Ora-Ora Live — Episode 17: Interview with Barbara Pollack (2)
This week, we speak with Barbara Pollack live from NYC as she discusses her recent, co-curated online initiative “How Can We Think of Art at a Time Like This?” to promote and reflect numerous artists’ works during this time of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Henrietta: Are there some countries that you haven’t covered that you would like to?
Barbara: Yes. We’re looking for Thai and Indian artists. Artists from Thailand and India are two important countries that we haven’t really represented yet. We’re looking for artists all over Africa, we’ve done most Zimbabwe and South Africa. We’re looking for artists from Europe, we have not gotten enough. There’s so much going on in Italy and France. We have two artists from France, but we really haven’t had enough from across Europe right now. We’re looking for that kind of participation.
Henrietta: Hopefully people seeing this would reach out and recommend artists and ideas for your viewing and selection.
Barbara: Yeah. So please, send suggestions and we’ll be happy to look them over and consider them.
Henrietta: I know how serious you are about the type of work and the level of standard and quality that you look for. I went to spend some time to talk to you about your curatorship. You have been curating numerous shows and I couldn’t even finish the list of exhibitions that you’ve attempted, but you do have an interest in vast geographical locations and in thematic pursuit. But I want to spend a bit of time today to focus on two areas. One, of course, is I want to pick your brain on Chinese contemporary art –
Barbara: Of course.
Henrietta: And secondly, learn a lot more about African, or African American contemporary art, which is much more accessible for a lot of us. What do you think about the future of Chinese contemporary art, given all the different things that are happening around the world and with the artists you know?
The future of Chinese contemporary art
Barbara: Well, I have two feelings about the future of Chinese contemporary art. One is, I really feel like the generation that is coming up now, the generation born in the 80s or younger, are fantastic. I started Chinese contemporary art in the 90s, I didn’t get to China until 2004, but I’ve really travelled a lot to China and met with the artists of this younger generation, and they are so creative. Their understanding of technology puts them in the lead of artists around the world. They have very interesting things to say, and that’s what my whole last book was on, and so it gave me a lot of hope.
But now the environment in Hong Kong — I’m trying to think of the most diplomatic way to say this — not the pandemic, but the political environment in Hong Kong and China is going to impede this growth. I think artists have to worry now on a whole other layer than free expression. Although many artists just ignore the politics and make their work anyway, which is kind of amazing to me, I think that in Beijing and Shanghai I’ve seen increasing instances of censorship and increasing fear among the artists, and that is never a good situation for creativity. I don’t think the pandemic is what is going to put a damper on Chinese contemporary art, but I think the politics, the politics between the US government and China, makes it harder to show Chinese contemporary art in the United States.
Henrietta: That’s right. You feel that too.
Barbara: I definitely feel that. I definitely feel like the tariff they’ve put in place makes it harder to sell Chinese contemporary art in the United States, so I think all this great work is being done, but the global dialogue is definitely faltering. That’s never a good thing. I definitely felt very optimistic even 5 years ago, but now I’m worried. But that’s the whole point of How Can We Think of Art at A Time Like This?. That artists will respond, but whether it gets shown is another question.
Henrietta: Where can people find platforms to express themselves, without fear and with freedom? It’s a really big question at the moment.
Barbara: Yeah, it is a really big question. We definitely want to hear more from Hong Kong artists right now.
Henrietta: Like the last major political rally, back in 2014 with the movement, at that time a lot of artists just completely shut their doors. It was such a new thing to us, and every day is a new day, people are just kind of in shock all the time. Artists are unable to actually express yet, it takes time for them to distill, to filter through information, to understand what the external factors in relation to them are, and how all these things affect them and their families. So, I think it’ll take some time, Barbara, for well-thought-through art. At this moment, it’s more like reactional art. You’ll probably see art that are just reactive, the first stage reaction to things. But to be able to see some interesting, with different layers and undertones on things, it’ll take some time.
Barbara: Yeah. It’s going to be interesting.
Henrietta: We are all watching global news every day, and with the situation in the States and around the world about #BlackLivesMatter, some people became increasingly interested to know how African or African American artists around the world are reacting to this. What do you think will evolve from this whole movement?
The impact of Black Lives Matter movement
Barbara: Well, it’s a really interesting question that actually you could write a whole book on. You know, African American art has taken place all through the 20th century. In recent years, galleries have rediscovered certain artists even from the mid-20th century that got overlooked by the official ‘canon’ and begun giving them shows. There is a number of artists that I met for the first time in the late 1980s, like Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Howardena Pindell, who only now are getting major attention, and have worked for decades, and I think that’s great.
Also, many galleries over the last few years have taken on African American artists. So there are certain African American artists who are art stars at this point, like Lorna Simpson or Hank Willis Thomas. But all that work has been commodified into saleable work. I think this is the moment where African American artists feel like they haven’t been heard. They’ve been sold and they’ve been exhibited, but their methods haven’t been heard. Now, in addition to artwork that’s coming out from the protest, many young Black curators or art critics are complaining about the systemic racism in American institution.
Barbara: American museums are really going to have to change their hiring practices and their acquisition practices and who they put on the board. There’s a whole system around this that excludes young Black curators from entering the system.
Henrietta: Would they be willing to change? How would they go about doing this?
Barbara: Well someone could sue them in the States.
Henrietta: Right, it’s like gender equality, employment equity, racial injustice.
Barbara: So, it may take that, but right now I think there’s enormous public pressure on the museums to change and they’re responding to that pressure. Even their board members are seeing that there’s a big public that they’re going to lose if they don’t respond to this. They’re very nervous about losing public because right now they’ve had no income coming in this year cause of the pandemic, and even when they open their doors at the end of the summer, which looks like when museums will reopen in New York, much fewer people are going to be allowed in. So probably museums will have to rethink what their purpose is.
Henrietta: But it’s like the 80/20 rule, probably all these major institutions are supported by a small percentage of patrons in terms of the funding, and the public tickets just form a part of it. Would institutions ultimately have to submit to the financial funding of patrons?
Barbara: Oh yeah, definitely but you’re looking like at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MOMA, where being closed, they lost a lot of money. More people go to MOMA than the Statue of Liberty in New York. It’s like the second biggest tourist attraction in the city. Millions of people go there a year, ticket sales are not a minimal part of how they’re running that museum. If they can’t have as many people coming in, they’re really going to have to rethink their priorities.
Collecting African American Art
Henrietta: On the other hand, for collectors in this part of the world, if they want to start building a collection of African American art, how should they start, or how should I start?
Barbara: It’s not that hard to get into collecting Black art. This is what I say if you can figure out how to collect a Gerhard Richter, you can figure out how to Black art. If you want to understand a Gerhard Richter, you need to know a lot about German history, and you have to do research on that. Nobody says “How do you start collecting European art?”, nobody asks that question. But when it comes to people who’ve been excluded, the biggest excuse people use is that they don’t know the history.
But the history of Black America is very well-known, and easily accessible. It will not take you — we’re talking about 300 years here, not 5,000 years here. Also, you don’t know the amount of people who’ve said to me: “I can’t get into collecting Chinese art, there’s too much to know”. I think, this is just prejudice. Or “I can’t pronounce the artist name so I can’t collect Chinese art”. I think we have big prejudice about what art we think is accessible to collect.
Barbara: Getting history books, or art history books, is fairly easy to research. Sometimes all you need to do is read one or two books and you get the context much better, and then the work is much easier to try to engage with or understand.
Henrietta: Of course, with the lockdown and all these travel bans, it wouldn’t help the situation. How can we promote cross cultural dialogue from this point on? Your platform is one thing.
Barbara: I don’t know. That’s a difficult challenge for me. But what we’re doing with the website is one way to promote cross cultural dialogue, but normally in a typical year, I travel to China four or five times and this is an impossibility right now. We can’t figure this out just at the moment. On the other hand, if you wanted to do an interview with me in Hong Kong, I probably would have flown 15 hours to come meet with you, whereas Zoom is an amazing tool and allows us to talk together without me leaving my house.
Audience Questions for Barbara
Henrietta: We were able to collect some of the few questions that some students wrote to us. I would like to ask these on their behalf and see what you’d want to respond to. A student wrote: “How do you relate your earlier curatorial effort like the exhibition staged at your home My Friends In My Apartment in 1996 and the recent lockdown, which keeps us at home?”
Barbara: You know that show was like really prescient about what was going to happen this year. I made that show because the Whitney Biennial were all artists that were friends with the curator and I thought, if you can do a Whitney Biennial just by putting in your friends, I could do an exhibition in my house just by putting in my friends. But my friends were all really well-known New York artists, so it was interesting, we got a huge amount of coverage. It was at a moment in the art world where a lot of galleries were closing because of financial hardship and a lot of artists did not have outlets for their work, so I did this show in my apartment.
Doing the platform is very similar to that because it’s all being done within the space of my office within the apartment, but this is not just my friends, it has called on me to tap into all the artists that I’ve ever admired in my career. I think both initiatives, the My Friends in My Apartment show and this platform, show that you do not have to have a major institution behind you to make an impact in the art world, you just need initiative.
Henrietta: That’s very encouraging because while we respect a lot of major institutions, there are just limited opportunities and resources, but artists are many creative people in many different parts of the world. What you mean with your initiative and creativity is you just have to create a space for yourself.
Barbara: Yeah, you have to make a space for yourself and have something to say. I think what people forget, is that art is about communication, so you can really use art, curating shows to make a statement about your point of view on an issue, your insights on an issue and incorporate the artist’s insights so that you can make an impact. And I’ve proven that over and over again in my career.
Henrietta: I also think that what you have done is important. The action, and then your documentation. You always record it in a book, your afterthoughts and findings. So after this initiative and platform, then we’ll look forward to reading your other book.
Barbara: Thank you.
Henrietta: What are the challenges of launching online exhibitions in catastrophic times like this? Do you have any ideas on how to expand the norm of virtual exhibition, Barbara?
Barbara: Well we had some ideas on how we wanted the artwork presented. We definitely wanted to present the images large and readable and impactful, and that went into decisions about how the site should look and how the artists should be on it. I would say, the biggest difficulty, and I’m sure you can agree with me, Henrietta, of doing anything in the art world during a pandemic is raising money. For good reason, a lot of foundations that normally support our projects are giving money to COVID-19 research or emergency assistance to artists. That is the biggest challenge for us, but the other challenges we’ve managed to get around, that’s important to us.
Henrietta: I may be narrow in my way of thinking, but maybe it takes a few major art patrons who believe in you and what you’re doing to support you at this time. We are seeing something similar here in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, there is a group of amazing, hardworking art people including art promotion, auction houses, Asia Society, and Gallery Association people who came together and started Art Power HK platform, which is a bit similar to yours.
It’s also a non-profit platform and they have decided not to take private or company sponsorships, they’ll only work with crowd funding or government funding. But with government funding there are a bit of restrictions, right? You’re right, this problem will be the same around the world. How do we make the most impact, like what you’re doing, with the least amount of resources — apart from your brain power — but the monetary resources? This is the 10-million-dollar question.
Barbara: Well I think the more relevant you make the work you’re showing, the more people will tune in and watch. What gallery associations here in the States are doing is that they’re just showing work they haven’t been able to sell in the past. And some of that’s relevant, and some of that’s not relevant. And I don’t think people feel compelled to tune in if the work isn’t extremely relevant, because what we’re going through is so visceral and disturbing that we need an outlet for that.
Henrietta: Having been a curator for over 26 years, is there any show that’s changed your curatorial approaches fundamentally?
Barbara: Yes. The exhibition Cities on the Move that was curated by Hou Hanru and Hans Ulrich Obrist. When I saw that show in New York it completely changed my understanding of how the world was organised and how art and architecture fit into that. It was a whole new way of presenting art, instead of seeing pictures on the wall that was supposed to “speak for themselves”. Everything was contextualised with the growth of the cities across Asia.
Then I saw Hou Hanru give a talk, and when he showed photographs of what Shanghai looked like in the year 2000, it completely blew my mind. Somehow, I really thought New York is the epicentre of the art world and all these other places were far behind. I actually thought of things that way. And then when I heard Hou Hanru speak, I figured out that there were other exciting centres that I needed to get myself to in order to really know what contemporary art was like. That completely shifted my perspective on how to curate a show, and how to look at art.
Henrietta: How would you describe the art scene in New York City and how would it change after COVID-19 now?
Barbara: I don’t know how to describe the New York art scene right now because we haven’t had openings or art fairs or public gatherings for the last three or four months. It’s not like I’m running into people to compare notes with and to find out how they’re doing.
I don’t know exactly what New York is going to be like post pandemic and even with the opening up now, certain galleries are open by appointment, and I’m just not sure exactly how that is going to work. But New York is still one of the most vital places in the world in terms of contemporary art, and I love living here, But I hope to get to Hong Kong sometime soon.
About Ora-Ora Live
Each week, Ora-Ora’s founder Dr. Henrietta Tsui-Leung will speak with various members of the art community — including artists, curators, academics and other professionals working in the cultural sector — to address topics of interest related but not limited to Hong Kong’s art and cultural scene. The series aims to be an outlet for creativity and a means to connect with peers who share similar interests. The episodes will also available live on Ora-Ora’s Instagram (@galerieoraora), Facebook (Galerie Ora-Ora) and later on Ora-Ora’s YouTube channel.
