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Art

The Year of the Spectacle

(Photo: Andrew Cross/Estate of Robert Smithson)

The year began with a winter festival, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude swaddled Central Park in orange. No one ever adequately explained the why or wherefore of The Gates, but explanations were never the point of the exercise. Fervently promoted by Mayor Bloomberg, The Gates generated a huge amount of attention, drawing thousands of visitors to New York. It became a citywide distraction and conversation piece—a spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Later in the year came Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, a less flashy but more penetrating work of public art than The Gates. A tugboat pulled what looked like a small piece of Central Park around Manhattan—a lovely and resonant gesture, akin to a religious procession, that seemed to trace out something essential about New York’s nature.

Not all serious artists or curators are seduced by public spectacle, of course, but many of the most ambitious today want splash. The Guggenheim doesn’t just do a Russian show, it does “Russia,” and even that isn’t enough. It must be “russia!” On a New York City pier, the photographer Gregory Colbert opened his own “Nomadic Museum” in which he depicted animals and humans meeting in a kind of cosmic kiss. Larry Gagosian is the emblematic art dealer of the moment. His last show was Mike Kelley’s “Day Is Done,” billed as a gallerywide “musical” and composed of 32 blinking video projections inspired by the extracurricular activities in a typical high school. Another American spectacle.

It seemed odd that the outsize performance works that bracketed the year—The Gates and Floating Island—were conceived long ago, in the seventies, and then came to fruition only in 2005. But their emergence now was not just a coincidence. We’re becoming a culture ever more hungry for public spectacle, and it’s not surprising that art itself—no stranger historically to extravagant effects—partakes of that hunger. (The most monstrous extravaganza of the age was surely the attack upon the World Trade Center: Terrorists, too, depend upon the politics of spectacle.) The result of this craving can be as vulgar as reality TV, in which fools make spectacles of themselves, or as sublime as Smithson’s quixotic ritual.
—M.S.

The Industry Award

Matthew Higgs, White Columns
In the year since the English curator Matthew Higgs arrived at White Columns, he’s turned New York’s oldest alternative space into an intergenerational, international hive of talent and energy. He combines considered trend-spotting with a punky spirit informed by his years in the late-seventies northern-England music scene (at 16, he promoted New Order’s first U.K. gig). His shows have included “Trade,” which cheekily sent up the art boom by featuring works swapped by artists; “Post No Bills,” a boisterous aggregation of poster art; and “Odd Lots,” curated by Cabinet magazine and devoted to cult figure and White Columns founder Gordon Matta-Clark. (The Whitney has even shown Higgs’s own text-based art.) “I’m interested in the space between the commercial galleries and the larger institutions,” Higgs says. “Here in New York, I think, there’s a really huge gap.”
—K.R.