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Politics alive and well
By libby
December 24, 2010 · 9 Comments
A political show has turned into a political embarrassment for the gallery involved. Gagosian, the gallery with the most oversized space in New York, has a bombastic Anselm Kiefer show called “Next Year in Jerusalem” (we reviewed it in our last Chelsea post). In the course of the show, heavy-handed ejections from the gallery took place, at least one of them in response to a fairly decorous political action (perhaps better characterized as a publicity stunt), the other in response to…who knows what.
Anselm Kiefer Last Year in Jerusalem installation shot at Gagosian. The Holocaust inspired show has inspired some reaction. Maybe it was a better show than we thought!
My friend Lenore Malen forwarded me this New Yorker blog link describing one of the incidents, as well as an email from a gallery goer who witnessed a second incident:
Subject: 2nd Gagosian atrocity!
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:45:30 -0500
Dear Laurie,Brian forwarded me your email about the incident at Gagosian. I wrote to him last Saturday about a different one that I witnessed right before closing time. I’m glad that the New Yorker picked up your story. I am wondering if by putting both incidents together we could get even more publicity. It is outrageous, scary and horribly ironic–and now there are two!
…
Here’s what I saw and protested about:
Hi Brian,
I witnessed a very disturbing police incident tonight at Gagosian. It was about 5PM and a woman who was apparently being followed by guards–I don’t know why–suddenly turned on one and yelled, “Leave me alone! I just want to see the show.” I was about 10 feet away from her. She lost it and made a scene for a minute or so and then stormed out of the room. I thought she had left but when I went the reception area a few minutes later to get a catalog, she was down on the floor in the hallway, handcuffed and surrounded by at least 5 policemen. I protested and asked why in the world they need to handcuff and surround a 100lb woman who was obviously distraught (I don’t know that she was “disturbed” only that she was angry and, at that point, terrified.) The blew me off and told me to get away. I then went to the reception and complained as was told “We have had other incidents” as if that explained the treatment of this women. They then took her into the vestibule and put her up again the wall and stood in a huddle around her. she was crying and shaking of them, maybe more, standing around. I again protested and demanded to know why they were treating her this way. I was told, “She refused to leave.” So I asked why two officers couldn’t just escort her out, but they again told me to get away and became a bit threatening. Eventually EMS came and strapped her to a gurney. She was put in the ambulance with 4 police officers standing in the doorway of the ambulance as if she were Son of Sam. When I asked an officer why they needed an army to deal with an emotionally upset women who was already handcuffed and strapped down (and possibly in a straightjacket at this point) he told me “She might have boyfriends with guns in cars.” (this was after about 15 minutes-or more– of them having her on the floor or against the wall.) When I asked why them they were all huddled around the back door of the ambulance, he said, “We have to protect the EMS guys.”!!! They probably sent her to Bellevue although it was a Beth Israel Ambulance. The gallery was about the close and the only people on the street were the ones coming out of Gagosian. EMS left with her–presumably to Bellvue although it was a Beth Israel ambulance. I was the only one who confronted the police, although an elderly German man said to me after the police left, “They were outrageous!” As the show inside was the Anselm Kiefer exhibit, the irony and scariness of the incident were impossible to ignore.
I filed a complaint online with the police but didn’t have any badge numbers. Who can I send this to for publicity?
R
All in all, I’d rather be in Philadelphia!
Tags: anselm kiefer, gagosian gallery
do you people realize how provincial & tiny you sound with your continual anti – new york comments ? as if philadelphia isn’t world famous for its police brutality . as if people aren’t getting strangled in kensington on a practically daily basis. don’t worry , anselm kiefer & his like won’t be doing phila gallery shows anytime soon .& , by the way , is ANYBODY here going to follow up on WHY the hennessey youngman video was censored at the sande webster show ?
Hey Stuart, we’re not anti-New York, really. We just like picking on the big guys. The Hennessey Youngman video story — there’s not much to follow up. The gallery made a decision that it later regretted. They changed their mind and wanted to include the videos, but the artist by then didn’t want to show the videos at the gallery where they were initially rejected (the videos will be screened elsewhere in 2011).
Hi, Stuart, I am quite confused about the accusation of our being anti-New York. This post was generated by New Yorkers’ outrage. All sources are New Yorkers. And I am a native and I adore New York.
If you want some answers on why Sande Webster gallery was upset about the video, the answer is right there in the video–n-words and cuss words–in a gallery that doesn’t cater to young hipsters who are comfortable with such things. It’s also a gallery that has young children coming through. Ultimately, the gallery figured out how to show the work and feel comfortable with it (headphones) as Roberta pointed out, but by then the artist had moved on to a new venue for the work.
By the way, in general we do not accept incivility on our comments. Please calm down!
first , thank you roberta for the hennessey update & thank you libby for the further info. while any gallery is , of course , entitled to not show work that offends them , i do find this situation of a white gallery person (regardless of their credentials & extensive history in presenting black artists in phila) to some extent censoring a black artist because of their use of “the n word” kind of problematic. the phila art scene is INCREDIBLY segregated (by race ,age & pretty much anything else people can segregate themselves by) & i commend sande webster for doing this show of younger artists but i do think you have to let them have their say & there are generational language differences between old folks like all of us & penn mfa students. scaling things down because a child might stroll by is troubling & let’s hope they don’t see the checklist w/ doron langberg’s titles.(or hear the language of any of the english speaking kids in my neighborhood.)
the anti ny bit i was referring to in the gagosian article was the “i’d rather be in phila ” comment which really had nothing to do with anything in the article unless you think the gagosian business was typical of ny (rather than just gagosian.) personally , i doubt the gallerist who called the police was a real new yorker anyway. more likely , one of the many recent transplants who are trying to give ny a bad name.
also i am referring back to the (& yes, i know it was meant facetiously) “it’s a ny show , go see it anyway” comment about a recent jolie laide show. regrettably the attitude you’re referring to is all too prevalent in the phila art scene. what i find problematic is the idea that the phila art scene can be compared to ny. this is just setting the city up for a fall. artists come from all over the country & the world (like kiefer, whether you or i like this show or not) to live or show in ny. people in johannesberg or berlin or brazil or tokyo don’t dream of moving to phila & being represented by a phila gallery. the city could better be compared to other regional art scenes like houston , newark ,chicago etc that have their own particular flavor (granted , ours is staggeringly white) rather than to a major art center w/ more major galleries in a block than we have in the city.
this is about as civil as i can get…
Stuart, you are so right about Philadelphia being a regional center of its own. Unlike Chicago, Houston or Kansas City, tho, Philadelphia is in the shadow of New York, making comparisons, unfortunately, inevitable, the way sibling comparisons are inevitable. One of the problems with this historically is that many local collectors look to New York for buying works for their collections. That’s a problem for galleries and for artists in Philadelphia. We have been beating the drum for the local scene since 2003 and hope we have helped educate people about the ups, downs and in-betweens of the art world here. If we knock New York every once in a while, it’s truly like the little sister getting some licks in — family habits die hard. But your point is well taken.
Fair enough re Philly vs. NY. (The line that irked you was just a snarky toss-off). But really, the galleries here are too low profile to attract this kind of brouhaha, probably. I still don’t think it’s fair to judge Sande this way. She reversed course. You have to admire her willingness to keep an open mind. Ultimately, she did not censor him, which is an honorable outcome. The circumstances slipped beyond her control. Ultimately she would have shown the work otherwise. The only loss here was hers and the show’s, not the artist’s. The material is all easily accessible on the internet and will be showing at a bigger gallery. To describe it as censored seems not quite right.
re : the sande webster incident. i agree censorship was too strong a word . i’m not really sure of the EXACT situation , not having spoken to either party myself. i definitely don’t want to villainize her & am glad she changed her mind but at the same time do regret that there wasn’t any fuss over this or debate & that the people who go to her gallery (largely older people) didn’t get to see jayson’s video at the opening (which i suspect is when phila galleries get 90% of their visitors) because i doubt they are frequenters of you tube or penn mfa shows or the hipster circuit & the more older people are confronted with young people’s work the better especially when it’s work that might upset them a bit.
as someone who tries to make it to galleries of all stripes (whether i belong there or not,) i wish more other gallery goers here & especially artists were more diverse rather than being so cliquish in their ways & keeping to their comfort zones. but i will stop here before i reopen the ny/phila can of worms…
Sounds like loitering to me. While i love Kiefer’s work, one of the very few great artists to arise since 1960, a sterile commodity transaction establishment like Gagosian’s is hardly the most appropriate site for his work.
These wannabe martyrs should have just shut up and let the work speak, his is one of the few who actually uses the visual language, seep into the closed and self absorbed minds of the Chelsea artscene. But it would be much more appropriate and effective in a slightly less hedonistic venue.
I love your comment on Gagosian and hedonism where it’s hard to avert our eyes from the money issue! The excessive proportions of the space transformed Kiefer into whining bombast, and yet that is not my past opinion of Kiefer. The only artist I’ve seen in that airplane hangar whose work looked like it belonged and made sense was Richard Serra.