Frieze Masters Podcast 2024, Episode 4: Spatial Intelligence

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‘Isn’t to exhibit to historicize?’ – Julian Rose 

Artist Nairy Baghramian, Director of the Museum of Modern Art Glenn Lowry and historian Julian Rose all have extensive experience of presenting art in public places and thinking about civic spaces. In the fourth episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, they come together to rethink the role and design of museums in shaping cultural exchange.  

 Nairy Baghramian is an artist whose sculptures offer new ways to address the architectural, social and political conditions of contemporary culture; Glenn Lowry is director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Julian Rose is a historian of art and architecture, exploring the design of art museums.

‘Nairy Baghramian: Jumbled Alphabet’ is on view at South London Gallery until 12 January 2025.

About Frieze Masters Podcast

The Frieze Masters Podcast is back for 2024, bringing you the annual Frieze Masters Talks programme recorded during this year’s fair. The series of seven discussions was curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Shanay Jhaveri, with the title ‘The Creative Mind’, and features 21 intergenerational and international speakers exploring how the art of the past can help make sense of the present.

The series includes topics ‘The State We’re In’, ‘The Faces of Community’ and ‘The Power of Painting’, with speakers ranging from artists – Nairy Baghramian, Jeremy Deller, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Shirazeh Houshiary, Mark Leckey, Glenn Ligon, Ming Smith – to curators such as Gabriele Finaldi, Glenn Lowry and Victoria Siddall, plus writers, thinkers, architects and politicians. 

Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill.

Further Information

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Episode Transcript

Julian Rose: Well, thank you all so much for being here. And I’m really thrilled to be speaking with Nairy and Glenn. So I want to begin our conversation with a very basic question that I think we all have a stake in, which is: what is the best kind of space for art? Nairy, for you, when I think about the shows I’ve seen, even only in New York, I’m struck by the incredible variety of architectural contexts. So I think back to your Sculpture Center show in a building interior, but also a kind of classic New York renovated industrial space. Then I think of your recent piece in the MoMA Sculpture Garden – outdoors, in nature, sort of outside the building, but still with the building as a backdrop. Then, of course, your Met facade commissioned literally on the surface of the building.

So the question for you would be: do you have a preference in terms of that architectural relationship? And then, maybe more broadly, how do you think about the relationship between your work and the space it’s shown in? And then for Glenn, your experience is, in my opinion, unique, in that you’ve overseen these two major expansion campaigns. And what I’m really interested in hearing from you is: how did artists’ spatial needs change from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s? You know, there’s a sort of two-decade period, and I would love to hear how the museum brief evolved over that time. 

Nairy Baghramian: Since you mentioned New York, New York has been so generous to me and I am owing the city a lot. It shaped my thinking. I did travel very late to New York as I got my German passport very late. But actually, my first encounter with, for example, the MoMA garden was actually not my active experience. It was not the real experience. It was through a film by [John] Cassavetes. It was the Shadows. So I already had the feeling I know that space and a dialogue with the, because it was a very frontal dialogue, with the three siblings stand there and they’re discussing about the necessity of contemporary art. So that was the starting point for garden as a place, as an architectural site for sculpture. 

But in general, I think for at least for me, architecture is not only wall, window, floor, doors, ceiling. It is more than that. And I think the notion of space is also where the architecture is. The site of the architecture. The surrounding of the architecture. The institution is just not the empty shelf as a building. It’s not the form only. It invites you to engage with it in very different forms. And I think in the last, at least for my generation, the last 20 years, the institution has shifted to an amazing productive space; it has changed itself through the institutional critique. So just to destroy or to be aggressive towards the institution, it will be a silly act. I mean if I would repeat what [Michael] Asher has done who has informed my thinking, it would bring me nowhere. So because I believe that institution themselves as creators have done the job that has been told by certain institutional critical artists that were so involved with architecture and space as such. 

Glenn Lowry: You know, my sense is that chasing the ideal space to show art is a chimera. There is no ideal space to show art. I think those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to oversee building campaigns, which were really, at least in our case, about addressing a whole range of intellectual and artistic concerns, and more about reconfiguring floor plans than they were about adding more space, although that was definitely a consequence, and there are some pragmatic conditions. Certain kinds of sculpture require certain kinds of floor weight. Enter Richard Serra. Certain kinds of drawings and paintings require specific lighting conditions to be seen well. But in the end, especially when you’re working with living artists, the space is going to actually change by the impact of the artist working in that space. And I was really struck – we just opened a large installation by Otobong Nkanga, and there were lots of critiques over the years about our atrium being too large, too wide, too high, too cold. I mean, you’d go down a litany of, of critiques. Uh, and I asked Otobong how she felt about that. And she said: ‘Oh, I loved it. I mean, I love the challenge of a space that’s difficult to work in because I have to adjust my work to that space. I’m responding to it. And if every space were an idealized cube, it wouldn’t be very interesting to me.’ And that really resonates, I think, that artists respond to what is there and then change it.

And so if our role as a museum is to be as accommodating as we possibly can be, to provide that platform and then say do it. And when your great piece was shown in our garden, it wasn’t just this large form that vaguely recalls a human body being front and centre. It also started to displace the other works that were around it. And so there’s this chain reaction that begins to occur. And all of that is what makes working in a museum fascinating because you’re constantly adapting and adjusting. 

JR: I’m very interested that you brought that up because for my recent book, I interviewed Liz Diller about that project, and she told me a fascinating story where in the early stages, I don’t know, this is her version, you can, you can correct me, but she was thinking about trying to cut it up and subdivide it because, you know, it did absorb a lot of criticism for being sort of over-scaled, but then she decided exactly that, that actually she looked at how artists had used it over the last ten years and felt that they needed a challenge. I mean, that it actually was a very important space now within the museum.

But I guess for Nairy, the question is: what can architecture do to kind of thread that needle because you want specificity, you want maybe a challenge, you want, you know, an unusual scale or something like the Met facade, you want a sort of unusual relationship to the building, but obviously at a certain point, architecture can start to create obstacles for you as an artist. So how do you feel about that kind of calibration of challenge? Maybe we could talk about it like that. 

NB: I think I’m more...let’s say, I think Asher was the only artist who would claim ‘site-specificity’. I would say for myself, the term ‘responsive to the architecture’ would be more correct. I’m not in a fight with architecture. I do need the, I need challenges and I remember as I was doing the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, [Renzo] Piano does ask you not to touch the wall or not to draw into the wall. And I, I said, ‘why not?’ It’s a challenge. So it asks the sculpture to be, to find solutions and to struggle with itself. And there is nothing better for art than to struggle. And if architecture allows you, gives you that opportunity or the potential, it’s an amazing dialogue. So that’s just one example. So I think in the last years, I had the feeling that architecture is trying to become reduced. It’s becoming as much as unproblematic as possible, and we are losing the potential of architecture. 

JR: Well, so then that maybe that gets back to this question of the updated brief, Glenn, because it’s certainly, maybe you can tell me, I’ve always wondered if this was actually apocryphal, but supposedly, Yoshio Taniguchi told the board that if they raise enough money, he could make the architecture of the museum disappear. And then certainly Diller’s studio Scofidio + Renfro, it’s a much more active architecture. And that, you know, I think, I mean, we could point to various things. I know that they’ve spent a lot of time programming the lobby, for example, they introduced project rooms, special spaces, you know, media galleries and things like that.

So it feels like the architecture is trying to be a kind of more active partner in that museum. Would you say, first of all, is that even, am I reading it correctly? But was that sort of a deliberate institutional strategy? 

GL: I’m not sure I would read it quite the same way. I mean, Yoshio, I think, meant by his observation that if you got it all right, if you got all the details right, if you had the ability to just work it ‘til there wasn’t anything that was out of place, the architecture would disappear and what you would be left with is the art. That’s what he meant about it. He actually said that in relationship to his Horyuji Temple museum in Tokyo, which is an extraordinary place. If you’ve ever wondered how fine a bead can be on a, uh, on a concrete pillar, it can be unbelievable. It can be microscopically fine. And that column, which is made out of reinforced concrete literally disappears because it is so beautifully burnished and simply becomes a shimmering form against which you see the temple figures in the background. So that’s what he meant. It was very interesting because he was such an unknown figure to an American architectural community. And I think largely misunderstood by that community. But interestingly, I think Liz and Rick [Serra] shared an awful lot of his sensibility. They were given some opportunities he wasn’t, we were able to acquire a lot more space. So some of the things that were fixed in his case, they were able to open up and change, but I think they were both very attentive to circulation, the way people flow through the building and to creating spaces that were inherently comfortable. 

There, Nairy said something that I, the one thing that you didn’t mention that I think is the fundamental element in space that makes you feel comfortable is proportion. You can have a high wall, wide galleries, and it can feel far more gracious than a smaller, more intimate space. So it’s all about the volume of the space and the height to width to depth relationship. And there, I think Yoshio and Liz were entirely on the same page. And I said to her, you have a pretty free hand here. Like, if you want to mess with the existing architecture, go to it, right? We want the best possible work you can do. And she spent a lot of time thinking about it. And at the end of the day, she said: ‘I don’t need to touch those galleries. They’re just fine. I can add to them, change some of the proportional relationships and create different spaces. And in doing that, I’ll make the whole better.’ And I think she did that at Lincoln Center and she did that for us, which is, she’s actually a surgeon. Like, I, you always think of architects as form-makers, uh, but one of Liz’s great qualities is she’s like a neurosurgeon. She knows how to make the slightest incision to an existing space to alter it and then suddenly make it much better. And that’s exactly what I think she did for us. 

JR: Would you also say there’s a more emphasis on the kind of social spaces in the museum in the second iteration, or is that, I don’t know if that’s Liz’s sensibility, or... 

GL: Museums are first and foremost social spaces, intellectual spaces and artistic spaces. They’re all three, and they always have been. Look at those great early 19th-century paintings of the Grand Gallery in the Louvre and they’re really about flaneurs promenading through the space as much as they are about individual paintings. So museums have always been places of congregation, right? They are where people go to be with other people to see art. I think the big difference between the Taniguchi project and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro project is that we always knew that we were going to try and buy more land and continue expanding in order to complete the project. And we made the decision when we worked with Yoshio that we would put all of the infrastructure required to do that in the Taniguchi proposal. The whole infrastructure was there. That absorbed a lot of the space that might otherwise have been directed towards social spaces, but we knew that eventually we were going to solve that problem. I had no idea it was going to happen as quickly as it did. I thought that would be for another generation of museum professionals, but we were lucky. We were able to do it in 15 years. 

So all that additional space that creates the comfort was a result of the fact that Liz didn’t have to use any of that space for infrastructure. There was a building next to us that was owned by the Folk Art Museum that went bankrupt. And everybody thought it was a tragedy that we were going to take the building down.Well, the building had to be taken down because it was a giant staircase with some bathrooms and less than 5,000 square feet of gallery space. So it was a beautiful building, but it was wildly inefficient. That building became almost 20,000 square feet of gallery space in Liz’s remaking of it because we didn’t have to put any infrastructure in, because it was already there.

So, you know, over time, I think, especially if you’re looking at institutions that, that have the, uh, opportunity to change the Metropolitan, uh, Tate Modern, the Louvre. You ultimately make them better, at least, I hope. You ultimately make them better because each iteration can build on the last one and address whatever problems might have existed.

One last point, Yoshio wanted a soaring entrance as we walked, as you walked in, um, because he knew that it was a long, narrow space. We, at the last moment, said we need a film and video gallery, which meant compressing that space to add. We took the double height space, sliced it in half, and of course we had a long, narrow, and very unpleasant entrance. Liz got the chance to rip that piece out and expand it. The end result, I think, is really a combination of both Yoshio and Liz’s work. 

JR: I like the idea that there’s not something oppositional about the second round, you know, in a way it’s kind of echoing what Nairy is saying, I think, about artists and architects, like it’s all more of a collaborative or an iterative process. I’m really struck by your use of the term ‘comfortable space’. Because it’s making me think of something that Nairy and I have spoken about a bit. Nairy, could you describe, my understanding is your spatial sensibility was really deeply informed by your early experiences arriving in Berlin as a refugee and kind of being hyper-aware of whether you were supposed to be in a space or not supposed to be in a space, who had access to certain spaces, you know, the kind of social dimensions of architecture. Could you talk about that and how that’s maybe then informed how you would say approach an institution that you’re working in? 

NB: I think it was not Berlin, but the experience of architecture in Berlin was a more liberated one. The strongest, um, impact, how I experienced architecture was after the revolution in Iran in 1979, when public and private were extremely strongly divided and at that time I was seven and I was for the first time I felt that the malleable transparent wall, let’s say skin between public and private collapsed and it became a wall and it was strongly opaque. And also the reaction of the body. That was when I understood that architecture has a political impact on you and politics has impact on architecture. And I was so young and I could sense it. I remember my mother walking around and she would never talk about the fear in the streets. After revolution, I just felt whenever I saw a Hezbollah in the street, I would pee in my trousers and it went on for two years. The fear of somebody will attack you, the street is not safe for you. And um, that has a huge political impact, also formally, impact on my practice. And I never actually go back to that kind of psychological or childhood stuff. But I think it has an impact because that was the subject of today’s talk. So I was thinking about it. What was the first encounter of myself with architecture?

And what does it mean that I said architecture is not only wall, uh, windows? And, um, that was something that stays with me when I think about what is inside, what is outside. How can democracy create that space that is malleable and how can we keep it alive? And I think people who haven’t experienced in their lives, the strong reduction of experience of a space. And even as a body, like as a child, you have a body and if fashion is architecture, let’s say, if it’s a skin that you wear and is that dictated by your gender, that my brother had a freedom to wear whatever. And I was six and I had to look like an old lady because that was my experience when you wear a scarf.

So. That was also in the body as architecture that it’s forced to do something that it’s not even understanding. So, of course, that is my experiences in the life. So, I bring that into my sculpture. But it’s not literally that I think I’m confronting myself with architecture. I’m thinking about architecture even when I do a site visit in a museum. Then I have to turn my back to it. I have to take everything that I’m embracing and learning from that space to the sculpture itself. So there is not a division. I don’t think that any sculpture can live without thinking architecture. So it’s embedded in the thinking of, of sculpture generally. 

JR: I love that idea of a sort of inevitability of an architectural connection somehow. The next thing I feel like is hovering a little bit in the background is the question of the museum as a kind of machine for producing art history, right? And I know Glenn, you’ve talked about a very interesting idea of trying to think about MoMA as an acanonical museum. So question for both of you, for Nairy, you know, we talked about your commission in the Sculpture Garden, and it was very deliberately sort of framed by the famous Matisse bronzes.

And so, you know, to me, there’s an interesting question of how do you, as a contemporary artist, how do you engage in a kind of art historical dialogue without inevitably just re-inscribing the canon?  For Glenn, similarly, I mean, what are the spatial implications of that acanonical museum? Because it seems like, again, my experience in Liz’s museum is that it’s actually not just, you know, different proportions of galleries say or different, but it’s a kind of new way of looking. It’s a little bit. It’s more fluid. It’s more comparative arguably more critical. You know the modern museum is a kind of white cube for having your moment with the masterpiece has really sort of been displaced. I think with new modes of looking and that does seem to have new architectural requirements, too.

GL: But she knows everything. You just have to walk around, uh, Frieze Masters for five minutes to understand how complex art-making is and the ways in which objects live with each other, both in the present and over time, right? So you can go from a medieval sculpture to a [S. H.] Raza painting to a Isabella Ducrot textile and they’re all there, right? I came to the museum as somebody who was steeped in medieval Islamic and Indian art. So the idea of this white cube and this canonical history that began with [Paul] Cézanne passing the torch to [Pablo] Picasso, lateral to [George] Braque, that made no sense to me at all. Because there were other histories that were equally vibrant that needed to be told.

And so then the question becomes: what is the relationship of these histories to each other? And what is the role of a museum of modern or contemporary art? My take on it is: one, if you want museums of modern and contemporary art to be different in kind from more historical museums, then they have to have a different operating system.

And the way I think about that is, if the role of the Metropolitan or the Louvre is to look at history through the long lens of a telescope, so your field of vision is actually incredibly deep, the role of a museum of modern art is to look at the moment through the very short lens of a microscope, so your field of vision is in fact very narrow. Uh, and when that happens, several things follow. The first is, you have to constantly recognize you’re a work in progress. You need to change all the time. And even your previous sets of assumptions about the relationship of certain artists to a moment have to be opened up and refracted by the reality of other artists who were working simultaneously who might have arrived at similar solutions, but for fundamentally different reasons.

So I think of what we’re trying to do as being acanonical. I’m just not interested in canons. Uh, I think when the Museum of Modern Art was created, it was created to make, to demonstrate to a, a new public that the art of our time was every bit as interesting as the art of the past. Then, over time, a group of curators felt determined to demonstrate that there was a history here. A recognizable through line. And that history was written in the late ’70s, ’80s, and into the early ’90s by a group of individuals who were brilliant curators, but who had zero interest in what was going on elsewhere in the world. Their field of vision was somewhere between Paris and Berlin and New York. It didn’t even go necessarily to California. My generation came at it with a very different perspective, not to take anything away from the extraordinary achievements of all those artists who had been in a way, premiated by the museum, but to add and complicate it and to unravel the certainty. To make the process of coming to the museum an inquiry, rather than an answer. You come to a place like the Museum of Modern Art to discover what you don’t know and to have your assumptions unsettled. And to the degree that we reify the knowing, we’re actually doing the work of another museum. So that’s how, how I’ve approached it. 

JR: I mean, I love that idea of reinforcing uncertainty. I’m curious, Nairy, is that an accurate description of what you do? 

NB: Maybe I disagree a little bit, but we cannot give up the canon because it just, it’s a supportive structure for me and we can rewrite, re-shift things. But I definitely need that. When I look at the back of the Matisse, what a good example to think of that. Even the site where, where, in the MoMA Garden, I just love to look at the back because it just gives a new perspective to the outside. It sits between the skin of the inside and the outside of a museum, and that’s what you’re describing, that new canons have been written. 

The only problem is that it’s not the museum who’s writing the canon. It should be outside of the museum. It’s the artists, young art historians, and we cannot project on somewhere that we don’t know. The unknown, let’s say, not the Western canon. That’s the missing part that the certain, more and more countries, because of the dictatorship, the first thing they are fighting is the culture.

So how can we build a new canon when it, art itself, culture itself, is not allowed to create space and create dialogue and discourse. So there is something missing, the huge positive projection of, there must be other canons, but we don’t have the, the power in certain countries that allows culture to grow and evolve. It will be slow, but we have to take the time. My obsession with the back of Matisse is just an example even for the Met how we look back as artists. It should not give us the burden of taking understanding the history as art historians.

I look of course back and I would lie if I would say I was standing in front of the Met and they asked me to look at the collection and make something out of that collection. I mean, I would be an Übermensch if I would understand what’s going on in the Met. So I just did go through the art historian and through the Met and look at things.

But the more I was looking, the more I understood that I see less. So I turned my back to the huge history and I tried as a contemporary artist to do what I think a contemporary artist should do for its time and maybe also for the future. And that connects again back to the MoMA. So there are certain dialogues between museums that happen, but I just don’t want to become a curator. I just have the feeling in the last years museums are asking artists to get involved with the collections and to a certain point it is productive but it’s also subjectivized too much of the collection, the history, and I think we need that objective relation to, to history and only then we can write new histories. So the burden is huge on us to be artists again.

GL: You know, you said something, Nairy, that I think, uh, is worth underscoring, which was about art historians. Canons need to be written by art historians. And that’s, I think, my, my point about the museum. Of course, we’re trained as art historians, but we’re curators. We’re there to, in a way, play with a petri dish, to put a lot of different pieces in play, to experiment, to try things out. The role of the art historian is to sort through that and make whatever his or her argument is about why certain sets belong together and other sets don’t. And this goes back to trying to identify in the case of museums of modern art the uniqueness of their role so that they don’t become, over time, just another form of a historical museum with a different starting date.

That’s, that’s really important. Uh, so it’s, that’s where I think you’re right. Of course, canons need to be written and they need to be debated and they need to be pulled apart, and we all need them to react to. But the question is, who’s writing the canon and what’s the role of the institution in its own thinking about the art it chooses to explore?

NB: No, I, I totally agree. We need more voices to come in. I’m just saying don’t destroy the canon that already exists. I think building on things, parallel, is needed. It’s like a muscle that needs all these little things that grow on it. I don’t believe that canons have to be destroyed to create a new canon. They just have to parallelly exist, just to ping-pong with each other.

JR: When we’re talking about the specific role of the museum of modern and contemporary art, I mean, one thing I am really curious to hear from both of you is about the institutional role as essentially a frame, and I think especially in relation to the legacy of the readymade and conceptual art, and even Nairy, you’ve mentioned Michael Asher several times, I would sort of put institutional critique in there in a way. And what I kind of can’t Totally wrap my head around is the way in which that work relies on the museum to essentially produce the work of art as an ontologically distinct category of object. Right? So it’s critical, it’s fascinating. I mean, a lot of that at work is very sophisticated, but it’s really relying on the institution as a kind of marking itself as a separate space and marking the artwork as a kind of special separate object. And so I’m interested in if we do the petri dish or we do the multiple simultaneous canons, both of which I love as kind of metaphors, but are we in danger of kind of undoing that part of the modernist legacy? And maybe that’s fine. Maybe we should undo it, but...

GL: Well, I mean, I think there’s a lot to be said for constantly challenging legacies, right? But legacies exist. I mean, certain things happened at a certain point. They were absorbed, responded to and critiqued in the moment and over time. But I think the role of any sentient human being is to constantly query that, right?

So, often when the query occurs, it takes a long time for the response to be absorbed. So, one of Michael Asher’s strategies was, in fact, to put a pin in the white cube, right? To understand that it was a trope, right? And it was a trope ready to be taken apart, but it was still a trope, right? And it was a trope that mattered to a lot of artists and institutions, uh, but there was no tablet from Moses that said gallery shall be white cubes. It was a convention. And so I look at it through the lens of, of friction. We’re constantly rubbing up against these legacies and having to make decisions about the degree to which we want to challenge them, or the degree to which we simply accept them.

So a very simple example at the Museum of Modern Art. From the 1930s, within years of being founded, there were episodic attempts to collect, uh, art from Latin America. Part of that was tied to a political agenda in the 1950s as the United States was trying to diffuse its power abroad and wanted to have a presence in Latin America. We began collecting even more vigorously, but by the ’70s, that legacy had essentially ceased. And it turns out that a lot of the art we collected was from a very narrow political bandwidth of art-making, even though it stretched across different countries. When I arrived in the mid-’90s and started asking questions about our various histories, there was a history that was ready to be exploded and continued.

And so, was it a legacy? Because already the DNA was there. Or was it a new departure because the artists that we actually were interested in turned out not to be the ones we had previously collected, but a different generation. And it was both of those things. And I, and I think that’s the interesting side of it, that, that these legacies exist, but they’re there to be played with and changed.

NB: No, I agree, but I still think there is a lack of certain works that we would love to imagine that exist outside of the canon and we’re placing it and it’s sat with craft and the idea of the craft that has to become art and since we don’t find anything else we are putting craft and art again, so in equal position, that I have problems with. And maybe we go through this and we fill the holes and when we discuss again what actually contemporary means for us, not only globally, but how we understand universal idea of certain things. And I don’t think also that the Western chapter and Western canon is something that is closed and should be closed. And I think it has to go on. And, um, and the guilt that there is something that we feel, it should not destroy the canon that we already created. As you said before, maybe there is a danger that we destroy it. I don’t think there should be a danger. Just, just to be honest with what we are facing. 

JR: Well, maybe that’s a good note to end on. Both the Museum of Modern Art and the canon as unfinished projects. Alright, thank you so much.