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Ethel Seno
Patrick Steffen
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 | | | | | | 10.07.2012
Patrick Steffen: You grew up in Tokyo, Japan, and moved to the United States to complete your studies at Wesleyan’s College of Letters. You moved from New York City to Los Angeles to work at TASCHEN America’s editorial office. How does that background influence your
work?
Ethel Seno: I spent over six years putting books together for Taschen, and I consider publishing to be my background as far as work goes. Curating and coordinating exhibitions in the end is not so different from developing books and working with a lot of visual information, ideas and texts, and balancing the personalities involved. The difference of course is the three-dimensional space versus the pages of a bound book that constitutes the limits of the presentation, as well as the scale. The books I worked on before coming to MOCA were big productions — I worked with visionary photographers William Claxton and David LaChapelle who both had very strong ideas about what they wanted. I felt I was there to make sure that their visions could be realized, and that took a certain amount of diplomacy and problem-solving, and thinking outside of the box because people get used to a certain way of doing things — for example the designers wanted to proceed a different way instead of listening to the artist or the person best suited to direct the project. So I learned how to work with artists and professionals at Taschen. At MOCA, part of my job continues to be working on the books or catalogs that accompany the exhibitions. | | | | PS: You started your collaboration with MOCA by co-curating the blockbuster exhibition “Art in The Streets”, and now you are co-curating the show “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol” which is a completely different project… ES: I got involved with the "Art in the Streets" exhibition through a book that I spent years researching and editing, titled “Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art (Taschen, 2010).” It was a complex curatorial project that was developed with the writer Carlo McCormick which aimed to reframe preconceived notions about street art and graffiti. MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch saw a PDF of the book a few months before it was released — he was looking for someone with knowledge about the subject to help with the exhibition alongside associate curators Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, and he hired me as the curatorial coordinator. Being connected to street art and the graffiti community was very important in that first collaboration with MOCA — it's the relationships that make a project easier to realize, and that also proved true for "The Total Look: The Creative Collaboration between Rudi Gernreich, Peggy Moffitt, and William Claxton", which was the second exhibition I coordinated for the museum (I was a good friend of Peggy Moffitt, having worked with her on projects before). "The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol" was an idea Jeffrey had been developing for some time, and he invited me to work on the exhibition because of our success with "Art in the Streets"; I had learned what was involved with putting exhibitions together at MOCA, and I was interested in the subject. "The Painting Factory" is also accompanied by a book, which will be released next month. | | | | PS: The first impact with the exhibition is a room featuring Warhol abstract paintings from the Shadows, Rorschachs, and Camouflage series. As stated on the press release, “one of the places where (a) fresh approach to abstraction was germinating was the studio that might seem the farthest from the practice of the abstract tradition, Andy Warhol’s Factory.” I understand the existence of a link based on the extensive use of techniques of mechanical reproduction, but I have never considered Andy Warhol as an influential abstract expressionist painter and the relationship with the generation of artists presented in the show is for me unexpected, if not overplayed. Could you elaborate on this crucial concept of the show?
ES: People don't immediately think of Andy Warhol as an abstract painter. I was in the Warhol room at the entrance to the exhibition when I overheard someone ask, "Where are the Warhol works?" So I understand that the connection is unexpected. Warhol returned to painting later in his career, and the abstract works you see were created in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, when he was moving in a different direction. That first room sets up a number of relationships beyond the visual impact of the huge Rorschach paintings that nearly go from floor to ceiling. Warhol's mode of production — the use of silkscreens to produce the Camouflage painting, for example, and the use of materials such as crushed glass in the Diamond Dust Shadow paintings — clearly influenced the works by Christopher Wool and Glenn Ligon in the adjoining rooms. Do you remember Ligon's Figure paintings made with coal dust, and the series of large silkscreened Wool paintings that also look like inkblots? Most of the works in the exhibition were made with non-traditional painting methods. Mark Bradford even used industrial sanders on layers of posters to create his paintings, Wade Guyton literally used the inkjet printer to create his work, and so on. Sterling Ruby, who used spray paint to create his paintings, said, "I think the concept of Warhol being the first artist to take mass production and turn it into abstraction is very fitting for us. I see a huge shift happening with artists roughly my age who, after years of post-conceptual training, are reflecting on formalism, abstraction, and different ways to make a gesture.” | | | | PS: One of the highlights of the exhibition is a white wall-to-wall carpet by artist Rudolf Stingel, which covers the entire floor of the museum. How the installation has been conceived? ES: When we were first working on the floor plan for "The Painting Factory", we thought of placing a Rudolf Stingel carpet piece on the wall, similar to the installation he did at the Whitney Museum — the carpet as a ready-made is a recurring medium in Stingel's work. We thought it would be a great transition from the Warhol room to the main gallery with the skylights that visitors could interact with. We worked with the architect Kulapat Yantrasast on a model of the exhibition space to determine the placement of the artworks, and it wasn't until we confirmed all the pieces for the exhibition that we could see we needed all the wall space for to fit the pieces — it was like a puzzle figuring out what the best presentation would be. At the point that we had decided on two parallel walls for the main gallery with the skylights, Jeffrey asked the artist Urs Fischer for his input. We sent the whole model with all the scaled miniature paintings to Urs' studio in New York, and he and Rudolf continued to work on the model there. In the model they returned, they had covered the floor with a white cloth indicating that the entire exhibition space would be covered in carpet. We loved the idea! We understood it would transform and unite the space, and that visitors would help make the carpet piece a true Stingel work by leaving their marks on it. We asked other artists like Kerstin Braetsch who visited the museum during the planning process what she thought, and she agreed it would be interesting. We found a local carpet mill to match and custom-dye the carpet sample we received from Stingel's studio, and we couldn't be more pleased with how the installation turned out. | | | | PS: One of the major qualities of this project is that you have successfully created an ethereal atmosphere, namely by using natural sun light from the ceiling of the building, thus enhancing the immediate visual impact of the canvases on the wall. If I’m not wrong, during the Jeffrey Deitch era, this is the first time that a curator utilizes this option. Is there a particular reason? ES: The architect Arata Isozaki who designed MOCA Grand Avenue in 1986 meant for the skylights to be used. But artwork — particularly works on paper — are sensitive to light, and the skylights were covered for different exhibitions over the years. Jeffrey pushed for them to be used as was originally intended, and I understand it's the first time in many years that the museum opened the skylights using the original screens that allow light to filter in. It's not a very easy thing to do because there are hundreds of screens that make up the skylight grid, and I'd need to check with our production manager Jang Park if he had to walk on a glass roof to replace each. The natural lighting really added to transforming the space, and it's great because the lighting really shows off the architecture and the artwork; you don't feel like you're underground even though the galleries are located below street level. | | | | PS: In the US, in contrast with the European tradition, it’s fairly unusual for a director of an institution to have such a direct impact on the organization of an art exhibition. How would you define your relationship with Jeffrey Deitch in term of curating this show?
ES: I was just reading about the Center for Curatorial Leadership based in New York that trains curators to be directors, and it makes sense to me that a director would be involved with his or her institution's programming. Jeffrey is a visionary, and it's exciting to work with him as MOCA director and curator, most recently of "The Painting Factory", because his knowledge and experience of art is so expansive. His way of working with artists and other creative people is inspiring to me because it's an open and collaborative process. He wants the people he is working with to understand and feel good about what they are doing; he asks you what you think, and he explains what his ideas are, which energizes and motivates each project. As the curator, Jeffrey made the final decisions about the exhibition. I get a lot of satisfaction from my work as project manager or curatorial coordinator because I feel like I'm making things happen for an artistic cause or vision. For "The Painting Factory" book, we worked with the same editor as "Art in the Streets", Nikki Columbus, so it really felt like we were a team — I learned from all the conversations about the content and of course, the communication with the artists, hearing what their ideas were, was also very stimulating. | | | | | | Ethel Seno is a project manager at MOCA Los Angeles
Patrick Steffen is Flash Art Los Angeles Editor | | | | | | “The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol (April 29- August 20, 2012)” explores the recent transformation of abstract painting, including works by Tauba Auerbach, Mark Bradford, DAS INSTITUT (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder), Urs Fischer, Wade Guyton, Glenn Ligon, Julie Mehretu, Seth Price, Sterling Ruby, Josh Smith, Rudolf Stingel, Kelley Walker, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool. http://www.moca.org/ | | |
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