Hello, I'm Trash Bear, and welcome to the Bear Facts Podcast. In this episode, I travel to Washington, D. C. to sit down with Melissa Chu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, to talk about the evolving role of the National Art Museum and its 50th anniversary. This episode is brought to you by my old friend, And the very first subscriber to the Bare Facts, David Zwirner. By the way, they also have a great podcast called Dialogues. Give it a listen after this episode.
It's marking two anniversaries coming up. Ten years of being the director here and 50 years of the museum. What does that mean to you and to the city?
Well, 50 years of this museum's history is a real milestone. as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. I think that, you know, so much has happened in this time of us being open, but also in terms of an understanding of what modern art was and is now. And certainly contemporary art scenes changed a lot.
And for my own tenure, 10 years is a milestone and one that I feel very fortunate to be here, located in the nation's capital and now it's an extraordinary moment to be part of this museum's kind of 50th anniversary.
Even these terms modern art. Yeah, I know. I wonder about is it time to Change them with MoMA, Museum of Modern Art. What does it mean when you talk to people and you say modern art? What do they think?
I think most people, not necessarily in our field, conflate modern and contemporary. So, for them it could be art that was created today or even now we have a history of over a hundred years. So,
Well, you're going to do a 15th anniversary show. So do you think in terms of that, about different periods or do you think about them for a new audience of being sort of all put together as one narrative?
Well, I think we're at a moment where there's no such thing as one singular narrative. And I think for us, our 50th anniversary exhibition was more about us acknowledging our own history, a collection from a single founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, and wanting to figure out how to kind of talk about that history of its collection, that here we are, it was one person's dream to assemble an important collection that could then one day go on and found a museum.
It really came from first an impulse, uh, a collecting impulse that he had. And so in some ways our collection is based on an individual approach. You know, he had certain predilections and interests that we've inherited.
And so this exhibition is about, in some ways accounting for it, but also figuring out what this, um, I mean, the show begins in 1860, which is a moment that people don't necessarily associate with modern art and so it's really one that allows us to showcase more of our collection depth and holdings that really haven't been seen in a long time and in a way that people don't really associate with the Hirshhorn history nor our way of kind of telling that story. Well,
how would you compare the story being told now, particularly in relationship to the works that he gave, to how that story was told 50 years ago at the founding? Has the story changed as history kept to the same place, or has it really developed in ways that no one, or even Mr. Hirshhorn, wouldn't have expected it?
Well, I think there are a couple of, um, important differences. I think the first difference I would say is that when we opened in 1974, that's often known as the post war period, but you're still in the 20th century. And I often talk about our scope as having just expanded exponentially. Where in 74, you were talking about 74 years or so, give or take, now we're talking about over 100 years.
So the late 19th century, early 20th century works actually feel like they're so far removed from our life today, that we feel like we have to always be providing much more context. So that's kind of one thing that our mission and scope kind of stretched, right? 50 years on from our founding. And then the other thing is that the, um, art history itself, and I've spoken about this in the past, has changed so much from even when I went to art school.
When I was at art school, I was very interested in multiple art centers. And even that was kind of Were you making art in art school? I went to a university where it was a degree in art history and criticism, and we were required to make art, even though we were art historians. I always think of that as being such an important grounding to my own understanding of how hard it is to make work that is compelling and with your own kind of voice.
And I'm always humbled by it, but I also feel like I have some degree of knowledge of what making is like. When I think of art history, I think of multiple stories, multiple voices, and multiple locations. And I don't think that that's how I was taught art history. I was taught art history as maybe two major art centers, and kind of that was it. You had to be in Paris or New York in order to really make it.
When I was coming of age in the, um, late nineties, there began to be a discussion about multiple art centers. And that's kind of what drew me into, in some ways, wanting to study what I did was a moment of international biennales and, um, things like that. So when I think today of how we tell art history, in some ways, I go back to my early studies, which is there are multiple ways of approaching this multiple voices.
And that's what we've tried to do in our revolutions 50th anniversary show, which is to also allow, uh, contemporary counterpoints to the historical works in our collection.
I'm going to come back a little bit more to politics. Revolution is an interesting concept. I'm thinking to what you were saying about even using the term post war. It's been identified to me lately. It's like, who's war? Yeah. Which war? Which war? Which war? And we took it for granted. And you still see it at the auction houses, talk about it. And we think about it as only one war. And suddenly language is going to have to change quite a bit.
So as we slide into these terminologies, And I think Reflecting on it is useful for where we stand, particularly as you're trying to think about how you're more global.
After the break, Melissa shares her observations on the evolution of the art world in Asia. This episode of the Bare Facts Podcast is brought to you by David Zwirner. Their podcast, Dialogues, is about art. Artists and the Way They Think, with each episode featuring a conversation with artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians exploring what it means to make things today. Tune in for conversations with artists like Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Elizabeth Payton, Rikrit Tiravani, and so many more.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm always reminded of my work, uh, in Asia. And when I traveled to Vietnam in the mid 1990s, you know, here we refer to it as the Vietnam war and there they refer to it as the American war. And so it's all about where you are standing and For so long, art centers, such as New York, were really a center, and so they defined the terms and the
language. There was one history of art, it was how MoMA told it, from the beginning of Picasso, Brancusi, Baba. through ABAX to Pop Art, and that's kind of an elite view. I happen to like that view, but it is a bit monolithic. Do you think, let's go back to Asia for a second. Now it's 2024, you have like M Plus there, you have 25 years of being a bit open to the West. What do you see now versus when you started? Looking at art there and seeing the art scene,
I often think that it would be hard to imagine how much it's changed from when I first began to travel in the region, like from the early 1990s, and I think it's almost come full circle in the sense that throughout the 1990s kind of peaking in anywhere from 2000 to 2010. There was an exponential sense of just development on every front, whether it was new museums, public and private, galleries, auctions, biennales.
Non profits, artists run spaces, all of the ecology that we come to associate with a contemporary art world was there in Asia, in different ways, in different countries. And yet, today, we have a very different scenario. I was just talking to a friend and colleague, Orville Schell, who runs the U. S. China Center, and we collaborated on an interview about Chinese contemporary art, because both of us were doing so much work. Uh, at the time in the Chinese contemporary art scene.
And we said, we didn't realize that we were there at a high point, at a moment in which there was so much openness and kind of porosity between the art worlds, between the U. S., between China, between the world. And so now it's a very different environment. We always assume that it's linear progression, but actually it's never like that in reality, that things go back and forth all the time.
And so on the one hand, the generation of artists that I studied, researched, did a PhD in, you know, they have a huge body of work behind them. And now we see a new younger generation emerge, but with a very different sensibility. And a very different relationship to the government and with a very different set of, um, preoccupations and interests. So it's a completely different place. What
I found fascinating being there three times last year and having been other times is it's kind of the knowledge is kind of simultaneous for a lot of the people they discovered old masters and impressionism and pop art and emerging art. Almost simultaneous, they're seeing it in broad way. In fact, I think they're a little bit embarrassed. It's that bad. I think it's kind of great to experience all art at one point, rather than in this sort of classic way that we've been put together.
Do you think that that's accurate to what's gone on for a lot of people? I
think it depends who we're talking about. I think there's definitely an asymmetry. Certainly for collectors. Oh, okay, for collectors, okay. Definitely true. I think that I often think about it as an interesting asymmetry of knowledge, in that whenever I travel in Asia, there's often a deep understanding of American art, actually. And yet here, there's not nearly an interest necessarily always in understanding what that local context is. I'm often struck by that.
I think if we're talking about new collectors in Asia, that's a different scenario. And I think what is interesting is that what you speak of as a kind of a lack of hierarchy of knowledge necessarily, that you're learning things all at the same time. It's certainly the case that knowledge is learned very differently today than say even 15 years ago because so much is available. You know, if you're a collector, we used to have to wait for magazines.
And I mean, I've, Sound very old now, but there's a simultaneity of knowledge, like all at once, all at the same time. I remember even a number of years ago that friends of mine in China would have a better sense when I lived in New York, they'd have a better sense of what was going on in New York because people would FaceTime them at the openings and they would be doing videos. And so they would know all of, you know, what was going on in Chelsea. at that moment in time.
And so I think that the way people consume or learn is very different today. But I would say that the idea of connoisseurship, which in the contemporary art world is like a bit of a dirty word, but you know, it's, how do you acquire a depth of knowledge? I think that's harder today, actually. I
often say we're over informed, but undereducated. And you think because you've got Google and all these things that you know what's going on. But if you're not seeing art in person or there's just many rabbit holes, um, the other thing we noticed lately is there was a big show opening at Hausernworth in Hong Kong. And I noticed like, this is a Chinese master and like none of us in the West. Know what that person is. So we in the West, in fact, we're behind because they know what's going on here.
And we don't have much knowledge of what's been going on a 50 years of, of that. Do you feel that you bridge that gap a little bit? And that's part of your mission? I don't
know about me personally, but my own background, you know, my father is from China, my mother's Australian, and I think I have. felt that I'm kind of acutely aware of an in between space. And I'm not sure of how that's necessarily impacted my work here at the Hirshhorn, but I am very interested in artists that lie a little bit outside of the usual streams
of Well, let me segue into a different in between space. Yeah. Because you're in an in between space of United States government and the politics of Washington and working with a lot of young artists who have strong feelings about these things. and have made a conscious decision. I think that the demographics of what you collect as a museum, what you show have shifted quite a bit. So you are that middle person there. Can you talk about that a little bit of those challenges?
Join us in a moment as Melissa reflects on the responsibilities of a national art museum and the Hirshhorn's recent television show. Finding the next great artist. This episode of the Bare Facts Podcast is brought to you by David Zwirner. Their podcast, Dialogues, is about artists and the way they think. With each episode featuring a conversation with artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians exploring what it means to make things today.
Tune in for conversations with creatives from Luca Guadagnino, to Sofia Coppola, to Hilton Als, and so many more. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
It's a curious position to be a national museum and that we have really been thinking about that a lot. Like, what does it mean to have a national mandate or mission? And I think that it's about having a sense of being accessible. And we talk about this radical accessibility, how we are a free museum. We're one of the few major modern contemporary art museums that are free in this country. And so, knowing that we want to share all of the work that we do with the most people possible.
You know, how do we do that? Knowing that contemporary art used to be, you know, when I joined the field, it used to be considered something that was for the rarefied few. And so being here located on the National Mall, where there are 35 million annual visitors, we think a lot about, you know, what is that first point of contact, first entry point for a visitor that's never been in a museum of modern art before.
I think we're looking for a program that addresses both the history side, it's like, what can we tell the visitor about history and our collection? And on the other side, what can we say about the world today through an artist's perspective?
And an interesting conversation with Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney, and it was during COVID, like, who's our audience? Is it people who live here in Washington that come every show and their members? Is it the 35 million people who come to Washington to see the Air and Space, to see the White House? And a third audience that's, especially during lockdown, that was virtual. Do you favor one the other? Are you reaching different ways?
I would think that COVID really forced that conversation in some ways.
During COVID, we made this decision to attempt to do everything we did in our building online. And I would say one of the most successful projects that we did was that we worked with Arthur Jafa to present a work that we acquired.
One of my top 10 favorite artists. Yes. A huge
fan. Love is the message, the message is death. But that was at that particular moment and incredibly significant work to help people to understand his experience in America. And we realized working with him that there were a number of other museums with that work in their collection. And at a moment when all museums around the world were closed, we collaborated with, we convened 13 museums and we web streamed it. You know, we'd never done that before.
And it over a weekend, I think attracted over 150, 000. Visitors, essentially, and that for me, I think, was a high point of the work that we were able to do during COVID,
you know, this is still Washington. Is there any other insight that you've observed here that we New Yorkers might not see? I think so, because New York, I mean, the other day in New York, we had They take over the atrium of MoMA and the museum seemed to say, you guys can stay, just don't damage anything and leave at seven o'clock. And from what I read, they seem to sort of go with the flow, but there's a lot going on there that's New York based that would be different, I suspect, in Washington.
Mm hmm. It's true. It's true. I mean, DC, uh, you know, the majority of our visitors are actually from, you know, outside of DC. So they're from all across America. And I think that we're more likely to encounter a visitor that is simply curious rather than one that has a set series of expectations of what we should be doing. So that has a different kind of
inflection. Now, sort of going back on the Arthur Jafa thing a little bit, you did do this experiment through mass media. Through your TV show, what was it called and where was it shown?
The exhibit finding the next great artist was a collaboration with Smithsonian channel and subsequently MTV. I have to say,
I didn't watch it, even though some friends are on it. Then you can't comment on it. So I'm not going to comment on something I haven't seen, but I'd be curious. What was that experience like?
So people in the art world are very suspicious of TV, generally. And I understand why. My
dad was a television writer. So maybe I'm less. Well, I
haven't done this. I understand why we did it. We made a decision at the museum to move forward for a number of reasons. I think firstly, we collaborated with the Smithsonian channel. So we were able to have a hand in some of the content in the selection of the artists and other elements. So within each episode, there is an inclusion of her Sean works in the collection, for example, which is a very different format.
From other television series, you know, so it had a very different tenor, although is seen as a competition, it was less competitive than other models, right? Meaning there was no elimination, nothing like that. I mean, there are lots of ways in which we actually had a commitment to work with the artist. and the television producers, Smithsonian channel to create a series that was about being an artist and making work with our own mission as a museum.
We felt like that was an important contribution in a very different medium. Then we would ordinarily work. The art
world is very conservative. And it's really, and it's very prudish and it hates anything new. So it took a little bit of bravery to say, I know we're going to take some incoming, but there's a different point.
And I think for us, it wasn't for the art world. It was for the 112 million households that Smithsonian Channel and MTV might reach. And this is something that I think is different from perhaps a New York museum. Our audience is this country. And so would it not make sense for us to then try to reach audiences in their own homes?
I think we get lost into this notion that there's one art world. The world I'm in is a really small world of a couple thousand people. And most of the time you're in that world, that's where the money comes, that's where the best art, quote unquote, is that's really radical and changing art history. And then there's millions of other artists and they're doing something different. It's not worse, it's different. And so I think you should be commended for making attempts.
I mean, that's for us an important piece of our work. We want to be able to speak to different audiences in different ways. And that's what a public museum is about. That on the one hand, we can do a Tino Sehgal performance. And on the other hand, we can, you know, show de Kooning. We can have a Laurie Anderson show. For us, it's about how do we have. different kinds of voices, different kinds of artworks that can somehow, you know, cohabit within this museum.
In our final segment, Melissa considers the ways artists have influenced the museum. From Hiroshi Sugimoto's new sculpture garden, To Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms. Don't transact without The Bear Faxed. Subscribe to the Bear Faxed newsletter to receive the key developments in the art world and op eds from Josh Bear in your inbox each Thursday. Plus special auction additions direct from the sale room. The only report on who bought what and who tried to but didn't get it.
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As a public space here, something big has gone on here also with the sculpture garden. Could you tell us a little bit more about what that is, how that was done, who organized it?
So the sculpture garden is a major project for all of us here. It's been many years now in the planning. We commissioned Hiroshi Sugimoto, who is probably best known for his photographs and some years ago began to design spaces and architecture. And so we commissioned him to rethink our sculpture garden and to really propose what a sculpture garden of the 21st century could be. And that is for us a space that is directly located on the National Mall.
It is one that now we can, with his design, have an open gallery space that is changing for new large scale commissions. There are more intimate galleries for the 20th century. works in depth that we have by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore and Matisse and others, and also performance space. So for us, it's an important extension of the galleries inside our museum. So we'll be doing everything that we now do inside also outside.
And speaking of Sugimoto, I often tell people the best piece of writing I've seen about, I'll use the word post war Japan, was his essay for the Hirshhorn. It's about a 20 page. Essay, and it's really maybe the best piece of artist writing I've ever read. So if you can find that catalog. I don't even know where mine is, someone took it, but it's a great, great piece. And I associate the Hirshhorn with Sugimoto in that piece of writing. Yeah. I
think it's important that an artist was able to rethink the space too, because it really was about creating the right environment for art, and who better to do that than an artist. Tell us a little
bit more about what's upcoming in exhibitions for people to get them excited to come and visit. So we've
been working these past few years with Os Gemios, who are Brazilian twins, who began their life as graffiti artists and now, uh, creating quite extraordinary installations, paintings, sculpture, and looking forward to working with them in their Third floor takeover of the museum and we're also working on a commission with Adam Pendleton and
anything Way out down the line that's coming. It's great when museums can work on a short turnaround Which is I think a really tough thing to stay relevant for a museum when it can take two three four years to organize But sometimes you need 5 or 10 years to do a Rothko show or, what's the show I saw here, was it Yves Klein? That was a tremendous show. Yes, that was an amazing show. I remember that. That must have taken a long time and a lot to do.
Is there anything on that level that's Five or 10 years out that you can.
Five or 10 years out is the revitalization of this whole museum. So once the sculpture garden is complete, then we turn our attention to this building and SOM, the original architects and Annabel Seldorf are responsible for that redesign. That's interior? Interior. So expanding the galleries, making as much of this building as possible publicly accessible and for art. When
the demand is there, people want to come. I mean, when you did the Kusama rooms, I mean, the attendance must have been insane,
right? So that year was an extraordinary year for us. So we had 1. 2 million visitors and that exhibition for us was really a breakthrough moment. And it's hard to imagine today because Kusama is so much in the public sphere. But when we embarked on that exhibition, which had. a focus specifically on her infinity mirrored rooms, which had not really received much attention prior to that. It was an extraordinary moment where, you know, we had lines around the museum from 3am in the morning and
then we sent it on national tour. I think that we were, that we realized really what the demand for art and serious art was. And I remember even David's Werner Gallery in Chelsea, people were waiting 6, 8, 10 hours in line. I mean, that's terrible that they waited so long. But on the other hand, the fact that people wanted to, the only place that gets a little iffy is it being set up for selfies and how to get past that moment, too. That's sort of the 2. 0 of looking
at art. Well, it's somewhat ironic because her infinity mirrored rooms are intended to be fully immersive moments of. in a way, not just immersion, but escape. You're in an environment to take you somewhere else. So it's kind of ironic that it became a selfie thing.
Yes, and then you had to be sort of organized. You have 12 minutes or four minutes. Oh, much less than that. You know, or one minute, rather than some people would like two minutes, and some people would like an hour. And that's kind of an unfortunate byproduct of its own success. But I think the moment here really changed the perception of, what the demand from young people was to look at art. So
it's hard to imagine, but she began to create those works in 1965. And up until our exhibition that really looked at that part of her practice, they were really always considered a sideline, you know, to her infinity net paintings. And then I think that the kind of coming together of a moment of a younger audience demographic being interested in contemporary art and museums, along with their cell phones.
That was a whole other coalescence of things that changed and a whole appreciation of her work and those works in particular.
One last question that relates to something that I spoke about recently. Um, I've been complaining that a lot of major museums don't have artists on their board. Now, a number of other major museums do. It's like, how can this be 2024? And for some institutions to think that that's not something valuable. It's like, it seems like preposterous to me.
So the Hirshhorn has, uh, nearly always had artists as board members.
And for a long time, Ann Hamilton served, um, most recently Theaster Gates, who did so much work with us during his tenure to help us to develop different kinds of communities and audiences here at the museum, whether it was through a performance series, whether it was through public programs that he did, or even during COVID, where we co curated an artist diary series in the First three weeks of the COVID lockdown, we invited nearly 50 artists to send in kind of video
diaries almost of their life in lockdown. And it was a wonderful kind of personal, very intimate look at what it was like to be an artist in that particular moment in history. But
when you're sitting at the bar at the association of art museum directors, then somebody able to turn to one of the others says, yo. No artists on the board, what's going on? And do those directors say, I know, you're right, but? Or is it just not spoken about? Director to director.
I've never had a conversation like that with a director. Maybe you should. I mean, each to their own. You know, I mean, everyone, each board of each museum has its own kind of ecosystem, its own history, its own understanding. And, you know, we try to do our best on representation on our
board. What a great political answer, given that we're in the home of American politics. With that, I say thank you, Melissa, for joining us.
Thank you, Josh. Wonderful to have you here.
Thank you for listening to the Fairfax podcast. This episode is brought to you by David z Werner. Our host is Josh Bearer. Our executive producer is Lou Yang Zong. Our content strategist is Boli Yang Shin. I'm Will Griffith, our associate editor. And our editing team is Mona Productions.
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