After much delay, I want to return to Skin Fruit, the exhibition of Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection. I purposefully put off writing about it, I wanted the time to think, because this was yet another of those occasions where most people seem to me to be missing the point…
I know I said I would not review any shows. But Skin Fruit, ongoing until June 6th at the New Museum, is a worthy exception. Saying that, a review is not really what I have in mind. I am more interested in how this exhibition relates to a lot of things I have been thinking about regarding exhibition making. (The background of the show, as well as the controversy that broke out, are well known, and frankly quite boring, particularly now that their urgency has expired; still, if you feel like revisiting the whole thing, you can pretty much follow everything through Tyler Green, Jerry Saltz, and the New York Times.)
In the numerous reviews that followed the opening of Skin Fruit, much was made out of the fact that Jeff Koons refrained from crowding the exhibition with his own works. But, the question of how many works is not really interesting. What is interesting is: which works? Jeff Koons included just one, the iconic One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, a work that stands for the beginning of the official narrative of the Dakis Joannou Collection. What is happening is clear: in the show, One Ball functions as a spare reminder that this is Koonsland, a world of art developed under the varying influence of the most important artist of the 1990s.
Unavoidably, the first image that came to my head was that I had just magically landed in Jeff Koons’s playroom. There was something happily hap-hazard about the arrangement – I could picture him moving things around just to try everything out in many different ways, well-mannered but insistent, the tall one with the short one, no, with the other tall one, no, bring the blue one back, ahh, can’t we hang this over here, it fits, it fits, I’m telling you it will fit…
The playroom image was not a bad thing, quite the opposite. In a way, it was the instance when I felt the most connected to the aspiration of the show, namely that Jeff Koons, being a close friend of the collector and a long-time collocutor, would provide an unprecedented reading of the collection. And although the playroom image might allude to arbitrariness, it is, I think, very true to how an artist like Koons could look at his contemporaries and his descendents – like materials or toys.
This is a wholesome show, and, despite the fact that I know the collection rather well, this was still an opportunity to view it in a fresh way. There were also some works I had not seen, most of them extraordinary, like a new Andro Wekua, which really stuck with me. It is true there were instances when it seemed that something bold was being articulated (like the placement of Robert Gober’s bed behind a corner, or a wonderfully hidden-away Cady Nolland), while there were others when it felt like there was just no specific idea as to why these particular works were set up the way they were (one felt this particularly on the ground floor, where a pretty strong John Bock is reduced to object status). But, overall, Skin Fruit is full of fantastic works – selected in the only way that would have been honest for someone like Jeff Koons (as if there is someone else “like” Jeff Koons): by playing around.
Very soon, however, my thoughts drifted. I felt I was being trapped into how the questions were formulated since the show hit the news. There was a specific way to read all this, a way that since very early on became dominant: from questioning the morality of the players, we progressed to conceding that having shows is better than not having them, and from there to granting the New Museum license to “inform” New Yorkers on a great collection, and finally to the rare opportunity of snubbing Jeff Koons for not shocking us enough. I found I was inadvertently following this way of reacting to the show and I resolved to think things over.
Skin Fruit is the latest in a series of presentations of the collection, including Translation in Palais de Tokyo and Dream and Trauma in Vienna. What was common in all these shows was that they were the result of curators’ efforts to “read” and “interpret” the collection along a thematic, more or less explicit. Having seen all of them, I believe I know what is lacking – and it is something that is really exemplified in Skin Fruit:
No one is dealing with the collector. I mean really deal with him. Though I have no inside knowledge whatsoever about this, I think that there are two ways the collector winds up being treated: The first is as the provider of the works. The bond between him and the works is severed quite early in the exhibition process; the works become autonomous, free-standing. And this despite the fact that formally what is being stressed is precisely that the works belong to this collection. The exceptionality of the collection is in effect being employed to obscure its idiosyncrasies – this is the real operation behind it often being billed as “comprehensive” or “representative” of a trend, such as figurative art or art of the 90s. The second way the collector is being treated is as a “player”: yes, there are personal and perhaps intimate relationships in the background, but they are not examined as constitutive of the exhibitions; on the contrary, what determines the form of the show is the collector’s position in the field, his capacity to shape and sustain valuable relationships.
I realize I am flying against a persistent story, that the relationships surrounding the Dakis Joannou Collection are deeply personal, exceptionally so in a rather cynical art-world. I don’t doubt that. But I don’t believe that these relationships have successfully fed into an exceptionally personal way of making exhibitions. I feel that things regress to conventionality, as soon as the “personal relationship status” is established between collector and curators.
It is really puzzling to me how it is not obvious that the central character here is the collector, the true dramatis persona.
Maybe it is fear of some sort, a submission to the politically correct attitude of keeping collectors at a distance, even if on a personal level one becomes quite close with them. But, whatever it is, in the case of the Dakis Joannou Collection, it makes for timid, un-daring shows, where they should have been tremendously unsettling, rushing straight under the skin.
I am sure about this: the Dakis Joannou Collection is a seriously unsettling thing, if one looks at it like the unique personal narrative that it is. This is a dark, tormented collection. These works are no trophies. Unlike the playroom image I mentioned above, they are not even toys. One feels it might even be dangerous to touch them, as if they would be scalding hot, or infected in some way. This collector collects to save himself from himself, there is a very specific drama being enacted here. With every work that affirms status or power, this collector says: this is not who I am. Every work is a little cry. The very futility of the Sisyphean exercise is what makes it really disturbing.
But no one seems to want to deal with this. In the bleached, balanced, polished rooms of Skin Fruit, what is missing is the dark soul of the collection, the boldness to look at what this man is doing and to treat it like the subject that it is: after so many shows of the Dakis Joannou Collection, its underlying tormented humanity, its constitutive guilt, its inherent self-negation is still not pondered upon. I am still waiting for the show that will do that.
