Lawrence Rinder & Shepherd Steiner
Re: Democracy and the Demos
For more information:
- – Shepherd Steiner, “Where World View and World Lines Converge,” Fillip 1 (2005)
- – Larry Rinder, “Remain in Life,” Fillip 2 (2005) link
Shepherd Steiner: I assume you received the invitation from Fillip to have a conversation on democracy and the demos in art. What do you think? Eggleston’s and Tuttle’s approaches to the problem seem light years away from each other, but perhaps that would serve us….
My own investment in singularity is for instance nowhere present in the essay on Eggleston. And perhaps the self-curatorial problems I outline in Eggleston’s photography as a mutable narrative without privilege finds a responsive curatorial ear in you. Roger Buergel’s curatorial project may be a halfway house. As a close reader of singular images, I have always been struck by his insistence on a metonymic machinery of presentation that disallows any one work from assuming the dominant and instead institutes the substitute. Anyway, I look forward to hearing from you, whatever your thoughts.
Larry Rinder: Eggleston has always been a great favourite of mine (William Eggleston’s Guide was the first art book I ever purchased). Also, I’ve been working on an essay about Raoul De Keyser and am trying to put forth some thoughts on the “democratic” syntax his work implies. So your essay was reassuring. I hadn’t known that Eggleston had explicit notions about “photographing democratically.” It certainly is clear from seeing his work that to some degree every subject is as good as the next: society lady = hunting dog = parking barrier. Something in this resonates for me with Jacques Rancière’s conception of the aesthetic regime and the homostatization of themes in writers like Flaubert. Tuttle is an interesting case in relation to this since, at first glance, his works seem to be radically homostatized, that is, broken down to the thinnest degree of difference, both from each other and from non-aesthetic things. Yet, as I described in my Fillip essay, his pieces are finally precisely about difference, explicitly in relation to individuation in a capitalist democracy.
Your text drew for me a clear line between the opportunity to open a “democratic” space in the syntax of an artistic project (i.e., Eggleston’s or, perhaps, De Keyser’s) and the possibility for doing so in curatorial work. My own curatorial practice is strongly influenced by that of Group Material, whose work demonstrated the quite radical possibilities inherent in a multidirectional, nonlinear curatorial approach. In fact, I have just opened an exhibition of works from Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive’s collection that I’ve installed every which way, in clusters that make sense only through their arrangement and are organized more or less without regard to period, medium, or theme. My work with Nayland Blake on In a Different Light was helpful, too, in demonstrating to me the advantage of curating from art rather than from an idea. Nayland, being an artist, gave me a kind of permission to “tune” to currents within and between the works and to draw conclusions from these. I wonder if you could tell me a bit about your own “investment in singularity”?
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About this Article
Re: Democracy and the Demos was first published in Fillip 10 in Fall 2009. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Lawrence Rinder is Director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He is Dean of Graduate Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Shepherd Steiner teaches Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Florida. Recent publications include Snow Changes Everything: Unfinished Form in the Filmwork of Ibon Aranberri (Funadcio Tapies, 2009); “(Art and) Democracy | Hegemony (and Anarchy),” in Becoming Dutch (Eindhoven, 2009) and “Curatorial Formalism and Tinkering with the Political on the Far Side of the Subject at Documenta XII” (Journal of Visual Culture, 2008). His curatorial project focussing on American painting and video art, titled Acts of Non-Agression: 1960–76, opened at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, in September 2008. He is currently finishing a book on Modernism titled Mnemotechnical Bodies: Close Readings in Modernist Painting, Sculpture, and Criticism.
Notes
image: Andy Warhol, Race Riot, 1965, and Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting, No. 3, 1960–63. Photo by Silbila Savage, courtesy of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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