Adrienne Edwards

EO

Did you know that you wanted to be a curator starting out? Or is it something that happened along the way?

AE

No, it was in the relationship to thought. Thought was always primary. I think the most important thing to know is that I had a career as an arts administrator. And I decided to include it. And I remember the day I did it, and then I went to India for a little bit, as one does. [Laughs.] I always knew what I wanted to do, I had seen a lot of art and I have done a lot of work. I've been going to shows and seeing things at that point for a long time, about ten years.

I was aware of what I thought was missing in terms of the discourse, in terms of presentation and framing for art and I felt like one of the laziest things that you saw again—and again, and again—about anything that has some level of complexity was, “Oh, it's about art and life.” Anything that was interdisciplinary, anything that had to do with the world—which everything had to do with the world—lacked a certain level of complexity. I didn't know that I could take it on, but I knew that I had something to say. So, I decided to do that. Because I had a grown-up life and was like, “Okay, so now how do I do this? Like, how do I leave this nine to five that was the six figures at that time?” I was the vice president of the Apollo Theater, which is a whole other story. [Laughs.] I ended up there because of Thelma [Golden]. Jonelle Procope, who's leading there now, had gone into power and at the time, it was functioning as a commercial theater, which you could book.

The first act to perform, when I worked there, was Aretha Franklin. At the time, she still wanted to be paid in cash. We paid Aretha Franklin $125,000 dollars a night in cash. So, each day, I would go walking to the Chase Bank and ask for this cash, which is another thing. I need someone to perform that someday. The administration was trying to make this commercial theater a nonprofit. I had some understanding and experience around how you do this, strategically—with how you think about programming in this space as an administrator. So, because of Thelma, I ended up taking this job and ended up on her couch on a weekly basis—bemoaning taking this job, because it was hard, really hard.

We were building something from the ground up. So, I said, “Okay, three years, you can do the 75th anniversary?” And then I promised myself that I would do something else. And that something else was, which I knew at the time, going back to graduate school. So that's kind of where it started. I wanted to write books, which is just to say, I wanted to tell the story.

EO

When I was reading your writing earlier, I was excited. You’re generous with your subject matter, in that you think hard against the work. There’s something happening so intimately in the writing, that it doesn’t necessarily belong exclusively to the work.

AE

I might ask you, what do you think my writing is about? One of the things I love about Aria, which is something that I recognize in you, but that I also see in my own project, is this desire to have something to say, and to be rigorous around it. My project is to bring a certain rigor that was forked along two paths. One was Blackness, obviously, theoretically—just really trying to fuck with that term. And a lot of people are, but I feel like from the position of a curator—or the position of an artist—to sit with thought in that way was unusual.

So, there's that fork, and then there's the interdisciplinary fork. Sometimes those things converge. Sometimes I'm writing about Blackness as the thing that is performing in the world. Sometimes for me, those two things are deeply about sensuality. They're deeply about what it means to feel toward something, and then, how do you make someone feel towards something thing; how do you compel? A word that I think a lot about is felicity, which seems like old school Performance Studies.

EO

[Laughs.] Yes, precisely. Felicitous Speech Act. Your writing feels like something that is being incited, a call to action.

AE

This is the sweet spot of it, right? That you have been compelled, you have been interpolated. To what extent can you bring me into something and that's the sensual dimension of it—which often doesn't get talked about. If you're really trying to sit with what the tipping point is? What is the precipice of that? It's the sensual part.

EO

Aria, how do you confront abstraction in your practice?

AD

I think I have approached abstraction through a frame similar to 1960s and 1970s minimalist artists. More recently, I began to feel I could only do so much just walking step by step behind Robert Morris, like, step by step by step. But overall, I never actively considered my work “abstract” or “abstraction.” I think it's structural; it's not abstract. It's very concrete. It’s not abstracting something; it's modeling an action very precisely.

From the beginning, when we started talking about this work, when I was like, “I'm going to make this monolith that's getting beat up by itself,” it was always only about making something that's only ever itself. And so, if there's any abstraction involved, it might be in the fact that the dimensions of the object are roughly my dimensions. And the force that is applied to it is something that is around what I could, as a human being, apply to another object of the material, or whatever. But it's a model more than anything.

AE

I've been sitting with this obsession for many years now, which is this question of the monochrome, the Black monochrome, specifically. There's just something about that Black Square that Malevich made. And it was purely just an instinctual thing. I was looking at it obsessively, reading the history obsessively, thinking about the political context in which it was arriving at that time. First, in 1913 as a theater curtain—later, in 1915, it became a painting. As an object it’s so volatile. It's materially coming apart. It’s either trying to say something or it's falling apart, or under pressure. I could sit there and take it in endless directions.

And then in 2015, a few conservators got hold of it. And they discover there are two forms under the painting’s surface. And there's something written on the side, just alongside, inside the square. They also reveal that there's a futurist, kind of proto-futuristic form. There's some knockoff of Picasso. And then there's also this joke, which tracks back to an Alphonse Allais comic called “Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit” that had been in a French newspaper in 1897 or so.

“Negros battling in a cave at night.” The body was already implicated. My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one, so you can't actually talk about abstraction without talking about the body. I'm not talking about this language, we've been taught and given, right? Figuration, form, that the abstract is a “void” or absent of these things? And this is where sensuality comes in: what was that trigger for me? What was it that I was sensing that I didn't even know that I couldn’t name?

Part of this work I've been doing is thinking about the quantum dynamics of why it is that Black artists who know nothing about this story, pick up this color, in the ’90s, and deal with it conceptually. We're making an insistence upon the fact that what we’re doing is about the concept of race itself, which then jumps us all the way back to W.E.B Dubois’s most experimental text. He's like, I've done all this political work. I've done all this work, trying to make a case for my humanity. And he gets to a point where he is like, “fuck it,” and writes this autobiography. It's so experimental. He's taking all these different dynamics, in one chapter he becomes this white man, and in another, he takes on something else. And he's jumping through these different figures.

What does it mean to think in a dynamic way, where the voice is trying to do something that was already related to the way that you were raced? To engage this thing that is already irreconcilable—it's illogical, it's a madness that is embedded by Malevich in this black square. Which is illogical, irrational, and it makes no sense.

LO-B

What are the intersections for you, Adrienne, between abstraction and conceptual art? People tend to think they aren’t related but you’ve shown us how they are. In the Whitney Biennial catalog, you make a case for lush abstraction.

AE

Maybe I’ve offered a possibility of what that can be, but that it’s not what we've been told it is. I feel like everything that I see is not what we've been told that it is. And I have to also say, maybe in terms of sticking with some of this nomenclature, it’s really important to me to destabilize or expand what we think abstraction is, formally—and it's important that we do that for conceptual art.

I often think about why that is, and it gets back to something that José Muñoz said to me very early on. I arrived at performance studies after getting a master's degree in Italian Renaissance art—I skipped out on the PhD. I had some fun, and it was amazing, but I realized that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life on it. I learned how to read a painting and iconography. I built my chops and gained an understanding the fundamentals of Western art, which then allowed me to know where to poke holes.

I also wanted to be able to read abstraction. I wanted to be able to think about a conceptual art that feels and has demands on our heart and soul— that's not about us reading. So, that's kind of how I came to this thinking through a lush conceptualism. And there are many ways to plot it. The conceptual, for me, is the core of the structure of our society and these categories. This is why I love [W.E.B.] Dubois: there's this thing that happens in the 1960s and ’70s and we call it conceptual art. And I think there's a reason Adrian Piper went ahead and stuck with it, because she saw in it a bit of Dubois—though she would never say that. But you can see it in her aesthetic choices. What she was doing and the way she was navigating it is so much about illuminating possible contours of conceptual art.

EO

Yes, performing concepts like indexicality and noumena. What did José say to you?

AE

I had this whole conversation with José about how there's performance in my project, but that it’s not about performance. And he was like, “Uh huh.” He saw in me what I hadn't even seen in myself. And I was like, "It’s about this and this," and he just nodded his head and handed me a stack of books. And I was like, “So what's the difference between performance studies and art history? What am I doing here? What is this?” And he was like, “You'll know when you're in the room.” He was so right. So, one of my favorite things, even to this day, is just going to conferences and doing what José said: “Just lob it in there and run.” Viewers of the Biennial were like, “Performance Studies is taking over everything.” And I thought, "I should frame that line and put it in my office."

AD

What is the difference between performance studies and art history?

AE

It's an art historical context. In art history, they're essentially telling you, it comes out of this school, this is who hung out with who, and then they did this brushstroke, and then they worked with this material. At some point, you might get to like, “These are some cool theories.”

In performance studies, they didn't teach us any art. I should be very clear. We are a cult; this is very specific to NYU. This does not happen at Northwestern’s performance studies, does not happen at Brown’s performance studies. This is a very NYU, legendary approach to teaching. There was no art ever. You would go in and they'd be like, here's your Marxism class. First class, first week, you would read the Grundrisse. Or you’d have your class on Deleuze, or Lacanian thought or deep Freud. I don't prescribe to any of the psychoanalytic stuff; that's a whole other thing. But you’d have classes on Foucault. So, you would have theoretical thinkers, and that's what you sat with…

EO

Can you zoom out for those unfamiliar with these modes of thinking? I’m a student of this school of thinking but can you break down the difference between art history and performance studies? What is performance studies?

LO-B

It feels closer to philosophy, perhaps? Everything you’re saying about art history as a discipline really resonates with me.

AE

They’re tools that we were given to tell stories from the performance studies perspective, with what it does in the world. So, then take this and tell us what it is that Stanley Brouwn is doing. And that's the play, that's the gymnastics that you get if you're rigorous, because it can be messy and a lot of people aren’t rigorous when they’re reading work, and don’t know what they are driving towards.

The extraction in that program and my experience was that you come knowing the art that you're invested in. I arrived with this understanding of Blackness and wanting to think about abstraction, minimalism, and conceptual art. Then you show up with that interest and they say, “Okay, here's some stuff for you to look at.” Then you see if it holds or not. Everything that I still do is just testing these ideas, and then I get to go to the Whitney and get a nice, big budget and play with folks like Aria, and say, “Does this hold up, this idea?” and then maybe I'll go back and revise something or write.

I'm always writing alongside all my curatorial projects—publishing books for the museum and academia. For me these things are always on parallel tracks—I cannot do one without the other. That’s why something like the Biennial is super hard because that's a decade of work and basically a theoretical book in a show.

EO

Yes, Aria and I were talking about the formal and structural aspects of the show earlier and were trying to bridge the ideas across the two of them together. My reading in understanding art history is that we’re not taught that we have our own innate ideologies when we enter into the academy. And that’s the problem and disconnect, where they want you to tether your own belief system to theirs and become subservient, where you don’t have any sort of references to pull from outside of the ones that you’re provided with from them. But let’s talk more about the biennial.

AE

I'm happy to answer specific questions about it.

AD

I have a question. The two floors are so different; the architecture is treated differently. One floor is so dark and enclosed, the other so light and open. Could you talk a bit about why this layout rather than a more integrated install?

AE

It came out of a decade of thought and ideas and things you look at and soak up in the world. For me, one was Lina Bo Bardi’s sculpture, not only sculpture, but her earliest systems of display, when she had left Italy, and gone to São Paulo, and her husband was working as an art advisor, and it was really kind of weird. She was making the systems of display for different kinds of collections. I have been spending a lot of time in Brazil for about a decade now—these were pilgrimages, really, to see Bo Bardi’s work. And I have had at my desk for twelve years or so an image of one of her earliest pieces.

We worked with our exhibition designers, and we were like, this is the thing that is the obsession, what can we do with it? And so then you have this process of trying to figure out something that can be made specifically for the works that you imagine are going to be on it. And then you have to go to the artist and be like, is this a usual thing for your work, how do you feel about it? Which then becomes this process of making it specific. So, there were like 15 structures that we ended up making related to that. But also, just if you work at the Whitney, you've got the largest columnless space in any museum nearby. And it felt like a time for a little bit of chaos.

AD

I think it's something that I always just like—for me, the install also brought up some thoughts about what you can do with exhibition space as an artist versus as a curator. It made me think about my own sort of sometimes theatrical desires—to put a sculpture in a dark room with a big spotlight or something. There's something so loaded about that as an artist, the specter of installation art maybe. It was cool to see you guys as the curators, like a kind of edit if you guys do this thing that feels a bit forbidden in terms of presentation.

AE

Really forbidden. I am a creative person. I don't work in a mausoleum, I work in a space that is dynamic, and about people and making you feel something. You may not like it, but that is part of the job, I believe that. That's also what makes me different from an art historian. There's a little bit of license in creativity. I like the pressure that theatricality puts on a museum. I like the fact that a certain kind of animatedness is always racialized. I like that it means something for me to be who I am and going into that building every day. And I'm kind of like, "Let me just be what I am, not what I'm not!"

EO

The Whitney has such specific architecture, and the biennial interior structure made me think of a circus tent because of how light manifested within that darkness.

AE

The light is so hard; we were fighting against the light.

EO

I really want to know your thoughts on its architecture. I don’t think people really consider the architecture and performance of Renzo Piano’s new building. Given the Whitney Museum’s history with the Breuer building uptown, its former home, and its relationship to light. It went from practically having no windows and light to being a titanium lightbox. There was a decorum to the Breuer building, where you get off the elevator and the structure of the building really determines how you interact with it and the art–there’s a system at work that you have to submit to as a patron. I remember seeing Andrea Fraser’s Down the River and thinking, wow, I’ve never experienced a room this big in New York with so much open space housing sound in this way overlooking the Hudson River. It was disorienting given how poetic it was giving form to music in a way that was foreign to that context. I’m used to seeing music performed at The Metropolitan Opera, but this context with that soundscape was completely destabilizing.

AE

That cacophony was so important. I remember sitting there for a couple of days with sound and turning it all on, like an orchestra. And I thought, “That's how we're going to treat this whole thing.” I needed to hear Lucy Raven on the other side of the floor, letting it rip. That kind of thing.

EO

To end, we have to talk about David Hammons’s Days End. Aria, maybe you could talk about it and how it was on your mind when you were making your work for the biennial?

AD

Yeah, the story is that initially, in our early conversations about the Biennial, one of the things we talked about was me responding in some way to that work, and that site. I tried my darndest to make an intervention on the actual Day’s End structure. This ended up not being possible. Which was funny because, as a proposition, it was like the most Hammons thing that one could propose, like, “Let me fuck with your thing, dude.”

I think that it was really generative after all, because I hadn't yet been to see the work. I was a huge Gordon Matta-Clark fan in college. I wanted to study architecture then, and I think he was major for me in terms of seeing that there are artists who work directly with architecture. So, I went to see it, and I was like, “I just don't really know what to do with this. This is like this weird, like, non-monument. I don't know what is happening.” And then I continued to walk. And I went to Little Island just up the waterfront– which is so weird. It’s not a real park, in terms of how civic space is traditionally meant to operate. You really don't have free space to navigate; you kind of get ushered to the peak of the park, and then you can maybe take a snapshot of either Manhattan or New Jersey, and then you can go back down. And I spiraled from there. I was like, “I gotta get this letter to him.” So, I wrote this letter asking him: “What's going on, David Hammons? Why did you do this? Are you nostalgic? Are you not? What kind of monument is this?”

Whatever is being marked as already dying when Matta-Clark made his work on the pier. The thing that I wanted to do was attach a small chromakey green sheath on the haunch of the structure, that would somehow annotate it. I'm so glad I didn’t get to do that, but it was a great place to start.

In the catalog, in the thing I wrote, I use this phrase, “chroma key green for an empty set.” I was really just thinking about New York, then and now, and possibly bemoaning the fact that there's this unconscious and sometimes conscious collective ongoing desire for it to be 1970-something or 1990-something or the 2000s. We have to get over it and realize we live when we do and try to make new ideas happen. The idea was almost a joke about nostalgia.

AE

I was at the height of working with Mr. Hammons on this piece, trying to process it. He told me a story—in his sly way that he tells stories. He said, “You know, there’s this video where Jane Crawford, Gordon’s widow, says he met this houseless Black man that lived under the Manhattan Bridge. And he was making these little structures there that Gordon was really drawn to.” So, I found in the video and in it, Jane shows these photographs that Matta Clark had taken. He was going under there because Creative Time had an art program, at the time, under the Manhattan Bridge. Gordon was working on an installation there, and he became friendly with this man. When you see these structures, you have a completely different impression of Day’s End.

LO-B

Incredible!

EO

I’m most interested in talking about the actual structure and how Matta-Clark punctured it, rendering the people and cruising visible. I’m really fascinated by the fact that it was this massive warehouse with very little light and Matta-Clark exposed the interior. Initially, I didn’t know what to make of Hammons’s restaging of this structure’s form–but the symbolism is another beast of its own.

AD

Well, in this Sasha Frere-Jones piece on Matta-Clark that was just in the final Bookforum, there’s a little bit about Days End, just kind of noting the fact that rather than marking Matta-Clark’s subtraction or redaction, Day's End traces the building itself. In that sense, there is an inverted relationship between the two works. But I think that it's interesting as a kind of talkback moment.

AE

I’ve talked to this man every day for years, and I still have absolutely no idea why he did it.