WHEN ATTITUDE BECOMES A FOUNDATION - "Making the Impossible Possible" in North Rhine-Westphalia and-for a Few Days in July-New York City
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Art July 13th, 2015
WHEN ATTITUDE BECOMES A FOUNDATION
“Making the Impossible Possible” in North Rhine-
Westphalia and—for a Few Days in July—New York City
by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Nowhere is the myopic New York-centrism that Saul Steinberg so famously captured in his March
29, 1976 cover of the New Yorker as ubiquitous as it is in the art world. Although international travel
is a given for most art professionals, in 2015 the art-infested boroughs of New York City, branching
out from Soho to Chelsea, to Williamsburg, Long Island City, and Bushwick, with museums
expanding in ways both depressing (MoMA) and exhilarating (the Whitney), it is hard not to
continue to call New York the center of the art world.
Chauvinistic as this is, and typically American in its
sense of exceptionalism, the question is: What kind of
art city is New York? Although the answer is hardly
news, the tenor and quality of my own awareness of New
York’s (and America’s) notion that “successful” art is
synonymous with financial capital shifted, after my trip
to North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany at the invitation
of the Kunststiftung NRW, the Art Foundation of North
Rhine-Westphalia,1 from a grudging acceptance to a
stark, “oh yeah, capitalism is not nature.” World Heritage Site: Shaft 12 of Zollverein Coal Mine
Industrial Complex in Essen, Germany, built by Bauhaus
architects. Photo © Thomas Wolf, www.foto-tw.de.
What I discovered wasn’t just the world-class quality and
surfeit of art museums in this tiny state, but a culture, or attitude, towards art that, for a New Yorker,
was a welcome bite in the ass.
The occasion for my visit was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Kunststiftung NRW, for which they
mounted a state-wide series of exhibitions titled 25/25/25, pairing twenty-five NRW artists with
twenty-five municipal art museums. The artists were given access to the museum’s collection and
asked to produce an original artwork in the spirit of the museum.2 An image of the artwork appeared
on local billboards in the surrounding city as a way to connect with the community, and after a year,
the piece was donated to the collection, becoming a part of the very museum that inspired it.
The artist Batia Suter selected the newly (and brilliantly) renovated LWL-Museum für Kunst und
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Kultur, in Münster, and created a singularly affecting work called Alte Treppe [Old Stairs]. In the
museum’s archives she discovered black-and-white photographs of a monumental Beaux Arts
staircase, torn down during one of the museum’s renovations—a signifier of another time.
Alte Treppe brought this lost architectural sensation back to life as a large fabric collage cut from an
accretion of subtly shifting perspectives and angles as well as expressive digital blurs and
manipulations of the original black-and-white photos. In this way Suter produced a present but
impossible memory of the building itself, “making the museum the custodian not only of the
artworks it holds, but also of its own architectural history.”3
This is fitting, since the motto of the Kunststiftung NRW is “Making the Impossible Possible,” so
Suter’s Alte Treppe might be seen as a synecdoche of the very mission of the Foundation itself—to
protect and promote the historic and contemporary visual art, literature, music, and performance of
the NRW. As the Secretary General of the Foundation, Dr. Ursula Sinnreich,4 puts it, “When
deciding on whether an application will be successful or not, only the creative strength and
innovative power of the artistic concept determines its success. In decision-making, we do not look
at the status or the reputation of the applicant, nor at the level of the amount requested.”5
What makes this statement more than just the directive of a benevolent funding institution is that
the Kunststiftung NRW is funded by the state lottery and is a creation of the government itself,
initiated in 1989 by Minister President Johannes Rau with a constitution that explicitly states that
support is “exclusively for non-commercial projects.”6
And here we come to my cultural vertigo. Imagine a percentage of the profit from the New York state
lottery suddenly allocated to the arts, with the stipulation that it is exclusively for non-commercial
art.
Although the foundation works in tandem with the government, Dr. Sinnreich is adamant that the
Foundation is:
[…] free from political interests or state government cultural guidelines. They do not stipulate any interests
whatsoever. This way of working is possible because the foundation exists as an independent organization
under civil law and is underscored by the fact that the constitution focuses on the support and promotion of
exceptional projects and extraordinary artists. That means, the money does not flow into the infrastructure of
the maintenance of the institutions, either for the physical space or for the staff.
Once again, imagine such a situation in New York, where profits from the lottery currently allocated
to the less-than-educational No Child Left Behind reforms are controlled by the legislative decisions
of Albany—so bribable, crooked, and debauched that Governor Cuomo’s Mooreland Commission to
Investigate Public Corruption was shut down amid rumors that the administration was itself
tampering with the investigation.7
•
Foundations sometimes have their own ideas of sponsorship and how they want to create an ideal picture of
themselves—in contrast to my experience with Kunststiftung NRW, where the focus was on my work. The
Foundation gave me the freedom to let the project develop “naturally” on its own which is the kind of support
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artists really need but often don’t get.8
Sabrina Fritsch is an emerging artist living in Düsseldorf who received a year of funding from the
Kunststiftung to produce an artist’s book. In a statement that echoes what I heard again and again
from the artists and institutions supported by the Kunststiftung NRW, the Foundation really does
act as a benevolent fairy godmother whose interest is the support of creative vision above all else. In
other words, there is a welcome absence of micro-managing or invasive helicopter parenting once a
project is selected. Additionally, curators and associates of the Foundation are available for artists
and institutions to consult with if obstacles arise or they decide to change aspects of the original
terms of their application.
During her year of support, Sabrina Fritsch’s ideas for her book deepened due to her desire to
translate the materiality of her paintings onto printed paper. As she put it:
I’m really thankful that the Kunststiftung NRW didn’t nail me down on the content of my letter of application
(making a quite “normal” artist book: creating a PDF on the computer and printing it abroad on a special
machine). Because working one year with my own copy machine I was able to use the machine to create new
pictures, to build new “paintings” on the Risograph.
Fritsch was free, and even encouraged, to use the funds from her fellowship to purchase a
heavy-duty, high-speed color copy machine, whose ink was supplied by formidable two-foot circular
drums. By purchasing it and putting it in her tiny, minimal studio, she actually invented, as she puts
it, “new paintings.” The images produced on Risograph GR 3770 were as labor-intensive as her
painting because she spent hours (and was able to because she owned the machine) sending images
back through the copier in order to produce the same layered texture with ink as she does with paint
in
her paintings.
The visual arts are only one of the areas the Foundation supports, along with literature, music,
dance, theater, media arts, and literary translation,9 but, of note:
During our 25 years of supporting projects, we have experienced the disciplines that find it especially difficult
to realize an independent evening program for the stage are the areas of musical theatre, young composers,
directors, choreographers, and dancers. The support of the foundation then consists of making this idea
become reality. That means: we ensure that the space, time, staff, and facilities are all made available to
develop and rehearse the piece.10
One such artist is the young, much buzzed-about choreographer Ben Riepe, who works “on the edges
of forms.” His troupe’s production Der letzte Schrei was one of only two theatrical performances
presented in the 25/25/25 project. Riepe and his company of performers choreograph
“atmospheres” (dinners) and facial expressions, as well as present performances in galleries and
museums as a moving exhibit of choreographed bodies rather than performers on a stage. Their
work falls between experimental theater, dance, performance art, and innovative installation art.11
Riepe says of his support:
[The Foundation] really listens and understands the needs of an artist without any institutional agenda. They
have supported all of my projects since 2005—including stage performances, installations, serial works, a
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Sabrina Fritsch, Book NR 28 from the series of artist
books “1/100.”
research project to develop new forms and even an open-ended scholarship for project development. We
would never be able to do the work we do if our salary had to be raised by the sale of tickets. […] We are given
complete freedom to work only on our productions.12
•
The state of NRW was created in 1946 when the British military administration merged the province
of Westphalia and the northern parts of the Rhine province (which had been part of Prussia under
the German Reich). The NRW is approximately the size of Arizona, yet within this 13,000-
square-mile radius there are an astounding 200 museums. As ZERO group co-founder Heinz Mack
put it, one “would need another life to see everything there is on offer in the NRW, given that every
town has a world-class museum.”13
The Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, founded by the Duke of Palatinate and his wife Anna Maria
Luisa de’ Medici (and the site of the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937), is undoubtedly the
oldest and most famous. It is also one of the few NRW institutions the Foundation has worked with
since its inception in 1990. Renowned director Beat Wismer expresses a warm and appreciative
admiration for the long history which, as he put it, is not just monetary but includes an ethic of total
commitment to the creative process, free of bureaucratic nonsense or interference. One such
exhibition is the 2012 internationally acclaimed “El Greco and Modernism,” an ingenious
exploration of the affinities between Expressionism and the 17th-century painter.14
You became aware of the fact that whatever you did should be a document of your own existence; therefore it
should not be a kind of entertainment, but something that gives you a certain reason for doing art at all. This
idea of doing things “just for fun” did not fit. There was a real awareness of the fact that everything had been
destroyed after the war—this was not only the destruction of the material world, but also of the intellectual
world. It was really this pure emptiness, which goes along with philosophy, of course. We were really
impressed by the philosophy of Husserl; existentialism became so important, and it started with Kierkegaard,
and Nietzsche, and then it became actual by Sartre and Heidegger; Albert Camus was very important for us, as
was Kafka.
—Heinz Mack discussing ZERO in 201415
The Museum Kunstpalast is also the home of the ZERO Foundation. In the fall of 2014, prior to
going to the NRW, I attended the press preview of the Guggenheim Museum’s ZERO: Countdown to
Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, the first museum survey held in the United States of this relatively unknown
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(in the United States) but essential (to contemporary art) European avant-garde group. As this was
my introduction to ZERO, it wasn’t until I spoke directly with Mattijs Visser, the founding director of
the ZERO Foundation at the Kunstpalast, and with Heinz Mack himself during my trip, that this
issue of differing attitudes towards art became more than just a one-note truism.
The website for ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, which Otto Piene described as “an idea
not a movement,”16 describes ZERO this way:
Among the central themes explored are the development of new definitions of painting, including the
monochrome, serial structures, and pictures made with fire and smoke; a focus on light, movement and space;
the interrogation of the relationship between nature, technology, and humankind; an interest in viewer
activation; and the production of live art actions, many of which were known as demonstrations.17
In this description Yves Klein’s monochromes move to the front and we learn, that yes, ZERO was an
international network of artists reacting against the subjective, gestural tenets of Abstract
Expressionism, Art Informel, and Tachisme, but its essential identity rests within an aesthetic art
historical avant-garde rather than a philosophical movement or idea.18
Rejecting the then-dominant styles in European art, Tachisme and Art Informel, which emphasized gestural
abstraction and personal expression, the emerging generation of ZERO artists devised new approaches to
painting. They explored the use of single colors and serial structures to achieve a minimal aesthetic. Klein’s
Monochromes series proved influential. By limiting his palette to one color and applying dense layers of
pigment in an all-over treatment, he downplayed the hand of the artist. Rather than focusing on the personal
expression that was central to Art Informel, he pointed to painting’s capacity to convey immaterial concepts
like cosmic energy.19
Klein becomes a driving force in the origin story of the Guggenheim’s ZERO. Here is Heinz Mack in
2014 discussing his first meeting with Klein in 1957:
Actually, it was Jean Tinguely who asked me if I’d ever heard of Yves Klein, and it was Tinguely who took care
of it so that I met him in Paris. It was exactly the time Tinguely produced a construction with a little motor on
top of it that could spin around, on which Klein added a little disc of paper—a coaster—on it, coloured
monochrome blue. Tinguely and Klein told me proudly that this was what they had been collaborating on, and
they asked what I thought of it. When they turned it on, immateriality was the main thing that stood out for
me: the colour of this rotating disc became completely immaterial, like a blue cloud at once spinning but
seemingly static. They were so happy that I immediately discovered the sense of it! This was a very important
meeting.
Not only is it Mack who emphasizes immateriality rather than materiality, but, within the actual
history, it is Mack who brings Klein into a non-hierarchical zone of like-minded artists.
I supported this [sculptor Norbert Kricke’s suggestion of Klein to Alfred Schmeller ] which resulted in Klein’s
1957 exhibition, “Yves, Propositions monochromes.” So you see, things kind of happened almost by accident:
everyone was influencing and impressing each other at the same time and reaching out in different ways.
There was no hierarchy: it was really more about equivalence between artists.20
The Guggenheim reinscribes hierarchy in favor of Klein.21
After the brief, efficient, bizarrely lacking press preview I walked up the Guggenheim spiral and saw
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pristine, aesthetically compelling works such as Piene’s
Light Ballet (1961 and 1969), but it is difficult not to
associate the allure of ZERO as beautiful objects with the
fact that in February of 2010—around the time planning
for such an exhibition would be put into motion—Piene’s
Rauchbild, a 1961 oil and charcoal on canvas from the
Lenz-Schoenberg collection, was sold for £223,250.22
By contrast, the value of ZERO for Düsseldorf, and for
the NRW in general, was described vividly by Matthijs
Visser:
My uncle, Henk Peeters, was a ZERO artist: he was one of
the central Dutch figures who organized all the museum
shows for the ZERO movement in Holland, so I was raised
around ZERO. The idea for the foundation actually began
through him, when he told me in 2005 that someone from Heinz Mack during the shooting of the film Tele-Mack,
the Getty institute wanted to buy his archive—which 1968. Photo: Edwin Braun.
included thousands of exchanges between him and artists
including Duchamp and Rothko—I told him not to do it, and then I wrote a letter to Düsseldorf’s local
government officer for culture, Hans Georg-Lohe, and told him that it wasn’t a good idea that the Getty was
buying archives here in Düsseldorf, a city with such an important and rich international history. After I wrote
the letter, Getty bought the entire archive of a very famous gallery here in Düsseldorf, Schmela, for something
like half a million euro in 2006. I would say the next day the Minister of Culture called me and said we needed
to talk. From here, I developed the concept to collect works and archives from a handful of artists, including
Mack, Piene and Uecker, which I calculated would represent, at that time, a value of 9 million euro. I
presented this concept to the city of Düsseldorf in 2006, which agreed to fund us with 300,000 euros per year
over 30 years to build the archive.23
As an example of its interest in promoting and protecting the history of the NRW, Nam June Paik’s
years of living and art making in Düsseldorf, are honored by the Foundation’s annual Nam June Paik
International Media Art Award of 25,000 euros. In 2014 it was awarded unanimously to the New
York-based French artist Camille Henrot, a recipient of the Silver Lion Award at the 2013 Venice
Biennale for her video Grosse Fatigue, and a 2014 Hugo Boss Prize nominee. Her exhibition at the
New Museum in New York, in the summer of 2014, “The Restless Earth,” filled the museum with her
intensely theoretical visual essays that mix intuitive research with finely selected images and objects,
discovering morphological links between disparate systems of knowledge such as anthropology,
philosophy, film theory, colonial studies, myth, and the epistemology of the Internet.24 The
Newcomer Award, also a unanimous decision, was given to the theoretically inventive
Düsseldorf-based artist Manuel Graf.25 Graf works with computer-generated 3D and 2D animations
to explore the social and political constructions of global identity, culture, and place, as in La
Mediterraneé (2010): a film collage of the Mediterranean region, which investigates these
constructions through their depiction in the book of the same name by historian Fernand Braudel.
As if to illustrate Heinz Mack’s comment that one would need another life time to see everything the
NRW has to offer, the exhibition for the Nam June Paik Award takes place in the Kunstmuseum
which consists of two remarkable residential buildings—Haus Lange and Haus Esters—designed by
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Mies van der Rohe, for the German industrialists Lange and Estes, between 1928 and 1930. Inside,
hidden in plain sight, is also a 1961 Yves Klein white room which, until the curator pointed it out and
let us enter one by one with white slippers, is just a plain white door, most likely a storage room or
utility closet.
•
The housing of art in such places as the residential buildings Haus Lange and Haus Esters suggests
that Gandhi’s observation, “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are
treated,” can be applied to how a nation treats its industrial and urban ruins. While New York City
has a robust history of transforming abandoned factories and urban buildings into art museums or
galleries, pioneered by the visionary Alanna Heiss in the ’70s, chances are that such buildings are
either torn down for the development of luxury housing (the future fate of the Domino Sugar
Factory26), or made into upscale malls. 27
And here we come to the Zeche Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in the city of Essen, built in
1847, and designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001.28 It is a massive complex29 that was in
operation until 1986. Described as “the most beautiful coal mine in the world,” the visual grandeur is
indeed jaw-dropping, more Fritz Lang than industrial landmark. In fact, if you can imagine a
working Bauhaus coal factory, Shaft 12 was built by Bauhaus architects Fritz Schupp and Martin
Kremmer in 1932. In order to maintain the principle of symmetry, the architects included a
completely nonfunctional addition to match. As if this isn’t enough, it is now a sprawling arts center
that includes the Red Dot Design Museum, an escalator designed by Rem Koolhaas with translucent
electric orange railings to suggest molten ore, and a performing arts center. As our exceptionally
knowledgeable guide Frank Switala said:
For our part I can add that a former industrial open space like Zollverein can provide other opportunities to
connect people with art. In contrast to a museum, people can incidentally see works, for example sculptures in
the open space such as the works of Ulrich Rückriem, Ansgar Nierhoff, or Alf Lechner, or the Works
Swimming Pool, a leisure facility built in a formerly human hostile environment. The combination of reduced
architecture, monumental industrial machines and facilities, and the nature create strong contrasts inspiring
artists and public to new ideas.
While the Zeche Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex was overwhelming as an architectural
marvel and signifier of the state’s and Foundation’s commitment to art, the museum that really
unhinged me was in the out-of-the-way town of Unna, where the Westfälisch and Ruhrpott dialects
are still spoken, and whose history is described as “a series of wars, plagues, and fires.” And yet, here
one finds the first and only museum dedicated to light art in the world, the Centre for International
Art and Light. Again it is this very fact that the Centre is located in an unremarkable, out-of-the-way
town, that is so strikingly different from New York and the United States. Although we have the
examples of Dia Beacon, New York and Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts; even if our
NRW geographic corollary, Arizona, suddenly sprouted 200 museums—many of them world-
class—it could not match the 120-year-old Linden Brewery in which the Centre is housed.30 The
contrast between 19th-century industry and 20th- and 21st-century light art by Mario Merz, Joseph
Kosuth, Christian Boltansky, Roni Horn, and James Turrell, among others, throws both into
stunning relief. But, guided through the dark, vaulted cellars, by the immensely warm and
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knowledgeable director John Jaspers, while the museum was closed, images of industrial amounts of
beer floated about in my head, and we came upon Roni Horn’s Lotus Shadows (2006), which was
heart-stopping.
•
And yet, for all its previous invisibility as a site of extraordinary quantities and qualities of art, the
NRW will have its impact on New York City this summer when a project the Foundation developed
brings, of all things, the American composer Harry Partch’s rarely seen Delusion of the Fury to
Lincoln Center under the direction of Heiner Goebbels and the Ensemble MusikFabrik of Cologne.
Featured in the New York Times’s “50 Essential Summer Festivals” under the description:
“Homemade instruments, a Japanese Noh play, dancers and a deaf hobo? That would be the weird
and wonderful Delusion of the Fury, a rarely-staged 90-minute musical theater piece by the
experimental American composer Harry Partch.”31
Born in
1901 in
Delusion of the Fury, Ensemble MusikFabrik. Photo: ©
Klaus Rudolph.
Oakland, California, the self-taught Partch, who described himself as “a music philosopher seduced
into carpentry,” is a legend among the musical avant-garde, yet he is far less well known in the art
world than John Cage. While Cage experimented and expanded the vocabulary of music via
principles of indeterminacy, the never-silence of silence, and the non-conventional use of
instruments such as works for prepared piano, Partch completely rejected the Western standard of
twelve-tone music as early as 1930, when he burned all his compositions, instead developing a
microtonal scale based on an octave divided into an astonishing 43 unequal tones “exposing notes in
between the standard pitches that convey hauntingly beautiful gradations of flatness and
sharpness.”32 But, since there were obviously no instruments capable of playing such compositions,
Partch invented his own, among them, the poetically named Eucal Blossom, Zymo-Xyl,
Quadrangularis Reversum, Castor & Pollux, Spoils of War, Chromelodeon, and Marimba Eroica.
And yet, Delusion of the Fury has rarely been performed in the United States. It was premiered at
the UCLA playhouse on January 9th, 1969 but, this remained the only performance until 2007 when
the Japan Society sponsored a production, ostensibly because Act I is based on the Japanese Noh
drama “Atsumori.” In 2013 the piece was restaged at the Ruhrtriennale—founded in 2002 by the
government of North Rhine-Westphalia—by Ensemble MusikFabrik, under the direction of Heiner
Goebbels. This was the first time Delusion of the Fury had been staged in Europe.33
While there are many reasons Partch’s masterwork has been performed so rarely,34—among them
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the fact that the original instruments, preserved at Montclair State University in New Jersey, are too
fragile to be played so they must be remade—the fact that it is the Japan Society, or an art foundation
from the supposedly unhip area of the NRW, who bring Partch to New York, suggests that the limits
of the Steinbergian view, which sees only flatness and scarcity beyond the Hudson River, have
actually come back to bite us where it hurts.35 For in that foreshortened vision of America, the
absent California is in fact where Partch was born and remained until his death in 1976. But on July
23 and 24, thanks to the Art Foundation of the NRW, Delusion of the Fury will be seen and heard in
the boundaries of New York City. The caveat being this is New York City so the experience of this
American genius is yours if it isn’t sold out and you can afford the round-trip subway and the
sixty-five to eighty-five-dollar ticket.36
Endnotes
Many thanks to the indefatigable Caroline West for her flawless organization of the trip and to Dr. Ursula Sinnreich
for her generosity. A special thanks to art writer, Stephanie Bailey as well. My essay owes a tremendous debt to the
many excellent articles, cited here, she published after the trip.
For an overview of the Kunststiflung NRW’s 25/25/25 see Stephanie Bailey’s January 20, 2015 essay, “On the
Autobahn: A Report from North Rhine-Westphalia,” Ocula.com.
Kunststiftung NRW News, 25/25/25: Batia Suter at LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, November 13,
2014.
Before Dr. Sinnreich was appointed General Secretary of the Arts Foundation NRW, she worked in France, England,
the USA, and Switzerland as a curator, dramalogue, professor, and museum director, most notably at the
International Centre for Art and Light in Unnur. She is the author of a monograph on James Turrell.
Email correspondence with Dr. Sinnreich, January 28, 2015.
See Kunststiftung NRW (Arts Foundation of North Rhine-Westphalia) mission statement.
Erica Orden and Chris M. Matthews, “Federal Investigation Looks at Cuomo and Mooreland Commission Referrals,”
The Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2014.
See Sabrina Fritsch’s website: www.sabrinafritsch.com.
The Foundation also sponsors residencies in Mumbai and Tel Aviv.
Email correspondence, May 12, 2015.
See Benjamin J. Riepe’s film, Natura, 2011, excerpt.
Email correspondence with Benjamin J. Riepe, May 6, 2015.
Stephanie Bailey, “A conversation with Heinz Mack,” Ocula, December 22, 2015.
Charles Darwent, “El Greco and Modernism, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Urs Fischer: Madame Fisscher, Palazzo Grassi,
Venice,” The Independent, May 13, 2012.
“A conversation with Heinz Mack,” Stephanie Bailey, Ocula, December 22, 2015.
Also, “From the beginning we looked upon the term not as an expression of nihilism—or a Dada-like gag, but as a
word indicating a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for a new beginning as at the count-down when rockets
take off—zero if the incommensurable zone in which the old state turns into the new.” Blair Asbury Brooks, “How
the Zero Group Became One of Art History’s Most Viral Movements,” Artspace Magazine, November 5, 2014.
See the Guggenheim’s Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s website.
See the Guggenheim’s Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, video on Youtube.
See the Guggenheim’s Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s, press release.
Stephanie Bailey, “A conversation with Heinz Mack,” Ocula.com, December 22, 2015.
Untitled Blue Monochrome (1959) sold for $6,085,000 GBP on February 10, 2015, Sothebys.com.
See Otto Piene Auction Results at artsy.net.
Stephanie Bailey, “A conversation with Mattijs Visser,” Ocula, March 30, 2015.
M.H. Miller, “Camille Henrot Won the Nam June Paik Award,” Artnews, September 29, 2014.
Stephanie Bailey, “A conversation with Manual Graf,” Ocula, March 30, 2014.
“One of the most substantial works of art to hit New York in years was with us for only two months. This week, the
final vestiges of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby were removed from the old sugar shed of
the Domino factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which will make way for apartments.” Blake Gopnik, “Fleeting
Artworks, Melting Like Sugar,” The New York Times, July 11, 2014.
A welcome exception is the renovation of the beloved Tobacco Warehouse in DUMBO for St. Ann’s Warehouse now
on Jay Street but formally at a spice-milling factory a few blocks away. Nonetheless it is an exception since lately
DUMBO has been scarred by a number of hackneyed luxury glass box obscenities such as the Pierhouse, which was
called “the worst building in the Gilded City” by Gawker. Hamilton Nolan, “The Worst Building in the Gilded City,”
Gawker, January 2, 2015.
The Arts Foundation of NRW supports various individual projects as well as general funding to the Zolleverein.
See Zollverein World Heritage Site Map.
9 von 11 15.07.15 20:11WHEN ATTITUDE BECOMES A FOUNDATION “Making the Impo... http://brooklynrail.org/2015/07/art/when-attitude-becomes-a-foundation
Such projects are more difficult to realize post 2008, due to the depressed economy in Germany.
See the New York Times list, “50 Essential Summer Festivals,” New York Times, May 15, 2015.
Anthony Tommasini, “Dreams (and Instruments) of a Visionary Tinkerer,” New York Times, December 6, 2007.
Voted the best classical performance of 2014 by the Guardian. Tim Ashley, Andrew Clements, and Tom Service,
“The 10 best live musical events of 2014,” The Guardian, December 16, 2014.
Partch has a deeply knowledgeable, impassioned, and fiercely loyal following in the United States. When I
contacted Jonathan Szanto of the Harry Partch Foundation, who knew and worked with Partch, he stated he had
seen the MusikFabrik production and had no interest in supporting their presentation of Partch’s piece. In fact,
from the tone and content of his response, it was clear he regarded it as a violation of Partch’s entire musical
philosophy.
The Ensemble MusikFabrik remade Partch’s instruments. Kate Molleson, “Harry Partch—how Heiner Goebbels
bought Delusion of the Fury to Edinburgh,” The Guardian, August 29, 2014.
Tickets available at Lincoln Center Festival’s website.
CONTRIBUTOR
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
THYRZA NICHOLS GOODEVE is a writer living in New York. She received her PhD from the University of California in Santa Cruz under
Donna Haraway and James Clifford. She is faculty and thesis director of the MFA in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts, and
Program Coordinator for the MICA summer intensive in DUMBO.
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