Will Klaus Biesenbach’s Speech Last Tuesday Evening at MoMA Mark His Biggest Career Blunder?

“Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Myopic”

He’s older than 44.

I was going to ask you not to approve my last comment because it was probably a bit out of line, but I had a hard time believing he opened Kunst-Werke when he was only 25.

Klaus you dick!

Well, according to nymag, he’s that young: http://nymag.com/arts/art/profiles/62918/

There goes the neighborhood.

OK his age makes sense if he started Kunst-Werke before the Mitte boom. (When I first saw the place in 96 or 98 it was already an institution in the middle of some expensive real estate.)

Did anybody go to the Marina at Moma? Klaus moderated and he was beyond terrible. He barely let Marina get a word in edgewise. She clearly had things she wanted to say, but he kept talking over her and interrupted her. He was also super self-aggrandizing. He tried to make the Artist Is Present seem like an equal collaboration between Marina and him. He was so grating. I went to see Marina speak, not him. Also, he is a parody waiting to happen: a Jil Sander wearing, German performance art curator? The jokes write themselves.

Did anybody go to the Marina at Moma? Klaus moderated and he was beyond terrible. He barely let Marina get a word in edgewise. She clearly had things she wanted to say, but he kept talking over her and interrupted her. He was also super self-aggrandizing. He tried to make the Artist Is Present seem like an equal collaboration between Marina and him. He was so grating. I went to see Marina speak, not him. Also, he is a parody waiting to happen: a Jil Sander wearing, German performance art curator? The jokes write themselves.

My experience says different. She was able to successfully mimic my blink patterns, as I did hers for a number of minutes. We had an undeniably clear communication, even if limited. She may not have been able to see clearly, but enough to pick out facial gestures, surely.

Biesenbach may have been performing an Ulay role. She didn’t get there independently and he was provoking her to react, to slap back. Was it equal? Probably not given the context. Is that a first, to upend Abramovic? Definitely.

Is it not possible that she also wears contacts? Typically when someone says they “can’t see anything without glasses,” that really means “can’t see anything without some kind of aid to my vision.” I have a hard time believing that she is walking around in a blurred world, not knowing who she’s speaking to.

Yeah, I mean, she’s obviously wearing contacts. It’s mostly just an indication of the level of drunkeness he’d achieved.

Please.

Marina sits in a chair for three months, then turns up the next day wearing a couture snakeskin outfit and posing with Courtney Love, and suddenly KLAUS is the freak?

The art world is full of crazy people doing weird things.

If Klaus and Marina had settled down in their Bavarian gingerbread house twenty years ago to bake apple pies all day, they’d be attending school soccer games and packing the trailer for their two week vacation in Spain.

And if Linda Yablonsky wants to treat the museum like it’s the Colony Club, or if you want to tut-tut outbursts in “professional” settings, fine. The art world can accommodate your weirdness, too.

“Will Klaus Biesenbach’s Speech Last Tuesday Evening at MoMA Mark His Biggest Career Blunder?”–
Probably not. He’s proven with shows like Greater Brooklyn that he can do whatever he feels like and regardless of the criticism it will still influence the art world, regardless if the work has become generic and inconsequential.

“She was able to successfully mimic my blink patterns, as I did hers for a number of minutes.”

How “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” of you guys, minus the crippling-degenerative-living-hell part. And whether she had contacts on or not doesn’t really matter: she didn’t “see” anyone, at least not in the telepathic-soul-licking way that people imagined that she was “seeing” them. Though the drug-addict-getting-their-fix look on many of the repeat-sitter’s faces attests to the fact that they were having some deep itch scratched…

I’ve decided to sum up “The Artist is Present” as a dizzying stew of paradox and hypocrisy, with the black-clad, Biesenbach-gushing, star-fucking nightmare power party acting as a fitting cap to such an “inclusive,” über-emo, and “seminal” retrospective. I hope that Bjork puked up her golden-lip-stamped chocolate dessert all over Michael Stipe as Patti Smith dove for cover behind Liv Tyler as Antony made a pass at James Franco who…

@greg.org Yes, I’ve overstated craziness of the incident. I am not perfect. Happy?

These people are as “crazy” as foxes, and their affected “weirdness” isn’t what’s being criticized here. The whole show has this gauze of hard-won “realness” that is fairly repugnant, and reading about the curator’s drunken, maudlin schoolgirl love-profession/gaffe that somewhat undermines the “realness” is understandably satisfying, however dishy and immature such a reaction might be. I like that some of the air is being let out of this balloon, because the “mystification” brought on by the retrospective was getting fairly cloying.

That being said, I think Abramovic knocked this one out of the park. She also made a strong case for the kind of pandering showbiz-y “eccentric” posturing that one must engage in to achieve such “greatness” (cough, Lady Gaga, cough).

Touche’ on the posturing, JPM.

And I’m not trying to wring walkbacks out of you, Paddy; the faux pas faux shock is mostly Yablonsky’s.

I just think/hope we don’t have to be Ben Davis to recognize when country club mores take over the art world.

Wait, I thought Klaus’s true love was James Franco.

May I steal the phrase “telepathic-soul-licking” for an exhibition title?

No you’re not trying to wring walkbacks out of me, you’re telling me how you think I should be writing this blog. I want this kind of feedback, which is why I’ve tried to set the comments up for people to say, “actually I think the real issue is this”, but I do wish you took the tone I approximated a little more frequently. Instead, I read that I’m just as crazy as a lunatic curator who drunkenly professes his love for Marina, the artist herself, who’s now wearing the most designer-y of designer-y clothing, and the stars now clinging to her because I’ve focused too much on Yablonsky’s account of Klaus. Your argument would have been just strong without kicking me over a bad headline choice.

Meanwhile, Jesse is right. My interest had more to do with highlighting something that undermines the “hard-won realness” of the show, then it did picking on Klaus. Perhaps we can discuss that.

@L.M.: “Marina Abramovic: Telepathic-Soul-Licker” was actually the original title for her retrospective, but they changed it at the last minute because it brought back too many tough memories for Klausy B.

You can probably use it, but you’ll probably have to deal with Abramovic’s newly-formed long-duration-performance-art intellectual-property-protection team first.

It’s true..Berlin early 90’s…Kunst-Werke. I was there…

Klaus’ comments, and then the various reactions that have spun out, are part of a performance that ended. A friend of mine said that it was like a roast. However the literal interpretation of the event, as Klaus’ gaffe, reveals that viewers are still challenged to interpret performance art when it does not take place on a stage.

Do note that Abramovic’s show began with her ex-husband, and longtime collaborator Ulay sitting across from her at the table. Tears ran down her face in the cathartic moment. Ulay came back to open up a show that gave him marginal recognition. So it is very fitting that Klaus performed an Abramovic vignette back to her, similar to Ulay, a slap for a slap, creating a good closure to the piece. Abramovic would not be Abramovic without a complimentary response from an other, from someone else.

If Klaus’s discomfiting speech was “part of a performance,” it’s less Andrea Fraser, I’m afraid, and way too much Jennifer Rubell.

As I tweeted, I’ve felt uncomfortable before watching Klaus’s unabashed, emotionally raw toasts for artists he [presumably] hasn’t lived with, and I’ve just come to assume it’s Klaus’s thing. Or one of them.

Yablonsky’s right that it was awkward, but I would really like her to be wrong that everyone is an always-striving careerist, or should always be conforming to some professionalist expectation.

@Jill: What is life, really, but one big, pretentious, long-duration performance? And are we not ALL present, artists or not?

Any thoughts, viewers? Others? Someone else?

I'm so full of shit. No, I'm not. Yes, I am.

@Jesse, according to the Greeks who set dramas on an open-air stage with a view of the city in the back, art and life have been closely connected for a long time. But now, as seen at MoMA, can something be viewed outside of the highly theatrical, conspicuous consumptive moment, where fashion and celebrity dominates? I doubt it since everyone wants the latter but not anything that poses as a diversion – in this case Klaus’ heckling of Abramovic.

Also, consider the cultural differences that are at play. Klaus, for example, is not a conspicuous consumptive American. He is German who carries out Kantian critique, the dialectic. If Klaus made a mistake, it was in assuming that the audience would be able to understand the aberration beyond its literal character.

@Jill: You’re giving Ãœbermenschean status to Klaus and making determinations based on nationality (culture), and otherwise over-academicizing as a way of justifying an exhibit that was “conspicuously-consumptive” through-and-through.

Just because this took place in the (American) MoMA and involved a Serbian performance-artist and a German curator doesn’t exempt it from the nastier mechanisms of spectacular capitalism (which is a global phenomenon, last time I checked).

In fact, I’d argue that the show (and its attendant parties and press) have succeeded in further assimilating this meta-theatrical-high-art you’re defending into the crass-celebrity-famewhoring-moneymaker that you’re claiming it’s above (or somehow functioning outside of).

honestly, art opening pictures look a lot like any other “event” opening picture to me. I would feel out of place and unhappy at any such event. I’m not sure how they all take it, or seem to thrive on it.

It was a very uncomfortable moment for anyone paying attention. Yablonsky was at our table and we asked her if she was going to go easy on Biesenbach. In my opinion she did, because it was a typical moment of arrogant curator trying to eclipse an accomplished artist at their “shared” moment of triumph. Plus, it was just pathetic and boring the way he was going on and on. His jealousy of Ricardo was palpable.

@Jesse – I’m married to a German, I’ve studied German and German culture, I’ve worked with Germans at a bluechip company, have friends in the art world in Germany and there are certain things that just don’t go away, especially Kantian critique. Why do you think Theodor Adorno (of Jewish descent) was homesick in America and so happy to return to Germany after the War??

But sure, let’s take a few steps back: Biesenbach is not the type to knowingly mess up his career in front of thousands. He’s highly in control. So if it wasn’t a mess up, what was it? Given that he’s highly interested in performance, could it be connected to that? The result was like a Sprockets skit gone bad without any laugh-track.

I agree completely, though, that because the show was in MoMA, it was very capitalistic. Did you read the NYTimes House & Garden section in March that detailed Abramovic’s million dollar properties in NY? She’s at a different level. And yes, the show did succeed in dissolving itself into celebrity and brand, because that’s what successful contemporary art has been about for the last decade – not about the majority of artists who are making art with no gallery or have shows in small, alternative spaces (something which I highly favor.) It’s about fashion, spectacle and now a TV game show.

@Jill – Point taken: you have a telepathic-soul-lick with Germans. And they’re a thoroughly professional and precise people who are incapable of messing anything up. Gotcha.

@Jesse, they’re not perfect – it’s their illusion that they are and that’s where the arrogance comes from.

KB is an ass. Really. An ass. How he has got so far at MoMA is a fine example of someone being kicked upstairs, and not recongising thats whats happened to them.

anyone remember Dieter by Mike Myers on old SNL?

We’ve arrived at throwing around German stereotypes as a means to justify things, so I give up.

I like how calling everything “a performance” is (another) way for people to suggest that something is beyond (or outside of) a certain kind of criticism. It’s like when people call an art-based reality-show “a game,” as if it being one makes it impervious to the same kind of (qualitative) criticism. So it’s actually fitting that any attempt to address these things ends in a critical dead-end where we’re expected to indulge in banality and cliché… or just give up.

Jesse, I wrote a review of the Tricia Donnelly show today that’s posted on the blog, and invests a good deal of thought in the art. Perhaps that’s a little more your speed?

Obviously reality show comment threads and Marina Abramovic news aren’t going satisfy your interest in doing some heavier intellectual work. I honestly think it’s a waste of your time to complain so bitterly on these threads about this when it’s clear they’re never going to be the forum you want anyway.

I greatly appreciate the omnivorousness of your posts, and I do make a point to read your articles outside of AFC. I engage in a plethora of other “forums” as well. I’m polymorphous, too! But thanks for the (somewhat condescending) redirection to your “smarter” writing.

Still, you’ve used this platform to post a great deal on Abramovic and WANGA, and I don’t think that my comments are mere “bitter complaints” or pretentious sniping for “heavier intellectual work.” Both are major mainstream contemporary art events – which involve major “art world” players – and I’m trying to engage them as attentively as one should, say, a Tricia Donnelly show. Both events are based in and appeal to, I think, utter cynicism – so I don’t feel that my equally cynical comments are in any way out of line. I’m just “fighting fire with fire,” really.

But if you want me refrain from playing in your sandbox, that’s fine (I was kicked out of Saltz’s pretty quickly too, remember!).

“As innocuous as it might seem, the divorce of the critical voice from the art media breeds a conformism that ultimately thwarts any desire to be original. Art is then replaced by perpetual cynicism and held in check by the institutional affiliations of critics.” (Robert C. Morgan, from “The Plight of Art Criticism”)

Sorry Jesse. I hadn’t meant to be condescending. Let me recast:

I hope you don’t give up on all the comment threads here.

Hah am I really the first reply to this amazing writing!?