putting pressure on conventional museum models. It remains a really important legacy. And one that I think a lot of younger artists are still actively working through. We still have on view an installation of works by Guadalupe Maravilla. Who's an incredible artist and healer and, they have been extremely involved in a lot of mutual aid projects, benefiting a variety of refugee communities and platforms. I know they've been particularly supportive recently of trans refugees who are coming into this country from Latin America and just trying to help point them in the right direction about how they might establish their lives here. The way they balance their art practice, with an activist practice is really exciting and really important. And it's a question, how can you create a meaningful engagement between that full spectrum of activity and a museum. And so they were presenting sound bath activations of the sculptures here and working actively with, for instance, communities of cancer survivors. Guadalupe is a survivor stomach cancer and so had dedicated a number of sessions just to that community. And so I think it's important to think too, about how performance and live art can do that, can achieve that. Again, it like blurs some of the typical boundaries between a learning and education or engagement department and the more conventional curatorial departments in most museums, and just to think about how action can energize a community in a different way than just objects can and how often, bringing the two together and activating those objects can also achieve that. I think performance doesn't just simply mean presenting dance in the atrium, although we love to do that. And I think it was really successful with Judson and projects like Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, but we've also been for instance, acquiring a number of works that we think of as sonic objects. So when we open the studio, we open with an installation of David Tudor's Rainforest, which also I think asks interesting questions about, these objects with voices in the collection and how this idea of resonant frequencies might make us rethink how an object functions or behaves in a museum. So it's not only living bodies and living histories that we're engaged with, but sort of living objects as well.

[00:43:36] Ben: How does the work of a curator such as yourself differ in approach from say a curator of paintings or sculpture or works on paper, you know, are there any unique particulars to the way that you have to work? 

[00:43:53] Stuart: I mean on one level, there are just so many different practical considerations one has to consider including sound in particular or light levels or obsolete technologies. Again, this question I mentioned earlier of what role the status of the work as an image plays versus its status as a more immersive experience. And, I think one of the things I respect most highly about my colleagues in painting and sculpture is their incredible sophistication about installing and hanging and so space is just as much a consideration for painting our sculpture, obviously, as it would be for a video or a more immersive installation. Sculpture is by its nature, immersive and many paintings are too. So I think there's as much overlap as there is difference, but certainly there are very fundamental, practical considerations. It could be really challenging and installing any media installation or certainly with performance. It can often be putting the circle in the square hole in a museum because the way that resources are structured are often almost diametrically opposed to how they would be in a theater or you know, a space more traditionally dedicated to live art. So I think museums are largely designed to house and present painting and sculpture and framed images. I find the systems can be a little bit smoother because they've been designed to achieve exactly that. Whereas I feel that a lot of media and live work is actually rubbing against the grain a little bit, which is why it's interesting, but it is often more challenging in some ways, because the systems that have been established for decades were designed for things that behave very differently. And so the process and steps by which you get to what you want are somewhat different. And I guess again, it's trying to shift the understanding away from things, always having to be about an image, but really understand like how that image behaves in a space and how the public engages with it. And obviously there's the added challenge that many people coming to museums have a very different expectation than if they were going to the cinema or to the ballet where they would expect to go and sit down for two hours and watch something from beginning to end. But in museums, people tend to be more peripatetic and they kind of drift from one painting to the next and they're kind of free agents. So to try to shift their expectation, to be patient and understand that they might have to watch things for a longer period of time is still challenging. And there's been a lot of great thinking going into how to rethink those models and it goes down to even marketing. Like just many basic functions of a museum need to be rethought just to change those expectations. These are the challenges I'm also really interested in.

[00:46:40] Ben: In your career, you know, you've worked with everything from big name pioneers of early video art and avant garde film and expanded cinema, as well as, as we've been talking about, you know, much more contemporary and even emerging artists. Thinking over the span of your career and over the span of time of this chronology of artists you've worked with, have you witnessed any kind of change or shift or I guess maybe like difference in the way that artists work with technology? Because of course technology has changed.

[00:47:12] Stuart: Definitely. Just how artists are navigating the increasing kind of collapse of digital and virtual space, because that is the way we're all functioning does feel very different, but that's also why it was interesting for me to continue to think about artists like Dara Birnbaum, because she was trained as an architect and was always thinking about the spatial equation with the images she was constructing. And so, seeing her work with Martine's work at Bard makes enormous sense to me. And Martine is clearly, I mean, when we did the project's exhibition with her here at MoMA, she was already using facial recognition software on iPhones to activate kind of hidden sequences in the posters on the walls of the gallery that related to the primary video in the center of the room, but then it allowed her to expand out beyond that video and create new chapters. And so just using basic facial recognition software that also empowered everyone with a smartphone to be able to participate in that installation in ways that, could not have easily happened a generation before her. So I think the technologies all shift so quickly now. I guess I've always been interested too, that, the moment that museum started to show video in HD for the first time was exactly the moment that a lot of artists started showing 16 millimeter film installations. So there's this kind of revenge of the repressed, as something becomes obsolete, that it tries to insist on itself as the new technology starts to overcome it. So there's also that toggling back and forth between artists who are really breaking ground with very new technologies and then others who are slightly resistant to that, which also comes out of a long term resistance that goes back to the earliest generation of video art and video activism, which was, adamantly prodemocracy and anti corporation. And so I think that's just in the DNA of artists since the beginning of the medium. But also someone like Sondra Perry, I think is building on artists like Dara Birnbaum in super important ways. She was using and hacking all kinds of different technologies for her show at the kitchen, for instance and continues to do that in her work. And I feel that Sandra and artists like American Artist are also back to this question of the image, they're not only installing images, they are really thinking about material and materiality and physicality. And in both bodies of work that comes down also to the physicality of inhabiting a Black body and the violence that is often proposed to that body and like, how do you convey that through images or through an artwork? And so I think, you know, they do think through technology, but that those technologies are always inherently connected to some idea of a body. And even if that body is something under surveillance, or if it's holding the camera I just feel the way that the sort of cyborg for lack of a better word has become a reality is central to a lot of the way that younger artists are working. It's not assumed that these things are separate anymore.

[00:50:18] Ben: That's awesome. So, Stewart, we have talked so much about the past, but I'm curious what are you working on right now, are there any active projects that you'd like to share? 

[00:50:30] Stuart: My next major project that I'm working on primarily is Signals. The full title is Signals: How Video Transformed the World, which I'm co-curating with Michelle Kuo, my esteemed colleague in our painting and sculpture department, and we're looking at a long arc of video practice from roughly 1964 to the present and very specifically looking at its emergence as a communication technology and a political tool, as much as it was an aesthetic form. We're really trying to kind of chart a path to really think through how it literally constructed publics or captured the demise of certain publics in various moments of revolution.

Again, there will be a strong emphasis on what I was mentioning earlier, like thinking. Architecture and apparatus and kind of physical manifestations of video beyond the black box. So there will be relatively few black boxes in the show, ironically, and in many ways it champions the monitor as much as it does large scale projection. Because there really is I think a pretty interesting line from, the earliest Portapak technologies and the earliest monitors to the way we're engaging with iPhones and small screens, throughout the day, every day now. Immersion does not only happen through large scale projection it happens, through networked communication. So I think, It will start with landmark works by Stan VanDerBeek and Marta Minujín and Nam June Paik. And again, rather than emphasizing the sculptural aspect of Nam June's work, for instance, it really will emphasize his investment in the satellite and simultaneity and global networks. But then as the world itself has, the show will definitely take a dystopian turn as it moves along. And then we'll end with a number of artists that I think are reflecting on. video'ss specific temporality and its specific ability to capture, survey, control, and how that might be repurposed in a way that certainly echoes the early sort of guerrilla television and media activism of the 1960s and seventies. But as you know, to your earlier question, it is a fundamentally different way of working because the world has changed and the technologies have also evolved. It's not meant to be like a sweeping history of video art specifically, but a slice through that history that again, really thinks about the network and the kinds of forms of democracy and counter democracy that video has been engaged with.

[00:53:09] Ben: Wow. And when does that open?

[00:53:11] Stuart: March 2023.

[00:53:12] Ben: All right. Putting it on my calendar. So, as such a senior curator in your field, do you have any advice for folks who are interested in getting into curation specifically within time based media?

[00:53:29] Stuart: I mean, I always say you just have to put in the time ultimately and really see everything you can and. Through doing that, you'll obviously become better acquainted with what's going on, but also who's most eager to be part of that conversation and going to screenings, going to openings, going to performances. And I have to say it has been encouraging the last few weeks. Just it's summer everybody's on the streets, I'm just sort of getting my head around what New York is right now, you know, as we're still fumbling around in the pandemic and dealing with one catastrophe after another. There is still an energy and urgency to the community here. And so I think just tapping into that in the most powerful way you can is really just the best way forward. And I think writing, trying to find your voice through writing, I think is also a really critical tool. And can really help establish your voice you know, either in or outside of an institution to some extent and also trying to look beyond your immediate community. So to try to better understand how it connects to whatever may be happening on the opposite coast or in another country. Communities are like families and with all the good things and all the problems that come with any family. So it's just, sometimes it can get competitive and petty, and to kind of look beyond that and just understand the bigger stakes of what's going on in the world, whether through artistic practice or politically just to try to like keep an expansive mind will really help you understand, I think your place in that world. There are too many prescribed paths to quote unquote success and I think, you know, that's definitely something I learned by ending up in Los Angeles where I'd never planned to go and working in a bookstore, which was not what I had imagined my dream job would be, but it allowed me to connect with a lot of artists and curators and other thinkers on a completely different level, on a different stage than I would have otherwise. So just don't get frustrated if the more typical paths are not serving you and you have to basically invent your own

[00:55:34] Ben: That's great advice. Well, Stewart, this has been such a treat and a privilege thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate having the time to chat. 

[00:55:43] Stuart: Well, it's so great to reconnect with you. Thank you for the invitation, and have a great summer. we miss you at MoMA.

[00:55:50] Ben: And thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's show. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did. How about leaving a lovely little review for the show on your favorite podcast platform? As always, if you want to help support our work and mission of equitably paying artists, you can join us at patreon.com/artobsolescence, or if you are interested in making a one-time tax deductible gift through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts. You can do so at artandobsolescence.com/donate. And there you'll also find the show notes and full transcript. Until next time have a great week my friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin and this has been Art and Obsolescence.