The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 11: LA Special with Cauleen Smith and Kibum Kim
We’re still in the city of angels for our second special episode asking ‘What if LA is the future?’ Join host, Charlotte Burns, as she drives from the East Side to Korea Town and out to Santa Monica. We visit the studio of artist and filmmaker, Cauleen Smith, whose life and work centres around building a better world. We also drop in on Kibum Kim, partner and co-founder at Commonwealth and Council - a gallery building a supportive community of artists - who wants to challenge the high-speed efficiency of the current art world model. Both embody what it means to live in the realm of possibility. “I guess I'm, what I'm doing is always looking to like the relatively recent past of models where people really did do things differently quite successfully,” says Cauleen.
Join us for more.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?!. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns, and this is the show asking people in the art world to imagine new possibilities. We’re still in Los Angeles for our second special episode from the city of angels, asking people what if LA is the future?
Diedrick Brackens:
My name is Diedrick Brackens. Oh my God, if Los Angeles is the future, there’s not going to be any water.
[Laughs]
I should say something more hopeful.
Charlotte Burns:
No, you could say whatever you want.
[Laughter]
Michael Govan:
You know what they say, “LA is the future,” they always say that but what I love is that it’s always the future, meaning it’s always in a state of becoming, it never becomes. That’s a sort of philosophical state of mind for a place that I really love.
Chris Sharp:
I’m Chris Sharp, run a gallery here in Los Angeles. Obviously, New York dominates, Miami is very important but LA is definitely on the rise.
James Fuentes:
My name is James Fuentes. In LA, the art studios are bursting at the seams. There’s experimentation, there’s freedom—maybe it’s the large spaces, maybe it’s the culture, maybe it’s the light.
Charlotte Burns:
I’m here with Alex Logsdail, the director of Lisson Gallery, which is about to open in Los Angeles in April. Why LA?
Alex Logsdail:
Artists are here. And a lot of artists continue to be here and are moving here.
Lisa Spellman:
I already thought LA was the future and the future is now. So here we are.
Charlotte Burns:
And we’re standing by this great Doug Aitken Sonic Table.
Charlotte Burns:
Lisa Spellman of 303 Gallery and me making some noise there, and Michael Govan, the director of LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art] with his optimistic take on Los Angeles’s future.
Join me as I drive around the city from the East Side to Koreatown and out to Santa Monica.
Now, for our first guest.
Charlotte Burns:
Here we are in Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles. We’re starting the day, it’s hilly here, it’s chilly here. Cars going past, you can hear birds in this slightly industrial part of the city close to the LA River.
Good morning, LA.
One of the biggest privileges of working in the art world is talking to artists and—even better—visiting their studios. We're lucky enough to be in the studio of artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, whose life and work are focused upon the idea that, and I quote: “It is possible to build a better world. It is possible to be generous. It's possible to leave something behind. It's just possible to make a better world. People do it all the time.”
Cauleen, thank you so much for having us here in your studio.
Cauleen Smith:
Sure.
Charlotte Burns:
Which part of LA are we in?
Cauleen Smith:
Well, we're in a big warehouse that used to be a Mattel toy factory in Lincoln Heights, which is by the LA river, sort of Northeast LA. It's hilly and industrial over here.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
And we're surrounded by Cauleen's work. Fabric pieces hanging from the ceiling and also lots of your inspiration. Your books, I can see The Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis. Energy Never Dies, lots of science books on the bookshelf, political writings, queer feminology. And then lots of images that provide you, I guess, with inspiration.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. A lot of the stuff on the walls is actually gifts from friends or fellow artists and then this stack of books here is like the current, what I need to be reminding myself to think about. It's pretty sprawling range from, like, poetry of Wanda Coleman to American folk tales to Black geography. It's a big range of ideas I'm trying to grapple with right now.
And then the banners you were talking about are from a show that just closed at my gallery, Moran Moran and they're all kind of talking about geologic time, but also what happens after kind of apocalyptic destructions, like what's possible and stuff like that.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
Just light stuff.
[Laughter]
Souffles!
So Cauleen, you were an obvious choice for this show. Our editorial advisory team was like, “you have to interview Cauleen, her entire practice is a ‘what if?”. Let's start there. You often envision alternate futures in your work, often with Black communities at the center of them. What if we weren't so cynical about ideas of utopia? That's a question you've asked, and I'd kind of like to bring it back to you.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. I mean, I wonder if it's cynicism or if it's really like a failure or a fear in the imagination to think about the fact that this version of human that we are is a relatively recent invention. A lot of work has been put into placing us into this hierarchy where we imagine, as a fundamental truth, that this earth is our dominion and it's here for us to take and to extract and to exploit. But there is and has been other ways of understanding our relationship to this planet that we're on.
And so when people say it's not possible to do away with capitalism, or it's not possible for people to work in communities of mutual aid because the base nature, the fundamental nature of humanity is what it is…This fear of loss is just to me a failure of imagination and to think about what else there could be, who else we could be, how else we could live. And that the absence of one notion of security might produce a multitude of other possibilities in which we don't have to rely on ourselves and our little piles of money. We can rely on each other instead.
And, in fact, that's how people lived for quite some time—maybe tens of thousands of years. Maybe it's a bit of a heresy because I feel like the way we understand humanity is like a religious commitment to an idea that is purely an invention.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, there was imagination once, and it since failed us?
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. And now I guess it's Hobbs, is that the guy who was talking about, like, once we stopped being hunters and gatherers and we started having property, we started killing each other. And that's nonsense. That's just not even true. But it's the way we structured an entire, I mean, religions, nations, governments, economies have been structured on this total fiction of what humans are.
Charlotte Burns:
So what if we thought differently? How does your work propose that?
Cauleen Smith:
I mean, I guess what I'm doing is always looking to like the relatively recent past of models where people really did do things differently quite successfully. And even though maybe some of these models don't last forever—I mean, that's a question, isn't it? Like, what is the value of forever on a planet that we're rapidly killing? Like, you know what I mean? Or, like, actually, we're not killing the planet, we're making it so that we can't live here anymore. So what's the point of that?
And I was looking at the shakers, or now I'm looking at Fannie Lou Hamer's, a Poor People's Farm or Freedom City [Freedom Farm Cooperative]. The last project I was—I'm still really invested in—Chicago's Freedom City, which is not an actual city, but a conceptual model of, like, how communities wanna live and treat each other and interact and sustain themselves.
And so I'm just actually looking at what people do that operate outside of these realms of like, coercion or deprivation or exploitation that we are all subjected to. The boundaries and enclosures that we have. It's really weird, the stuff we fight about on this tiny little planet in the scope of this universe. It's bizarre that not only are we fighting about that, but then also planning to go to other planets and do the same thing there and fight over that. I think maybe, it might be time to rethink that.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, it’s not working so well.
Cauleen Smith:
It's not working. So why do it? Like, I don't know, like usually when something doesn't work, you stop.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Do we, though? It's not what we've seen in history.
Cauleen Smith:
Actually. That's the past 600 years. No, it's double down on stupid.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
I love that. “Double down on stupid.” You said something actually just there about this idea of permanence, and I was listening on my freeway drive-in here this morning to something you said for an artist talk at Berkeley questioning why it is that we hold permanence so dearly because it's a mirage anyway, considering we’re finite. But you said there was a sort of inherent violence in this idea of keeping something permanent at all costs.
I thought that was so interesting in the context of some of the big conversations in the cultural realm right now about museums and what they're for, and this idea of hoarding a past and being really reluctant of breaking any kind of tradition, and a hankering back for these older models.
But we're in a real moment of nostalgia, which kind of seems tied to that idea, in my mind, of a search for permanence that's impossible. Maybe the question is, what if art is the space that can allow us to think of impermanence rather than art trying to be a space that makes a claim for the permanent, which in a way, is what art’s stuck between?
Cauleen Smith:
I mean, that's what's so interesting about museums. This idea that they're preserving the past but then only collecting things that are preservable and not actually being able to support things that are ephemeral. And like what would it mean to have a museum of the ephemeral where it's the ideas circulating? That's where all the work is. And like, “Oh, this gesture,” “Oh, this performance.” Like how do we keep the conversation of this active? What would that museum look like? So it's not as if artists, artists all the time, are dealing with decay and impermanence and ephemerality, it's just that they're punished by the art market because no one can buy that. No one can hang it on their wall.
So, that's a totally different conversation—the values of the museum sort of being guided by what people can have and hold and accumulate versus being guided by history and culture and human practices.
Charlotte Burns:
It's so interesting. Well, another thing I wanna ask you related to your work is, what if we imagined what a radically generous community, an intentional world-building, looks like? That’s something you spoke about, and I think in your work, there's so much generosity. It's so lush, you know, somehow you get sort of into these worlds and they are abundant utopias. How do you feel when you're making those works? Do you get transported yourself? I guess it's a very positive place to dwell.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. Like, I think like I was thinking of the Shakers, which ironically to me have this really amazing idea about how to live, but also it was…the practice of how to do it was so austere, it was difficult to survive in it.
And I tend to look at a person or a group of people who are doing something interesting and try and figure out, like, what can we learn from that? And I guess so many of the people that I have looked to actually have like philosophies or practices that are really different from mine or anything I would be interested in actually living. But the ideas they produced are just so exciting and rich. And I think what I try to do is translate my excitement or my enthusiasm for these human experiments into something other people can inhabit. So I guess all of like the textiles and colors, the sequins and the satins and all that stuff comes from a kind of desire to invite or seduce people to think about something and to do away with ideas around taste, which I think taste is so different than the aesthetics of pleasure. They're not the same, and they don't look the same. And so I think I'm really interested in the aesthetics of pleasure and sociality as opposed to the authority of like order and good taste and those things, things like that. Like they're really different to me. And so particularly when I'm trying to make something for other people to experience, I'm thinking about like, even if it looks completely, like, broken or, like, gaudy, that it also looks really like that would be where you would wanna be. You know what I mean?
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. It's sort of opening up a possibility for mess.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. Like the messiness is the sociability.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. You don't have to arrive at that space knowing the answer. You can arrive there and your films, you've made it so that people wanna be in that space so that the installation is a welcoming space for people, which is often what we don't hear about contemporary art. It's got this sort of austere bubble around it.
Cauleen Smith:
I was talking to another videomaker, Stephanie, who’s here in LA on a residency, and she, we were talking about how, because we were trained in film, we always think about audience. You know, you'll see video art and the artist has explicitly said that they do not want a bench in front of this video because they want you to encounter this image as like a work of art, I guess. For me, if there's no place to sit and it's a time-based piece, meaning I need to be there for more than, I don't know 35 seconds. If there's no bench, I don't watch it. Like I just, I don't care who it is, it's just like, I'm like, to me, that's just rude.
[Laughter]
And like, that's like a… this kind of principle of conceptual art, this austerity. And it's literally that idea of like the withholding and the denying. That’s like so much a part of a particular idea of the human that I just think is a problem. You know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah.
[Laughter]
It's just rude.
Cauleen Smith:
It's just rude.
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
I agree. I’m in strong favor of more seating around the place.
Your work, Sojourner (2018), meditates on this idea of what it means to build something for others and be generous. You re-staged a photograph of nine dapper Black men taken in 1966 at Watts Towers by Bill Ray, but this time you did it with women and at Joshua Tree inside Noah Purifoy’s sculptures.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
And this is an example of that sort of lushness of your work and this sense of there's almost something viscous about it. There's this sense of like being carried away on a body of water somehow. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Cauleen Smith:
It was just so lucky, actually, that I couldn't reenact the photo at the Watts Towers because it was being restored and so when I thought about taking a huge group of women out to the desert, a lot of things actually started to happen just in reckoning with what that would mean.
The photo was this beautiful image to me of a kind of like performance of leisure where these guys are just hanging out, and they're just kind of enjoying being in this formation, and they're all presenting a version of themselves that they want people to see. I felt like that photo was very self-conscious. Like it wasn't a captured thing, it was a collaboration, and I love the idea that people had this desire to have some say about how they were seen. And so I tried to have that feeling with these women. Sometimes it works really well with a film shoot where everything you set up produces the effect you want, so you don't really have to work for it.
So, they all stayed in a house together and we would wake up with the sun. Everybody committed and submitted to this like rhythm of like waking up really, early shooting and then it gets too high, taking a nap. And there was a kind of care in that, and I feel like it was my collaborators, they produced that and maybe I set up the conditions that made that possible. But that's the funny thing about filmmaking is that filmmaking is an experiment in sociability and how to live, and the way I was trained to make films is kind of horrible. It's like this hierarchy and all the metaphors for filmmaking are like from war. Even like the activity of filming someone is to shoot them and the hierarchy of how sets are run violent…and so like trying to do something different is like, that's the point, is like, we should be able to figure out how to do things differently.
I don't know if that makes sense.
Charlotte Burns:
That makes a lot of sense. And it's what you see on the screen that there's this…you just presented with a different vision, quite literally.
Your 1998 debut feature film Drylongso has just been digitally remastered. How do you feel seeing that work again in these kind of fresh conditions? It highlights associator threats towards Black men. I love something you said. You said, “I like Black people. I think they're interesting. I think they made for themselves a culture in a way no humans on Earth ever had to do before, and that's just endlessly fascinating to me.” I love that. That kind of sympathy of like, yeah, it's just interesting to me.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
Do you wanna talk a little bit about that in the context of this remastered film?
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting because it's true. One of the characters in the film is obsessed with like the impending jeopardy of Black men in society, but actually, the film is about two Black girls who are just trying to like, make their way. Every minute of the film you spend with them trying to figure out how to live and they do it by linking themselves to each other even when it's sort of uncomfortable or unclear what's happening—and with the people around them, like, and with the surrounding community. And again, like my favorite thing about watching that film now 25 years later, is just remembering how it was made. And that was actually my lesson in this idea that making a film could be a social experiment because we didn't have enough money to secure anything or get permits for anything.
And so the only way anything ever got done was through the protection of the community or the generosity of the community. And I kind of realized, I was like, “Oh!” But that was the best part actually, like, you know what I mean? Like if I had all the money, I guess I would just spend the money on people to see what that would do. But like in film, like the money is supposed to go to producing this perfect image and that was like the least interesting thing going on.
You know what I mean?
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
That's so interesting. I guess that's what you see. There's this, in the absence of that perfection, there's a real fullness to your work.
Cauleen Smith:
Right.
It's like you can feel everybody around the edges, like holding the image up. You can just feel it. It's like incredibly sweet and a wonderful way to make something. It's also really exhausting and depleting because you have to, there's a lot you have to make yourself open to in order for people to feel like they wanna give you anything back. You know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah.
Cauleen Smith:
But the irony is like my goal at the time was to make another movie and with a real budget so that everybody, myself included, could be like paid and supported. I never got that opportunity for other instances. But now, even as I think about it, I think, I wonder if I would've enjoyed that. I don't know, because it was truly amazing to see people decide every day that this is what they were gonna do. You know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. They were in it.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah and it's beautiful. Even now when I can compensate people better, I really try to produce an environment in which we decide we're gonna do this. We commit to making this happen and it's not just me like cracking a whip to make it happen.
Charlotte Burns:
Would you wanna make a big feature film?
Cauleen Smith:
Uh, I love the idea of making a movie. I don't love the idea of operating in the film industry, which is where it ends up. It's just something I think about a lot. I really love screenwriting. I love crafting like this, like document that's supposed to be a thing and like, but I, the business itself…I mean the art world has its problems, so I'm aware. But there's something about the weird social hierarchies of Hollywood that I find really hard to deal with. I can't, it's just not my disposition. In fact, I feel like I had, I made decisions very young to live a life that wouldn't conform to those hierarchies and values and so it's hard for me to operate in them and it's better to not be in it than to be in it and be like, defensive or contemptuous or suspicious or, you know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. You'd need to be in it in the same space in which you approach your work.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. I had this epiphany, I was talking to Jordan Peele one time, and I realized that he loved cinema, he loved everything about it. He loved all aspects of like making movies and I was like, I actually don't. I actually have an argument with cinema, like I'm actually trying to break cinema. Like, no wonder I shouldn't be here. Like, you know what I mean?
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
I don't know because that's also coming from a place of love, right? Isn't it also about, like, you could be better, I want the better thing for you, do it my way.
Cauleen Smith:
But sometimes, instead of like attempting to change something, it's better just to do something else. So I make these broken little films that are imperfect and very taped together and that's my way of responding to this thing that I wish would change a little bit. You know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Showing an alternative reality, I guess. Which is what you come back to so often in your work.
So let me ask you a question about Los Angeles. What if Los Angeles is the future?
Cauleen Smith:
Oh, I mean, is that even a question? Of course. LA is the future. It's been the future. It is the future. I mean, how and why? Okay, so LA is this place that embodies sort of like all of America's past. There's this poet that I love named Wanda Coleman who calls LA the Deep West and I think that that's absolutely true about California. It has this same horrible history that the South has and modeled itself on, say, states like Texas. And on the other hand, it's always looking East, it's looking out towards the Pacific. So there's always this possibility that like when the sun sets, there's another day in which anything is possible. And there's this interesting like way in which even with this history here, one can shed habits or values or beliefs that like enclose them. I think that's what California offers. My concern is that that particular idea is vulnerable right now. Like it's too expensive to live here. People have decided that the people living on the street, that it's their fault that they're poor, and things like that are really frightening to me.
Actually, strangely enough, when I was in Europe, I heard someone talking about homeless people in LA and the American woman, and the way she was speaking, it broke my heart. I thought it was like the absence of compassion and her clarity that like “I've given up on those people. We've tried to help them and they're beyond help.” That mentality frightens me and I know it's always been present, but we're at like a moment where if we don't decide that we really are the future and that we really can figure out how to do things differently—one of those things being how to take care of people—if we can't figure that out if we can't figure out how to take care of the earth, the land that we're on if we can't figure out how to respect the people who know best how to do that, I am worried about LA's future. You know what I mean? It's like we're at a moment. We don't have water, we don't have shelter for people. We don't have an education system that works and people have made decisions over the past 30 years of my life being a California native to make that the case. Like if I had to go to public school now, I wouldn't get the same education that I got when I was a kid. No one would've handed me a cello when I was eight years old, and said, “Take this home and practice.” That doesn't happen anymore. So I think I'm like, strangely, I hope it's not nostalgia. I just know that something else is possible. I think we have to fight for that.
Charlotte Burns:
Let me ask you one final ‘what if.’ What’s the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and what's the one that gets you up in the morning?
Cauleen Smith:
I would like to make something real and even potentially lasting for other people and I'm not sure what that looks like, but I always think about like, what if I could leverage the things I make into something that's useful for other people. What if I could actually figure out how to set up a situation for people who want to experiment with mutual aid and different ways of living could do it. And what if the art I make or the ideas or the things I make and other people make our are part of this different version of human relations?
I think about all the time, like, what if we didn't believe the things we believe in? We believe something else. Like what if we believe that elephants and dolphins were superior beings? Which they are! That's obvious. And like, what if we like, you know what I mean? Like what if we just believe that? And instead of thinking about things like equality, we just thought about things like regard so that you would have to have regard for any and everything around you as opposed to trying to figure out where they fit into your idea of a little hierarchy. I think about that stuff like obsessively. All I can do is make little films and little objects that suggest that ask people to think about it. But I think about what it would mean to amplify that or how to do that. And ironically, I think you have to do it outside of politics because I think politics is just people with clubs beating the shit out of each other, and I'm not interested in that. I'm just interested in like, how we can relate to one another, relations. Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
There's also something about art existing on its own terms as its own separate space, its strength.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Is that the one that keeps you up at night or the one that motivates you or both?
Cauleen Smith:
Both. I feel like my concerns and my worries are also the inspiration and the fuel for what I make. Absolutely. And I was talking to someone and they were like, “I just really need more leisure time.” And I thought, but God, I feel like sometimes I'm in my studio and someone's helping me sew something and we're just chatting and I'm like, this is a great way to spend the day working. I don't know about like leisure time. Like sometimes I just think that's a part of capitalism. Like, here you work, here, you rest, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, why would you need leisure time if every practice in your day is like rewarding or fulfilling? Like what does that look like? You know what I mean?
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, I think so. Like your work obviously fulfills and sustains you, which for many people isn't the case.
Cauleen Smith:
Yeah. And like what if we could change that? I think sociality is really our strength that as people, we're better when we're talking to each other and doing stuff together. And that even that includes people maybe who are anti-social that we still look after and regard like we don't all have to perform in the same way. We started out where I was like saying like, what if we just understood ourselves differently? That's what I think about all the time is like, how do I encourage a different way of thinking about humans in relation to time, space, each other, place? How do you do that?
Charlotte Burns:
How do you do that?
Cauleen Smith:
I don't know. I actually don't have an answer, but it's what I'm trying to do.
Charlotte Burns:
But that exploring in your work that you do, it's creating a space for that question itself, which is, it was just a lovely space to be in, you know, to watch your works and to be in the studio is a lovely way for me to start my day. It's a great privilege. So thank you very much for having me here.
Cauleen Smith:
[Laughs]
Sure.
You forgot to pour your tea.
Charlotte Burns:
I did. I'm gonna do that now.
[Laughter]
[audio of crowd]
So we are now in Koreatown in Commonwealth and Council with its co-director and partner Kibum Kim. Founded in 2010, the gallery has a different structure and set of values than most committed to exploring how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. It champions practices by women, queer, people of color, and ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities.
Kibum, thank you for joining me today.
Kibum Kim:
Thank you.
Charlotte Burns:
So what if the gallery could function differently? Commonwealth and Council does. Do you wanna talk us through how?
Kibum Kim:
So my gallery partner, Young Chung, started the space in 2010 at his apartment. And the artists who have shown with us—especially from those early days—they were beginning their careers a year or two out of graduate school. They literally built this gallery together. There were no sales to even imagine at that point and it was a collective enterprise that they dreamt up together. Since my joining, we have been navigating the commercial side of the art world space and being completely frank, it has not always been easy because there are many things that we've done that involve us subscribing to the art world system. So we participate in the big fairs, we do a lot of the similar things in traveling to the biennial circuit and supporting exhibitions and all of that. But at the heart of it, I think we also really want to carve out a space for ourselves that, if it doesn't necessarily reject the system as is, it's trying to at least pose questions.
So some of the initiatives that we started include something that we call the Council Fund and that came out of conversations during Covid. The Council Fund is something that we ask of our collectors and institutions. So when they purchase a work, there's that customary art world discount of like 10% to say 20% for a museum. We ask you to consider either foregoing the discount or taking less than what you normally would. And that money would go towards a pool that the artists together can decide how to utilize. The kind of most acute needs that we wanted to address was the fact that as this pandemic was raging, about half of our artists still didn't have health insurance. So currently we are trying to build this war chest because the overall sentiment at this point has been that the artists want to kind of make a big gesture together. So that might mean, perhaps buying a building or a plot of land together because I think that is one of the acute pressures that many artists feel today, is constantly not feeling any sense of security.
Another initiative that we have is something we call the Commonwealth Trust. For artists who participate, we are taking works years from now when a few of these artworks are potentially valued at a high price, at least in the market, we will be able to place them and share the proceeds to the artists who participated in that pool.
I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I do. It's a real privilege to dream up something that feels impossible and work with artists who are true visionaries. We get to travel around the world, meet incredibly dynamic, intelligent people but there are moments when it feels like we are just in this, um, interminable rat race circuit. This kind of contemporary art world system is relatively a new beast and I think many of us, even though we love what we do, don't always feel we have agency in our day-to-day lives in what we're able to do. I would love to be able to challenge that. To me, this current system is unsustainable on many levels but particularly in the way artists' careers, that trajectory is playing out it feels more and more difficult to find a time to come up for air.
Charlotte Burns:
The efficiency is, on the one hand, creates a lack of friction that is helpful and on the other hand, reduces that sense of patience in the system. That sense of this being something you needed to make a deliberate decision about, that it wasn't a disposable action.
Is it that the system is so efficient once you are in it and you start finding success as your gallery is, is it a question that things become so efficient that the lack of friction creates its own issues around thoughtfulness and scale and the artworkn itself?
Kibum Kim:
Absolutely. I mean, this is something that's been kicking in my head. I started up my career in finance and working in the art world was completely unplanned. And it was something that really changed the trajectory of my life and changed how I think about the world and the role I want to play in it. And I am so incredibly grateful for it. But I know how the system works.
I am a product of neoliberal aspiration. My parents sent me to this country at the age of 10, hoping for a better future. And that future that they wanted for me was ostensible economic and social success—which in some ways, I failed miserably at. But I also feel I've gotten so much more out of life in the path I've chosen. The most precious inspiring things I experienced in the art world come out of illogical inefficiencies where the most interesting magical encounters and exchanges might develop. I would hate to think that the art market can be reduced down into an algorithm.
Charlotte Burns:
So I guess the question is sort of what if the art world became too emollient? I think about this a little bit as it from the journalist's perspective too. And I think you're right, that it's a market thing that everything became smoother and easier to digest if we think about the stories we tell ourselves what the art world is, that the art world is this place where it's a space of imagination, that it's a progressive space. The reality of that sort of mainstream art world is that it's not very diverse and it's not very progressive and that progress isn't really being made in the way that the art world conceives of itself as making progress.
Kibum Kim:
Yeah, and also the naval gazing of the art world drives me up the wall. I do believe art plays an important role in our social and political discourse. Visual art has a power to express ideas in multivalent ways that linear written text or speech can't. I do believe there are important politically exogen conversations to be had in the art world. But I personally feel frustrated at times when there seem to be certain drives to play out and solve real-world problems through the art world, if that makes sense.
This is kind of like a very like facile example, but we are having very important, very complex and very urgent conversations around racial inequities in our society. Buying a bunch of Black figurative paintings does not make you a good person. There's something so consumerist about that, not that it's a bad thing, supporting Black, POC, queer artists and what have you. But your actions should not end there. I think it's really important that people think deeply about what their own relationship and responsibilities are. I would love to see some deeper, inefficient, slow-food approach to things.
Charlotte Burns:
What if the art world ran a little less fast? There's this sense of it being slightly runaway, that to maintain success, to build success, to serve the best interest of the artist, to keep the thing going, you have to go to the next thing. Do you think that the art world has lost control of itself, has lost its sense of agency? Do you feel that for you to have success in that realm, you have to give over more of that and that the artists probably feel that too?
Kibum Kim:
Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot. This kind of explosion of interest in contemporary art is a super, super, super recent phenomenon. I thought it was like very interesting, the last interview with Paul Chan and his wanting to get off the hamster wheel and having finished this art practice and what was it like 2007 or something when he did that? I was like, oh my God, I would love to do that but the art world rat race that he got out of in 2007 probably feels like a real pastoral stroll compared to what it is now. He chose to prioritize his agency and really drive his career in a way that felt authentic to him.
Something I've also been thinking a lot about is the art world's relationship to labor, how we define it, how we compensate for it, because art doesn't fit into prescribed systems or expectations of what productivity is. It's not leisure, but it doesn't fit into perhaps the capitalist definition of labor and that's probably where a lot of the power of art comes from. But at the same time, artists should be rewarded for the work that they're doing, at least to be able to have comfortable lives, to be able to expand and grow their production in ways that feel good. But there are times when I feel like even as we are trying to not subscribe to the art world system in like a blind way, we often do feel so much pressure to not miss out on opportunities to participate in these things. I don't think that's a very exciting environment in which to make, look at, and think about art.
Charlotte Burns:
There's that tension between the things that you think you should be doing for the artists to make a successful gallery for them to bring more stability and even the things that you're doing differently, like the fund and the pension trust, they both revolve around money. And so to do something differently, you need to earn enough money. You're redistributing the money, but you're still needing to earn the money in the same way as everyone else. You can spend it differently, but you still need to earn it. And so if you're building more ambitious ways of redistributing it, you need to probably earn a little bit more to keep that all going. And then that makes you more part of the rat race.
For whom is that success? Is it that the artists want those opportunities to show? Is it that that's what you should do in a gallery? You sort of need that, and yet the transaction isn't only one-sided. It takes something as well as it gives something.
Kibum Kim:
You know, I mean, like, that's one of our most difficult conundra that we have to grapple with. We've had tremendous institutional success with our artists. It's a blessing. It great. They have these platforms to make new work, and oftentimes, most of the works that get made for those shows have zero market demand, and half of my job is fundraising for these exhibitions and, at times, acquisitions. It's a 360 issue in the art world where the demands of institutional validation and the practicalities of building market demand, they don't correspond in a way that makes things comfortable for the artists to make work but also for us to survive as a gallery that is representing them.
Charlotte Burns:
What do you mean by that? That the market wants something else than the institutions?
Kibum Kim:
Yeah. I do think that the tastes are changing, shifting at this moment. I know it's not a good thing, but I do think the sort of potential recession is going to have some correction in how the art market has been trending that will be healthy overall. The market loves wall-based works. The market loves paintings. The market loves things that they can compare to be like, “Oh yeah, you know, this is like a 2020 version of what [Mark] Rothko was trying to do,” whatever.
Many artists who create work that doesn't fit into certain scripts, even if they're getting all the opportunities institutionally and critical attention in the world, they find it very, very difficult to feel comfortable having a roof over their heads. You could do a solo museum show and the artist fee is often negligible if there is one. While oftentimes, we have to put in money ourselves to make these shows happen. And the expectation is, well, with this critical attention, you're going to have more…
Charlotte Burns:
Market success.
Kibum Kim:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
Which isn't true.
Kibum Kim:
It's not true at all.
Charlotte Burns:
We did a data study actually a few years ago, In Other Words, looking at that idea that a museum show brings about market success. And it basically is true if a series of factors align beautifully. You need to have the right show. It needs to be a show that synthesizes things clearly because the market doesn't like confusion. So it needs to make things clearer for the market to grasp. It needs to be shown at a moment in time when there will be enough people going. So having an exhibition in Venice in November is not the same as having an exhibition in Venice during a Biennale year. There needs to be a curator who does a great job of the work. You need to get the right loans for the work. You need to have it be in a proper space rather than a little backroom corridor. Usually, even if there is the expectation of market growth, often the expectation is larger than the reality, so it's a myth actually that exhibitions create more market success because it depends on so many different factors aligning. And even then it can be a destabilizing success. It's a kind of pay-to-play scheme in a way, isn't it? That you have to pay the museums and the museums by saying, well, you might have market success. It's slightly unethical really because it's sort of a collusion with the market that the museum says it's separate from.
Kibum Kim:
Oh yeah, every time one of our artists gets an exciting museum show, we're really happy. But then in the back of my mind, and also, oh my God, I'm gonna get that email about from the development people, and they're gonna ask for this X amount, and that's another hustle. You know?
Charlotte Burns:
A big collector of like [Andy] Warhol the other week who was saying the same thing that they're constantly told, you know, lend your Warhol to this exhibition, no doubt you'll see the increased market value. And it was like, no, we won't. And that's not the job of the museum anyway. It's just funny that the market took over to that extent that museums expect.
Kibum Kim:
Yeah, to me it feels unsustainable. I think it's very exciting that more people are interested in contemporary art than ever, especially in the past few years, I feel that there have been many, many, many, many new collectors who have come onto the scene who are very eager. But at times, it feels like we're adopting like a hype beast model where you talk to any gallerist, everyone wants the same handful of artists’ work. We all know from experience that kind of hype doesn't last. It might be a completely different set of artists from that same program who are making the same kind of work, who might have their moment in a few years, and the ones that currently have a waitlist of 500 and might fall out of favor in a few years.
That feels so toxic to me to adopt the trend cycles from mainstream culture, especially when we're talking about artists who are making work hopefully to do this for the rest of their lives. And the speed at which things have been happening has been so disconcerting. The fact that an artist can come out of school and within a couple of years have sold out shows and be picked up by like a major gallery. And in a couple years after that may be completely forgotten. I would love for all of us, galleries, artists, curators, collectors, the media. I think it's incumbent on all of us to recognize the sort of art world that we're building and this is a kind of like a self-defeating thing to admit, perhaps, but personally for me, I love art. I don't care that much about artworks. That's not what has brought me joy and changed me as a person. It's been the relationships, it's been the completely inefficient acts of generosity and dialogues that have been the most rewarding.
I hope we can continue to protect that space instead of engaging and committing to this star-making system. I've been thinking about the ‘what if’ question, I would love to see what we could achieve if we try to de-mythologize art a little bit. The romanticist myth of the artist genius, and we love to anoint these superstars and take them down. What if we engage with art at a much more humble human level? And even in the transactional space of running a gallery, going to an art fair, selling artwork. You know what I mean? Like, we sell artwork, I'm not gonna make it seem like this is some like moral enterprise. But what if we really thought about the basic human dignity of everyone, particularly towards artists? I think it's a very, very vulnerable, hard position to be in. Like whether or not you have success. Working with artists very intimately as we do running a gallery, we see how much pressure, how much instrumentalization that happens.
Charlotte Burns:
I’m going to ask you a ‘what if’ that I’ve been asking everyone, which is what if LA is the future?
Kibum Kim:
I would love that. Obviously, I’m biased. A lot of what we've been talking about, I think we do see a lot of inefficiencies. I mean, just look at the geographic makeup of this city and our traffic. You can't do more than three things a day, although you're, you seem to be doing more today. I moved here seven years ago. I thought it was the strangest thing when I started going to gallery openings. I'm like, why are people hanging out here for more than 30 minutes? You know, in New York, I was just used to like hitting like 20 openings a night, and it's incredibly inefficient. But that's where so much of the communal exchanges take place. I think LA can be described as an anti-institutional place and not to always like pit LA and New York against each other, but New York to me is hyper-institutionalist, hyper-structured, hyper-hierarchical. LA is a much more open, porous place where a lot of these strictures and expectations don't exist.
I feel like Los Angeles, because of just how inherently inefficient and like nonsensical this place is, it leaves a lot more room for more organic odd things to happen. I think that's where a lot of the magic comes from. Some of the wildest like weirdest artists, like Mike Kelley came out of LA and I think an artist like Mike Kelley only could have come out of LA. And you went to a place like Clockshop, which is running an incredible program that is asking different questions and really also showing art in a different way because they operate in a physical space that is quite different from the traditional art world model.
If I may, a gallery like Commonwealth and Council only could have happened in Los Angeles. The fact that it was able to take its time and figure out what its core kind of program and values is. You know, Young says this thing that drives me up the wall, so I asked him to stop, but he loves to say is like, “Change the world.” That’s kind of like a motto and ethic and raison d'être for the gallery. And of course, we're not gonna change the world, but isn't it beautiful to dream that and aspire to that.
Charlotte Burns:
That is such a lovely note to end on and it's so interesting because everyone I've spoken to today has that sort of commonality of, “I think it might be an LA thing,” that sense of steering the future.
But I have a question for you. What is the ‘what if’ that keeps you up at night and the ‘what if’ that gets you up in the morning?
Kibum Kim:
We believe in and we value the collective, but the collective only works if individuals have their basic needs met. The collective goal has to also reflect individuals' needs and dreams. And that takes constant work, conversation, and empathy. Going back to what I said before, it's really, really difficult to maintain that at the pace we're all moving. That's what keeps me up at night.
The ‘what if’ that gets me up in the morning is the next generation after us all have real capabilities, the moxie, and the abilities and the drive to change the system. I’ve been meeting a lot of younger artists and younger curators who are bringing such fresh ideas to what is important about art, to question the canon, and to really focus on the integrity and dignity of people for their own selves and also other players in the art world. I guess the ‘what if’ that is inspiring to me is, what if these radical, brilliant people roll this fucked up system? I dunno if I can say that, but, um…
Charlotte Burns:
You can definitely say that!
[Laughter]
Charlotte Burns:
Oh, thank you so much.
Kibum Kim:
Thank you.
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks so much to Cauleen Smith and Kibum Kim for joining us and sharing their ‘what ifs.’ Join us next time for a conversation with my co-host, Allan Schwartzman, looking back on some of the biggest ideas of the season so far.
Allan Schwartzman:
What rose up, again and again, was a sense of belief in the future and of creating new ways of collecting, viewing art, the role of talk. Everybody was speaking in their own ways about the need for a kind of daily life, a community sense to what it is that we do.
Charlotte Burns:
Join us for that and more next time.
The podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.