On museum row: Aesthetics and the politics of exhibition

Daedalus

Volumn 128, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 57-81

  Noriega, Chon A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748145214     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. I examine these changes in greater detail, with attention to the role of the Ford Foundation, in Chon A. Noriega, Shot in America: Telecommunications, Chicano Cinema, and the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).
2. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 9.
3. H. K. Colebatch, Policy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 10.
4. See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
5. For an excellent anthology on science and technology museum exhibitions, see Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 1998).
6. Carmen Lomas Garza, A Piece of My Heart/Pedacito de mi corazón: The Art of Carmen Lomas Garza (New York: The New Press, 1991).
7. See also Carmen Lomas Garza, Family Pictures/Cuadros de familia (San Francisco: Children's Book Press, 1990).
8. See Chicano & Latino: Parallels and Divergence/One Heritage, Two Paths (Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.: Daniel Saxon Gallery and Kimberly Gallery, 1992);
9. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, eds., Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (Los Angeles: UCLA Wight Art Gallery, 1991);
10. and 1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993).
11. For an insightful study of the Chicano Art exhibition, see Alicia Caspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
12. Robbie Farley-Villalobos, "Museum President Embarrassed: 'Personal' Survey Shows Public Doesn't Like Current Exhibit," El Paso Herald-Post, 25 January 1992, A1.
13. Robbie Farley-Villalobos, "Museum President Embarrassed: 'Personal' Survey Shows Public Doesn't Like Current Exhibit," El Paso Herald-Post, 1992, A1. Ibid.
14. New York Times, 28 February 1993.
15. Elisabeth Sussman, ed., 1993 Biennial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1993).
16. U.S. News & World Report, 22 March 1993.
17. Art & Auction, March 1993.
18. New York Times, 19 April 1992.
19. Homi K. Bhabha, "Beyond the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation," in Sussman, ed., 1993 Biennial Exhibition, 67.
20. Hal Foster et al., "The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial," October 66 (Fall 1993): 3.
21. I am not arguing for some sort of critical purity, as if inside and outside were discrete categories, but rather pointing to the failure of the roundtable members to locate themselves within their critique of the museum. To be fair, I was an "outside" advisor to the Biennial, while I had quite a different critique of the museum, not for including "minority" artists with a limited understanding of the signifier (as if the two were the same thing), but for the politics signified by the limited selection of "minority" artists. Chon Noriega, letter to Elisabeth Sussman, 5 September 1993.
22. See especially Rosalind Krauss's reading of Lorna Simpson's installation Hypothetical? (1992) in which she essentially equates the catalog texts with the art itself. Simpson's piece consists of three walls: one wall covered with mouthpieces from various brass instruments opposite another wall with a photograph of the lips of a black person; on the third wall is a newspaper clipping in which Tom Bradley is asked whether, as a black man, he would be afraid after the Rodney King verdict if he were not also the mayor. Bradley replies, "No, I wouldn't be afraid; I'd be angry." Ironically, Krauss insists on attention to the "material level of the piece," and yet dismisses the third wall as "irrelevant to the piece" in order to redirect its "meaning" from "black rage" to "the play of the signifier." For Krauss, the former reading is "profoundly unpolitical," a point she extends later when she implies that blacks and other minorities should be grateful to modernism for ending (aesthetic) slavery: "The fact that modernism fought a battle to liberate images from a slavery to text, to a totally instrumental, illustrative task, doesn't occur to this generation." In the end, Krauss's repeated call for "multiplicity" becomes a code word for not talking about certain things, like race, no matter how material to a piece.
23. Some signifiers are not allowed to signify. Foster et al., "The Politics of the Signifier," 4-6, 11.
24. Chon A. Noriega and José Piedra, eds., Revelaciones/Revelations: Hispanic Art of Evanescence (Ithaca: Hispanic American Studies Program, 1993). A documentary on the exhibition is available through the Cinema Guild in New York City.
25. New York Times, 26 September 1993.
26. See Daniel J. Martinez, The Things You See When You Don't Have a Grenade! (Santa Monica: Smart Art Press, 1996).
27. Exhibition documents and press clippings are archived in the Special Collections Department at the Stanford University libraries.
28. Earth Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, 1969). Dickson was the precursor to the Johnson Museum.
29. Editorial, Cornell Review, 29 November 1993.