THE DREAM OF THE FISHERMAN'S WIFE
The Dream of the
Fisherman's Wife
Antakly Projects · Curator Interview
Steven
Pollock
Writer, curator, filmmaker. Vienna via Princeton and New York.
A second-generation gallerist who grew up under the influence of Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, and Ruth Asawa, Steven Pollock has spent his career refusing every category available to him. He has staged Warhol, Haring, and Banksy; written for the Brooklyn Rail; scored neo-noir films; and now turned his eye to one of art history's most transgressive images as the starting point for a show of 23 international artists in Paris.
Growing up in Princeton, Pollock began making backyard Super 8 films with future director Mitchell Lichtenstein. It was also in Princeton that he made his first deep dive into Pop Art while attending arthouse screenings of Fellini, Kubrick, and Antonioni. That combination became the genesis of his conviction that categorisation usually hinders rather than advances artistic development.
In New York as an SVA fine arts student, he studied video under Shigeko Kubota and film theory with Joan Braderman. Seeking alternative venues to the Soho gallery circuit, he found the New York nightclub scene and staged his first multimedia event, Cold War Zeitgeist (1981). He went on to exhibit at the Times Square Show, Fun Gallery, Annina Nosei, and the Pat Hearn Gallery, and in Europe at the Cartier Fondation and Lia Rumma, Naples.
Curatorial projects expanded internationally. Art in Action, featuring Kenny Scharf and Ann Magnuson, was staged at the Sogetsu Museum, Tokyo. In 1996 he instigated online collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne, and Asha Putli. Further projects followed in Tokyo, India, Norway, France, Italy, and London.
Recent years have seen Pollock turn to film: a collaboration with Viennese filmmaker Marieli Fröhlich on an experimental short; a documentary selected for the New Jersey Film Festival; and an ongoing neo-noir musical drama set across 1970s Berlin and 1980s New York, which he is writing and scoring.
A long-overdue retrospective at mumok, Vienna. Rosso: "European anarchist born on a train."
Beresin shapeshifting playfully with complex and loaded material, and not for the first time.
After premiering A Year without Summer, Holzinger's trajectory is as assured as her seven-syllable name.
On Christian T. Norum's curatorial installation at No Institute. Edvard Munch: "learn to fall."
Greatest inspirations
and influences
My courageous uncle. Lou Pollack founded the Peridot Gallery in 1948. Throughout the 1950s he worked with Louise Bourgeois, Esteban Vicente, and Ruth Asawa as their exclusive dealer. He staged the first New York gallery shows of Weldon Kees and Philip Guston, and in 1959 introduced the great sculptor Medardo Rosso to the United States. Alfred Barr bought the first Louise Bourgeois for the Museum of Modern Art from the Peridot, at the insistence of Marcel Duchamp. Lou Pollack was also friends with Jackson Pollock, who gave him a sculpture after the opening of a group show in 1951. He was very discreet but surprising: I even found a photo of him dancing with Marlene Dietrich.
Also films: The Night Porter, Salo, A Clockwork Orange, Satyricon, Point Blank, There Will Be Blood, Convoy, and Blowup. In no particular order.
The creative
process. From idea
to physical show.
I am obsessive. If any of that leaves a sustained feeling for the viewer's experience, I have succeeded. I have lived in Tokyo and travelled quite a bit. For one chapter of my life I was very involved in Japan. In 1985 I curated the first museum show about the art of the Lower East Side in Tokyo. Kenny Scharf did major installations, and Ann Magnuson and John Sex performed. It took the Museum of Modern Art until 2018 for their own Club 57 Lower East Side show.
My present obsession with Hokusai may have started back in Tokyo, where I bought erotic prints (Shunga). I met great artists like Isamu Noguchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yoko Ono in New York, and even my samurai acting hero Tatsuya Nakadai. I remember working near Tetsumi Kudo in Tokyo. He was so neglected at the time, in a borrowed studio. I would have loved to include his work in my Hokusai show.
My curating concepts have always begun in a flash.
In 2007 I was jogging in Regent's Park and I suddenly turned to a friend and asked: what's more obvious than putting on a show pitting Banksy against Warhol, as Tony Shafrazi had done with Basquiat? That was June. I immediately pitched it to The Hospital Gallery in Covent Garden. They gave me three weeks in August, a terrible slot on the calendar, which turned into a feeding frenzy. 14,000 visitors in the first week alone.
The state
of the art world
The art world has never been as timid as 2021. The pirate raid on the market in the form of NFTs is a planned decimation of the last great unregulated market. I find the common justification, that NFTs have given artists greater control, to be an enormous lie. Artists need people to see their actual work: which means exhibiting it, not turning it into data. What transpired was a hermetic transfer of cryptocurrency tarted up as art. I am using gambling terms because NFTs are based on pure greed. People I respect have joined that camp, but you will never see me there.
Young artists have a great opportunity in every city to explore recently abandoned spaces, where offices, kiosks, shops, and nightclubs have shut down, and stage their own shows.
I curated my first New York show in the Mudd Club, and Jeffery Deitch reviewed it for Art in America. He even checked with Hans Haacke whether it was politically correct to print what he perceived as possible fascist signifiers, because the singer in my band was wearing fetish military gear. I was 19 years old and still in art school. Nobody invited me to curate.
On the other hand, the development of cancel culture and its present allure for the young and disenchanted is reactionary. Imagine if Basquiat had used methods of shaming? SAMO mocked the rhetoric of dogma, yet successfully raised issues of race, class, and privilege in a poetic and sensed way. For me, art is like a Trojan Horse. Young artists seem far too cautious at the moment, and are not having fun.
This show should be seen in person. There are household names like Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers, but also excellent works by Carlos Pazos, Philomène Amougou, Marieli Fröhlich, Kitty Brophy, Matthew Collings, Vilte Fuller, Robert Hawkins, Lily Lewis, Sophy Rickett, Marie Sauvage, and Ilona Staller. No children please.
23 International Artists
Ruttkowski;68, 8 Rue Charlot, Paris. By appointment only.
If you are in Paris, make an appointment.
Ruttkowski;68 Paris · 8 Rue Charlot · Until May 16th · By Appointment · No Children
