Countersign Family Tennis Invitation Made Easy

Countersign family tennis invitation

[Music] [Music] good evening everyone this a good evening and welcome to the Menil my name is Paul Davis I'm the curator of collections it's my distinct pleasure this evening to be asked to introduce this evening speaker professor Darby English English is the Carl darling buck professor of art history at the University of Chicago since 2004 he is a 2014 he has also served as the junk curator in the Department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York his little his lyrical writings are really studious meditations on the ways in which we make interpret interpret and digest works of art both in the past and in the present his several essays books and edited volumes provide compelling ways of thinking about aesthetic form object could exhibition making and the many social historical issues that are ever so pertinent to address in today's fractious world exactly how can one see a work of art when shadowed by total darkness these what violence or resolution does one find at the intersections of art and race terror these probing questions are sourced from his titles including his forthcoming to describe a life essays at the intersection of art and race terror which will be available in 2018 I'm sure it'll be available at the Manoa bookstore in tonight's lecture professor English surveys two exhibitions and in a paradigmatic year in the life of color one of which particularly is a particularly poignant moment for the for the humanism that underpins the Manila's collect the manila collections mission and for the diverse communities of Houston but now we live in a world that is menacingly turned that menacingly turns on a tweet 140 characters so having mentioned in many words some of the many many numerous accolades professor professor English perhaps the most eloquent introduction is his own self definition on Twitter and is perhaps the most apt for this evening he writes he writes I am an art historian focusing on modern and contemporary art I read I write and I teach please welcome professor darby english [Applause] yep I'm on Twitter yeah I I was dared to join Twitter whatever I guess you joined Twitter I accepted the dare and I I think I've only tweeted a bagel since that time but I I had a really terrific bagel at shelfs keys in Brooklyn which you should seek out urgently if you I think that's my only tweet also the word nothing and then a year later I tweeted okay not nothing that was my second degree but anyway thank you thank you Paul very much I also wanted to thank Ted Bale and Tony Martinez for all of their help making this happen and getting me here and correcting me when I was wrong about many crucial details I missed a limo yesterday which I he never missed a limo right how many times you get to take a limo but I managed to do it anyway but not for they're attempting to steer me otherwise so I'm only going to talk about one of the exhibition's in the book 1971 in fact and it's the one that the family the patron family of this great institution sponsored and oversaw in 1971 that bita Lux Theatre at three three zero three Lyons Avenue and the fifth Ward I thought that was a better use of our time this evening because I found in the course of spending some number of years coming in going from Houston during my research in the archives downstairs and in the neighborhood yeah there I met a lot of people who are long-term residents of the city even very involved people who simply didn't know about it and this is proven to be paradigmatic of large numbers of otherwise very knowledgeable and exposed and traveled people in modernist art culture consumers of our aficionados of art makers of artists it's this thing this amazing experiment that took place in summer of 1971 has managed to fly almost completely under the radar for these 40 something years intervene and it makes it's what made it feel incredibly important to work hard and work as correctly as I could to enter a robust account of the exhibition as an experiment as an event as a legacy into the historical record and that's the reason that I'm gonna i'm planning to focus on it and not on the whitney exhibition that is more than amply detailed in the book and if you want to talk about the Whitney show later we can do that so as will probably be clear enough as I go forward the the work that I've done on deluxe has absolutely been without any question at all the most satisfying research I've ever conducted the existence of the exhibition came to me as a total surprise in the course of some reading that I was doing about eleven years ago on sabbatical and the Clark Art Institute library I found the catalogue another amazing achievement which I was just discussing with Rebecca I found the catalog on the shelves at the Clark I it's an amazing book just unto itself but then you know my next quick my first question was why don't I know about this and I've been studying modernism and studying abstraction I've been studying black art and artists for at that point more than 10 years why don't I know about this I realized quickly that that was a problem that our history had generated and that it was my responsibility as an art historian to begin to produce some answer to so my research on the show has not only been an attempt to on earth it and to reintroduce the people who have some familiarity about it but also to learn from it in public so what you'll see tonight is here NC tonight is a combination of a wordy academic disquisition on what I think the show was and how it matters and and also hopefully an interesting slide show featuring some of the cooler stuff that I came across in the archive which as I said or I alluded to a minute ago is just it's one of the most extraordinarily rich and broad compelling our archives I've ever seen and that's just on this one show yeah it's so with without any further ado I'm gonna start with the first fall well the first slide is an image of is a screen with four images I'm sorry for those of you stuck in the wings can you see what okay okay great that good good these are scams of four beautiful color photographs of the installation of the exhibition that were that live downstairs in cold storage they are they appear in the exhibition catalog is a gatefold which is you know one of the most kind of momentous page-turning experiences you can have and an exhibition catalog reading they give an almost comprehensive view of the exhibition which I will get into in a little bit more detail later on some of the more salient examples of extraordinary work so that the work at the exhibition included are the some works by Michael Steiner distribute across the floor of the sculpture by Tony Carra that was mailed over from London for the occasion to ellipse paintings by at Clarke a Sam Gilliam draped that's a Larry Poon's this is one of two Ken Nolan's in the show I think the other Noland is right next to that one I'm having a hard time seeing that gigantic album loving construction I think there are 19 canvases in that in that construction put together with the help of local children I suppose see in a minute a Richard Hunt sculpture on the pedestal in front of the loving Craig Coffman Darby bannard forgot Jules Oh litski Peter Bradley Danny Johnson Peter Bradley William T Williams Virginia Jeremy Lowe Peter Bradley can you tell the Peter Bradley had something to do with the execution of the so you know it's a it's it was just it was just it was just extraordinary so that's the show that's what people found but here's how it all got started this is a letter ronald hobbes a literary agent in new york with whom the family worked closely with whom they had worked closely on an exhibition it was organized by Larry rivers in the season prior to deluxe called some American history which featured a number of the artists in the deluxe show as well as Joe Overstreet another person another couple people who I forgot some American history which was staged at I believe at the Institute for the Arts at Rice caused a bit of a flap and even though it was a multiracial experiment the fact that the curator in charge the artist Larry Rivers was white served as more than a strong a lightning rod for the exhibitions so the whole thing got creamed basically and the foundation and a lot of their local supporters found themselves in a good deal of I won't say trouble but there was a lot of exposure that your various parties to this process were concerned to address and remediate as they could and so this is a letter from from Hobbes to mr. mrs. D July 7 1971 suggesting that they consider putting I'm sorry I can't read and I was going to read it to you I will read it to you that's okay because I feel like it's it's an important tone setting moment might not it be worthwhile to contemplate some sort of minor yet effective exhibition right at the heart of the black houston community all I mean is that at the forward Times a local black newspaper which I think has gone out of business in the mean time has fully come forward finally come forward hold on to their goodwill maybe there's a good local artist who can produce a sculpture and memory of the blow of a black youth recently gunned down or character in black history it would be a gas if it were I think in a prominent black community intersection one could come upon a symbol of pride dignity and higher artistic achievement realized through the skill of a local black talent I hope you find a Colonel here so turns out they didn't find much more than a colonel and it's certainly true that Hobbs was deeply correct about the appetite for affirmation for putting forward affirming uplifting images symbols and gestures he was probably also correct in anticipating that this kind of exhibition would would would receive an approving response from the community his proposition was extremely low risk however and for some reason this didn't fully appeal to the people in charge if I think that the people in charge are to be commended for that it's because I hold a particular and somewhat unconventional view of the context in which all of this was occurring at this moment the 60s are over the time of Negro America had ended in the time of black America had begun what rang in the period was a great deal of separatist rhetoric and activity of the sort that the civil rights movement of which the dominoes have been very fervent supporters had worked extremely hard to transcend but largely unsettled unsuccessfully by 1971 black neighborhoods like the fifth Ward had become particularly fertile grounds for black cultural nationalism probably never before and never since have America's urban ghettos been blacker places either symbolically or demographically you had black power black pride black music black hair black just about everything this I just had these developments affected things at a ton of levels and on a massive scale and not entirely in positive ways the stress may have been on positivity positive images and so forth but the implications for progressive socially open-minded creatively social people were actually quite grave as a result optimism word a word in an idea that I came back to again and again in the course of my research into these exhibitions optimism about productive collaboration between the races was as scarce as it was widely seen to be naive so fast forward a mere I think 15 days this is a letter from by authored for Peter Bradley by Simone Swan and mailed out on the 22nd of July indicating how the ship had turned how the the the organization's plan to present a major art exhibition to the black community of Houston had been altered by their engagement with Peter Bradley Peter writes I maybe I will just read you the whole thing and then oh I won't as I can't read we're planning an exhibition in a poor section of Houston the object is to bring art directly to the people good art directly to the people this is the point good art directly to the people Peter is a color painter deeply influenced by label it's deal its keys turn and fall of 1966 towards spray painting also changed changed Peters whole conception of what it meant to fill a field with form and color and he was working in in a really a Witzke s mode for most of the end of the 60s and that's that's where he was when a Larry rivers found him and and that's where he was when he came to the attention of the organization and his his idea of a cohort of good painters and sculptors was deeply informed by that that aesthetic prejudice commitment he was he was he was into hard art as Greenberg called it and his acolytes got called it and this is how he thought you know an exhibition would best be situated in terms in terms of its relationship to contemporary art styles and so he printed he he's inviting people who haven't yet already committed to participate here and he includes in his invitation a list of the very enticing company in which the invitee or the or the addresses of this this letter would find themselves if they were to accept so we got I can see Darby bannered most of the names that I read to you in my little run-through of the of the installation shots plus some others and the only people on this list who were not able to participate were david cow and a barber chase for booth everyone else on that list was in the show so this was a place you wanted to be if he you were a serious painter or a sculptor and modernist vein at that time and so and this may be for reasons that we don't fully understand rationally but rather respond to on some other level of cultural understanding it made totally obvious sense for Bradley and his advocates to do something that would get into circulation some different ideas about color than the ones that were appropriating in the context of black nationalism and the black art that was made to support that politics not a counter-argument against black nationalist work by any means just an alternative a lot of counter argument just an alternative it's really important I think to recognize that there was nothing antagonistic in the contrast that this experiment meant to set up or propose to the going styles of art making in the black community this was just another way of another way of looking at things and another another way of thinking about representation making the exhibition multiracial of course was another way to introduce a different attitude toward color namely racial color usually discussed in a rude and restricted palette of black white and sometimes brown yellow and red a multiracial exhibition as opposed to another black art show was by far the harder exhibition to pull off the hard choice to make socially and politically and in a way I think it also shows in retrospect just have narrowly Hubbs and others have been thinking about affirmation so here are just a couple of images of the promotional materials that were pulled together all very fast I mean it's it's astonishing how much was done over the course of five weeks between the conception of the exhibition and the opening on August 22nd of 1971 including the complete and total renovation of the deluxe theater by a local contracting firm black-owned contracting firm Bynum & Associates I believe posters in two languages that were plastered all over the city with the help of kids from the neighborhood the bumper stickers remember bumper stickers advertising hard art at the deluxe Joe I don't I don't know how much sense it would have made to assume that anyone driving the streets of Houston would have any idea what hard art was maybe that was cool it would seem to be the best way to get them in the door on him now but and then here are two views do I need to get closer I'm okay sorry great two views of the voice of hope met a newspaper another a local black paper on the left and image of the full page ad taken out to advertise the exhibition the day before the show so a Saturday paper and on the right and image just to give you a feel for what was going on this was this was you know a high time for active systemic racism in Houston I'm a mcgregor park if you don't know it was a public tennis facility in a park this this news of the denial of black applicants attempts to work at the park was especially noteworthy in the summer of 1971 because this was happening in the heyday of Arthur Ash's famous a tennis player he had won two Grand Slams he had just been a finalist at the at the Australian Open who's about to win the US Open black people in tennis were coming together in a way that was also a world historical change and and I have this here just to give you a feel for the I don't know the the political atmosphere in the intenseness and and I guess the ambient tension around the entire experiment that was the deluxe show so like in addition to thinking differently about racial color clearly an exhibition full of totally abstract art was nothing nothing if not a lot of other ways of thinking about color its entire premise is that color is uniquely pliable intellectual and physical material and that this makes it uniquely congenial to creative invention and inventive creativity and I'll come back to this towards the end of this this is also a kind of art that there's no getting right or wrong this was a really critical component I think how consciously it was being mobilized I'm not sure but it was it was certainly a crucial component in the exhibitions accessibility such as it had that it is kind of art rather than being right or wrong able affirms humaneness rather than groupthink more importantly it's a kind of art that one process isn't more or less privately we might even say that what the exhibition tried to drive home was in truth a viewers already established at home Nisour that community that in the larger world as such still to most people Bradley's interpretation of the brief would have seemed completely insane start in the center of Houston's black ghetto not by accident convert a dilapidated movie house into a sparkling gallery worthy of New York or Los Angeles and mean it park some of the most unforgiving contemporary painting and sculpture in that space and make it look amazing generate no explanatory text at all and be serious about that too then throw open the doors to all comers and if anyone asks you what you're doing tell them it's for the children I'm very interested in the way that Bradley was thinking about visual art and color about opportunity and possibility he said at the time that he had two main interests in taking accepting the invitation to organize the exhibition this way first and foremost he was not going to make a black art show because this is the last thing he felt was needed and second he wanted to bypass the museums and galleries and take real art directly to the people this is a phrase that he used again and again and was repeated in a lot of the a lot of the promotional materials which were sent directly to the media with the intention of being promoted forward not some kind of weatherproof kitsch stuck where and whoever would fit and made to look good enough to those passers-by who might happen to notice it so here just two pictures I you know this is archive fever if this happens anybody who does researched knows about getting getting lost in the archive and reaching a certain point in which everything is super interesting and you can't you one has to be very careful about slideshows with this the : tell me show you all that no I could show you I could show you I'm gonna show you things that you you're gonna think I'm insane this is I just I love the realness of this photograph of from one of Peters two paintings being being being loaded into the gallery by a Helen caustic on the left in the in in the long sort of coat or evening I don't know what that is that's Helen on the left with the curly hair and three members of the contracting team loading him the plastic covered painting and then this image which just you know when when I saw it in Idol 2008 I think was the first time I came to the archive I just just everything that I was hoping I was hoping would be true was true about this thing experiment that is this experiment as a social experiment with modernism as a social experiment with integration as a completely heartfelt and unplanned uncynical attempt to use art to do something real in the world everything I wanted to be true about those factors of the experiment as I began to Intuit them hypothesizing that they might be defensible became true when I saw this picture and I you know I'm not I'm not gonna say more than that I've already said a lot but it's just it's just it's it's it's just great so half of his pictures to cover the book I and the other half is not but on the left-hand side is one of the two Virginia Jeremy law paintings that um that appeared in the exhibition on the right is Peter and as-yet-unidentified collaborator positioning the painting that we just saw on the sidewalk outside we know it has a vertical orientation because that's how it shows in the in the in the catalog so as I was doing this research one of the things that struck me first and hardest and continued to hit me again and again was the just overwhelmingly positive attitude that everyone involved seemed to bring to the enterprise particularly striking to me was the optimism they had about what could be done in a place like the fifth Ward someone associated with the project said the most beautiful words about it saying that Deluxe was for her quote about the vast human potential for new experiences and quote that's the quote the vast human extension new experiences this is something that my father always said to me he said lots of stuff is true but only some stuff is powerfully true and that's a distinction that I've that I use to sort of weigh truth all the time I used that distinction several times a day like well that's true it's a powerful truth it's not powerfully true it's just kind of true enough whatever just keep moving that I think that I think this this this observation about about the the vast human potential for new experiences is power future and it was understood by everyone with a closed hand and the close eye on this experiment I take the view that our potential for new experiences is so great that we've grown terrified of it we've devised an in limited number of ways to ward off substantially new experience in favour of having the same favorite experiences over and over and over again someone else in 1971 thinking along these lines said the following in reference to the to the exhibition quote I think we're witnessing a new social energy and alliance of people both black and white that may give a whole new life through neighborhood once simply written off unquote if we're to believe most historical accounts of that place in time such attitudes were very rare indeed and there were very few places in the culture that one could go and engage with projects built up from starting points such as the ones that I just narrated as I mentioned a moment ago Bradley approach to this entire process much more like a humanist than a modernist his thing about children was a staggeringly courageous stance for him to take delux was in fact an extremely bold use of an a style of art the whole attitude about our creative for art's sake not to affect social change even at the level of people attempt or an experiment such art is not supposed to be widely accessed it's meant in fact to work the opposite way that's why around 1971 a certain modernist argot referred to it as hard art hard isn't difficult like this one's not there's no direct paths no open pathways into it nevertheless Bradley oppositely characterized the works that he chose for the exhibition as quote bright and airy and open just like the world we're all striving for each work offered a different way of making sense and of sensing the space as it were would no longer be merely an enclosure within the world but a world unto itself Bradley knew this but he had also intuited another powerful about people and culture there is a limited period of time occurring relatively early in life during which art can enter the body and Bradley played to an audience that was precisely at this moment in its lives its collective lives conscious of the children's insecure future the deluxe show set up a relatively uncomplicated pleasure in their absolute present it understood the children are way more capable of wonder than we grown-ups they're adapted to Enchantment in the exhibition children would see a number of very different ways of looking at the world each of these valid in itself questions of taste were entirely beside the point taste isn't much of a child's question anyway after all this is a situation of simultaneous sensational effects each one shaped or colored by something on the wall or floor now people accustomed to viewing art in institutional settings but also have been struck by the absence of discourse I mentioned this a little bit earlier art of this kind usually finds its public meaning and critics or curators approvals or disapprovals of it apart from private homes there have been very few places in anywhere where one can encounter art like this without some wordy judgemental discourse attached to it word upon word having little to do with the ways that people most people actually become acquainted with works of art the exhibition promoted the importance of bringing a receptive attitude to art over and against the need of providing an explanatory or apologetic document whenever the slightest risk of disconnect seems to be present more importantly still it refused outright to assume that a disconnect would exist between the art and the site where it was located for reasons of so-called cultural differences I'm not denying cultural difference I am suggesting that sometimes it's taken way too seriously and compensated for in ways that are dangerous to receivers and dangerous to art that's something that I'm happy to defend here's one of those things that only researching lecture anyway this is something I shouldn't be showing you but I'm showing it to anyway this is a contact sheet of largely undeveloped or unprinted photographs showing the process of installation you have a bunch of views here of Sam Gilliam sideways helping to install his drape he's the only artist I believe aside from Ken Noland and Bradley who came from any distance to install their work in the show others sent representatives or just let Peter in Noland and Greenberg and Helen work things out on their own here a couple views of Bradley's picture the other picture of Bradley being spun into position Greenberg came this was a big deal you can talk about why later if you don't know who Greenberg is we don't know why it's a big deal here's the owl loving you can see in pieces people were just clearly having a lot of fun working in a very open way the reason that Greenberg is important is because this was the single most notorious figure of a probation or board disapprobation in modernist art culture anywhere in the english-speaking world and here he was backing up an enterprise that it had as its primary objective to use art to do something rather than just sit there on a wall and wait for someone to come along and like it or not like it and he even penned a very moving if brief word of approval for the catalogue which appears near the beginning of the catalogue as if to sort of counter sign for modernism and he didn't stay long but he was here long enough to appear in three different outfits and the photographs that and to exchange hats with Peter Bradley what I loved one of the first aha moments was when I realized that at one minute here early in the thing in the game the cowboy hat that they bought at a place called stelzig on the way into town a cowboy outfitter I never been to one of these whatever stels likes but they bought this hat I think for fun and then at one moment it's on Peters head and at another moment it's on the head of kind of Greenberg of all people so even Greenberg had a good time even Greenberg got into it apparently he it was really difficult for this man to have a good time so that's that's why I mention it ok back to my texts ok are you ok ok ok and they're nearly done and then we'll look at some more pictures recently I read something that Abraham Flexner wrote about curiosity a Flexner was a leading education reformer in the first half of the 20th century and the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey where I wrote most of the book that includes the chapter on deluxe a Flexner said the following in 1939 curiosity which may or may not eventuate in something useful that's probably the outstanding characteristic of modern thinking it's not new it goes back to Galileo bacon and Sir Isaac Newton and it must be absolutely unhampered employ now when I first read this at one piece of mail that came from the Institute a couple of days ago actually I felt delighted and full of agreement with Flexner then I got irritated because Flexner is seriously under the impression that it's valid intellectually and morally to insist at the same time on the unhampered exercise of curiosity and on making a distinction between major and minor curiosity if this makes me uncomfortable it's because the attitude is still prevalent still an active prejudice probably every culture every field every thought process has its own version of this prejudice but it's bothersome in part because curiosity is such a humongous part of an artist's life and really of any creative life and in part because it's the valuation or ranking of the curiosity that has played one of the most defining roles in both crafting and perpetuating racism in the United States and elsewhere black people for instance are presumed only to be curious about black things or expect it's a channel our curiosity into reflection on black affairs of course there have always been exceptions and the fair share of my work as a historian has been about those exceptions about making sure that they get into the historical record as best I can delux as a project undertaken and as a model provided constitutes one such exception more views of the the Hat Jeremy Lowe at Clarke in the background just kind of narrating the art there's a Dan Christensen that they're hanging in the lower right of the top photo that was swapped out for a better one apparently because that that object doesn't appear in the and in the checklist or in the photographs and then later I think this this is Sunday so they're working down to the wire that's Sunday August 22nd 1971 Greenberg's in his Sunday best and Peter's doing his Peter thing suppression of curiosity has also been a very effective tool for keeping black culture closed closed from within as it were here is where my interest in curiosity crosses with my interest in color in the book 1971 every oppression distorts the sources of power available to the oppressed so that black visual artists using color in a way that's not obviously oriented to her or his blackness that is said to be that is said to be unrelated to the problem of oppression black artists are taught to be suspect of their curiosity about non black things and other ways of working that are not in some way descended from traditional ways of being a black artist taught in other words not to see these non black things that is as a source of inspiration and power in their work it's a very short step from here to the false belief that we can only be strong by suppressing our that kind of thinking supported almost 100 years of dismissals of abstract art created by black artists such as Peter Bradley and many many others before and after him I say to this thinking is false an arbitrary exclusion that does not understand that in a color obsessed society all cultural work that features color is related to the problem of oppression by means of color in a color obsessed Society and I mean to refer to our own color is a means of power within and beyond the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change all color period still cultural work with color that's not fixated on black or white remains extremely difficult to do that means the compelling manifestations of it are exceedingly hard to find so when we do find them it's crucial that we track them take them seriously read them closely and try to think about how they can teach us that's some of the reason that I felt compelled to work long and as hard as I possibly could on the deluxe show and hope that others I'm gonna hope now that others will look at it too and find other things that it may have to teach us thank you for your attention I'm have a couple more pictures that we can look at that's the entirety of the academic portion of the evening I just I didn't want to lay [Music] I was about to say I didn't want to lay it on too thick and and then that happened are we good Tony do I need to do something differently no we've got some books we got your book back here oh sure GW sign books if you want to take a few questions a couple questions you can write I'm just gonna go through a few more pictures and I just want to make sure that I'm not going to explode the place with my microphone so here is a view of opening day I don't think I included in in the book it's just it's just really nice to see the you know the level of you know there is a level of engagement here that's undeniable this is not staged the the crowds were astonishing within a month within a month they had counted 4,700 visitors the exhibition was extended from one month to six weeks to accommodate the interest there was a very sad thing that happened in that Simone swans tireless efforts to bring national media to Houston to cover the show were almost entirely unsuccessful I think from no fault of her own she sent tens and tens of letters Robert Hughes was intended was meant was actually assigned by his editor to come for Time magazine but he got sick and canceled his flight never made it none of the major New Yorker or West Coast art press caught it there was one very serious and well-written review of the transformation of the space itself that appeared in an architecture trade magazine about three months after the show closed marvelous piece of writing about the actual about the actual gallery and that was it that was it and it became a footnote very quickly and that that's one of the questions that that one has and that one one wants to think about compelling and truthful answers to but it's my my suspicion that the exhibition was impossible to historic sites for a very long period of time precisely because it got black art wrong and it got modernism wrong there was therein in other words there was no Institute of discourse academic or otherwise that could accommodate the the perversity of it the eccentric quality of it without blowing its frame apart and it's so it became a kind of untouchable quirk of exhibition history in modernist history and and a kind of almost black art history but not quite because you had a black artist in charge but he would he would make black art you know what do you think all these white people in a Mexican lady what are you gonna do yeah like what you're gonna you can actually take it as an opportunity to think about complexity is what you're gonna do but not so much not so much not that I'm taking any credit for anything it's just that in order to in order to but I did it well what I'll take credit for is is fighting through the kind of the kind of weird very real sense that I had at the beginning of trying to write about this thing but maybe I shouldn't be like maybe that why should I dude it's 40 years of silence maybe there's a reason for it and I think I think if I hadn't come and if Chris hadn't walked me down to Jerry Aaron Armanda who is the like the most angelic archive keeper I think that ever walked the face of the earth and let it carry just like moved me in just moved me into this her workspace and let me do whatever I needed to if I hadn't done come here and learned all this and been welcomed in the ways that I was over a quite a long period of time and lots of noodling in for more information than they could provide me as quickly as I needed it I don't think I ever would have done it and it was just so I I'm triply grateful for this place for that reason for for having the temerity to do it in the first place for recording its activities and maintaining the archive as it did and then for and then for accommodating you know and historians attempt to make something out of it without without the approval I frankly of anyone here I mean I I so anyway but that's that's why I think that's how I've explained the silence to myself and that's that's why it feels important to to encourage people to keep thinking about it and that's that's that's all I got I'm happy to answer some questions though [Music] got a mic here you want to just raise your hand that's great for the mic I'm curious given all the research and the time you spent do you think this show was successful in what it set out to do and achieve and and how then I guess a follow-up how how might it have been I guess well I just the the first question wasn't successful in some way in achieving what you think it's set out to achieve yeah I do think it would but I think I think that we in in order okay I think we need a fairly creative conception of success in order to in order to define it as a as a success is defined as let me try to change one person's views yeah that almost certainly happened right the so one thing that I would really regret about the way that I conducted the research that I was going I kept thinking you should put a Craigslist ad in Houston Craigslist or whatever asking people who saw the show to talk to you about it just ordered to write to you about it I did it's just I just I'm lazy sometimes so I never did this I never did the guy I wanted to hear from the kids I wanted to I wanted to know if there are kids who remembered it I'm hoping the kind of sociological hypothesis was that sure they reached someone and actually one person's narrative would have been enough for me I mean I was I just needed to write a 75-page chapter I mean one narrative extrapolated to some academic you know largeness what it would have been would have been enough for me i but you know it at the end of the day I think I didn't do it because I just I have dumb faith that that happened I have dumb faith that it's certain to have happened it was open all day every day for six weeks in a place where what kids did when they weren't in school and a lot of important school even when they should have been it was late summer but then school started was walk around in and out of the deluxe they installed a 41 ton air conditioner on top of the building so that the place would be attractive and comfortable 41 ton air conditioner that could be removed at the end I don't know what was done with it after the Black Arts Center closed a couple years later but it's I have no doubt that large numbers of people saw it among those people someone must have been affected in that's enough for me that's enough for me I mean I'm an academic I write books that nobody reads like I sell one book and that's enough for me so my standards are pretty low right my standards are pretty low I can't make money on a book write my standard for this is is very low but I also think I mean as someone who as someone who was deeply touched by art at a fairly young age art that I fully failed to understand at the time still have a hard time explaining to people memorial environment and coming from you know a very different situation I know that what I'm saying about Peter's intuition about children's receptivity and likelihood to be enthusiastic in response to something that was big and bright and colorful and different than other ways of things things add up being big and bright and colorful I know that happens because it happened to me and it's a reason that I do this for a living so it's all just look at it I mean it's still a good show if you can deal with this kind of art which is a big if for a lot of people but if you can deal with this kind of art this is good frickin art show and that I think that also could have been intuited it wasn't over full the the hang makes a lot of sense it makes a lot of sense I just I just think we have to have dumb faith that it did it made some difference but it's all about how you quantify the difference and whether or not you need to see a certain kind of data rich result in order to count it as a success the way that we tend to today I know I know first of all I know I know I know but I I mean I have this this kind of question reminds me of a something when I was a dissertation graduate student I mailed off at one of my chapter drafts to my advisor and it was just full of praise for this artist like oh there's nothing that thought this artists has ever done that isn't wonderful and everything it's a masterpiece in MoMA and his I guess the writing was okay the structure was fine me his only response to this chapter was does the artist ever fail you it was a really critical question for me to get at that point because I needed to be reminded that I'm not a critic I wasn't getting a PhD in criticism I was getting a PhD in history basically and I needed to find some way of squaring my professional obligation to some measure of objectivity with my subject matter and my practice and I have to say it's been very difficult for me to find a way to I don't know what the failings were because I wasn't there I only have the perfectly curated archive to work from and I have great enthusiasm about the potentials of this thing as something that can still teach 40 something years after the fact so I may be not the best person to ask a critical quote to answer a critical question about success but I do think that it worked I did think so Sandra Michael Linda and someone whose name I don't know very lucky um thank you so much for this talk it was really very interesting especially like uncovering the archive and seeing your process I was wondering since it's 1971 and it's Houston and it's the dim Anil's and it's abstraction if you saw this show happening in dialogue with the building of the Rothko chapel and how you would put those two efforts in conversation with each other I I don't know how to I don't know how to respond to that in a full way I can speculate about it I know what I read in in in in the great book about the projects and I think they're there they're historical coincidence is really important and interesting but i you know and i think the through line is just for me the through line is the ecumenical attitude disposition really like the act in the ecumenical disposition the idea that spirituality is a part of our experience it doesn't need to be directed by any particular theology or rhetoric or faith structure and the way I could do that I meant like whatever I meant like the X&Y anyway that that much is is is is carried over but I Bradley as far as I know Bradley really this was more it was definitely under the auspices of the family and it couldn't have been done without their generosity and resources but this is a lot of Bradley's choices in concert with Winkler and Mickey Leland whose name I didn't mention but is utterly utterly I mean talk about a major star of this show so I just yeah I think it's more of a happy coincidence of history then then a strong conceptual link I would link it i think the link that makes i just lost my train of thought the oh the the family's attempt to gift Newman's broken obelisk to the city of Houston couple years earlier in honor of Martin Luther King which gift was refused by the city of Houston that to me is a way Morris that's a way stronger link because that's a bat that links politics abstraction and racial representation in a way that's you know it's just I mean that that talk about a book that needs to be written why not like you know and you know the fact that it ends up adjacent to the chapel feels important in connection to your question but sorry Sandra I didn't I might go hi I had a question around contextualizing the patron and if you could do any more of that I would love to hear it but my question was more on Greenberg at this moment in time you you were a little light on the fact that he made the trip in August to Houston yeah in 71 and these were his last year's could you give me your sense of where of whether he was feeling cornered at that moment in time I think he Wiley and the rest I mean where yeah where was Greenberg at that moment because I think coming out here was actually for this scale show in that short notice in the middle of August was actually a major event for him and what we're trying to you know save something that's one thing yes he was he he had he gave the famous Pennington lectures the month the wheat cake gave those lectures and got on the plane he went to New York I you can you can track every day of his life from 1930 until his last visit from the urologist and October of 1994 in his day books at the Getty and I did that and he gave the bennington lectures he went home packed for hot weather came to Houston flew in on Saturday and I think what the bennington lectures are are a continuous rant over eight nights about the effects of Dada on contemporary art he sees the the rise of theatricality in conceptual art and performance art and act and post studio practice as the ultimate manifestation of a kitsch oriented art that needs to explain itself instead of just being being good and he's completely cornered on the cover of Artforum magazine of the same season that the exhibition opens the other summer 1971 issue of Art Forum is a project of Richard Serra where he embedded steel rings and this in streets in the Bronx utter utterly off them off the map for for the leading modernist art magazine in the world he's completely in the ditch greenberg he's been run off the road and he sees he sees a kind of maybe a last hope for the stuff that he pushed and the people that he pushed in the galleries that he advised in this and a marvelous celebration that he probably assumed would be celebrated well beyond Houston he maybe needed it to be celebrated of all beyond Houston for exactly the reasons that you're alluding to that didn't happen thanks to Robert Hughes and others and as you said he continued his his critical purchase continued to decline for the next twenty three years I mean he lived another twenty three years but he had no relevance none none circa 1971 not in corners that mattered he had relevance among important collectors you know all the places where where people who could tell you like what jules Olinsky was thinking about in 1963 well I think wherever they hang and hang out and talk about that that's that's where Greenberg had that's our Greenberg had entrees so no I I think he came for something and it probably you know it's it's it's a reality that should be narrated in terms of opportunism for sure in his case but I think you know he seemed also to come with a pretty good attitude and in what's interesting to me that I think that makes me a little more sanguine about Greenberg's participation is the fact that it was such an instrumental ization of that art this was not he wasn't just put it in they weren't just putting it up there to be to be frigid and present in the way that this art was designed and in spirited debate was meant to be used by people I was actually people were allowed to touch it and all kinds of things that violated the kind of sanctity of the relationship to people in the greenberg and mine frame are meant to have in the presence of works of art so it's you know it's a complex situation like anything else that's actually interesting that Thank You Linda Shearer or whomever I'm not yep go hi thank you very much for your talk I kept wondering as you were talking why why use them like is this why why Euston why was this showing Euston it's just because they're the people who organized it were having to be here oh because the McNeil's were here or is there something about the city of Euston specifically that allows for this type of show it's entirely what yeah thanks for an easy question yeah yeah no I mean there's the there what what's that yep again oh the answer is that it's entirely the first two things it's a matter of where we're the people in a position to support the experiment were and where the the infrastructure was yeah I I it would be great for there to be some further reason but I just I have no no way of speculating as to what that would be hi Darby Highlander I assume in the process of your research that you were in contact with Peter Bradley and could you share with us how he looks how he looks back in retrospect on this experiment and this effort on his part important to be diplomatic important to be diplomatic when I went to Peter to talk about the exhibition first in the fall of spring of 2007 again in the winter of 2007 after of 2008 after my first visit to the archive he didn't want to talk about it at all because and for good reason for legitimately good reason he hadn't been no one had knocked at his door and ages and I didn't come I wasn't coming with questions about Peter Bradley and his art I was coming with questions about this thing that you did in Houston is one time that I think people should know about he's like well yeah they should know about that but they need to know more about my paintings in sculpture and I need a gallery and I need it and I need to know where my is I don't even know where I mean he it's it's a it's a it's a pretty it's a pretty he's it's a it's a it's a situation full of challenges he's in a situation full of challenges and so I it was like pulling teeth frankly to get to I mean I took pictures I I used every ethnographic interview trick I could borrow from my ethnic refer friends and it's just it was just it was just really difficult because his in his mind was was elsewhere and eventually you know I read him some letters and so you know that's didn't know it didn't happen like that at all is more like yeah and so I got I got a some interesting sort of perspective on some some facts as recorded and as told but I didn't it didn't end up proving it didn't end up proving super-super in enriching in terms of adding to the content available downstairs it did put me in a funny position as an author though of having to be having to actually speculate and deduce a great deal more than I had expected to to need to do I mean I I really thought that I was gonna report this thing out like a like a biographer or something when in fact very few of the parties to it were interested or able to to talk about it that way it was interesting learned a lot about dealing with a living subject matter hi I was wondering if you could talk about the context of the movie theatre one thing I noticed from the announcements is that there are announcements that there were would be films and they obviously made the choice to retain some of the old seats and so as yeah just wondering if you had any thoughts about that connection in that context and and how it remains in the in the show yes so the only signs remaining in the exhibition of the fact that this was a movie theater where the thief as you said as you noticed they parked they parked to two rows of five theater seats in the center of the gallery in place of the Barcelona bench or whatever would ordinarily be in it and otherwise it had been completely transformed and movies were shown I think to ensure steady traffic ident the screen so the point of view from which most of these photographs are taken is you enter the space and turn left I think the screen would be behind you so I don't even naturally know how the screenings would have worked they showed just a random selection of films oriented to children as the winter time approached you know toward the end of the run and early November they were showing Christmas films they were mostly Disney Christmas films and things I think this was because of the you know the deluxe had had been a very successful cinema and gathering point in the fifth award for a long long long time I think it was built in 1927 and it had been defunct since 61 or so and so one one thing that made the exhibition the exhibition in important was that it was breathing new life into probably the central cultural cultural gathering point in the neighborhood matrix and it was very smart to include a film program because it was a movie theater and it was known to be someplace that you went to see movies not to see paintings in sculpture but other than that I mean I don't think III try as I was writing I thought a lot about you know sort of like how does the historical temporality of the movie theater or the ontology of the space or whatever sort of in in form I don't think it's I don't know how it's doing that I became unconvinced that that would be an interesting Avenue to follow but I do think that I do think however that there one can make a link pretty readily and it's a pretty stable link between between the there's a kind of threshold consciousness that I think people have going into a theater where you just you're just that much more open to fantasy maybe just that much more open to whatever comes your way that's the suspension of disbelief moments that we you know even the most ardent skeptic maybe is a little less of that when she walks into a movie theater and I think it was it was a smart place to choose because it you know it's a place that we associate with you know pleasing some of some of the time at the very least entertaining sensations which occur in succession and rather thickly and it's it's a you know it's a durational experience and so forth but other than that it's just you know I think it's it's a it was it was a place of convenience Bradley liked Bradley chose the site Helen and someone else drove him around and he chose that site he was shown some other places from which I think he was expected to make the choice and then he he picked the deluxe I don't know if he knew what an iconic sight it was I'm sure maybe someone told him but in the end the its existence as a movie theater was rendered more or less incidental by the way that it was used here by the way is how it looks now I cut this but that's I took that in 2011 I don't know I don't know if it looks that way still it did no it's better different better better great great sorry I knew I should have gone by today like don't show me I this is how it looked when I was last here for research and that what what what I like about this mural is that you see in a mural in the fifth Ward the deluxe right at the center which goes to show what kind of place it occupies in the local imagination even and this mural was was in place in 2011 at which time this is how the movie theater looked so it even after it's even after it's what's a descent into disuse again it was being remembered very fondly so it had a charge it has a charge around it is it it's a functional movie theater now great great oh wow great hmm and is there any sign of its having once been in an art and art Transbay okay marquee huh oh great yeah terrific that happened yeah yeah oh really [Music] and one more question yeah Darby I'm wondering if you can talk about your research process and then how by researching this particular exhibition how possibly that has changed your own practice as a historian and how possibly this rethinks your pedagogical practice with a younger generation in terms of how a younger generation needs to look for these anomalies or how how one as a kind of curator or our historian could develop this practice as a younger generation well this the two to two questions to answers I'll try to keep them brief but they're both really rich questions so the first one how did it affect my research practice a way that I do work whatever hugely it was the first this is the first archival research thing I've ever done I got my PhD in a program that didn't valorize does not valorize archival research art history and it's a visual and cultural studies program I wrote a theory dissertation about contemporary art basically and with a long history graphic chapter about how that art had been written previously but you know I my archive was my University Library in the New Republic I mean those are not archives this is an archive and the Mahal is the Achilles Mohawk Frances Moho Achilles archive at the Whitney is a real archive this is where I lived and at the Getty to write this book so the what what it changed in me was just it developed in me a real appreciation for the difficulty and the fineness of that kind of research and the need really to be responsible for other attempts to tell the story that you're telling thank you you're you're always Co telling the stories when you're narrating from the archive you're not alone in the authorial zone they're not alone in there that's that was totally new to me and I feel greatly enriched as a scholar I actually feel like a scholar for the first time now that I've gotten this thing done honestly I feel like a writer or something like I don't know contemporary art person very generically now I'm a modernist because I came I came to this through a realization that I was more modern than contemporary all along and now I also feel like a scholar so the second thing in for in terms of teaching I the the that's a very simple answer I always encourage always encourage my students to pay attention to what people disavow they'd like whatever a writer or whatever is saying I'm not interested in me I'm not doing yeah I don't care about new that's that's where you look that's what they're interested in that's what they're doing that's what they care about you're not that but something in that direction is what that's where the interest is gonna is gonna gather because you've up what they're trying to tell you by thing I'm not dealing yeah is that like they're really just trying to do something that's already been done interestingly which is just over again which is inherently unuseful to scholarship to historical scholarship so with what they disavow that's where the money is it's like what where do they not want to be seen and and why not and you're not trying to get get them in gotcha or something you just that tends to be where so basically art history both modernist art history and black are history they didn't want me to know about delux so I said why not why and the rest is whatever this micro history of this book that makes us okay we just want to remind everybody who resigned some lips back here a year in the life of color 1971 and he will sign some if you would like that one