The New Art Examiner Re-examined

By Derek Guthrie
October, 2011

I came to Chicago from London just a few months after the ’68 riots to take a position as an art instructor at Chicago State College. The 60’s were in full swing. American life seemed dynamic and exciting, a roller coaster ride from the troughs of racism and anti-war sentiment to the heights of Utopian thinking, and art in America reflected all the twists and turns of this fast-paced culture.

I met my future wife Jane Addams Allen at Chicago State. She was the grand niece of the famous Chicago social worker Jane Addams, but like me, her perspective on the country was shaped by living many years in Europe.

Jane and I shared a passion for visual art. We were both painters, and our search for new aesthetic adventures soon took us to a college art association conference at the Hilton in Chicago. One of the keynote speakers was Leon Golub, the artist of conscience who spoke intensely of his concern over repression, racism and sexism in America. That intensity was spreading through the art world; and Edward Fry, then the curator of the Guggenheim Museum (later fired for putting up a show of slum properties owned by some museum donors) decided to form a splinter group called The New Art Association.

Follow The Artists

As the first Chicago members, Jane and I were tapped to put out the first regional edition of its art newsletter. Working out of Jane’s apartment in Hyde Park, we mimeographed a 4-page newsletter about the growing art scene in Chicago. This was our first taste of publishing, and the reception encouraged us to believe Chicago was ripe for a free and open discourse about all facets of the arts.

Invited to appear before the Illinois Arts Council, Jane argued for a more liberal approach to individual arts grants. The role of an arts council is to follow the artists not lead them, she said, quoting from Lord Maynard Keynes’ famous address to the British Arts Council. A few days later, Tom Willis, the arts editor of The Chicago Tribune and a great admirer of Keynes, asked Jane and I to become the Tribune art critics.

We worked hard uncovering risky new art in Chicago, never missed a deadline, and enjoyed considerable freedom to follow our own tastes. The arrangement lasted for 18 months. Then without the courtesy of an explanation, we were bumped for Alan Artner, a music student who’d shown little interest in art at the time and a safe, if predictable, guide to the Chicago galleries. We apparently were not.

The New Art Examiner Is Born

But we remained passionate about art criticism so we convinced Art News in New York to commission a piece about Chicago artists appearing in the Sao Paulo Biennial. When that story was spiked (it ran instead in Studio International), we decided the only way to continue writing was to become our own publishers. So in October 1974, The New Art Examiner was born. The cover of the eight-page tabloid carried an editorial titled "Without Fear or Favor."

For the next 28 years, The New Art Examiner roiled the art scene in Chicago with sharp opinions, outsider perspectives and not a little controversy. Everyone on the staff was paid equally, about half what they deserved, and equally shared in the brickbats and accolades of our readers.

When we started, Chicago was looked upon as an arts backwater. But for young artists, it was a place to be a big fish in a small pond, and no one really cared where the water’s edge lay. I remember Chris Millon’s diving board atop the Federal Building downtown and the Ice House show in an old Soo Line railroad storage facility. I remember the first Art Chicago exhibition at Navy Pier and venturesome new galleries outside the usual Michigan Avenue corridor like N.A.M.E., Artemesia and the Randolph Street Gallery.

The New Art Examiner covered them all with a passion and intelligence that soon gained it a national following. We didn’t care whether the art was good or bad. Our editorial policy was to give writers an opportunity to use their reviews as a springboard for intelligent discussion of larger social issues. Whether deserved or not, our reputation was as a renegade in an otherwise staid art community.

Jane and I stayed with the New Art Examiner until the mid-eighties when, for health and other reasons, not the least financial, we moved to Washington, D.C. We could see a growing age gap between ourselves and the young writers we commissioned. As outsiders in an increasingly insider’s world, we also couldn’t find teaching positions here that would allow us to continue mentoring their work.

A Shift in the Landscape

The art scene has shifted to academia––not only in Chicago but in all the art capitals. Art patrons and their endowments allow art schools to sponsor a variety of new art exhibitions that outsider galleries cannot afford. But the legion of students emerging with BFA and MFA degrees do not necessarily emerge with a professional arts education, especially when it comes to making a living as an artist. They only come out with a better appreciation of what it takes to make their work commercial.

The inner working of the art world, for instance, remains a mystery to most faculty and certainly most graduates. The inside dealers and collectors on the museum trustee circuit, the curators and art historians at museums foster an environment where art only trickles down, not up. Artists looking for a foothold in the market find themselves climbing a ladder to success stripped of the rungs of appreciative reviews that the New Art Examiner used to provide.

Art writing, art criticism and art publishing has once again coalesced in New York, which has regained its status as the epicenter of the art distribution center. But in its prime, "The New Art Examiner was the best thing to have happened in the Chicago art scene in the 70’s and 80’s," as Franz Schultze recently recalled.

Independent Thinking Dies Slow

The New Art Examiner struggled along in its last ten years under the constant threat of financial foreclosure. In its last days, Lew Manilow, the pre-eminent Chicago art collector, tried to resurrect the publication with a cash infusion. The board appointed an adjunct art professor at the School of the Art Institute graduate, Kathryn Hixon as editor. But the experiment lasted only another 18 months. The publication closed its doors for good in 2002.

Still, The New Art Examiner will not go gently into that good night. This November, the Northern Illinois Press will publish an anthology of articles from the magazine in a book called "The Essential New Art Examiner" by Terri Griffin, Kathryn Born and Janet Koplos.

It features timely articles by Fred Camper, Dan Sultan, James Yood, Ann Weins, Jan Estep, Robert Storr, Carol Diehl, Jerry Saltz, and Carol Squiers that resonate even today.

But the debate over what killed The New Art Examiner will go on. My own view is that it wasn’t one thing, but a change in the art scene itself, a sort of calcifying of the status quo, not unlike the slow transformation of America itself, into a self-satisfied boosterism where independent thinking, running against the grain of people’s comfort zone, no longer has a place in American cultural life, much less the art scene.

Derek Guthrie, now a resident of London, was a co-founder with his wife of The New Art Examiner. You can buy a copy of "The Essential New Art Examiner" on Amazon.com or read more of his writings at neotericart.com.

Pacific Standard Time

By Jori Finkel and Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
September 17, 2011

It seems worthy of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic, with a cast of thousands and a plot that spans four decades: "The Greatest Story Ever Told About Southern California Art."

Over the next six months, more than 60 museums and arts venues from Santa Barbara to San Diego will feature exhibitions of postwar Southern California art in an effort called Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. Organizers believe it's the biggest museum collaboration ever.

Every show tackles a different theme, such as the first wave of Chicano artists, the trailblazing feminists behind the Woman's Building, the pioneers of the so-called Light and Space movement. But they all share a common goal: to promote Southern California as an international art capital and cultural tourism destination by telling the sweeping story of the origins of the region's dynamic art scene.

"With something like this, you're not going to be able to forget about L.A. again," said Kellie Jones, a Columbia University professor who has organized a survey of L.A.-made African American art for the Hammer Museum as part of PST. "It's going to affect not just the way this country sees art in L.A. but the way the world sees it."

Since the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, New York has dominated textbook accounts of contemporary art. Pacific Standard Time hopes to establish Los Angeles as an equal player in the post-World War II art world by spotlighting its unique contributions, including David Hockney's dazzling swimming pool paintings, Ed Ruscha's deadpan-humorous prints and the lifestyle-defining furniture of Charles and Ray Eames.

But the goals go beyond that.

Joan Weinstein, associate director of the Getty Foundation, which funded the $10-million effort, says that along with spurring new scholarship, the project's two main goals are "raising the profile of Los Angeles as a visual arts destination, nationally and internationally" and working "to attract new audiences to new museums."

Toward that end, the Getty is paying for a regionwide advertising campaign, designed by L.A. agency TBWA / Chiat / Day (price tag undisclosed).

Print ads and a new phone app will augment 900 street-pole banners, bus wraparound ads and online video promotions. One video spot, designed to explicitly link the postwar art scene with today's L.A. and lure a younger audience, shows artist Ruscha with Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers discussing art while driving the city streets. News conferences have been held in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin.

"Come October, if you're interested in art and in the swirl, I think you will know about it," said Lindsay Pollock, editor of the New York-based magazine Art in America, who has devoted part of her October issue to the event. "I think it will be a major part of the conversation."

Still, luring tourists bound for Disneyland and Rodeo Drive to Ed Kienholz's grim assemblages or even David Hockney's sunny "splash" paintings remains a challenge.

"The worthiness of the exhibitions will, I think, be to a large degree applauded," said Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which is part of PST. "Whether the advertising and the awareness that comes from bringing all these shows together at the same time can create the kind of unprecedented audience people hope for, this is the big unknown."

One reason why nobody is making clear predictions about attendance is because the project has few precedents.

The 1984 Olympic Arts Festival focused more on the performing arts and lacked a scholarly dimension.

Pacific Standard Time began in 2001 with the Getty Research Institute, which launched an oral history project to preserve the recollections of the era's artists, gallery owners and other key players while they were still around.

About a year later, the Getty Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, began awarding grants, eventually totaling $2.7 million, to help local museums catalog their art archives and make them more accessible.

As the research began yielding new findings, the idea of mounting public exhibitions seemed a natural next step, said Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the research institute.

Within months, plans were afoot for dozens of museums to join in one mega-event.

The Getty Foundation ultimately dispensed nearly $7 million more in grants to cover research, exhibition planning and a performance art festival that will take place in January. The content was left up to each arts venue. "It was really not a top-down; it was more of a bottom-up project," Perchuk said.

So the shows are wildly diverse. LACMA will have a sweeping survey exploring how California marketed the fantasy of midcentury design, with things as varied as original Barbie fashions and the Eames' living room re-installed in the museum. The gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design charts the history of the Woman's Building in the 1970s and '80s, one of the most important chapters in feminist art.

One of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's shows, curated by Schimmel, focuses on art made during the politically turbulent 1970s.

The museum at Pomona College is bringing Judy Chicago to town to revisit her early fireworks-based performance art, and to "blow up" the campus football field.

Chicago, who has work in several Pacific Standard Time shows, said she has never seen a museum collaboration on this scale. "I don't think this level of collaboration could have happened in the East, where there is so much competition between museums. There's a spirit of innovation and self-invention that continues in California," she said.

The Getty also encouraged L.A. commercial galleries to stage thematically related shows this fall, and more than 70 are participating. The official V.I.P. program for Pacific Standard Time, packed with museum receptions, artists' studio tours and private collector visits, is designed to draw the European and East Coast art elite.

Still, for some cultural leaders, the promise of Pacific Standard Time is reaching more, and more diverse, audiences close to home.

"Sometimes I really feel that more people know about us in Berlin than they do in Westwood," said Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum. "Strangely enough it can take something like this to make people around the corner come to visit us."

Canvas is just so 20th century. That's the lesson of David Hockney's new Paris exhibition, where glowing iPad and iPhones _ their screens a changing medley of still lives and landscapes made by the celebrated British artist on the "Brushes" application, replace traditional canvases.

Dozens of the apparatuses are bolted onto the walls, their flat screens aglow with drawings of jagged mountains, somber interiors and bouquets of flowers in eye- popping colors. The show takes its name, "Fleurs fraiches" or "Fresh Flowers," from the still lives of bouquets, which feature vases full of dusty pink roses, purple tulips and butter-yellow lilies.

It's also a wink at the digital age immediacy of the exhibit, which will be updated periodically with new images — or fresh flowers — e-mailed by Hockney from "wherever in the world he happens to be," said curator Charlie Scheips.

This show, at Paris' Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation grew out of the digital doodlings Hockney started sending his family and friends following his 2008 purchase of an iPhone.

"David's hard of hearing and he got the phone to text people, and then he discovered 'Brushes,'" the iPhone application that allows users to use their fingers like paintbrushes, Scheips told The Associated Press. "It started out as something that was strictly about communication, not about art." But it quickly grew into a serious artistic endeavor. Over the past year and a half, Hockney has made more than 1,000 drawings, first on his iPhone and then on the larger iPad, Scheips said. He would lie in bed and draw what he was seeing — the scenes out his window, his "desk, or more often than not, the bouquet on his bedside table," the curator said. "And then he would e-mail the latest drawings on to friends."

A video in the darkened exhibition hall shows Hockney at work, his fingers gliding expertly over his iPad and changing colors and brush strokes on the application's virtual palette.

The most interesting and innovative aspect of the exhibit are the six animated pieces that show Hockney's creative process in fast motion. A still life of a desk sprouts books and papers, which disappear or change positions as Hockney draws over and changes them. A potted cactus grows multicolored needles as viewers look on.

Hockney was born in 1937 in England, where he studied at the Royal College of Art. He first gained renown in the early 1960s as a member of the Pop Art movement. He's known for his paintings and drawings, which show the influence of artists such as Matisse and Picasso, but also for his multifaceted photo collages.

Asked how the art world has reacted to Hockney's embrace of new technology, Scheips said the jury was still out.

By: Jenny Barchfield, Associated Press Writer