Centering Her Practice Around an Idea of Love That's Really About Empowerment
Continuing our close read of Cassandra Coblentz' interview of Alexandra Grant on the Grant Love Cosmology, we see Coblentz execute a really masterful turn that continues to push the discussion as an evaluation, or re-evaluation of Grant's fine art practice rather than discuss the real world financial impact of the grantLOVE project and its donation to OCMA, where Coblentz is curator/director.
Forgive the long quote, but this is really doing a lot of heavy lifting. This is one running paragraph in the book, but I've broken it down to allow us to see the ways in which Coblentz and Grant are making unsupported assertions, then leveraging those statements to cast Grant and her "love" work in fine art and the "art philanthropy project" as profound and theoretical:
"In the art world, we tend to prioritize theoretical and conceptual frameworks to validate the way we talk about art, but people often have a hard time taking the idea of love seriously in this context.
It can be diminished or discussed as sentimental or superfluous, not considered as a complex theoretical concept.
But I think one of the things that is really powerful about your work is that you've turned traditional dynamics of what we value and prioritize about art and art making on its head, precisely by thinking seriously and critically about love - by centering your practice around an idea of love that's really empowerment."
My word - does the art world prioritize theoretical and conceptual frameworks - yes, but so does Grant.
Consider this artist's thumbnail bio, taken from an auction site currently open on Artsy:
"Describing herself as “a writer who writes with materials,” Alexandra Grant produces paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations based on language. She is interested in how we engage with words, through reading, writing, speaking, and translation, and how it shapes our perception of others, the world, and ourselves. Her ongoing collaborations with philosophers, linguists, and actors, including Michael Joyce, Hélène Cixous, and Keanu Reeves, have earned her the designation, “radical collaborator.” Beginning with a text by or conversation with these collaborators, she transforms words into art. In her ongoing, multifaceted series, “Century of the Self” (begun 2010)—encompassing, for example, boldly colored paintings shaped like Rorschach tests and full of phrases like, “I see myself in you”—Grant presents the self as a collage of bodily drives and external influences, from mass market advertising to psychoanalysis."
Available for sale from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Benefit Auction, Alexandra Grant, grantLOVE x Cachetejack, grantLOVE x C
Now, what strikes me is whoever posted this page didn't use a recent bio for Grant - this looks like it was from the 2010s. Nevertheless, it fully displays the ways in which Grant theorizes her work and stresses the conceptual elements.
"It can be diminished or discussed as sentimental or superfluous, not considered as a complex theoretical concept?"
Reminds me of Grant's comments about how the initial reaction to her "art philanthropy project: was condescending, or how she feels discriminated against as a female artist (often noting that as a woman she wasn't given equal opportunities).
The next section, about turning the traditional dynamics of art making on its head by prioritizing love that is a form of empowerment makes no sense to me. Or rather, it makes sense only if you accept Grant's assertion that her artmaking is "radical collaboration" and that she is empowering those she works with.
But is she?
Grant responds by describing (one-sidedly) her interaction with the Bydgoszcz Museum staff, then using that as a platform for grandiose statements about art, and her practice.
Once again, this is presented as a single paragraph in the books, but I am breaking it down to expose the underlying logic, or lack thereof, in Grant's response.
The Bydgoszcz Museum staff asked me "What are your expectations for this show?" My answer was that we should make our decisions as a team. That we empower each other i our roles as exhibition designer, curator, and artist, without valuing one person's humanity over the rest."
Why do I suspect the curators and exhibition designer were sitting or standing there thinking -- gee, I just wanted to know how many hours we needed to schedule for this, and we have to stand her listening to this empowerment babble? Does Grant think she is being gracious in not imposing her authority as the artist to be exhibited, or refusing to accept any attempts by the local museum team to dictate conditions to her?
According to Grant:
"This is a loving approach where we acknowledge that in addition to our roles, we are people...that we're mothers and fathers, children, siblings, we're taking care of others, we're in relationships."
Huh? Why not just deal with each other as professionals? This is very DEI of her. How and why did these additional dimensions of the staff's lives, and Grant's, come into play when planning how to mount six paintings based on Polish women poets in a chapel-like space?
She then goes on:
How do we see people, within the framework of arts institutions, as actually being human, with different problems and needs? If art isa cosmology, then being an artist is just being a human, in collaboration with other people,
Well, that's certainly moving from the concrete to the theoretical and conceptual in a big way. I truly do wonder what the staff in this small regional museum, about halfway between Berlin and Warsaw the eighth largest city in Poland with under half a million people in the city and suburbs, made of this approach to setting up a temporary exhibit of six paintings by a not-very-prominent American painter.
Grant then asks: "How do you build bridges with people from different cultures, assumptions, and interaction styles? Humor is one of them. Body language. Visual art speaks when you can't understand each other's words. And love -- which is all of those things: humor, body language and art -- is a bridge between people who don't know each other, who come from different places physically and ideologically."
Well, perhaps this explains why Grant's default expression is a shit-eating grin, and she frequently seems to be laughing inappropriately. This, along with her attempts at body language, is, according to her, a bridge to those unlike herself physically or ideologically.
And the capper:
"The idea of equality is profoundly at the heart of, if we're going to call it this, a love cosmology."
Way to have it both ways, Alexandra. You've simultaneously staked a claim for a "love cosmology," presumably based on your art, art practice, and "art philanthropy project," but hedged your bets. "If we're going to call it that."
Having staked this claim to love cosmology, Coblentz moves back into further discussion of Grant's upcoming Polish project, and her experiences. I know this is a short post, but I'm going to end it here because if i add discussion of the next element in this "interview" it will become too long.
I'm leaving you here with this link to Grant's Marfa interview, in which she lays out, however vaguely, more of her love cosmology.
''If you choose to watch, please consider how her "self-love first, then family and close friends, then community, then the broader public" priorities for love match with the statements about equality and empowerment she's making her.
