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| Art attack:
a sampling of catalogues from shows at DUMA |
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January 1988, Cas Stachelberg ’89 returned to the Duke campus
to begin a belated junior year after a seven-month absence spent working
at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York’s SoHo district. He came
back to school with a considerable amount of new work experience—and
with an idea that has evolved into an undergraduate program unlike
any other in the country.
Stachelberg’s sabbatical job had involved him in
all aspects of operating a professional
art gallery, including working with the registrar, assisting the art
handlers, and helping to install exhibitions of works by internationally
renowned artists. The experience, he says,
had been enjoyable and rewarding for him, and highly useful in augmenting
his art-history major.
“During that semester off, I said to myself, ‘I’m
going back to school in January. How can I join these two worlds—the
New York art world and the world of Duke University?’ I had these
two ideas that were going on in my head, and I wanted to find a way
to put them together. At the time there really wasn’t a venue
for contemporary art in Durham, but I had this idea: ‘Why not
bring some of this work from the gallery back to Duke?’ ”
After receiving a positive response to the idea from Cooper
and other members of her staff, Stachelberg arrived at Duke in January
and almost immediately contacted Michael Mezzatesta, director of the
Duke University Museum of Art. When he sat down with Mezzatesta, Stachelberg
proposed an exhibition that would bring works by some of the most
widely known artists in Cooper’s stable to DUMA, and offered
to serve as the show’s curator.
Recalling that meeting, Mezzatesta
says that when he heard Stachelberg’s proposal and recognized
that this was an opportunity to bring works by internationally known
contemporary artists to the museum, “I jumped on it, because
I thought it was a great idea to have a student do an exhibition like
that. I’ve always really liked the idea of giving students firsthand
experience instead of having them deal with something only in the
abstract. So I called Paula Cooper, and it turned out that she was
more than willing to work with us.”
“I hadn’t thought of it as a continuing program,
but he very quickly did,” says Stachelberg. “As we talked
about it conceptually, we realized it would be great to have a student
curate a show annually.” Now in its fourteenth year, the program
has generated a dozen exhibitions of works by well-known, almost exclusively
contemporary artists, each exhibition accompanied by a handsome catalogue
that includes photographs and scholarly essays by the student curators.
Mezzatesta offered Stachelberg $2,000 in museum funds
to help pay the costs of his exhibition. Before it was all over, Stachelberg
would raise several thousand dollars more in order to cover expenses
that included shipping, insurance, and publication of the exhibition
catalogue—all of which, except for catalogue design and printing,
were his responsibility rather than the museum’s. Realizing in
advance that he was looking at a substantial time commitment, he arranged
to receive a semester’s academic credit for his work as an independent-study
project—a model that would be followed in subsequent student-curated
shows and eventually expanded to a full year’s credit.
By the end of the spring semester, Stachelberg had formulated
the overall plan for his exhibition. His aim was to put together a
show that would reflect the sharp contrast between the two styles
of art in which the Paula Cooper Gallery had long specialized—minimalism
and neo-expressionism—and would include works by six internationally
known artists. “Paula had been embracing these two very different
types of art since the late 1960s,” he says, “and she was
steeped in them, so the selection of artists came out of what I was
exposed to at the gallery.” He decided to represent the cool,
stripped-down minimalist aesthetic with works by Donald Judd, Robert
Mangold, and Joel Shapiro, and to combine their pieces with comparatively
“hot” neo-expressionist works by Jonathan Borofsky, Michael
Hurson, and Elizabeth Murray. Then he began organizing his thoughts
for the essays he would write for the show’s accompanying catalogue.
His exhibition was scheduled to open in early November.
For the summer, Stachelberg returned to New York, where
his gallery experience helped him find employment as an assistant
to Barbara Haskell, the curator at the Whitney Museum of American
Art. His main job was to help her organize an exhibition of Donald
Judd’s minimalist sculpture—a fortuitous development that
not only helped him become more familiar with the work of one of the
artists to be represented in his DUMA show, but enabled him to spend
two months in a museum setting where he could “pick up some pointers
on how all this is done.” While there, he selected the works
to be included and negotiated loan agreements with their owners, including
the artists and a number of private collectors.
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| Blue Green
Bridge, 2000, Do-Ho Suh, plastic figures, steel structure, polycarbonate
sheets, 448 x 51 x 24 in., Courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery;
detail below |
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When Stachelberg returned to school
in August, as he recalls, “I hit the ground running and started
writing the essays. I wrote a kind of general statement about the
show and six essays about the artists. I remember spending some very
late nights working on the essays.” In keeping with his initial
thought about bringing the New York art world and Duke together, he
decided to title the exhibition “SoHo at Duke” (a name that
was applied to subsequent exhibitions curated under the program, until
SoHo lost its central place in the New York art market during the
1990s, and Duke’s student curators began broadening their search
territory within and beyond New York). During its seven-week run into
late December, Stachelberg says, his exhibition was “very well
covered in the local news media and, in the end, very well received.
This was a slightly different take on the traditional museum show,
and it was a new group of artists for the whole community.”
Some thirteen years later, Stachelberg says, “It
was a great work experience that involved a lot of different components—developing
a concept; approaching artists, gallery directors, and the director
of a museum; pitching the idea to everybody; convincing collectors
that lending these works for the show was going to be a good thing;
working with a museum staff; writing a catalogue and working with
the catalogue designer; and dealing with shipping and insurance. At
the time I was very much a student, but still, it felt like this is
exactly what independent curators would be doing.”
Unlike a number of other participants in the program that
his idea inspired, Stachelberg doesn’t work for an art gallery
or an art museum, and he doesn’t teach in a university art-history
program. But he has continued to do work that he sees as directly
related to his experience as Duke’s first student curator.
After graduating, he went back to the Paula Cooper Gallery
and worked there for three years. Then, as he says, “I walked
away from contemporary art, because it was a bad time in the market,
and I felt that it was time for a change. I started working with an
urban archaeologist, doing field work on sites in lower Manhattan,
and I got turned on to urban history and found that the historical
side of archaeology was wonderful.” Since being awarded his master’s
degree in preservation from Columbia University four years ago, he
has worked with Higgins & Quasebarth, a historic-preservation
and rehabilitation consulting firm based in SoHo. His work has involved
him largely with buildings in New York, but it has also taken him
on several occasions to Mostar, a city in southern Bosnia that was
badly damaged during the Bosnian civil war and is most widely known
for the loss of its seventeenth-century stone bridge. “I like
to think of myself as still involved in the curatorial process,”
he says. “Now I’m caring for buildings in the same way a
curator cares for paintings and sculptures.”
Over the years since Stachelberg’s exhibition, twenty
other Duke students, following in his curatorial footsteps, have worked
individually or collaboratively on shows that have brought a wide
variety of world-class contemporary art to DUMA and have explored
a number of provocative, often controversial themes. Examples have
included text-augmented photographic appropriations by the quintessentially
postmodern Barbara Kruger, a show focusing on a Duke student’s
own contemporary art collection, an exhibitition exploring the theme
of self-identity in the work of a dozen artists in the age group pegged
as “Generation X,” a landmark display of contemporary Nicaraguan
paintings, a show about the influence of technology on artists in
the San Francisco Bay area, and, most recently, works by contemporary
Asian-born artists who have developed transnational identities and
visual languages. One student, Sherri Sauter ’97, bucked the
trend of curating only contemporary shows and organized an exhibition
drawn from DUMA’s extensive collection of woodblock prints by
nineteenth-century American artist Winslow Homer.
During preliminary discussions with interested students,
Mezzatesta stresses the inherent difficulties in curating an art exhibition.
“I try to frighten them,” he says. “I tell them at
the beginning that this is going to be the best experience of their
lives in many ways, and that in some ways it’s going to be the
worst experience of their lives. I tell them they’re going to
be working with difficult dealers and difficult artists and difficult
collectors. I tell them that it’s going to be frustrating, and
that they’re going to have to make compromises. It’s a real-life
experience, and that’s why I think that, by far, it’s the
best training any student can get in museum studies.”
Mezzatesta credits Kristine Stiles, an associate professor
in Duke’s department of art and art history, as the faculty mainstay
for the program, describing her as a dedicated teacher and mentor
to many of the students who’ve worked on these projects. Stiles
had just started teaching at Duke for the 1988 fall semester when
Cas Stachelberg enrolled in her seminar on popular culture. Because
they very quickly developed a good student-teacher relationship, she
agreed to serve as the faculty adviser for the independent-study course
he had designed for the purpose of curating his exhibition.
“In terms of the critical thinking that went into
the catalogue essays, working with her was incredibly helpful,”
he says. “She really helped me formulate my thoughts and get
those essays to the point where we could publish them.”
Stiles describes the curatorial program as “a crash
course in becoming a young professional,” and says, “These
students learn to collaborate. They learn to deal with multiple levels
of people involved in the industry of art. They learn to write, to
communicate effectively, and they learn to formulate a budget. They
learn to meet very, very sophisticated strangers and to entertain
ideas that they never would have entertained. They gain self-confidence.”
Not only does the program prepare them for professional curatorial
work, she says, “I think it prepares them for anything.”
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“It’s
a confrontation with contemporary art that otherwise doesn’t
really occur in the museum on a regular basis. There’s
nothing better than really contemporary, avant-garde art to
raise the cultural level of a city, because the discourse about
it engages one in the most important questions of our period.”
—KRISTINE STILES
Exhibition series adviser ” |
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A specialist in global, post-war art,
Stiles has overseen the intellectual aspect of the program—the
thematic development of the exhibitions and the writing of the catalogue
essays—for all but three of the shows it has generated. She commends
the program as invaluable for the way it exposes students to “the
most contemporary, avant-garde art in whatever city they go to.”
“It’s always been my policy to encourage and
enable the students to select the work for these shows on their own,
to select the best art they can find, and to select a theme that holds
the work together,” she says. “They have to organize their
aesthetics into an intellectual project—to make their subject
cohere, not only visually, but in a text. Then they have to do research
on the individual artists and on the subject that they plan to write
about. They have to learn to write a coherent essay that is not only
on a high intellectual level, but is also readable to the public.
Then they have to edit it and rewrite it, and that is very difficult.”
As for the value of the program to the university community
and the larger surrounding community, Stiles says, “It’s
a confrontation with contemporary art that otherwise doesn’t
really occur in the museum on a regular basis. There’s nothing
better than really contemporary, avant-garde art to raise the cultural
level of a city, because the discourse about it engages one in the
most important questions of our period. Confrontation with visual
form that is of its time or beyond its time can be a very difficult
project—a project of growth—which is why so much art gets
censored. It’s really a confrontation with ourselves. The program
exposes students and the community to new art, and the shows have
sometimes been controversial for that very reason. These students
have brought in work that was very advanced.”
Even some of her colleagues “didn’t get a lot
of the work” in the last show that Stiles advised on, 1999’s
“The Perfect Life: Artifice in L.A.,” she says. “There
was this bedroom set in that show by Jorge Pardo, and no one seemed
to know what to make of it.” Perhaps those who didn’t get
it should have read the catalogue essay by Alexandra Winokur ’99,
one of that show’s three co-curators, in which she devoted more
than two pages to a meticulous critical and scholarly analysis of
Pardo’s untitled bedroom installation. Winokur’s essay—which
she recalls having rewritten five times—exemplifies the kind
of intellectually rigorous, theoretically solid, yet reader-friendly
writing that can result from the kind of exactingly critical writer-editor
relationship that Stiles describes. After citing an art-historical
precedent for the installation in Claes Oldenburg’s 1963 piece
titled Bedroom, Winokur went on to write, “Jorge Pardo’s
bedroom installations reveal the concurrence of art and life in Los
Angeles.... The bedroom set displayed in the context of a museum removes
its functional aspect, and the museum-goer is asked to inspect the
bedroom as a sculpture, or an object of examination, not an actual
space to be inhabited.”
“We ran into numerous fire drills,” says Winokur,
“probably more than the curators of any of the other student
shows. We had artists threatening to pull works from the show at the
last minute. I remember talking on the phone at about one or two in
the morning to Paul Sietsema, the artist who made the sixteen-millimeter
film Untitled (Beautiful Place) that was the thematic centerpiece
of the whole show, and he was threatening not to let us show it, because
he didn’t like the way it was going to be installed in the museum.
We wanted to build a room inside the museum and show it there, so
you could hear the sound of the projector reverberating throughout
the gallery as you looked at the rest of the work, but he wanted us
to show it in a classroom down the hall.
“Finally, Kristine Stiles called him on the phone,
and she ultimately was able to persuade him to let us use it. And
then, on the day Victoria Vesna’s work was supposed to be shipped
to us, she pulled one of her palm-tree video pieces that we had lined
up for the show, because she said it wasn’t working properly
or something. So we were missing one of the pieces we discussed in
our essays.”
In retrospect, though, she says that negotiating the myriad
difficulties involved in curating the show was probably the most valuable
part of the experience. “The teamwork that it took to overcome
obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, and to get the show done in
spite of everything—that’s what has helped me more than
anything else about the project since I graduated,” she says.
“No matter how many crazy things kept happening and how many
problems we had, we just knew we had to figure out a solution.”
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