Anthony Huberman was appointed the director of the CCA Wattis Institute in August of 2013, but only really started reshaping the institution this fall with an intriguing—and fairly democratic—strategy for presenting and thinking about contemporary art. As the founding director of the Artist’s Institute in New York, Huberman has worked with artists such as Robert Filliou, Rosemarie Trockel, Haim Steinbach, and Thomas Bayrle, and will be publishing a book about them in 2015; he will also curate his fifth installment of Hello Goodbye Thank You, a biennial exhibition, at castillo/corrales in Paris. What follows is an excerpt from our conversation about the Wattis’ potential within the current cultural climate of San Francisco and beyond.
Joan Jonas. Volcano Saga, 1985/2011; video still; color, sound; 28:00.
Bean Gilsdorf: You’re done with the projects that you inherited [from former curator Jens Hoffmann], and now you get to start the new programming. What’s first?
Anthony Huberman: We gave ourselves an entire year before launching a new program because I wanted to spend time really thinking through some questions: What is the point of this kind of nonprofit art institute? What should our goal and purpose be in the context of contemporary art infrastructure? How can we contribute in ways that a gallery or museum can’t? And so we have a new proposition towards answering those questions, a type of art organization that works with artists in specific ways, and that is equally about showing work as it is about thinking about art and artists.
BG: And how will this work in the context of being a part of the California College of the Arts?
AH: Because we’re operating in an academic context, we really want to underline the fact that this is an exhibition space and a research institute, so we developed a program to answer three different questions. The first question is the most obvious: What are artists making today? This can be addressed through a commission-based exhibition program. But we are more than just display-based, and an artist is not just someone who makes things, but also someone who looks at things and engages with other people. So we also want to answer the question: What is an artist thinking about today? For this, an artist is invited to spend several months here in our San Francisco apartment, and is given a budget to do curatorial programming based on his or her current research interests. Finally, there is the question: How do artists inform or potentially disrupt the way we think about art today? To answer this, we dedicate an entire year to an artist’s practice as a topic of reflection. It’s not going to have an exhibition connected to it; instead, every month there will be a lecture, screening, or other event that is in some way connected to an ongoing process of thinking through the artist’s work. The way these components get phrased on our new website is: “so-and-so is in the gallery,” “so-and-so is in the apartment,” and “so-and-so is on our mind.”
Joan Jonas. Volcano Saga, 1985; installation, dimensions variable; installation view, Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK, 2011. Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery and the Artist.
BG: So these are three different artists?
AH: Yes, and I feel very strongly about dedicating each of the platforms to just one person. The era of the group show is no longer with us! The Wattis has done amazing things with group shows, and I just want to try something else.
BG: And the artists will all be from out of town?
AH: Not necessarily. When I moved here, I spent a lot of time talking to people around town, just asking the question, “From your perspective, how does the Wattis fit into the ecosystem of the Bay Area art scene? What has been the nature of our contribution? What do you feel has been successful or unsuccessful?”
BG: That was going to be my question for you.
AH: The main thing that I learned is that the Wattis has had a really rich and useful role as a platform to bring in a conversation about what artists are doing in the world. This place has clearly been engaged in San Francisco, but also a bridge to the world. I’m going to continue to do that. We need a really rigorous and committed center for the local community. There are a lot of people who are invested in the arts here—schools, museums, galleries, critics—but everyone has a tendency to inhabit their own little ecosystem. It seems to me that what was missing, and I say this as a total newcomer, was some kind of center of gravity. Whether the Wattis will become that…who knows? But I’m certainly going to try. There is no other place in the city that is 100 percent committed to new art by new artists. We have a responsibility to step up.
Adrian Daub, Associate Professor of German Studies at Stanford University, lectures on philosophy and repetition, November 17, 2014.
BG: With SFMOMA closed until 2016, and lots of galleries and art centers closing permanently, it’s an interesting time to be doing any kind of art project in San Francisco, let alone a rigorous commissioning project.
AH: That’s even more of a reason why we need to do a good job. I was really impressed with SFMOMA’s New Work series, so I said, “Hey, let’s do a new works show together”—I want the Wattis to be an active participant in a group conversation. So I sat down with Jenny Gheith from SFMOMA, and we came up with a collaboration between SFMOMA “On the Go” and the Wattis to work with Markus Schinwald. My goal for the exhibition program is to either really put my neck on the line for artists who are early in their careers, for whom the critical legitimation process has not yet taken place, or for artists who have received a lot more attention, but not in the U.S. That’s where Markus falls in—he has zero presence in the U.S., yet he represented Austria in the Venice Biennial in 2011. He has a mature practice.
Markus Schinwald. Installation view at the CCA Wattis Institute.
Courtesy of Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Photo: Johnna Arnold.
BG: Who else?
AH: The first artist “on our mind” is Joan Jonas. She was like, “I’m really happy to be involved, but starting in 2015 it’s going to be harder for me, for my schedule, I can’t tell you why yet…” A month later it was announced that she’ll represent the U.S. in the next Venice Biennale. For “on our mind” there is a self-selected think tank of about fifteen people from CCA, and we’ve put together a very active event program.
BG: Curator Jamie Stevens just came on board. Do you want to talk about his selection?
AH: I knew from the beginning that I would need to bring in another person with perspectives that are different from mine. Jamie is someone who I have never worked with before, but I have followed his work in London for the past several years, and he’s been working with artists I’ve been following for a while. I felt really confident about bringing him here in terms of having a very intense rigorous intellectual dialogue. He’s ten years younger than me and has his ear to the ground. He already knows way more of the local scene than I do! In conjunction with his position, we also have an eight-month curatorial fellowship that we offer to graduating curatorial MFAs at CCA, so the fellow has been in San Francisco for two years and also knows the local scene.
BG: I think there was more criticism about Jamie being a white guy than about him coming from London.
AH: All the directors here have been white men, so that’s a majorly fair criticism.
BG: Here’s another point of contention: We are in a climate in which artists (among others) are being displaced from San Francisco. Rightly or wrongly, it’s being blamed on the tech community and their use of resources and space, and, as a newcomer, I wonder if you have any thoughts about this.
AH: I can only speak to what the context does to the art. Using the word “tech” in this town is different than elsewhere. In the past four months there have been three distinct covers of Frieze or Artforum that have said art and big data—clearly this topic is of great concern to contemporary art at large. Why is this town not the place where all the conferences are happening? My wife [Juana Berrío] had a great comment that I’ve been thinking about; she said that word tech is so unbelievably overdetermined here that it actually limits the way that art can somehow complicate or rupture and make messy what that word even refers to. So why isn’t this the place to do all the conferences? Because that semantic space is occupied. However, I will say that there’s a lot of room for thinking about how to corrupt that word, how to use it and apply it to things that don’t have to do with technology. So rather than do a show that’s a bunch of digital this-and-that, do a show that looks like a painting or sculpture show but is in conversation with technological ideas. Yes, you might not ever use the word technology to describe what you’re seeing in this hypothetical show, but you can say, “Here’s why it applies, and hopefully it complicates how you think of that term,” rather than just “let’s look at artists who work with technology.” In general, I’m eager to put something into the world, and for it to bump into the world—to create a place for conversation and criticality.
An exhibition of new work by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, and a show curated by the artist Nairy Baghramian, will open at the Wattis on January 21, 2015.
