As I continue to work on the second part of my appreciative account of David Graeber on the art world, I have received This is Doug Hall: A Memoir, by the prominent Bay Area artist and teacher Doug Hall. I instantly was reminded of an important fact about the art world, namely, that while in many contexts it makes sense to speak of the art world (that is, in the singular), there are likewise many contexts where it makes sense to speak of artworlds (in the plural), since part of what makes up an artworld are the webs of affiliation, formal and informal, among its members, the artists, gallerists, museum professionals, critics, and collectors. So in many contexts it makes sense to distinguish, say, the New York art world from the Los Angeles art world, and both from the Bay Area art world. Such distinctions also play a role in hierarchies of valuation; the art worlds of New York, Los Angeles, and London carry greater prestige, and non-coincidentally contain larger fortunes, than those of Seattle or the Bay Area. To my mind Hall’s contribution to the Bay Area art world is immense, both with his art (installations, videos, and performances) and his teaching (primarily at the defunct San Francisco Art Institute, but also more briefly at the California College of the Arts). After a first chapter largely covering his life from earliest childhood through college, the book chronicles his time at art school, his prominent performance and video work in the 1970s as part of the small group T. R. Uthco, his videos and installations in the 1980s, his large photographs especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, and a small number of video works in the past two decades. The book also discusses the painful incident of receiving a highly negative review from the critic Roberta Smith in the New York Times, where Smith pans Hall’s work The Terrible Uncertainty of the Thing Described (a work that prominently features a tesla coil regularly discharging lightning) [fun fact: I helped Hall install the work initially in Pittsburg, Boston, and San Francisco, and wrote the manual for setting up the installation and operating the coil]. Smith wrote that “There must be a name for a spectacle, apart from amusement park rides and certain horror movies, that reduces the spectator to speechless fear—but it may not be art” (Smith quoted on p. 209). Might this indicate something about the Bay Area art world, and more generally how the relatively low prestige of regional art worlds is instituted and sustained?
In the past few years a couple of incidents have raised issues about the character of the Bay Area art world. One was an article in the New York Times that noted the closing of nationally prominent galleries in the Bay Area, and which accordingly suggested that the local art world was in decline, at least financially. What was instructive about this page-filling bit of fluff was the response: articles appeared righteously responding and insisting that the Bay Area art world was thriving. What was the evidence for the counter-claim? It seemed to be two things: prominent gallerists, especially Catharine Clark of the eponymous gallery, claimed that their sales were just dandy, thank you; and more interestingly assertions were made to the effect that the Bay Area art world consisted in part of distinct ‘communities’ characterized by gender, sexual orientation, and/or ethnicity, and that sales of expensive artworks played no role in the health of such communities. The other incident was the closing of the long moribund San Francisco Art Institute, which occasioned a great deal of public wailing and reminiscing about its alleged glory days. Having been officially harassed, slandered, denigrated, vilified, suspended from teaching and laid off by the Art Institute for having objected to their promotion of animal abuse (specifically, the animal abuse videos of the artist Adel Abdessemed, which were shown in their gallery in February 2008), I somehow could not manage any tears. What did strike me was how the Bay Area art world immediately generated a kind of social myth about the greatness of the Art Institute.
Nothing, I mean nothing, was said publicly about its well-documented corruption—not just promotion of animal abuse and harassment of its faculty, but also its nepotism, tawdry and trivilializing official conception of art, its anti-academic, anti-labor, and anti-union practices, its steep decline in national rankings in the 21st century (from its customary ranking in or near to top 10, to 35th in 2008, to 50th in 2020), and its astoundingly high rate of students who left after one year (the official statistics of the Department of Education show a rate of student retention at only 50% for the decade 2010-20, whereas comparable West Coast art schools ranged from the low 70s-mid-80s%).
I am very glad to have the opportunity to consider and remember Hall’s work. One of his works was fundamental to my introduction to contemporary art, and indeed incited a life-long interest, namely Seven Chapters from the Life of . . . (A Soap Opera), performed over seven consecutive nights, with the settings of the performances left in place for a few weeks afterwards as sculptural installations.
But the book also, and certainly inadvertently, offers some sense of the kinds of self-deceptions, evasions, and despair of second-class prestige that afflict the regional art world. One chapter is devoted to Hall’s teaching, which was noteworthy for its engagement with difficult philosophical and theoretical texts (especially those of Walter Benjamin; I myself gave a guest lecture in one of Hall’s MFA seminars on Benjamin in (I think) 1987). I note three peculiar instances of a kind of myth-making there:
#1: Hall describes the relationships among the faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute: “our faculty, although holding certain principles in common, differed in how we approached our own work and teaching. Relationships could become strained over ideas or just personal conflicts. But for the most part, we got along or at least remained civil and respectful of one another” (p. 120). Really? One of the faculty members of Hall’s Performance/Video Department was the artist Sharon Grace, who told me several times that when she tried to speak at departmental meetings in the 1980s, she was shouted down by another faculty member, Tony Labat, with the words “Shut up, bitch!” A peculiar kind of civility!
#2: In discussing the issues in and difficulties of teaching so-called critique seminars where students present their work for discussion by the teacher and their fellow students, Hall focuses on the problem of judgments of quality or ‘good/bad’. He suggests that one source of the difficulties is the fact that artists work across and among different genres and media (“sculpture, video, performance”). In thinking about this, he accepts as a basis for discussion the conception of art that ‘art is a creative act that changes something’, and notes that this characterization of art was made by his 11 year-old grandson (p.124) Is there any connection between the anti-intellectualism of the Art Institute and the willingness of a teacher to adopt a pre-adolescent conception?
#3. Hall describes teaching a class “[i]n the early 1980s” (p. 128). During the class a student has a panic attack, and Hall spoke with her afterwards. He says that she was triggered by some word, she knew not which, and this made him curious about the “magical potential of language”. He says he recalled an early essay by Walter Benjamin on the mute language of objects (p. 130). Now, having known Hall well in the 1980s, I’m pretty sure he did not then know German fluently, and as certain as I can be that he did not read Benjamin in the original German. But the essay he cites was not published in English until 1986. What sort of magic language is this?
References:
Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man’ (originally 1916), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1986)
David Graeber, ‘The Sadness of Post-Workerism’, in Revolutions in Reverse: Essays Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination (2011)
--The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . . (2024)
Doug Hall, This is Doug Hall: A Memoir (2024)