Director's Letter Winter 2016

As you will read in this issue of the Museum magazine, this season we are celebrating two magnificent additions to the Princeton campus art collection. Both are conceptually compelling and materially extraordinary and also represent deeply collaborative efforts. Doug and Mike Starn’s (Any) Body Oddly Propped is the product of two artists who have been collaborating since at least the 1980s. Identical twins, Doug and Mike were best known for many years for their photographic work, but more recently they have become better known for their large-scale commissioned installations, often monumental in scale. To work with Doug and Mike over several years to achieve a new artwork, or to visit them in their vast studio-laboratory in Beacon, New York, is to gain at least a glimpse into their process—one that finds a parallel in the constantly evolving construction that is the Big Bambú on the studio floor, a complex and changing network of bamboo poles and climbing ropes. On my most recent visit to the studio, the artists physically leapt into this ever-in-progress work in a way that seemed to manifest the extent to which theirs is an intimate and entirely interdependent practice.

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s URODA is, as I write, in the final stages of patination at the Brooklyn studio she has rented for that purpose. Colloquially the space is known as “the cathedral” for its soaring height and the way light filters in through high clerestory windows. Ursula’s best-known sculptures are probably those constructed of stacked 4-by-4-inch cedar boards that she handcrafts in a technique that is both balletic and brutal, involving a hand-wielded circular saw. By the time you read this, this new commission will be installed as a kind of totemic gateway to the new Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment on Olden Street. What may be most extraordinary about this new work—the sight of which in her studio after three years of fabrication brought tears to my eyes—is that it has been translated into thousands of sheets of heavy gauge, hand-hammered copper. A technique totally new to the artist, this would have been impossible without her collaboration with the metal artist Richard Webber.

As novel as it is to inaugurate two such important works of public art at Princeton in a single season, it is even more striking that both are the result of deep collaboration—so deep that it is impossible to imagine the work without the collaboration underpinning it. Artistic collaboration is, of course, nothing new, but it is often understood as a thwarted process. A few years ago, for example, the Atlantic ran an article titled “Does Artistic Collaboration Ever Work?” On the basis of some of the best-known efforts—Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—it can be a fair question, one posed by critics who find banality in the former or dominance and subjugation in the latter. But the “great art only happens in silence” notion—perhaps rooted in the romantic idea of the artist as lone genius—is easily undermined by a host of examples, from the learning community model of Black Mountain College, to the collaborative models of Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus (movements that emphasized process over outcome, that valued the collaborative act for bringing a new vision into the world) or, more recently, of such groups as the Guerrilla Girls. Many of today’s artistic efforts demand collaboration, as when an artist and a scientist collaborate and in doing so merge their respective experimental processes.

If we look more broadly at the Museum’s work this season, the collaborative impulse is everywhere. Two of our exhibitions—Princeton’s Great Persian Book of Kings and By Dawn’s Early Light—represent collaborations between the Museum and the Princeton University Library, bringing together curatorial voices, conservators, objects, and lenders from both institutions. Sacred Caves of the Silk Road represents a similar collaboration between the Museum and the Tang Center for East Asian Art. Cézanne and the Modern is the fruit of a partnership with the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation that began in 1976 but that has grown closer and more active in recent years. Pastures Green and Dark Satanic Mills: The British Passion for Landscape, opening in late January, represents our first collaboration with, among others, the National Museum Wales.

 Perhaps because I came of age as a curator and later a museum director in times of financial crisis and budget cuts (think of the attacks on federal funding for the arts in the 1990s, or the collapse of the American auto industry in the 2000s), I have long considered collaboration a practical virtue in helping cultural institutions survive and even punch above their weight class. On the basis of what we see at Princeton this season, it is a creative virtue as well.

James Christen Steward

Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director