My name is Michael Taylor, the director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College,

and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you

to the 8th Annual Dr. Allen W. Root Contemporary Art Distinguished Lecture

at the Hood Museum of Art.

I would like to thank Allen and Janet Root, who are in the audience with us today,

and to also recognize their granddaughter, Gillian,

who is a member of the class of 2014 at Dartmouth.

Dr. Root graduated from Dartmouth in 1955 as did his son Jonathon in 1982

and his daughter Jennifer in 1995.

This family bleeds green, and we love that.

Because of their father's passionate interest in contemporary art, Jonathon, Jennifer,

and their other son, Michael Root, established this lectureship in honor of their father,

a renowned pediatric endocrinologist and also a collector of modern and contemporary art.

It is a great privilege for me to introduce this evening's speaker, who is Dr. Richard Meyer.

Richard Meyer is one of the foremost art historians in the field

of 20th Century American Art and Visual Culture.

He is the professor of art history at Stanford University and has also taught at the University

of Southern California; the Courtauld Institute in London, my alma mater;

the University of Pennsylvania; and Columbia University.

At USC, he was also from 2008 to 2011 the director of visual graduate studies

and was an affiliated faculty member in American studies and ethnicity.

He received his BA from Yale University and his PhD in art history from the University

of California Berkley, and his doctoral dissertation led to the landmark publication,

"Outlaw Representations, Censorship in Homosexuality in 20th Century American Art,"

which was published to great critical acclaim by Oxford University Press in 2002.

He is also the author of "Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles" in 2011

and has 2 publication projects forthcoming in 2013.

The first, for which he is co-author with Catherine Lord, is titled "Art in Queer Culture"

and will be published by Phaidon Press.

The second, which relates to the topic of this evening's lecture, is titled,

"What was Contemporary Art" and will be published MIT Press.

So both in 2013.

Richard was also the co-editor of Weegee in Naked City in 2008, and in 2003,

he edited the volume, "Representing the Passions, Histories, Bodies,

and Visions" for the Getty Research Institute.

In 2006, Richard was co-editor of a 2-part issue of the journal, GLQ,

a journal of lesbian and gay studies.

He has served as curator of exhibitions as well including "Naked Hollywood:

Weegee in Los Angeles" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2011

and "Warhol's Jews, Ten Portraits Reconsidered," at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2008.

I saw both of those exhibitions, and they were absolutely outstanding.

He's the author of numerous journal articles and edited volumes

with such thought-provoking titles as "Big Middle Class Modernism,"

"Artists Sometimes Have Feelings," "Gay Power Circa 1970," "Visual Strategies

for Sexual Revolution," "Mind the Gap," "Americanist, Modernist, and the Boundaries

of 20th Century Art," "The Jesse Helms Theory of Art," "Have you Heard the One About the Lesbian

Who Goes to the Supreme Court," "This is to Enrage You: Grand Fury and the Graphics

of AIDS Activism," "Robert Mapplethorpe and the Discipline of Photography,"

and "Los Angeles Meant Boys: David Hockney, Bob Mizer,

and the Lure of Physique Photography" to name but a few.

Those are just my favorite titles [laughter].

Richard has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Charles C. Eldredge Prize

for Outstanding Scholarship in American Art,

which was awarded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Mellon Award for Excellence

in Undergraduate Mentoring; and the Albert S. Raubenheimer Award for Outstanding Teaching,

Research, and Service to University of Southern California.

His talk this evening is entitled, "What was Contemporary Art: An Introduction."

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Richard Meyer.

[ Applause ]

>> Thanks.

I first met Michael Taylor 6 years ago in Philadelphia when he was a curator

at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I was a visiting professor of contemporary art history

at the University of Pennsylvania, and I was immediately struck by his generosity of spirit

and of intellect, and I'm delighted to have this opportunity to reunite with him and to meet all

of you here at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth.

This is my first time visiting not only Dartmouth

but New Hampshire so I'm very happy to be here.

The book project I was working on at the time I met Michael, the one I finally finished

and I'm to preview for you here today, that book project addresses the tension

between contemporary art and art history.

How it asks can contemporary works be part of the history of art

when those works have not been time tested or vetted, when the necessary critical

and historical distance has not yet been achieved.

How in deed can there even be something called contemporary art history?

And I'll remind you that I was a visiting professor of contemporary art history at Penn

but even as I accepted the position I was sort of wondering, well what is this strange beast,

and that's where the book comes in.

So I'm showing you.

This is the cover of the book.

It features a young woman, one Miss Polly Cotter, facing off against a Plexiglas sculpture

by Alexander Calder at the Plastics Exhibition held

at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston in 1940.

The sculpture had recently won first prize in an art contest sponsored

by the chemical manufacturing company Rohm and Haas, the inventors

and commercial distributors of Plexiglas.

Created by the company as a shatter-proof alternative to glass in 1933,

Plexiglas was introduced to American markets within the context of military production,

so it was first used for cockpit covers, wind screens, and weapon mounts.

The sculptural competition in 1939 underscored the possibility of an aesthetic rather

than strictly utilitarian or militarist application of the material.

As the winning entry in the competition, and here's the sculpture from a different angle,

it's the same sculpture you're seeing here.

As the winning entry, Calder's sculpture was given pride of place in the Rohm

and Haas Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

That's what I'm showing you on the screen on the right.

Displayed on a circular table to allow viewers to approach from all sides,

the sculpture was set against a series of 7 backlit dioramas,

each of which demonstrated a different property, flexibility, lightness, luminosity of Plexiglas,

or it's sister plastic crystallite.

And there you see the pavilion, which features Plexiglas.

The showcase is Plexiglas, crystallite, and Calder's sculpture.

In their very datedness, the picture of Polly Cotter from 1940 and the Rohn and Hass pavilion

from the world fair in 1939 in their very datedness, these pictures recall

that the category of contemporary art is not a new one.

All works of art were once contemporary to the artist and culture that produced them.

Part of the task of the art historian then is to retrieve a vivid sense of the world

into which an art work was introduced and so to measure the distance

between its contemporary moment and the scholar's own between say 1939

when Plexiglas had only recently been introduced and was still kind

of a marvel of a material and today.

Our return to the past must acknowledge the impossibility of forging a comprehensive account

of the artwork as it really was while nevertheless attending

to the specificity and heft of history.

By asking what was contemporary art, I do not mean to suggest that contemporary art is now

over or that we have arrived at a post-contemporary moment

of cultural production, which some have suggested.

Rather, I mean to retrieve selected episodes in the history of once current art so as

to reclaim the contemporary as a condition of being alive, to,

and alongside other moments, artists, and objects.

So something like what we now call contemporaneous, that is existing along with

or alongside, alive at the same moment as.

Today, I want to share with you and excerpt from the book's introduction and a brief sketch

of its principal chapters, and I'm giving fair warning that we'll be jumping around quite a bit

between different art historicals, examples and contexts.

One of those contexts, which I've just briefly introduced to you, is the plastics exhibition

at the Institute of Modern Art in 1940, the Institute of Modern Art,

which to great controversy would rename itself the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1948.

And there's a chapter of the book that looks at that controversy and through

that controversy looks back at the history of the institute of contemporary/modern art.

In the book's introduction, which I'm going to turn to now, I seek to explain how

and when contemporary art emerged as part of the discipline of art history, and in doing so,

I revisit the doctoral thesis of a now eminent art historian.

The introduction is called, "The Art Historical Postmortem."

This is an excerpt from the introduction.

In 1969, a young woman named Rosalind Krauss filed a dissertation in the department

of fine arts at Harvard University.

Fifteen years later, after she had emerged as one of the leading critical

and art historical thinkers of her generation, Krauss would explain the unorthodox means

by which she had chosen her dissertation topic, and here is a quote,

a long quote from Rosalind Krauss, "I was in fact thinking of a topic

in 19th century European Art that would have been much palatable to my professors at Harvard,

but it was going to be difficult for me to go to France

for a year in the middle of this marriage."

She had recently wed Richard Krauss.

"I didn't know what to do until one morning I woke up to an announcement on my clock radio

that a sculptor had been killed in Vermont.

I thought it was Tony Caro, because they said Bennington, Vermont, where he was teaching.

I thought, oh, how terrible, because I knew Tony.

Then after a couple of sentences, they repeated the name, and I realized it was David Smith,

I thought, um, I now have a thesis topic.

I knew they would never allow me to do a dissertation on someone

who was alive, but he had just died.

I went rushing to Harvard to announce this as my topic."

Within the logic of this anecdote, the shift from the imagined death of Anthony Caro

to the actual one of David Smith constitutes a passage from personal loss

to professional opportunity, from the register of friendship to that of scholarship,

from the terrible thought that a sculptor Krauss knew firsthand had perished to the recognition

of the use value of an entirely different sculptor's demise.

Death here delivers the artist into history or at least into the history of art.

Sealed off from the possibility of new work, stylistic shifts, imaginative breakthroughs,

or creative disappointments, Smith's artistic output could at least be scrutinized,

interpreted, and catalogued by the art historian.

Krauss in other words could now write a thesis on David Smith but only

and almost literally over his dead body.

Even here however there was a catch.

To make Smith more palatable as a topic, Krauss' advisors approved her dissertation

on the condition that she prepare a Catalogue Raisonne

of Smith's sculptures as part of this thesis.

Krauss Dutifully researched and photographed some 700 sculptures.

So a Catalogue Raisonne as many of you will know is a catalogue that includes all the works,

in this case all the sculptures by a single artist.

Krauss dutifully researched and photographed some 700 sculptures dating from 1932,

the year that Smith turned from painting to 3-dimensional construction,

or what he called drawing in space, to 1965,

the year in which he was killed in an automobile accident.

He missed a turn in the road and was crushed inside his pickup truck.

A range of sculptural production I've represented here by showing you construction

from 1932 on the left, which is number 4 in Krauss' Catalogue Raisonne,

and Cubi XXVIII from 1965, which is number 676 in Krauss' catalogue, and it is the last work

that David Smith completed before his death in 1965.

The glossary color image of Cubi XXVIII shown here is not from Krauss' dissertation.

There's the image from Krauss' dissertation.

It's the same work but a very different, oops, different view as you can see

in which the images as you might expect are black and white photographs circa 1969.

But the image on the left is from the catalogue of Sotheby's sale of contemporary art held

in New York City on the evening of Wednesday, November 9, 2005.

Cubi XXVIII, also known that evening as lot 23, sold for $23.8 million to the dealer,

Larry Gagosian, who was himself bidding on behalf of the collector, Eli Broad.

The sale of Cubi XXVIII set a new record for the price of a single work of contemporary art

at auction, a record that had in fact been broken just the night before

when Christie's sold Mark Rothko's Homage to Matisse for $22.4 million.

So Homage to Matisse only held the record for less than a day

because the very next day Smith's Cubi XXVIII broke the record, and of course that's a record

that has now been broken many times since.

Though Rothko had been dead for 35 years and Smith for 40,

by the time these records were set, the prices paid for each man's work in 2005 raised the bar

for the secondary market in post-war painting and sculpture.

Here then, we have the conception of contemporary art attuned to the logic

and temporalities of the auction market rather than to those of the artist's life and death.